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Career Management Archives - How to be Awesome at Your Job

Apr 30
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1149: How to Stand Out, Multiply Your Opportunities, and Win People’s Confidence with Justin Humphries

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Justin Humphries reveals his fundamental principles for rapidly growing opportunities and income in an uncertain job market.

You’ll Learn

  1. How to multiply your inbound opportunities
  2. The simplest way to expand your professional network
  3. The key that keeps people coming back to you

About Justin

Justin Humphries is a dedicated Loan Officer with experience since June 2021, specializing in VA, first-time homebuyer, and DSCR loans. A Nashville native, Justin is deeply motivated by personal and professional growth, drawing strength from his faith, family, and a passion for building meaningful relationships. He takes great pride in helping clients align their mortgage strategies with their life goals, aiming to support them in building long-term wealth. Justin values the opportunity to develop lasting connections with customers who return to him year after year for their mortgage needs.

Beyond his professional work, Justin is actively involved in his church community, serving on the parish council and volunteering with the Society of St. Vincent DePaul to assist families at risk of homelessness. He is happily married to his wife Stephanie and is a proud father of three young children, including twins.

Resources Mentioned

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Justin Humphries Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Justin, welcome!

Justin Humphries
Hey, Pete, great to be here. Appreciate you having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I am excited to be chatting. We’ve known each other for just about five years now here in Tennessee. And, boy, I say this and I mean this, not just because we’re pals, but it sure seems that you’re awesome at your job.

Justin Humphries
Well, much appreciated. I think you’re awesome at yours as well, and I’ve enjoyed listening to your podcast over those last five years, too.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. Now your job, specifically, is you’re in the mortgage game. You’ve assisted me with some real estate mortgage-y lending things, and I was very impressed at the way you delivered. But what I got you on here today for is, you know, here we are in 2026, and people speak about the job market being terrifying, and here you are, a younger feller, still in your 20s, and you recently made a switch and found yourself with a hefty signing bonus.

And I was like, “Well, is this an anomalous character or what’s going on here with Justin?” Please, can you orient us a little bit to you’re in the mortgage game, and you took a new role, and what’s going on?

Justin Humphries
Yeah, so, essentially, the way that I look at mortgage as a self-producing loan originator, I control my own pipeline, I control my customer relationships, I control my referral partner relationships, but what that also means is I control revenue to the company that I work for.

So it’s less of an employee-employer relationship and more of a decision, a strategic decision on my part as to which platform is going to benefit my business the most. And, of course, they need and want that revenue because without my revenue, they don’t have any revenue.

So they are, what I found in that job search is that you did have companies that were willing to, essentially, advance, so to speak, a portion of their revenue, their future revenue based on my past production in terms of a sign-on bonus for some guarantees that I would stick around for a little bit.

So it’s a very different type of a job search than what you would traditionally think of where you go and you apply for multiple jobs online, but it was more of, “Hey, I had companies that were chasing me that wanted that production and that revenue into their own businesses.”

So being able to control that revenue stream, I found gave me a good amount of negotiating power on the front end.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, so originator, producer, revenue, we are speaking in a language in sort of sales-ish.

Justin Humphries
That’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
So it’s not so much that you’re just super swell at taking care of the customer, although you are, but rather you’re a bit of a rainmaker, if you will. With you, come relationships and the prospect of, “Oh, we’re going to get more mortgages in the door and more revenue for this business.”

Justin Humphries
Yeah, that’s right. So being a rainmaker is a great way to put it, right, in terms of that control over the relationships and the partnerships because I’m not so much selling a product of the company that I work for, as much as I’m selling myself and my personalized services and value that I bring my referral partners and my customers.

And I want to make sure that the platform that I’ve worked for, i.e., my company that employs me, is going to provide them with as much more value than the previous company that I worked for.

But it’s not as, yeah, it’s not as black and white as I’m just selling a product that the company provides for me on company relationships.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right. Because, in many ways, there’s a range of products in terms of lending, whether it’s a VA loan, or an FHA loan. And then all kinds of little nuances associated with it, or this is actually non-conforming in the US sense of the word to the Fannie Mae and the Freddie Mac world.

And so you know a lot of stuff. And, in fact, I’ve been impressed. You often tend to surprise real estate agents when you call them about their own listings and inform them about some cool lending financing opportunities that could exist for that property that they’re not even aware of.

