111: Finding and Understanding Your Core Talents with Marc Miller

Pete Mockaitis
Marc, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Marc Miller
Well, thank you. Great to be here, and I won’t hold it against you if you’re an Illinois graduate. I’m a Northwestern graduate. You’re the only team we beat back in the 1970s.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, it’s so funny. You know, I don’t really mind. I think it’s just the Michigan people. Sorry, Michigan, any Wolverines out there. Sometimes, I just feel like, in my experience, I’ve gotten some attitude, and it’s like “You know what? I don’t even follow sports very closely, and I’m being riled up about this now.”

Marc Miller
When I went to the Northwestern in the 1970s, we sucked at everything. I only saw us win two games in four years.

Pete Mockaitis
Mercy.

Marc Miller
That’s in football. And I saw us lose to some of the best teams in the country in basketball.

Pete Mockaitis
That happens.

Marc Miller
Yeah, but I got to see Magic Johnson and all the Indiana players and Bobby Knight, and we got clobbered by all of them.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I hope you were finding some fun elsewhere.

Marc Miller
That’s right. Well, I’ve been in Austin for now 39 years.

Pete Mockaitis
Fun. Well, I want to maybe kick us off a little bit here. You share a story that you had a near-fatal bicycle accident that really changed your perspective, and that hits close to home for me as my father passed away in a bicycling accident. And it’s true. Life really is pretty precious. So tell me, how did that impact you and your perspectives and changing your philosophies on things?

Marc Miller
Well, a couple of different things. Actually, multiple things. I had been working for a tech startup. We had been acquired by Lucent. Our options were worthless, but we were getting large retention bonuses, and so I paid off my house and I was finishing funding my kids’ college education. And two weeks after my son graduated from high school, I’m out on my club bike ride and I come down a hill at about 25 miles an hour. At the bottom was a turn where the road was cambered the wrong way. It was sloped outward rather than inward, and I couldn’t hold the turn. And it was a blind turn, and I hit a Toyota Corolla head-on. And he was going about 30 miles an hour. A buddy of mine in front of me thought a gun had gone off. To say the least, I totaled the car.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow.

Marc Miller
I tore up a knee. I broke a hip. I dislocated a shoulder, broke a bunch of ribs, broke a clavicle. I had imprints of the pads in my head. But I had no internal injuries and no brain injuries I’m willing to admit to.
I was five days in the BRAC trauma center. I was in the county trauma center. They had me walking on crutches in three days. They just threw three titanium screws in my hip and had me walking out the door in about a week. I was back in a bike in 10 weeks, flying back to China in four months.
Oh, by the way, when I flew back into China, the end of 2002, I flew right smack in the middle of the SARS epidemic, which is the bird flu. But we didn’t know it at the time, and of course, China wasn’t telling us that there was this major epidemic. And so it’s what I call my WTF moment. “Why am I doing this?” And rather interesting. Because it was two weeks after my son graduated from high school, I spent that summer rehabbing with him. And as it turned out, that was a blessing.
We had a lot of good discussions that summer, things like “You’re going to college. You can eat like crap or you can eat healthy. It’s your choice. Your first college roommate, not going to be your best buddy. The odds throwing two 18-year-old guys in the same room and being best buddies is almost impossible, but you have to respect each other’s privacy.” And we had all those discussions. And by the way, four years later, when he graduated from the University of Dayton, he actually had listened.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Marc Miller
Well, as you will discover, if you have a child who is 18 years old, particularly a male, and you tell them anything, you have no idea what sticks. So if I hadn’t had that bike accident, I would not have had the time to discuss these things with him.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, absolutely.

Marc Miller
So that was a blessing. I was flying back to China. I was going to China regularly, and I’m going, “Why am I doing this? I’m teaching people how to build leading edge routers and switches?” The chipset I worked on back in those days is now in most of 4G and LTE base stations. It’s now owned by Intel. And I’m going, “Okay, what social viability… What does this mean to society? Well, not a whole lot.” So I laid myself off the next year and I went off and taught high school math for two years.

Pete Mockaitis
No kidding.

Marc Miller
Yep.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s like Jaime Escalante over here.

Marc Miller
Well, I’ve taught engineers in 40 different countries. So I went off and got my math teaching certificate. Lots of funny stories. By the way, schools do not want guys over 40. We don’t do what we’re told. But I was highly successful. I went into an inner city high school. 95% of my kids had probation officers. No, that does not mean they were bad kids. And my second year, we had 60 pregnancies in a school of about 2000 kids. And so I ran into situations that… As I said, after I had been there a few weeks: “Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore.” It was essentially a different culture. So yes, all of that came from the bike accident.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. And so I guess I’m curious to hear, then. So you said the accident sparked you thinking harder about “Is this career even making any sense and worthwhile for me to be doing it?”

