007: Putting the Wisdom of the Centuries to Work with Jocelyn Davis

Pete Mockaitis
Jocelyn, thanks so much for being here on How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Jocelyn Davis
Hi, Pete. Great to be with you.

Pete Mockaitis
Well that is an impressive lineup that you have in your bio and I want to ask all sorts of questions but before we get there, I’d love to hear what’s something fun in life that’s keeping you busy that is not on the bio?

Jocelyn Davis
Goodness! Well actually funny you should ask, I don’t know if many people would call this fun, but I call it fun. I’m actually doing a master’s in Eastern Classics at St. John’s College, which is here in Santa Fe. So this just shows that I’m kind of the nerd of the world here, and addicted to studying great books of all kinds, but I wanted to go on from my studies of Western philosophy and study some stuff from the East, so that’s what I’ve been doing for the past six months or so.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I do think that’s fun. I took four years of Latin in high school, but I don’t know much.

Jocelyn Davis
Well I am studying Sanskrit now, believe it or not, because they have a language requirement –  so I’m studying Sanskrit.

Pete Mockaitis
Fun.

Jocelyn Davis
There you go.

Pete Mockaitis
Lithuania is my heritage, and I understand the Lithuanian language descended from Sanskrit.

Jocelyn Davis
Yes!

Pete Mockaitis
That’s all I know about Sanskrit.

Jocelyn Davis
Yes, very good.

Pete Mockaitis
I want to spend most of our time  hearing about some of these great gems that you have inside your book releasing this week here, The Greats on Leadership: Classic Wisdom for Modern Managers. But before we go there, you spent some great time as the vice-president for research and development for The Forum Corporation – that’s an international training company with a sizable number of people and revenue. So I just have to ask while I got you, what were some themes you discovered over the course of researching and developing training materials and how adults learn, is there anything that comes to mind as you reflect upon those years of career?

Jocelyn Davis
Wow! Great question. I was actually there for 23 years, so I have a lot to reflect back on there. But I guess what I would point to most of all, just to get a plug in here for my other book, my previous book, which really was written at Forum with some of my colleagues there, and that book was called Strategic Speed. It really sort of summed a lot of what I had learned over about 20 years working at Forum.The point of that book, Strategic Speed, is that in order to create speed or efficiency in business, you really need to focus on the people, which is not surprising. Everyone kind of says, “Yeah, yeah, we know that,” but when you look at what companies actually do, what leaders actually do, to try to speed things up, to try to make change happen or to install new systems or any kind of execution effort, what leaders tend to do is focus more on the process and the technology and the systems, and they often forget to focus on the people. But what our research showed in that book and over many, many years at Forum was that at the end of the day you’re going to go fast or slow and be successful or not successful depending on whether the people are on board, so that’s what that whole book was about. I’ve tried to bring a lot of that thinking about the people into my new book as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Interesting, so when you say speed, I guess I’m imagining in practice that can translate into you have fewer people dragging their feet, or hiding outand hoping that you don’t notice them if you’ve taken the time to get all kind of onboard and rowing in the right direction. Is that a fair kind of articulation of some of that or is there sort of a different angle?

Jocelyn Davis
Exactly. It’s that and what I would add to that, what we talk about in that book, is the three people factors of clarity, unity, and agility, which people always like I think because mostly it’s easy to remember, but also because of what those factors really speak to. As you said, business leaders tend to want to sort of skip over all that – getting people clear about the direction, getting people unified around the direction, and making sure that people are agile, willing to adapt. They tend to want to skip over that stuff because it takes time, but if you skip over it, then you end up going slow rather than going fast. So you kind of have to go slow at the beginning and address these factors of clarity, unity, and agility so that you can go fast down the road.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, understood. So now I’d love to chat a bit about this book here because it hits home for me, because I actually recently concluded a series of workshops. I was training a team of engineers and so I had some parting gifts for them, which were  a wide variety of books that I think are wonderful, which everybody should know about and help kind of reinforce and review some of the content that we shared. One of the participants noted “Everyone of these books you’re giving us was written in the last 20 years.Is there anything that we should learn from Sun Tzu, The Art of War or the Greek classics?” I was like, he got me there.You’d have to work a little harder, I think, to mine some of those nuggets and to apply it to your daily work life. Is that accurate? Is there some extra work that has to be done to mine and translate, or is it kind of ready to go?