Justin Humphries
Yeah, that’s right. So, well, and the beauty of mortgage is it’s a very commoditized business. So I’m not selling loans that another company necessarily is completely incapable of doing. It’s more or less a commodity and the service behind it is me and my team and what we bring to the table for that referral partner and for the customer and the client experience.

So, most every lender is going to do in FHA loan, they’re going to do a conforming loan, they’re going to have some of the non-conforming goodies, special loan products, you know, 20, 30, 40, 200 different loan products, right?

Some of which are very niche-y and required specialized knowledge. Others are, you know, something we encounter on a daily basis. So having that specialized knowledge, I found that it does help out quite a bit when you’re having those conversations with those referral partners.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so can you tell us a little bit about, so you made a switch recently to another mortgage company? Now, how did that come about? In a world where some people are really spooked and they feel like jobs are scarce and layoffs are happening, you had a few people vying for you at the same time.

Justin Humphries
Yeah, so it ended up being You know a combination of a couple things, right? I’m always being recruited. My production is public knowledge, so can go and pull it up with my licensing information. And so the numbers and the the quantitative value, so to speak, to a company is publicly available and people are constantly reaching out and constantly calling.

So it’s, hey, there’s always the optionality to move. So there were a couple things that were happening with the platform and a company that I was with before that were, I think, suboptimal.

And so I had expressed that they were suboptimal, was willing to work to help make things workable in the way that I thought they should go, was rebuffed a few different times on that. So, eventually, decided, “Hey, I don’t think I’m happy staying here. I don’t think this is the platform that’s going to bring the most value to me and my referral partners and my clients. So I’m going to move.”

And then once you make that decision, you start listening and hearing for those opportunities. So just like if you’re looking for a vehicle, I mean, I have a truck, so I have a Toyota Tundra, and when you start looking for a new car, looking for a vehicle, you start seeing Tundras, Toyota Tundras. You start looking and seeing the vehicle that you are searching for constantly?

The reticular activating system, I believe is what it’s called. And so I started getting that. I started noticing those spam calls that were just spam calls a month prior. And now they’re like, “Wow, this is an opportunity.” So I started taking some of those. So I landed with about seven or eight different opportunities on my plate.

Pete Mockaitis
Eight? Okay.

Justin Humphries
Yeah, just from listening, right? And two or three of which, about three turned out to be really good and pretty appealing, either way. But what ended up happening is I ended up finding my role through a networking event. So through my BNI group, which I know we may have mentioned when we talked, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
BNI? Business Networking International created by Ivan Misner, guest of the show. Hey! Hey!

Justin Humphries
So, through BNI, there was a referral partner and a real estate agent, BNI, that had known a company and, specifically, a team that was looking to hire somebody in our area here.

All the calls and all the listing that I did in the marketplace, boiled down to, “Okay, let’s have a conversation.” And that conversation turned into really three firm offers on the table. And I went with the platform and the terms that were most beneficial.

So all of it happened, I mean, in a relative short amount of time. It was very interesting how that all came about when it comes to just keeping my ear to the ground and just looking for the opportunities that were there the entire time, if that makes sense.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that is good. So I’d like to zoom out just a little bit for those who are saying, “Okay, Pete, I don’t do mortgages. I don’t do sales. What can I learn from this Justin fella?” I think it’s intriguing, a couple of points there.

One, you said your production is common knowledge. So someone people are logging in, I guess that’s why you’re getting all these calls from randos, is they’re saying, “Okay, who’s doing a lot of mortgage loans? Okay. This is Justin character. Oh, that’s a good number. Wait, he hasn’t been doing this that long. Oh, intriguing. All right.”

So that’s pretty nifty is that, in a way, numbers, black and white, very appealing, but I’m thinking that there are many ways we can have our expertise, our value, what we can bring to the table in a public format in terms of maybe they are listed, maybe you’ve got a blog or a podcast, some content stuff, or maybe you’ve got patents or papers or science things.

I’m thinking about Zuckerberg going wild, giving fat offers to all these AI scientists. They were known, like, “Hey, I am a guy who can get some AI breakthroughs, and this is what you need.” And so Mark Zuckerberg comes knocking at the door to get those kinds of folks.

Justin Humphries
Yeah, I mean, even LinkedIn, too, is a platform for showcasing, you know, in the bio section, what you do, putting some numbers to it, making it quantifiable, I think is key. In my industry, everything is quantifiable, right? It’s all about the numbers.