Marc Miller
Yeah. One of the things… Again, I’m a bit older than you. At that point, I had been with IBM for 22 years, and I then was working for Agere, Inc., which was acquired by Lucent, which was spun out as Agere Systems. To put it bluntly, I followed the default path through all these years. I didn’t make any career decisions. I took what was laid out in front of me. As a baby boomer, I claim I was raised to be an employee, to go work for a father-like company that would take care of me, and after 30 or 40 years, I would retire and go out into the sunset. Well, about three-quarters of the way through, they moved my cheese, and I then started making career decisions. So I didn’t make my first real career decisions until my 40’s.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I see.

Marc Miller
Because we were raised to go to react. We were raised to say, “I would be presented with opportunities, and then I would accept those opportunities. I would not seek them out.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood.

Marc Miller
I went to work. I was supposed to work for a father-like company. I went to work for IBM for 22 years, and they were going to take care of me, and then they moved my cheese in the mid-‘90s.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear you.

Marc Miller
So you, as a millennial, you walk into a completely different world that I walked into back then. When I graduated from college, I was going to go work for somebody. And by the way, a job is a job. You’re supposed to go to work. It wasn’t supposed to be fun. It wasn’t supposed to be fulfilling. And so I developed a whole set of skills that got me paid really well. I turned myself into an extrovert. I’m actually a big-time introvert.

Pete Mockaitis
I see. I’d love to hear you reflect a bit on something you had put out there in your website, which really intrigued me, is you said most people don’t really know what makes them happy at their core, what fulfills them. And you said before, jobs weren’t supposed to be fulfilling. But tell us here now, how does one come to know what really fulfills them and find some of that in the career world?

Marc Miller
Yeah. It’s rather interesting. In my generation, we were told, “Go get a job. Go get a paycheck. It’s not supposed to be fun. After 40 years, you can retire and then things will be fun.” Generation X saw us go through that and saw their parents go through that, and they said, “You know what? I’m going to work really hard, and when I’m successful, I’m going to be happy.” Well, that didn’t work. Your generation, which is my son’s generation, we told you to “Follow your passion. The money will follow.” Well, that didn’t work either.
So the point here is work and passion and what fulfills them, there has to be a cross-section of what society needs and what you love to do. So one of the things is to get really aware of your core talents and build skills on top of those core talents. So on my website, I have a quote from Larry Bird. And I’m presuming you know who Larry Bird is. If you remember, Larry Bird was not a good athlete. He was big. He was slow. He couldn’t jump. But his comment was a winner is someone who understands what their God-given talents are, works the bejeebies out to work skills to make themselves into a winner. Something like that. And I claim that probably his talents were great eyesight and hand dexterity, which he then made himself into a great shooter and passer.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Marc Miller
The key problem is we tend to forget that we have talents because we start developing skills because we get paid for them. And by the way, burnout occurs when you overuse skills that are not tied to your innate talents.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Yes.

Marc Miller
Right?

Pete Mockaitis
I’ve never heard that articulated before, but it’s resonating. Yeah.

Marc Miller
So the key thing here (and the way I do it with most of my clients, which tend to be over 45) is go back to your childhood, and what did you do that you couldn’t get enough of? Because when we’re kids, we don’t put all the filters on that society puts on us or we put on ourselves because of society.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Marc Miller
I’ve got a good buddy who’s an engineer, and the only reason he’s an engineer was he scored so high in math as a junior in high school back in the 1960s that he was told, “Go forth and be an engineer.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, okay. That’s it.

Marc Miller
That’s it. And he did for the next 40 years and, by the way, made himself really miserable. By the way, he’s good. It just doesn’t make him happy.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So you’re finding the intersection between what the world needs, what you’re good at, and sort of what you enjoy doing there.

Marc Miller
Yes. You don’t get everything you want. This is particularly true. I have a lot of clients who tend to be what I call closet creatives. They tend to be very artistic and they go off into jobs that they take it and shove it. And what I usually do with them is reinsert that artistic need into their lives. I have one former client who knows to take out her drawing pad twice a day. It makes her happy.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. And so I guess that brings up my next question. I’m thinking about when it comes to fulfillments, it seems like some skills, talents, abilities that you’ve got going for you can sort of naturally show up in your job and career, and others don’t. So do you have any perspectives on how you go about thinking what should you be looking for to get covered or met in your job versus elsewhere?