Jocelyn Davis
There is extra work to be done. There’s a lot of extra work to be done to mine and translate, and the good news is that I’ve done the work. I mean, I’m so passionate about this issue, as it sounds like your colleague was as well, that this idea of helping people see that the realleadership wisdom has been around for 2,500 years. People have been saying all this stuff about how to lead, how to communicate, how to motivate, how to make good decisions, how to — I mean you name the leadership topic, a great author or thinker has talked about it sometime in the past 2,500 years. But what hasn’t been done is the work, as you say it’s not easy to go back and read all those books and figure out what’s Plato really saying about justice or what was Machiavelli really saying about change. So I have done that work and curated it. Really this book is sort of a tremendous curation project is one way to look at it to compile and curate that wisdom from those two and a half millennia of great thinkers.

Pete Mockaitis
Well that does sound extensive –  that’s not something you wrap up over a couple of weeks.

Jocelyn Davis
Right. No, it took about two years.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’d love it. I’ve got so many questions here, but maybe I’ll let you kick us off. Who do you thinkis a thinker who’s perhaps sunder appreciated, under represented yet has a fantastic sort of takeaway that we should be actively incorporating into our leadership and work lives?

Jocelyn Davis
Wow, okay! So I know, as you have told me in advance,that you are a fan of Myers Briggs.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s true.

Jocelyn Davis
And so I’m going toopen the door here, or walk through the door that you’ve opened here, to talk aboutC.J. Jung, who was one of the authors featured in the book. There’s about 25 altogether and I’m hard pressed to pick just one, but I’ll just talk for a second about Jung because he is a great psychologist, wrote many, many long treatises, and one of them is called Psychological Types. Psychological Types is where the Myers Briggs, the type indicator, the MBTI, comes from.

Pete Mockaitis
Indeed.

Jocelyn Davis
So what is interesting to me about Jung, however, is that given the popularity of the MBTI in business today, it’s by far the most popular type assessment or personality assessment that’s used in many, many organizations. And alot of people know that has its origins in Jung but what a lot of people don’t know is how Jung – when you go and actually read Jung’s psychological types and you see what he was saying about these types, it has more of an edge to it, I would say.

Pete Mockaitis
Do tell.

Jocelyn Davis
Yeah, so the thing about Myers Briggs – and I love the MBTI, so don’t get me wrong. I’m an INTJ, and I love knowing my colleagues’ types and I used to do this with my team. I would have them do the MBTI. We talked about it, so I think it’s great. But what Jung does is he takes it  three or four steps deeper in that he doesn’t say, “Well, it’s just important to know your type and it’s important to know other people’s types and then you’ll gain greater appreciation for different personalities.”He also says you’ve got to integrate the different sides of your personality. So that means acknowledging and finding healthy ways to integrate your other side. So in other words it’s not okay, for me as an introvert to just say well, I’m an introvert, and so I’ll just be introverted and kind of go with that because what happens, says Jung when somebody sort of leans way to their favored side is they tend to – their non-favored side -so in my case extroversion –  tends to sort of come out in weird ways. They’re not acknowledging it and dealing with it in a healthy way.
A really quick example that I’ll share with you – this happened to me, gosh, 20 years ago now. 25 years ago, I was leading my first training program, I was co-teaching a little coaching program. And I knew that as an introvert, I tend to come across as maybe a little quiet, not dynamic. I realized this, and so I decided, well, I’m going to be extroverted. I went around the whole session with this huge fake smile, very loud voice, sort of approaching people in what I thought was an extroverted way, and of course it came across as completely fake, turned people off. They thought I was some kind of lunatic, I think, so the session did not go well.
What Jung would say in an example like that is,“You have not figured out. You, Jocelyn, have not figured out how to integrate this other side, this side that’s not your favored side, extroversion, and figured out how to integrate it in a healthy way and achieve a balance that would make you more successful.” That’s just an example of this one thing with Jung, if you read what he says about this thing that we often think that we know a lot about that, the Myers Briggs, he really takes it to kind of the deeper and more challenging place, I think.

Pete Mockaitis
So, you said edge there. It seems like there is an implication that there is maybe more of a dark side, or you said challenging. You described something coming out in sort of, a suboptimal outcome,like that extroversion that seemed inauthentic. Sometimes, I guesstype practitioners might talk a bit about different types and their reactions to stress, but I’d love to hear a little bit more. What are some of the more kind of‘edgy’ implications of the Jung perspective on this?

