Three Really Stupid Mistakes I’m Thankful For This Thanksgiving. How About You?

Hello. Are you tuning into this podcast because you want really good advice from a really smart person? Sorry, it's not going to happen this time. This is a podcast, our Thanksgiving themed podcast of becoming you, where I'm going to talk about the really big mistakes that I made that I'm grateful for. Okay, I am going to talk about gratitude, but I'm talking about all the ding dong, boneheaded mistakes I made, three to be exact, that I want to talk about because I'm so grateful for what they taught me. I'm going to talk about the most stupid, stupid thing I did in college, my dumb, ridiculous major, and how that. What that mistake taught me. I'm going to talk about. Well, my first marriage. I've talked about it before. It was a mistake. I want to talk about why, but I want to. I think you might be surprised by what I learned from it. Okay, maybe not what you would expect. And the third big mistake I made was getting fired. What a. It was awful. But I. I learned something. Then maybe you should learn, too, about failure from it. I'm also going to talk about four things that I'm really grateful for that were not mistakes at all. I think I might cry when I talk about them. So that's what we're going to talk about on the podcast today. I am Susie Welch. I'm a professor of management practice at NYU Stern School of Business. This is Becoming you. Becoming youg is a podcast where each week we endeavor to help you answer the question, what should I do with my life? And once again, we're kind of answering that this week because I'm giving you advice about. I'm not going to tell you. Look, I am not going to tell you to go make mistakes. Why would I do that? Becoming you as a methodology is to try to prevent you from making mistakes. I mean, that's what it's about. Living by design is making fewer mistakes. But if you're going to make them, and you are, because people are people and life happens, it's really good to learn from them. So today, the angle we're going at is what you can learn from mistakes, or literally what you can learn from my mistakes. In this case, happy Thanksgiving to you. Let's get going. All right, so I want to tell you about my first mistake. It happened when I was 18 years old. It's a whopper. I come back to it all the time. And here's what it is. I was a young, bright, ambitious, fierce young girl who came from a family that was kind of surprised by me at every turn. In fact, when I called my mom to tell her that I got into Harvard, when the letter came, my mom said to me, famous words in my family, sue, you applied. I showed up at Harvard in 1977, probably long before many of you were born. It was beautiful, leafy campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I had no idea who I was or what I was going to do in my life. We didn't talk about that. My parents were artists and hippies and. And the idea of a career was not a concept that they wrapped their heads around. So life starts. I kind of follow along with the crowd. I'm looking here, I'm looking there. I'm trying to teach myself. Like, you know, what do you do when you get at this school? I was naturally. Had an aptitude for sports, so I joined the lacrosse team, or I made the lacrosse team. And then I was very drawn to kind of community. And I was a pretty good writer, I thought, so. Tried out and got accepted to being a writer at the Harvard Crimson. That's the daily newspaper at Harvard. This was a. Felt like a great achievement to me. But when it came to academic work, I was good at school. So everything I took, I did pretty well at. I took epic poetry, I took sociology. I took psychology. I just took a smattering of everything I took. Economics, I took. But then at the end of your freshman year, you had to declare your major. And I was like, what am I going to major in? And I had no one to ask, or I thought I had no one to ask. And I decided, stupidly, to major in fine arts. So fine arts is basically at every other college, they call it the history of art. And I just. I randomly decided to major in it. Why? Because I'd gotten A's in all my fine arts classes. Art was very easy to me. I came from an artsy, fartsy family. And when I looked at paintings, I understood them. And I thought that art was fun and interesting because you learned about history. And so I just. It was a very small major, and it was filled with people who wanted to be museum curators. Okay. Which is definitely not something I wanted to be. And I signed up and I majored in fine arts. I was going out with a guy at the time named Mark, and his parents were educators, and I was over at his house. He lived in the Boston area, and I was over at his house for dinner. And his parents, who had a very sort of strong hand in his life, he was becoming a doctor. They. His mother, I remember her saying to me, why are you majoring in fine arts? Do you want to be a curator? And I remember saying to her something like, oh, God, no. And she said, well, why are you doing it? I said, I like art, or something like that. And she was the one who said to me, well, you'll certainly learn about the history of the world by looking at art. And I thought, okay, that's a good enough reason. And I sort of, kind of took it as my own, but it was not the reason I did it. So here's the thing about majoring in fine arts at Harvard is you had to specialize in an era, so it wasn't really like you were getting this expansive learning about the history of civilization. You actually really early on had to specialize. And once again, my friends, I took a dart and I threw it at a dartboard, and I decided that I was going to specialize in Japanese art from the Edo period. Now, I want to tell you, I retained zero of it so much. I retained so little of it, except for remembering thinking that this art was quite beautiful, that I had to go to ChatGPT today, and I typed in Japanese art from the Edo period. Tell me about it. Okay, so here's what it told me. I'm just going to briefly tell you about it. The Edo period, 1603-1868, was one of the most visually inventive, culturally explosive eras in Japanese history, An age when art became both democratized and dazzlingly sophisticated. Have I lost you yet? Okay. I studied this for almost four years. I did, and I'm not going to tell you that I liked it. I think that while it was going on, I thought to myself, what am I doing? All of my classmates were studying politics and economics and literature and having, like, these expansive