And they really do make a big difference when the decision is, “Okay, am I going to be on kind of a standard or more average or mediocre level? Or is this going to be, you know, my number is going to be top 10%, top 5%?”

Because I think that’s when you start really getting sought after, is what I found as well. When my numbers climbed from, “Okay, I’m kind of average or median early on, first couple of years,” to, “Okay, now we’re not elite-elite yet,” and I’m still not, working towards that, but top five to 10% is when people really start seeking you because the top 1%, oftentimes top half of 1% never move.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah. Okay. Well, that’s interesting, and I like what you say about the numbers. And I say this a lot when it comes to working with resumes. Back in the day, I’ve looked at many many resumes and that was often a huge opportunity for improvement in terms of, if you could say, “Oh, I provide excellent customer service.” Like, okay.

As opposed to, “Oh, I spearheaded these initiatives that improved our net promoter score from 21 to 53.” Like, “Whoa!” Like, folks who are in the know, who are thinking about a net promoter score, NPS, they say, “Holy smokes! That would be amazing if this person could drive that kind of improvement over for us.”

Or in terms of being public available, now I’m thinking about, “Is it contributing…?” for software people, like, I don’t know the lingo, the GitHub, their repos and their commits and their stars. Like, that world that people get the memo, like, “Oh, this person has an impressive track record. They are generating a result that is quantified and clear that I like, need, want in my organization.”

Justin Humphries
Yeah, absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I was also intrigued by just the networking piece. So you’re in the BNI, Business Networking International Group, and so you’re actively investing there. And I know that you’re also in a mastermind group full of real estate type folk. And so you’re putting some real dollars into that as well as real time and travel to deepen those relationships.

Justin Humphries
Yeah, I mean, to me, you’ve heard the saying, right, “My net worth is my network,” or, “My network is my net worth.” I think the reverse is a correct one. But that has been so true in my business. And everything I do is relationship-driven. It starts with that point of trust with either the client or the referral partner, whoever I make contact with first, especially with referral partners, everything is relationship-driven.

It’s all about, “How can I protect my relationships? How can I grow my relationships? How can I create new ones, nurture current ones, maybe rebuild or build old ones?” And the BNI group is a huge part of that.

Now in the investor group, that’s a very different type of networking, right? Because it’s a crowded room with a lot of people that do what I do, but it’s also a high-trust, high-transaction room. So you have people in that space that are transacting on the real estate investment side, 100 plus times per year, right?

And, obviously, those people like to work with the same people that they’ve been working with, right? So that is less a, “Okay, send me a referral that’s going to close one client,” to, “Hey, land a client or two, and build that relationship, build that trust with them, be consistent over time to grow a relationship there.”

And that’s a little bit longer of a time span in terms of revenue being generated. I found that BNI, because, again, it’s a higher-trust, higher-transaction, non-exclusive room, too. This is two very interesting, very good networking opportunities for me but also very different.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, and it’s intriguing. And so outside, again, mortgages or real estate or sales, I’m just thinking about how there’s a lot of studies done about the power of the weak tie, the relationships, it’s not your immediate friends, family, folks that you see in community organizations, but someone, oh, you went to college with somebody, you met them at an event and you kind of stayed in touch, and that opens up opportunities when they occur.

And that has, in fact, happened to me in terms of Podcast Movement. I went there and I’ve met people and we continued to collaborate in all kinds of ways. I was at my podcast mastermind group meeting in person last week, and it was awesomely fun.

And we are continuing to share knowledge and best practices and, “Oh, here’s a great publicist, and here’s a great book agent, and here’s a great guest for your show, and here’s a cool tactic I’ve used to grow my show.”

Like, all that knowledge-sharing stuff and relationship-building stuff, I think, is tremendously powerful when you’re in the job, just doing better, as well as highlighting new opportunities where you might land.

Justin Humphries
Yeah, you talked, I like the phrase you used “a weak tie,” right? And something else that I’ve noticed where weak ties, a seemingly weak tie, is particularly powerful where you may not even know them whatsoever, would be affinity groups, right?