Jocelyn Davis
Here’s another related but a different thing that he talks about.You know with Myers Briggs – and this is true with a lot of the present day thinkers that are kind of picking up on some of these ideas from the classic thinkers – they tend to take these ideas and they come out with an almost “I’m okay, you’re okay” kind of view of the world.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow.

Jocelyn Davis
And so with Jung and again, looking at Myers Briggs again, I would say that the people who have taken Jung’s ideas and brought them to the business world today, they come out as sort ofyou know “I’m sensing and you’re intuiting, andI’m judging, you’re perceiving,” and that’s all fine and that’s all okay. What Jung does though, being a psychologist, I mean he was a person who was working with people who had problems and were coming to him, trying to make their lives better. So he just acknowledges that – this is really what I mean by edge, I guess in a way –is that you really need to grapple with these things, especially as a leader or as an individual in business,you need to think about not just, “Hey, I’m an INTJ, great.” You need to think about “I’m an INTJ, what does that mean I’m likely to do wrong? What are the traps? What are the pitfalls that I’m likely to fall into?”And a lot of these classic writers, these great thinkers, they spend a lot more time on the pitfalls that you’re likely to fall into, that we as human beings, and then you as an individual, are likely to fall into, and sorat of acknowledging those traps and figuring out how to avoid them.

Pete Mockaitis
Well now I need to know, what are my pitfalls as an ENFJ?

Jocelyn Davis
Well, you got to read Jung.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright, no shortcuts. Well thank you for that. A couple of others I’d like to dig into a little bit – what can you tell us about Pericles, and what can you teach us about communication that’s highly relevant today?

Jocelyn Davis
Pericles, okay. So some of your listeners may know, he did the great funeral oration, which Thucydides, the great Greek historian, writes about. This was a funeral oration for the Athenian war dead in the 5^th century B.C. in Athens. Pericles’ Funeral Oration, what people may not know, is that Abraham Lincoln, it is thought, actually looked at that funeral oration as one of the models for his Gettysburg Address.

Pete Mockaitis
Really?

Jocelyn Davis
It’s known as one of the great speeches of all time, even picked up on by Abraham Lincoln. So,one of the things that’s interesting about Pericles in communication that I point out in my book is that a lot of leaders really emphasize and try to be inspiring when they communicate, and they try to be inspiring by kind of painting this glorious vision of the future and “Here’s where we’re all going.” What they tend not to do, maybe, because they don’t want to flatter people or they don’t want to make people too proud of themselves or something – is they tend to not emphasize kind of the specialness of the enterprise that that their team is a part of. They’re kind of reluctant to  make people feel too good about themselves, I think. But Pericles, his funeral oration, is all about these Athenians,what makes Athens so great, the Athenian character. It’s as if a CEO were talking to an organization and saying, “This is why this organization is so special,” and the effect that has is it makes everybody in the room want to live up to that specialness.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot.

Jocelyn Davis
Yeah. It’s sort of a twist on the vision thing, if you will, because the trouble with visions is that “Here is this wonderful vision.” Well, a lot of people are going to say, “Why should I care? Maybe that’s your vision. I don’t know why I should want that.” But if you really talk about what makes this organization special, what makes you special, make it about the audience,and all the things they’re already doing right and all the things that are already wonderful, then that’s going to make themstand a little taller, stand up on tiptoe and say, “Boy, I want to live up to that. I better live up to that.” That’s one thing that I learned from Pericles.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s fun.  I’m drawing all kinds of connections here, I’m thinking about Dr. Robert Cialdini on influence, talking about commitment and consistency, like“Well I’m part of this organization, and this is what we stand for and therefore I want to live up to it and be consistent with this image or vision,” and that really was my experience. When I was working at Bain, I felt very much a sense of pride, and they talked a lot about the ‘Bain DNA,’and how “It’s hard for us to hire from the outside because not very many people have that, but you know, some people do, and we can get them in, but mostly it’s homegrown,” and all that stuff.

Jocelyn Davis

Nice.

Pete Mockaitis
Well that’s good. And how about Machiavelli? I think of him as the original Frank Underwood. What can he teach us about change?