conversations. And I was, like, staring at two paintings, trying to sort of pick out what was different about the way, in some cases, the women's clothing draped. And I. I think that during it, I was like, what are you doing, Susie? My parents never asked about it. And again, when people said to me, why are you doing this? I would invoke my boyfriend's mother's explanation that I was studying the history of civilization, but I wasn't. I was actually studying kind of five different takes on this particular kind of Japanese art. And I. I realized. I must have realized how narrow it was and how uninteresting it was to me, because when it came time to do my senior thesis, which was required, I actually went to the head of the department and said, I wonder if I can have permission to do a totally different senior thesis. And I suggested this really journalistic examination of looking at three Boston based emerging artists and exploring what made them either break out and have success or not. They very begrudgingly allowed me to go out of my area of specialty to do something that was actually kind of contemporary and interesting. Let me summarize. I, hot mess, studied the wrong thing for four years. And here's what I would say about it. I squandered my opportunity to learn. When I was there, I could have taken advantage of my education. I could have learned so much more. And I actually think I knew what was going on but did not have the words to articulate it. What makes me so grateful for it is that because I knew it was happening, I got this mindset that actually you can't stop learning because if you didn't learn at school, you've gotta keep learning. And this is what explains the way I act about learning now. Like I am a fanatic about like reading stuff, staying ahead of things. Like if I'm about to meet somebody, I like research them excessively. If I see a topic coming onto the horizon, I like graciously. Like chatgpt is my best friend in this. Like the other day I was like, okay, there's something going on in Sudan. I keep on reading about it. I don't understand it deeply enough. Tell me everything I need to know about what's going on there. And by the way, what's going on there is unspeakably tragic and everyone should be talking about it. But I think that losing the chance to really have the education that was handed to me on a platter made me a self educator. And this has helped me so much in my life. I mean, I think sometimes I talk to people about AI and I think, wait, am I like the only one who's like obsessed with this and like following all these feeds about it? And I'm not obviously, but I think that it's like it feels forced me to realize that you have to be teaching yourself all the time. And, and, and I'm grateful that that happened to me. It also sort of made me a person that never ever wanders an incredible opportunity that's handed to you. Like when I see an incredible thing coming at me, like every time I travel, I like do all this research beforehand about what I should see, what I should learn. I read it before I went to Sicily. I like red the three most important novels written about Sicily. I think that this is all a result of the Fact that I had this beautiful gift horse handed to me and I looked it in the mouth and it changed me. So I'm really grateful it happened because I've learned a lot in my life outside of education that has made me, I think, more present in the world and more able to help other people. And I will say this one other thing. By the time I got to graduate school and I went to HBS for graduate school, I didn't squander it. I remember thinking before I stepped onto the campus of business school, I'm not doing what I did before. I'm going to be so prepared. I'm going to take all the classes I should take. I'm going to be so ahead of it. So I learned that lesson pretty quickly, but it stayed with me and my poor children who had me hovering over them with the hot breath of my mouth on their necks the entire time they were in college, asking them every semester, what are you taking? What are you majoring in? Why are you doing that? Are you taking the right classes? Are you meeting the right professors? So it's had long last casting effects, this four year detour into this look. It's a beautiful art form, okay? It's a very beautiful. It's so obscure. And that was a mistake for me to have done, but one that I'm super grateful for. All right, let's move on to the second mistake I'm very grateful for. A little bit heavier, okay? Because. Okay, fine. I studied Japanese art for four years. But here was a big mistake. And that was my first marriage. But I am so glad I made that mistake. I. I mean, okay, so my first husband's name was Eric. I hope you're listening. Hi, Eric. Hello, Siobhan, Eric's partner. These are people I'm incredibly close friends with. I met Eric when I was 14, 15 years old. We met at boarding school. One of the great mysteries of civilization is why we got married to each other. I think I finally cracked the code that Eric and I got married because we both shared an inordinate love of an album by Brian Ferry called Boys and Girls. I mean, that was the only thing that we had in common. We both went to the same boarding school, but we had one other thing in common, to be serious. And really, if you think about it, we had none of the same values. 0. We had none of the same aptitudes. 0. We did have one shared interest out of all the interests in the world. And it was like this one artist, Brian Ferry. So whatever, we followed the momentum and we got married after college after having met and gone out in high school. But when I look back actually as an adult and I say, why did it happen? I think that the true reason is that we both came from highly unusual families that did not present to the world in a normal way. And we did not have to explain our families to each other. We had gave each other a lot of psychological safety around not having to explain parents who didn't show up or parents who did not act like other parents. And that was a lot, because if you functioned in the world and everybody had a normal family, you felt like such a weirdo having a different family. And we allowed each other to do that. And between that and. And the song, the Songs by Brian Ferry, that was enough. And we were young kids with not a lot of adult supervision. And we got married. And it was enormously painful for both of us. It was a terrible marriage. We hurt each other over and over and over again. There was not a lot of.