You mentioned college, which is, so I went to the University of Alabama, we’re all tied. But somebody that went to the University of Alabama, that’s an affinity group, you know, an alumnus there. Religious organizations, churches, that’s an affinity group where you don’t even have to know that person, but there’s a built-in trust by the nature of you both belonging to that same group, even if it’s large and largely, like you mentioned, a weak tie.

So I’ve noticed that in my own business and within networking, too, that ability of those weak ties and sharing affinity groups just to strike up and create conversations and conversations leading into revenue and closed business.

Pete Mockaitis
And now, of course, a key thing for these relationships to really be fruitful from a career or a business perspective is trust, and a key part of trust is just your competence, your awesomeness. And I’ll just brag on you for a moment, Justin. You do this amazingly.

I was trying to refinance a situation and they were just so slow. It was taking months. And I was like, “Justin, what’s the deal here?” And you said, “You know, I think the deal here is they probably miscategorized or something, something, something, and run into trouble with this and that. So what you’ve got to do is you got to…”

And so you told me what to do. And I told them, “Hey, man, we’ve got a few days. If you can’t pull it together, I’m just going to go over to Justin.” And, go figure, they kind of, you know, kicked into gear from there. And then we did a subsequent real estate deal, which was cool.

And you just know your stuff, and realtors often tell you this, you know stuff that they did not know. And you’re wildly quick in terms of, “Hey, I need a letter to put together in my offer.” And I think I timed you once, it was like four minutes from “I call you” to “I have a letter.”

Justin Humphries
It’s not always that fast, but sometimes, yeah. You catch me at the right time.

Pete Mockaitis
And so it was just wild as nine days compared to the other lender that I was trying to work with. And so, sure enough, that means I am singing your praises. It’s like, “Oh, dude, hey,” and I have numerous times, it’s like, “If you’re ever doing anything mortgage-y, you just want to talk to Justin. You just do.”

And I mean that wholeheartedly, and so that speaks volumes. Because if you were kind of phoned it in, and just kind of barely sort of kind of getting it done, but in a way that was in no way remarkable, we wouldn’t be so fired up to recommend you.

Justin Humphries
And I’d say, you know, one thing I learned early on in my career, I didn’t come up with this, I forget who did, but it was somebody noteworthy, much more noteworthy than myself. But people do business because they know, like, and trust you, right?

But they keep doing business with you because you solve problems that they have. And so that’s always been my focus is, “What’s the problem here?” whether that’s the client, the customer, or the referral partner, right?

With the customer, with you, Pete, you needed that letter in two minutes, three minutes, four minutes so that you could execute on that house. That was the “problem” right, in your circumstances. For the referral partner, it might be, “Hey, they want to grow their business, but their conversion rate is not super strong. So how can I help them convert more clients?”

Or it might be, “Hey, I want to just keep the business I’ve got, but I want to do it with less time and with less headache.” So, like, “Okay, that’s their problem. How do I work on that?” So that first step, the first half of that equation to generating that sustainable business referrals, etc., is people have to know you, right?

Obviously, marketing, top of the funnel is huge. They got to like you. You got to be likable. You can’t be rude, mean, etc. You can’t be incompetent. They got to trust you with their transaction. That’s earned. And then the second half, and the more important half, to maintain that relationship is you have to solve their problems.

And you got to keep solving them. Because there’s always somebody, and in my industry this is definitely the case, there’s always somebody knocking at the door of that client, that referral partner relationship that says, “Hey, I can do this and I can do this, and I’m going to promise the world.”

You can lose that partnership, or you can lose that client in a heartbeat if you waver in your execution. And that is not a fun experience, as a whole.

Pete Mockaitis
For anybody.

Justin Humphries
No, for anybody, right? But, as a whole, it’s like, “Hey, if you’re consistently working to execute at a high level and you don’t leave that opening for the competition to jump in there and take your client, take your relationships, etc.,” that is much better.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, why don’t we get a little bit practical, tactical, super specific on what’s executing at a high level means. Now that’s going to vary in different roles, different positions. But one thing is responsiveness. You were super quick with me, that made an impression, it’s like, “Wow, very cool.”

I remember, other times, you have known things that other people did not know. And you’ve acquired that knowledge, as far as I can tell, by you show up at the events, the trainings, and you’ve actually read a startlingly large proportion of very long, very boring governmental documents associated with loan-compliancy matters. You’ve actually read the things, and they’re huge.