Jocelyn Davis
Yeah, Machiavelli. Here is another example of how these classic thinkers have come down to us in kind of a caricatured form, almost, because people will think of Machiavelli as Machiavellian. His book, The Prince, is known as the sort of the how-to book for tyrants. It’s got all thisreally sinister advice in it. And it does, to be honest, he’s a tough guy. But when you read The Prince carefully, what you realize is that Machiavelli has an extraordinary respect for the soft stuff. So he was a tough guy, but he really believes in the power of the soft stuff, namely how people feel about you and your regime and your leadership. He’s not one of these people today, the consultants today, who would say “You got to ignore the soft stuff, focus on business, focus on numbers, focus on results.”He would say the number one thing that a leader needs is the support of the people, he’s very good on change. This is going back to what I was saying in my earlier book when I first started talking, he really is one of the thinkers that believes that,a) change is very difficult to make happen, and b), it’s only going to happen and it’s only going to stick if you have the support of the people, if they feel good about you. He’s famous for saying, “Better to be feared than loved,” but that’s just one throwaway comment in the midst of a lot of advice about how to win the support, maybe not love but certainly win the support and the good feeling, the good will of the people that you lead.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, boy, it’s been so long since I read that. Could you refresh our memories? What are some applicable takeaways in terms of how one does win over that support?

Jocelyn Davis
One thing that he emphasizes is the importance of being with the people, going and living with them, not just sort of staying in your palace or often some other country and letting your henchmen go and take care of it. He says “You got to go. You got to be there. You’ve got to be present.” He also says “Don’t ever underestimate the trouble that you’ll get into as a leader if you insult or humiliate people.”He’s very clear on if you make people feel bad about themselves, if you humiliate them, then they’re not going to forget it. If you need to get rid of somebody and of course he’s actually talking about executing  people, which is not what we do today, but the idea still applies. If somebody is not the right person for a job and you need to get rid of them, then show them out the door immediately – get rid of them. Don’t have them hanging around and sort of make them feel bad and beat them over the head and humiliate them,because they’re never going to forget that.

He’s a big proponent of when there are problems, even if you need to do some sort of unpleasant things that are going to make you unpopular, just do them cleanly, do them quickly, get it over with and then move on to win the support of the people that you have around. Because if people are angry with you, if people feel insulted, then you know it’s going to come back to bite you.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, understood. So let’s maybe tackle one more. Let’s say if you had to pick one that you think might resonate with folks in the earlier part of their careers, becoming more awesome at their jobs, who’s another classical thinker with a message we should get our arms around?

Jocelyn Davis
 I’m going to go with, because this is just another unusual one, Mary Shelley.

Pete Mockaitis
Frankenstein.

Jocelyn Davis
Who wrote Frankenstein, yes. This could be my favorite chapter in the book.I love them all, but I really love the chapter on Frankenstein because people are so taken aback when I say, “Oh, Frankenstein is actually a leadership book,” but it really is. The reason is that, as some people know,‘Frankenstein’ actually refers to Dr. Frankenstein, not the monster, not the creature. And Dr. Frankenstein is basically a leader who has made a bet, he’s made a bold move. He’s made a bet on the sort of this big innovation, and soon after it gets rolled out, he realizes it’s not working. It’s not what he thought. It’s not what he expected, and I think everybody, especially early in their leadership career, can kind of relate to this. It’s like, “I’m a new manager. It’s my responsibility to make a new hire or to roll out this new initiative,” and it never turns out the way you think it’s going to. It never matches the image you have in your mind.

So here’s Dr. Frankenstein. He had this great dream of creating this wonderful creature. It was going to be so good looking and nice and everything, and suddenly it’s this thing, and it’s a nightmare. So what does he do in that moment? The question is what as a leader what do you when that scary thing rises from the table and it’s not what you thought it was going to be, this new product or this new hire, or this new system, what do you do? Do you run from it, or do you step forward and engage with it? Do you face your monster, or do you run from it?

Dr. Frankenstein runs from his monster. He does not face it and it turns out later in the book that really all this so-called monster wants is to be heard. He wants somebody to listen to him and Frankenstein fails utterly at that. He just says, “Oh, it’s a monster! It’s a fiend. I’m not going to look. I’m not going to try. I’m just going to run, or try to kill it.” And so he makes a grave mistake there that a lot of leaders make. What Mary Shelley would say, I think, to leaders, is that it’s one thing to kind of face down an adversary, but it’s much more courageous when a leader steps forward and faces up to his or her responsibilities, faces the monster, engages with this thing that you created and listen to what it has to say.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that and that’s something that I’ve been discovering more and more is that when you see something that you just think is dumb or bad, just to be very simplistic –  there is an understandable explanation at the root of it,interms of people just kind of doing what’s best for them, and their families, and their careers, and it just happens that given the incentives, or system or misunderstanding or something –  it just results in having a bit of a mess sometimes.