Marc Miller
Yeah. Part of it is understanding what are your core needs. And I can go into a whole… I use the Birkman Assessment with a bunch of my stuff layered on top of it to kind of dig into that and to get you to understand when you’ve been the happiest and when you’ve been the most miserable. And by the way, this works very well for those of us who have been working 20 plus years. We know when things really have sucked and when things have been really good. And when you start understanding why, then you can get down to your needs.
And then I work with a lot of clients to develop open-ended questions, so when they go talk to somebody, they know what they’re listening for. So I’ll use an example. I don’t do well with bosses. I’ve never done well with bosses, other than I have the worst boss ever now: me.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, great.

Marc Miller
So I know that if I went in to someone and said, “Tell me about your management style,” if they immediately come in and say, “Yeah, we’re going to measure you every week,” I know very well to say, “Goodbye.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Marc Miller
And it’s to learn to have the nice probing questions, big open-ended questions, something that can’t be answered yes or no, and knowing what’s the message you’re listening for.

Pete Mockaitis
Tell me more.

Marc Miller
Well, I’ll use an example. I have one client who I refer to as my structured anarchist. He appears very, very structured. Every hair is in place, clothing. He’s very rule-oriented. He’s been a former CFO. And by the way, the problem is the rules have to be his. In other words, he’s really good at coming in and creating order out of chaos. And by the way, when he’s done creating the order, he needs to get the heck out. And so what I got him to do is start asking, “Okay, what does this job entail?” and if it’s going in and solving problems, then he knows to listen for that. If it means to solve the problem and then run it, the answer is “Nope.” He needs to find chaos, fix it, and then move on.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And we talk about those open-ended questions. Part of the value is not only getting more information because it’s more than yes or no, but I’m imagining it’s also that many questions, it feels like there’s an implied right answer, like “I should say yes to this,” whereas if it’s open-ended, they can just honestly answer it and you can assess, “Does that fit what I’m looking for?” and “What did he fail to say there?”

Marc Miller
Yeah. I use the CAMP method of association. By the way, it’s a book called “Starting with No.” And in there, it’s a negotiation technique but it works very well with careers. And that is, when you go in talking to a prospective employer, you’re probing for pain points. You want to find out what hurts. And in that process, if you can get them to open up, number one, you can do a better job of selling yourself. Two, you’ll figure out whether this is a good fit for you. In other words, do they have problems that you know how to solve and/or want to solve?
And three, I like to say one of my favorite questions is “What keeps you up at night?” because what you want to do is you want to dig in. I like to say, and I do this with my clients: I want to poke their underbelly. I want them to open up, and I want to know all the bad stuff because, number one, that allows me to position myself, but more importantly, it says, “Do I want to work there?”
 Let me add one… This is like dating and marriage. It’s two ways. Unfortunately, so often, when we go in, we do like we date. And I’m sorry, it’s been 40 years since I dated. We just don’t want to get rejected. Right?

Pete Mockaitis
Indeed. So more so about defensively ensuring you don’t get rejected rather than offensively assessing, “Is this right for me?”

Marc Miller
You got it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And that’s problematic. And so you ask that question, “What keeps you awake at night?” You’re clearly talking about worries and anxieties and not that I’m watching too many episodes of “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” on Hulu. Do you have some additional kind of add-on probing questions that go with that “What keeps you up at night?” question?

Marc Miller
Well, one of the big ones is, number one, “Why are you hiring for this position? Why is the position open?”

Pete Mockaitis
“We can’t keep anyone in it. They say they’re on the edge of their sanity.”

Marc Miller
Well, if they say, “Well, the last guy quit,” okay. If he got promoted, okay. “Oh, it’s a brand-new position.” If it’s a brand-new position, “Why did you create this position at this time? Why now?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Marc Miller
And again, I like to say this, all I’m trying to do is poke them, and keep on poking, and keep on asking questions. And by the way, you will impress them if you ask really good questions.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, certainly. And I know that. I’ve been interviewing a candidate. If you say, “Do you have any questions for me?” and they have like nothing, or one or two generic things that could be found on the website, I am the opposite of impressed.

Marc Miller
Yes. You should walk in. I always have clients coming in with 10 to 15 questions that are related to their core needs. So they can go in asking about management style. One of the classic ones is “How do you show your employees that you value them?”

Pete Mockaitis
Sounds great.

Marc Miller
And by the way, we all want to get stroked differently. We all want strokes, and we all want different strokes. And I can write that down for you, if you want. And how frequently we want those strokes is very, very different. And by the way, it’s very generational.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I was going to ask next about the generational piece. You work mostly with boomers, but you’ve also interacted, you go up and down the line, with millennials. And so what have you observed as some key differences in this game by generation?