Justin Humphries
Yeah. So the HUD handbook, which is FHA lending guidelines on loans, I don’t know, it’s north of a thousand pages, but I might’ve scanned that one, for the full disclosure. Scan the sections that are pertinent when needed, right?

But, again, going back to solving problems, the excellence in that commitment, going back to your original question, I think, it depends on the situation, right? So sometimes it is that communication piece of it where, “Hey, I’m getting back within X amount of time.”

Sometimes, I may be able to leverage that knowledge and expertise and guidelines and kind of the get-it-done knowhow is what I call it, right, to do things that others either don’t think they can do, they can’t do, they won’t do it, to just get the loan done.

And that’s the problem that’s solved there, where we had somebody last fall that was denied by three other lenders, I think it was, and she was about to lose this house, called me, within eight calendar days, we had her loan closed. It was just a regular FHA loan.

Any of them could have done it, but they didn’t leverage the expertise and knowledge of FHA guidelines the way that they ought to have. I don’t know if that fully answered your question or not.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, you know, that’s really good. Yes. And I’m thinking now about a physical therapist. I haven’t met him in person, but I’ve watched a lot of his videos, Dr. Aaron Horschig, of the YouTube channel Squat University. His book is called “Rebuilding Milo.”

And so he’s got these videos in which someone says, “An athlete had a shoulder problem. They went to four physical therapists and they weren’t able to fix it. But we fixed it with these two easy exercises.” I was like, “You have my attention.” And, sure enough, like that is an experience I know people have had because our bodies are miraculously wildly complicated.

It’s no surprise that a lot of physical therapists take a crack at a diagnosis and it’s not quite right, not zeroing in on the exact right little tendons or whatever. And yet, a real master of the craft is able to do it. And, holy smokes, it gets referred, like, quick.

This book has 4.9 stars on Amazon with 4,000 reviews. But it seems like the guy is, actually, has that excellence in terms of, “Hey, when this body does this, this is often the thing, so let’s try the thing,” and, holy smokes, that worked and it’s amazing. We tell everybody.

Justin Humphries
Yeah, creativity and persistence is what it boils down to, willing to dig a little bit deeper than others will, go the extra mile, so to speak. It’s a bit of a cliche, but it doesn’t make it wrong. Now we’re able to come up with solutions that others may not have thought of.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, totally. And sometimes you get it. And it’s so funny, you actually, you get pretty excited about it. Like, sometimes more excited than I care to hear about it. No offense.

Justin Humphries
That’s okay.

Pete Mockaitis
You know I love you. But you’ve probably heard this feedback before. You’re sharing what’s going down with a loan, and you’re kind of excited because, sure enough, you have cracked the code in terms of, “It turns out, what we need to do is just make sure they had a tenant in place in one of their properties so that we could then count that rental income against it. And so that gets us over the debt-to-income threshold, so now it qualifies.”

And so, but that took some extra work and thought and conversation and back and forth and questions with them, as opposed to just looking at the application like, “No income number, not good enough. Pass.”

Justin Humphries
Yeah. I mean, I know we didn’t maybe talk about going this direction, but I’d love to take it this direction if you’re open to it, that’s what’s going to separate, you know, in my field and AI universe. Not just the creativity and the problem-solving because AI is good at it, and we’ll get better better, right?

Creativity and problem-solving are half of it, and the relationships is the other half. And still knowing that this is an incredibly emotional transaction for anybody. Getting a mortgage, buying a house, whether it’s first time, second time, or fifth time, investors are significantly less emotional about it.

But, still, anytime money is on the line and you have a personal stake in it, it just feels heavy, and it’s high-trust position. Some people, some home buyers care less about that and some care much more, but those that are experts with the trickiness, I think, are going to be who’s going to be successful in the long term.

Because I’m looking at this, the average profile of somebody that does what I do is they’re in the mid fifties, they’re a white guy, and I’m a white guy, too. The thing is it’s white guys. But I’m 27, right? So they’re not thinking on a 30-year time scale of this industry more than likely like I am.

I’m sitting here, going. “Hey, is this going to be here in five, ten years?” Certainly, that’s important. I think it’ll be here in some form or another for the next 10-ish years at least. But what does the job look like in 20 years? What does it look like in 25 years? What does it look like in 30 years when you can push button, get mortgage?

You know, it’s simplified a lot since the internet, but it’s not yet at the point where it’s push button, get mortgage, right? You have some regulatory moats around the industry. But regulatory moats often get crossed and don’t last forever.