Jocelyn Davis
That’s right, that’s right and the toughest thing I think for a leader to do, at any stage of a leader’s career, I think the toughest thing for that leader to do is to step forward into the mess, into the scariness, into the people who are yelling at you or making objections, or complaining, to step forward and listen rather than shut your eyes and say, “Okay. I’m not going to deal with this. I’m going to run away.”

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. Thank you. Well, I don’t know, is there anything else that you really want to make sure that you get out there before we kind of shift gears and go into the fast faves of rapid-fire pieces?

Jocelyn Davis
I think the only think I would say is that as I started out by saying is that I think the thing that is really great about this book for leaders,especially leaders early in their careers, is just that it’s all the best ideas of leadership from the past two and a half millennia in one manageable book. It’s an easy read. It’s fun. It’s entertaining. I’ve built in a lot of stories and practical tools and contemporary ideas that link to the classic ideas, so it’s a fun read, so I encourage people to pick it up.

Pete Mockaitis
You say you’ve compressed that two and a half millennia and it’s a handy summary. Is it shorter than the Summa Theologica,or what’s the size there?

Jocelyn Davis
It’s about 300 pages and each chapter is about 10 pages, so you can go to the chapters that interest you and read them quickly.

Pete Mockaitis
All in one volume?

Jocelyn Davis
Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, very good. Alright, so now I’d love to get your take on some quick responses to some of your favorite things.

Jocelyn Davis
Okay.

Pete Mockaitis
Could you share – and it sounds like you might have a ton, so feel free to share two or three – could you give us a favorite quote, or something that inspires you again and again?

Jocelyn Davis
Wow! Okay, my favorite quote. I mean there’s many, but Maya Angelou is one that I often come back to, and my most recent favorite quote from hers is, “When somebody shows you who they are, believe them.” She has another one, “People will forget what you say. They will forget what you do. But they will never forget how you make them feel.” That’s something I’ve tried to remember in my life as a leader is that people will never forget how you made them feel.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. How about a favorite study or experiment or a piece of research you find yourself thinking about or referencing frequently?

Jocelyn Davis
A favorite study? Well, okay, I’m plugging my own work here, but really the research that was behind my previous book, Strategic Speed, that research about what really contributes to speed and what doesn’t, we looked at many, many organizations and many initiatives that organizations had undergone, the ones that were successful and the ones that weren’t, and then looked at the factors that contributed to speed or slowness, andI still love that research.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m looking forward to take a look at it myself. Can you share with us your favorite book?

Jocelyn Davis
Well, I have 24 of them.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s very precise.

Jocelyn Davis
All in The Greats on Leadership. They’re all my favorite books. How can I pick one? I can’t pick one. You want one that’s more recent?

Pete Mockaitis
I will take one at random that is resonating with you in this very moment.

Jocelyn Davis
Okay. Resonating with me in this moment? Well, the one that’s actually resonating with me in this moment,because I’m taking this Eastern classics program, is actually the Bhagavad-Gita, which is the great Hindu classic, spiritual classic, featuring Krishna and a lot of other characters, so yeah, that’s what I was reading most recently.

Pete Mockaitis
How big is that?

Jocelyn Davis
It’s short actually. It’s embedded in a huge book –  the longest book ever written, which is the Mahabharata, which is literally the longest book ever written, and the Bhagavad-Gita, is maybe 40 pages embedded in the Mahabharata – so not that long.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright. I’m going to tackle that one. How about a favorite website or online resource you really like?

Jocelyn Davis
You know what one of my favorite websites, is  a British website and it’s called The School of Life, and it is a company in London —  the organizationis called The School of Life and then the website is called The Book of Life. They are a very interesting that does training – leadership training, personal effectiveness training -but it’s sort of a cross between  training and education, lot of interesting people come and give talks there. But anyway, their website is called The Book of Life and it has a lot of interesting tips on individual effectiveness and how to operate in the world.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. How about a favorite habit or personal practice of yours  that’s really been key to your effectiveness?

Jocelyn Davis
I’m not kidding when I say this – having a dog, and walking the dog every day. My wonderful Australian shepherd, Cassie.

Pete Mockaitis
What does that do for you, the walking?

Jocelyn Davis
Well, a) it’s my exercise, going for an hour-long walk everyday, and b) it’s my meditative time, and I can’t get out of it, because the dog wants to go, and she makes me go.

Pete Mockaitis
A symbiosis there.

Jocelyn Davis
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
How about a favorite tool? Any gadgets, or software, or frameworks that you use often?