Happiness or shared good experiences. It was terrible. It was a very, very. I was. He was in pain and I was in pain for a long time. And finally, after our fourth child was born, we got our divorce. And I would say that grateful for that marriage for two gigantic reasons. The first is that we had those children. And people have said to me, when I've told them this, they've said, yeah, but you would have had children with a person that you were happy with that, you know, that. That you didn't have all that pain with. And my answer is, yeah, but they wouldn't have been those children. They wouldn't have been our children who had to be born because the world is so much better with them. So I. I'm so grateful. I'm grateful for the pain I went through just because I got those four children. I'm glad that we didn't give up after the first one when we thought about it, or the second one when we kept thinking about it, or the third one that we had to stay together. And the fourth one, who was quite a surprise to us. I would say that I'm glad because I got those children. So that's the I. I do it again. Don't be scared. Eric and Siobhan. I wouldn't really do it again, but I would go through the pain again for sure. But here's the second reason. I'm so grateful for that dumb decision. And it was a dumb decision for both of us, okay? Believe me, Eric was not having a good time in this marriage. And probably a worse time than me. And that is because this Eric is one of my closest friends today. And maybe on some occasions, he feels like my best friend. I've known him for 50 years. I mean, I know every. We know each other as well as you can possibly know each other. And here's the thing. I am.

I am so grateful because the restoration of our friendship, our strong friendship has taught me about forgiveness and the freeing, liberating.

Empowering joy of forgiveness. I mean, I had to forgive myself for making a mistake that I. I mean, in the car ride to the church, I said to my sisters, I know I'm making a mistake. And I went ahead and made it anyway. I had to forgive myself for walking right into that, but I had to forgive him. We hurt each other and we had to. I, I forgave him. Not soon enough. I should have forgiven him the day the divorce went through. I didn't. I was mad for a couple of years. Then I met Jack and I was like, what am I mad about? He moved on and had other relationships and other children and I moved on. And we both found happiness. And then we found out that we could be really good friends because we had this important thing in common, our children and their well being. And I think every time I see people holding a grudge or I see people feeling mad at somebody who hurt them, I say, let it go, let it go, let it go. Sooner is better than later. And I actually, my kids sometimes get mad at me that I never get mad at any, anyone. People hurt me or say terrible things about me in the media, you know, or say something crummy about me or.