So, at the same time, as those that can make personal connections and think outside the box, think creatively understand people, in a way that I don’t think AI will ever truly be able to understand a person, are going to be the ones that stay successful for the next 20, 25, 30 years.

And, I mean, that’s a huge piece of how I’m looking to position myself going forward is, “How do I future-proof the business that I rely on, my family relies on?”

Pete Mockaitis
And when you said AI, that got me thinking about just sometimes there’s a rash of AI-generated comments in social media platforms, and I do not care for them.

It’s so unpleasant. But you’ve done this game where you’re solving problems, you’re building relationships with total strangers on social media, in terms of if someone has a situation, and then you really get into it. Like, you spend some time, you write some paragraphs about, like, “Oh, well, in this situation, consider this and this and this. You might want to do blah, blah, blah. Happy to chat.”

And, like, you’ve shown me, like, people are wowed like, “Wow, can we get on a call?” All of a sudden, total stranger on the internet wants to be talking to Justin, and that’s just good for your business.

Justin Humphries
Yeah, I mean, it’s awesome, and that’s something I only recently started doing, the last month, two months, that I’ve never even, I mean, I’ve considered it but I’ve been like, “Eh.” I looked at content, I do some content and stuff here and there, some batched-out stuff, which is awesome.

It’s mainly authority building and it’s not generating any leads, which is unfortunate, but I’m not getting anybody saying, “Hey, I loved your video. Like, can we…?” But when I make a comment on a post that’s particularly insightful, that does drive inbound leads, where it’s responding to a specific concern, “Hey, I had this happen.”

And there might be 60 comments on that post, right? And some of them are, “Hey, I would love to help. Reach out to me. Great.” I mean, so the mindset that I have going into those types of situations on Facebook, Facebook groups, marketing and networking in there, Reddit, whatever it is, is, “How much can I give away for free?”

Like, “How much value can I provide?” I want to provide so much value that, one, the OP, the poster the, of the question-comment, whatever, reaches out to me, ideally. And if they don’t, somebody else sees it, and they’re like, “Wow, that was pretty insightful,” or, “Wow, that’s a good rate,” or, “That’s a good…” whatever, “That’s a good strategy,” and I get inbound leads.

So, I’ve had several that have converted at a surprisingly high rate because you think internet lead and you think, “Okay, call center, 1% conversion, 1-5% if you’re excellent,” and that’s not what I’ve seen at all.

So it’s just a different kind of marketing and different kind of strategy where it’s “How much knowledge do I have and how much of that can I put into words and convey, even if it takes me a few minutes?” As opposed to you have some canned AI posts and comments.

So some will reach out to me and some are, like, the canned AI responses, I’m like, “That’s not even correct.” And I’ve had a couple that were AI-assisted writing when they get longer that I’ve gone back and edited, and that’s worked okay. But I’ve found, when I write it, it does convert higher. So I’m experimenting with some of that.

I don’t know if you, I know you work with Claude some, but I think it is Claude. Yeah, it is Claude Anthropic that now has a Chrome extension. So I’ve utilized Claude to basically read some of the posts in these Facebook groups, and help me respond, but always guiding and further kind of honing that response, if I do that.

We got here by talking about AI, that’s my tie back in, but it’s been particularly interesting. I do recommend, I’m not sponsored, but do recommend the Claude Chrome extension as it can kind of drive for you and post and comment and aid with that and kind of speeding it up.

I’ve noticed if I do it well, cuts my time in about half on doing those, but I’m still spending some good time with them.

Pete Mockaitis
And what does the Claude extension doing exactly?

Justin Humphries
Yeah, so Claude can read the post. So, like, if you’re on Facebook, Claude can read the posts and then you can instruct it, “Hey, read this comment. Type up a response around ABC thing, kind of making these points and clean it up a little bit,” right?

So I’ll guide it, but it’ll read the post, it’ll compose a comment, it will paste the comment in, and it will actually post a comment for you.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s intriguing. And I suppose if you connect that to like a real base of your knowledge inside a Claude project or whatever, I don’t know if you can, but that becomes much more substantial because I think the worst is the AI comments that actually say nothing, like, “Well said, Justin. And trust is such an important ingredient in today’s technological marketplace.” Like, you didn’t say anything at all.