Jocelyn Davis
You mean a technology tool or…

Pete Mockaitis
It can be a technology tool. I also think about sort of 2×2 matrices or frameworks that help you put thoughts into context with perspective as a tool.

Jocelyn Davis
Okay, yes. Wow, okay so I’m going to point to something that’s in my book actually,but it was drawn from some work that I did at Forum a while ago, which is a change process and a change model, and it’s called The Five Phases of Change. It’s actually in the chapter on Machiavelli, which is about change. It’s a way to recognize phases of change so that you don’t assume – I kind of go keep coming back to this theme here – so that as a leader, I don’t assume that everything is going to happen all at once, like you start out on any kind of effort, any kind of change effort, you tend to think, “Okay, things are moving. Things are going to get done,” and what inevitably happens is that you hit this thing called The Plateau, and you need to be prepared for that. You need to be prepared for the natural phases of change that are going to unfold.

It’s a model that helps me remember, helps me anticipate what’s going to happen and not be distressed when, in any area of my life, it seems like things are not going fast enough, things are slowing down, things are going wrong. It helps me go, “Okay, I’m in Phase 3 now” or “I’ve hit The Plateau,” so it helps me stay grounded.

Pete Mockaitis
Great, and how about a favorite time-saving trick? You like to go fast, any little tactical things you do to accelerate?

Jocelyn Davis
Time-saving tricks? Wow! You know, I don’t know if this a time-saving trick. This is my anti-procrastination trick.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright.

Jocelyn Davis
Whenever there is something that I am feeling like I don’t want to do, or I’m procrastinating, I tell myself “I’m just going to work on it for five minutes.”Inevitably what happens is I end up working on it for an hour, two hours, or whatever it maybe. But it’s kind of a way to trick my mind into taking this thing that looks odious and long and heavy, and just saying “I’m just going to work on it for five minutes,” and it helps me kind of jump into the pool, so to speak.

Pete Mockaitis
Do you ever say, “Okay, five minutes is up. I’m out of here”?

Jocelyn Davis
You know, I don’t think I have ever done that, because I get into it and once I’m in the pool, then I’m swimming around then it’s usually pretty fun whatever it maybe.

Pete Mockaitis
Great. How about a favorite gem or nugget, something that when you communicate or teach it, folks really start taking notes or tweeting, it or highlighting it in a Kindle book?

Jocelyn Davis
Yeah, you know the thing that people have really resonated to, and I’m thinking about The Greats on Leadership here, this book that I’ve been tweeting about, is just this idea that leadership insights don’t necessarily come from the usual suspects. You can look in odd places, like I just said “I’m reading the Bhagavad-Gita,” and you said “I’m going to pick that up and look at it.”

Another example is this crazy book that I was reading for class recently called Yoga Vasistha. It’s another huge book of Yoga philosophy and the professor who was teaching the class said, “This book is so scholarly. Nobody really reads it, not even in India.” Well, I went on Amazon and looked it up. It turns out there are 900 reviews of this book.

Pete Mockaitis
There you go.

Jocelyn Davis
I’m reading through the reviews and here’s plenty of people all saying, “I love this book. It changed my life. This is the most useful book that I have ever read.” So I just say that because I’m finding that, I don’t know if this a nugget exactly, but just this idea that wisdom is found in unsuspected places, unusual places. I think it’s something that people really resonate to.

Pete Mockaitis
Great. Thank you. How about a favorite way to find you? Is it best to go to your website or Twitter, or what’s the top place you point folks?

Jocelyn Davis
I would point folks to my website, which is jocelynrdavis.com.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, and final kind of parting challenge, or call to action? Is there any one thing you’d challenge folks who are seeking to be more awesome at their jobs to tackle?

Jocelyn Davis
I’m quoting Shakespeare here, “Be not afraid of greatness.” There’s many people, especially younger folks starting out early in their careers, who think, “I’m not a leader. I don’t have that title. I don’t have that. That’s not my job.” I would say don’t be afraid to be great, because you don’t need a fancy title, you don’t need a corner office, you don’t need a million Twitter followers to be a great leader. You just need your own willingness to learn. You need some fellow learners to talk to, to help you along the way, and you need some great teachers, which are who these great thinkers are that I talk about in my book. So go for it.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. Well, Jocelyn, thanks so much for taking this time. It’s been a treat and I’ve got a lot of reading to do now, and I very much appreciate it.

Jocelyn Davis
Thanks so much, Pete. It was fun.