Marc Miller
Well, I do this multigenerational workshop, and one of the key things I always tell people is… I call these generational echo effects, and that is, when everyone leaves home, you do one of two things. You either do exactly what your parents told you to do, or you do the exact opposite, and rarely anything in between. And so I’ll use the example. My parents’ generation. My father served in World War II. He was born around 1920. Very loyal to his government. Saved money like crazy.
My generation, we were boomer. We went through Watergate and Vietnam. We didn’t trust the government worth a damn. We also spent every last dime we had. My generation, we were hyper-competitive. So what do we do to our kids? Everyone gets a blue ribbon. Everyone gets a participation trophy. We were raised to be very private. Our kids created Facebook. So you get all these echo effects. So I claim your generation, this is the challenge. We keep on expecting you to be like us, and the reality is you are the echo of us.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And you’re saying some of those echoes look identical and some are the opposite.

Marc Miller
Well, one of the things you have to look at each generation is these are not homogeneous generations. In other words, not everyone behaves the same. So one of the things you have to look at is you have to look at each individual and understanding there are going to be differences. And by understanding generational norms, I can have a better idea how to ask. So when I didn’t see my boss for six weeks, that was good. If you don’t see your boss for six weeks, most millennials will go, “They’re looking for the constant stroking.” Now, it’s not like they need to be praised all the time. They just need doing a good job be quick, short, but they need feedback.
One of the key differences, we were very comfortable not being included in decision-making at work. The bosses went in the backroom, made the decisions. Most of your generation, you want to be involved in the decision-making.
That’s a real difference. And by the way, a lot of that comes from the way you were educated. So my generation, we were educated and we were supposed to sit in the corner and memorize stuff. You were educated in groups. It was all group learning. So the dynamics in which we were raised were really very different, and therefore, what we expect and how we want to be treated at work is very different. And by the way, it drives us nuts.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Marc Miller
As I said, you is the way you is because we made you that way.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear you. So could we wrap up by maybe sharing what are some key perspectives or tips you’d offer to ensure that we minimize the chance of bumping into career dissatisfaction?

Marc Miller
Well, number one, you’ve got to keep track of who you are and what’s enjoyable. And by the way, that changes through your life. What I enjoyed when I was 25 is not what I enjoy today. Two, we live in a world that is changing, and is changing fast. I did a blog post last year called “Has Your Job Been SMAC (Social, Mobile, Analytics, and Cloud)?” Your job will be affected by one of those, if not multiple of them. You have to understand where things are moving. And companies will no longer train you to stay up-to-date.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Marc Miller
So you have to both understand how you are changing to how is the world changing, and how does that intersect? In other words, I grew up in the world of where you choose a career, one and you’re done. The folks in your 20’s, you’re going to change careers multiple times over the next 30 or 40 or 50 years because many of you won’t retire until you’re 80, and you’re going to have to be constantly pivoting as you move forward, because think about it. The iPhone was created 10 years ago. We didn’t have video in your phone until like six years ago.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Marc Miller
Right? It hasn’t been that long. Guess I had an evil BlackBerry until 2010, and they don’t exist anymore.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. It’s wild how quickly things are changing these days.

Marc Miller
Right. And that’s going to speed up. It ain’t going to slow down. So as far as your career is concerned, you’ve got to pay attention to who you are and what you enjoy, and then what are people willing to pay you for?

Pete Mockaitis
Got you. All right. Well, thank you. You tell me, any final thoughts you’d like to share before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Marc Miller
Oh, sure. I can’t tell you the number of folks I deal with who are my age who don’t know who we are because we’ve so morphed our behaviors to make ourselves look the way our employers look. One is the look. And that’s something that you and your generation, you need to learn to avoid and not chase after that bright, shiny object. I’ve worked with a couple of 20-somethings that they keep on chasing bright, shiny objects just so they can make more money. I’ve run into “Well, I suffer from HDHD” or whatever, and I’m going, “You have to drug yourself so you can concentrate. You need to find a different job so you don’t have to concentrate.”

Pete Mockaitis
Interesting perspective.

Marc Miller
Right? I have a really short attention span, which kept me from being a really good programmer. That’s why I gave up programming and got into training and got into other things because, you know what, that’s not who I am. I don’t need to drug myself to make myself do that.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s a good acid test right there.