Do me wrong. And my kids are like, why do you not get mad? And the reason I don't get mad is because forgiveness is the way to go all the time. There's no point ever holding a grudge or relitigating the past. You can't move on. Forgive, let go and forget. Okay? Some people say, well, I'll forgive, but I'll never forget. I forgot also. I forget all the bad times. Why remember them. So that's what I learned. And I hope you, if you're holding a grudge at this moment or you're mad at somebody who hurt you, you're hurting yourself. You're hurting yourself. You don't have to go spend time with them. Look, I'm gonna spend Thanksgiving with Eric and Siobhan. They're coming to our family. Thanksgiving. They come every year. They are family to me now and to the kids. We're all together, we're one big happy family. And I. And thank God for it. And if you're holding some kind of feeling in your heart and you can't let it go, let me just beseech you to learn this lesson along with me. How important it is to forgive. Okay? That's number two mistake that I'm grateful for. Here's the third mistake that I'm really grateful for. Well, I got myself fired. It was 2001, and I met my beloved husband Jack, and I interviewed him and I. And then I withdrew the interview. And I said to my bosses at the Harvard Business Review, we can't run this article because I'm now romantically involved with Jack Welch. And they. I got fired. It was a long and tortured story. I mean, they would say I resigned. I didn't. I got fired. And it was a terrible embarrassment. It was terrible. In the newspaper, people thought it was a fling. This was very offensive to me because I knew from the beginning we were going to get married. And I have to say, the whole thing stunk. I cried so much. I told Jack I'd never get work again. I was. Oh, felt so disgraced. It was devastating. And so I'm not going to tell you to go try to get fired. Nobody wants to get fired. It really hurts. It's ugly, blah, blah, blah. But I'm happy it happened. I'm happy it happened because I learned one of the most important lessons of my life, which is that getting fired or failing in any way does not actually kill you. I mean, getting fired ultimately resulted in me having so much courage and so much more comfort with risk is like. I thought to myself, what's the worst thing that could happen if I try X, Y and Z? What's the worst thing that could happen? I could get fired publicly in the newspaper. Well, guess what? That happened. And you know what it resulted in? It resulted in people liking me better because I had more humanity. And I had been through the fire, and I had been that I. And I said I was sorry to a lot of people because I made some mistakes, and I was much more. A much more vulnerable and accepting person. After I got fired, I became a better person for being fired because I had been a little achiever girl. And then little achiever girl got kicked off her little pedestal that she'd built for herself, and she became a better human being. So I, of course, I didn't like the pain and the embarrassment of being fired and being, you know, HBR editor has a fling with the blah, blah, blah. I felt very Like, I was, like, such a prude. And so it all was yuck. Okay, There was a shock jock in those days named Imus. He had a show called Imus in the Morning. Every single day, he'd do this long thing about me and what, like a little, you know, hoe I was for what I. I mean, it was really disgusting what I went through, and I wouldn't want to go through that again. But I'll tell you, the whole thing taught me that sticks and stones may break your bones, you know what I mean? But you can just get yourself up and throw a punch and build yourself up again. And I did. I had to believe in myself, and I had to let others believe in me. And you can you get back up? And you're so much stronger. You have so much more courage. So I'm not sorry it happened. Of course, I'd like some of the ugliness of it left out, but I think it had to be that ugly for me to learn how strong I was or how strong I could be. And I wasn't strong all the way through. As I said, I cried a lot when it happened, and I blubbered, and Jack had to, you know, hug me a lot. And my kids really rallied around me. My friends did. Man, you find out who your friends are. You really do. But I would say that almost nothing scares me now.

Because between that and losing my husband, I would say, you know, that you've got love around you and that you can fight through what the slings and arrows, the outrageous slings and arrows that are life. So, okay, I don't want you go out and get fired. Just have this experience. But do understand that you've got inner strength and inner power that will be there when you call for it. It really will be. All right, so those are the three mistakes, and I'm grateful for them. On Thanksgiving Day, when we go around the table and we say what we're grateful for, I'm not going to sure, I'm going to mention the mistakes because I've got a lot of stuff that are not mistakes that I'm really grateful for, and I actually want to share those with you as we wrap it up today on our Thanksgiving episode of becoming you. All right, here's what I'm really grateful for. I'm going to be cringe now for a moment. All right? I'm going to be cringe because I am the Queen of Cups. Cringe, all right. I'm actually pro cringe. So here are the things I'm thankful For I want to say this. I hope they're listening. Everybody who I'm about to thank and everything I'm about to thank, the number one thing on my list is nyu. NYU is my employer. I'm a professor at NYU Stern School of Business, and I'm an irregular professor. I mean, it kind of dropped out of nowhere. I said, hey, I want to teach this class called Becoming youg. The class was successful. I went on board as a. As a professor on the. On the faculty. I ended up teaching also management with purpose on the faculty. And here's the great thing about nyu, an