Marc Miller
Right? We’re not all supposed to be able to do certain things.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that’s a nice note there. So now, tell me, do you have a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Marc Miller
Well, I was looking at your thing and I said, well, my favorite quote is around personal branding, and that is Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon. He says, “Your personal brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.” And I use that extensively in defining when people are trying to understand and explain themselves, “Who are you?” Sometimes, you need to go ask other people. In fact, rather interesting, some of my best brand stories from my clients have been written by, of all things, adult daughters.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow.

Marc Miller
They will see stuff in Mom and Dad, and will be able to articulate it that their parents can’t.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Thank you.

Marc Miller
You have to get out of your own head. Now, I’m going to throw in a book at you, everybody who listens to this podcast: “Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, absolutely. That’s such good stuff. We had Greg on the show a bit ago.

Marc Miller
Good.

Pete Mockaitis
Episode 38. Greg McKeown, “Essentialism.” Fantastic work.

Marc Miller
Yeah. I’ve had multiple clients go through that and it has changed their lives. The other book I really like, I work clients through, is “Positive Intelligence.” Some good reading, and I primarily use that to get people out of stress.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you.

Marc Miller
When people are really under stress and they’re really miserable, no one is going to hire them.

Pete Mockaitis
Makes sense. Certainly. And how about a favorite tool, whether it’s a product or service or app or thought framework you use a lot?

Marc Miller
Yeah. I based most of my work on the Birkman Assessment, and you can go to birkman.com. It is by far the best assessment. I call it my Myers-Briggs on steroids. Myers-Briggs will tell you how you behave. The Birkman will give you, number one, how you behave, and then how you want to be treated in that same behavior.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Marc Miller
So that’s where I come up with my structured anarchist, my stealth competitors, my closet creatives. And I’m a closet introvert of where we behave one way but that’s not really who we are. We’ve changed our behavior because we get paid more.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And how about a favorite habit, a personal practice of yours that really contributes to you being awesome at your job?

Marc Miller
Sure. Again, another good book for you is “Quiet” by Susan Cain. It’s on introversion, and one of the things she talks about in the book is restorative niches. And what restorative niches are are doing things that restore you and schedule them into your day. I have another client where she has learned to take knitting breaks during her day. When she knits, it turns the brain off.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s fun.

Marc Miller
And it’s to find those things that restore you. I had a client who had to present like six times in two days, and what I had him do between each session was not to stay at the conference, to go back to his hotel room and turn on his tunes, turn on his music, and sit for about a half-hour to 45 minutes just listening to music.

Pete Mockaitis
Perfect. Thank you. And would you say there is a particular quote from you or a nugget that you share that folks particularly seem to resonate with and write down and want to keep and use?

Marc Miller
Yeah. The one that most people remember from me is (it resonates with my generation, and that was) “I was raised to be an employee, to go work for a father-like company that would take care of me, and then they move my cheese.” And you will find that many of my generation don’t really understand that that’s just the way we were raised, and it’s one reason why boomers are becoming entrepreneurs at a much greater rate than any other generation. To some extent, it’s because we have to. But others, it’s the fact that “Wow, I’m now free to go do this.”

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. And tell us, what would be the best way for folks to contact you or learn more?

Marc Miller
Sure. Go to careerpivot.com. You can reach me there, either by hitting the Contact button or you can email me at marc@careerpivot.com. And on the top of my webpage, there’s a phone number. You can call me.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Marc Miller
That’s not usually found very often on websites anymore.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, we appreciate it. Thank you. And how about a final challenge or call to action that you’d issue to folks seeking to be more awesome at their jobs?

Marc Miller
Well, the first thing, the one thing that I absolutely challenge people, is number one, know thyself and understand. So I’ll use the example. My bicycle accident was what I refer to as a moment of clarity. We have different events in our life that cause us to be kind of clear. I claim we look at life through filters, and there are various different times when those filters come down. Some of those are births, deaths, when we get hurt, when we get laid off, when we get hired, when we get married, when we have children. All of these tend to get us to start looking at life a little differently.
And you can go back to those times and reflect and understand, “Okay, what was really important?” because we tend to forget that. As I said in the opening, most people don’t know what makes them happy at the core because we convince ourselves that if we make more money, or “If I do this, I’ll be happy.” Well, it doesn’t always work that way.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear you. Okay. Well, Marc, thanks. It’s been so much fun. I wish you lots of luck, and keep on rocking.

Marc Miller
Well, one of the things I want to tell everybody is I have a new book coming out, and it’s “Repurpose Your Career: A Practical Guide for the Second Half of Life.” It’s actually the second edition of that book, and it should be out for pre-order on March 15^th. And you can get pre-release, preview chapters by going to careerpivot.com/awesome.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, beautiful. Thank you.