institution. They just. They were like, let's try it. And I want to thank NYU for letting me be me and for letting me try to be a teacher the way I'm a teacher. Not a lot of institutions are like that. I don't think I could have taught Becoming you or taught the way I. Or teach the way I teach at a lot of other schools. And I'm really grateful for a university that talks about being innovative and entrepreneurial, being that way. So thank you, nyu. Thank you very much. When I go to bed at night, I wear a T shirt that says nyu. I bet you didn't know that. Okay, number two, I want to thank the team that makes becoming you possible. I mean, I do not do this alone. I couldn't do this alone. I really could not do this alone. I actually. I want to take this opportunity to tell you the names of the people on my team and why I'm grateful for them, who they are, what they do. This will not take forever because my team is very small. I want to thank Hallie Reiner, who's been with me since day one. She's kind of does operations and partnerships, and she's, you know, we call her my chief of staff, but there's not a single thing that Hallie does not do. I'm grateful to you, Hallie. I am grateful to Eliza Zinn, who happens to be sitting in the room with me right now. Technically, she runs social media, but she does absolutely everything. She's a partner to me and all the thinking that goes on in this podcast. If you've ever liked a podcast that is 20% because of me and 80% because of Elise's in. I want to tell you how grateful I am to you, Eliza. Hi. I want to thank Tanya Jogi. Tanya runs product and technology. If you've ever taken the values bridge and you've thought, damn, this is a good product, guess what? That's Tanya Jogi. She did that. She's a brilliant mind. She went to NYU Tandon School of Engineering, and she's such a partner to me as we build the digital products that make becoming you accessible to people all around the world, not just the people in my classroom. I want to say how grateful and thankful I am for Grant Stento, who is one of our engineers. He's a brilliant mind who every day builds our products with so much dedication to our purpose. Thank you, Grant. I'm grateful to you. I want to thank Kevin Bartley, who's a writer here, who is so much of the writing that you see in the Values Bridge newsletter, the product is done by Kevin, who is. We were comparing notes today on where we. He also attended Harvard University and he majored in English. And he said, I'm kind of right there with you with the fine arts, but I think he sort of had a better go of it. But thank you, Kevin, for your great mind and energy. I want to thank Jenna Karavere Sarah, who is our UI UX lead, and she. The beautiful design of our products, the beautiful design of the newsletter. Everything you see that is so easy to read and so accessible is because of her great eye and great discernment. I want to thank Issa Lamson, who does a lot of partnership marketing for us, who, when we have great guests on this podcast, that is Issa's handiwork. And if you've ever heard me on somebody else's podcast, that is Isa's handiwork. She's so creative. I want to thank Dan Davis. He is the head of our research and insights. All of our data is thanks to his great cognitive skills. He's a psychometrician. He helps us build our products and we could. I. I would be half as smart without Dan by my side. He's was a great help to me as I was writing my PhD thesis as well. He's just absolutely brilliant. Genius. And last but not least, I want to thank somebody you should know because if you listen to this podcast, you've heard me on this podcast with Dustin Liu, who does Career Confidential with me. Dustin is the associate head of the Initiative on purpose and Flourishing at nyu, a real partner for me as we build a think tank around flourishing. Dustin, I am so grateful that I was able to hypnotize you and steal you away from Stanford University so that you could come work with us here at becoming you and at nyu. All right, so I'm. Those are all people that I'm so thankful for. Then very quickly, you know, I'm Thankful for my dogs, you know, I am Sir Audrey au Pierre. And last but not least, on this Thanksgiving podcast, I'm going to be so ultimately cringe and I'm going to try not to cry because very sincerely, I want to thank you. I want to thank the listeners of this podcast. This podcast started out as a whim when two students said to me, I'm going to miss you this semester, Professor Welch, we're going to miss you so much after the semester ends. Oh, Professor Welch, we're going to miss you. And I said, I'll start a podcast. That's what I said to these two young students. And I did. And so here we are, 80 episodes later. Obviously, there's a lot more people listening at this point than those two students. I hope they're listening to wherever they may now be. I get so much incredible love from you. I love you back. I love hearing from you. I love your reactions to this podcast. I feel like I'm talking to you every single time I'm sitting in this chair. Please keep listening. I love being in community with you. I love doing life with you. So I want to say my thanks. Last Thanksgiving words are to you. I'm grateful for you and I look forward to remaining grateful to you for as long as we're both in this together. Happy Thanksgiving, everybody. I'm Susie Welch.

And this show is produced by by the amazing and fabulous Mikey Robley, Aliza Zinn, Issa Lamson and Hallie Reiner. And if you liked what you heard, and I'm on my knees praying that you did, follow me at Susie Welch across all my platforms, Everywhere, Instagram and LinkedIn and even TikTok. Although somehow TikTok doesn't seem to work for me. And don't forget to leave a rating and a review below because a lot of people have. And I love you, you people who have. It's not all my children, because there's just too many of them. I will see you next time. And until then, keep becoming you.