Justin Humphries
You mean the patronizing AI crap, yeah. So, I listened to a keynote a couple months ago on AI, and you may have to bleep this out or not, but he had a good comment that, when you rely on AI for your strategic thinking, which I no longer do as a result largely of listening to this, you’re getting your strategic thinking, your big picture, thousand dollar an hour work or whatever hourly rate you want to assign to that, guiding your business based on what he called the opinions of the masses of asses.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah. Yeah, I heard the subject in the study and they realized that, no matter what context you put in for a strategic problem in front of the AI, it just went with what the masses said, even if it’s a completely different context. It wasn’t actually “thinking.”

They used the term trend slop like, “Hey, that is the trend. That’s what a lot of people are saying. It sounds pretty good when you put it together, but you weren’t actually thinking. You were just grabbing words near the other words kind of around the thing.”

Justin Humphries
Well, and you lose your competitive differentiation, too, right? If you outsource your big thinking, your strategic thinking to AI, I mean, you lose a piece of that tactically. And going back to mortgage for a second.

I had a coworker recently that had, he asked me, he goes, “Well, hey, can I do this.” He goes, “Well, ChatGPT told me.” I’m like, “No, it’s just not correct. So he laughed and, well, I laughed because I’m like, “No, no, man. That’s not…” I won’t use his name.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s straight up doesn’t work with the law.

Justin Humphries
I’m like, “That is just not correct.” So now he has a file that’s DOA right now because he relied on ChatGPT to give him loan guideline advice, and this is an originator. Hopefully, he’s not a listener. But, no, I told him, troubleshot for him, and told him what he needed to do and whatever, and that I think is going to be fine.

But, yeah, you don’t want to use your ChatGPT for your strategic thinking, right? I think, inherently, we know this, but we have to retain – I’ll get off my soapbox on this here in a second – but we have to retain that which makes us human, and that which makes us competitive in the marketplace.

Pete Mockaitis
Well said. Well, yeah, that seems to be a real thing – competitive in the marketplace. Like, you solve a real problem. You bring forward revenue. That is publicly known and understood. That is published and it’s quantified and it’s unambiguous.

And, in so doing, you’ve got to put yourself into a power position, as opposed to you are not one of 600 people clicking the easy apply button for a job that they hope you can maybe do, so much as you have said, “Behold, world, it is on a matter of public record that I can do this for you. You want that done? Oh well, then maybe we can talk.”

Justin Humphries
Yeah, that’s right. And that’s been a huge, huge piece when I look strategically at my work. And I look at, “Okay, could I go through this under role that’s maybe a bit easier, maybe a bit less stressful, maybe not as high pressure?”

I look at that and I go, “There’s a trade off there.” When you’re since going from outside sales, outside loan officer relationship to inside me, like say your preferred lender works for a builders lender, whatever that might look like, you have a captive business.

Then you lose that ability to be in that power position in the negotiating table because you don’t own the book. You don’t own the relationships. You don’t own the business channels. So now I know that’s not going to apply to all of your listeners one to one, but I think you’re right on.

Like, when you can quantify your value that essentially, “Hey, you would, otherwise, not have this revenue had I not been with you, and had I not brought this piece of this relationship, this piece of expertise, this experience to bear,” and thinking about those things as you’re on the job hunt is huge.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, Justin, tell us, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Justin Humphries
No, I mean, I think we hit on it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, cool. Well, now, could you share your favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Justin Humphries
A favorite quote has to be, and I’m not going to name the Bible verse because I don’t know it off the top my head, but it has to be that God will never give you more than you can handle.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite study, or experiment, or bit of research?

Justin Humphries
Yeah, so one of my favorite experiments that, you know, and this is not related to mortgage in the sense whatsoever, but has been Universe 25. So, I think, it’s ‘68 to ‘73, some experimenters at the National Institute of Mental Health kind of created a mice utopia, mouse utopia, where they didn’t have any lack of food, water, or anything, so it was this perfect world. No suffering. No issues whatsoever.

So it, eventually, happened. And I’m really summarizing here, which is okay. They all went crazy and they died out. And so the lesson that I take from that is, because they had no predators, they had all abundance of food and water, everything they could need, all the space they would need, is that in the universe and in the natural world, suffering, in a sense, is universal. And not only is it universal, it’s necessary.

So that would be mine that I’ve actually applied that to my business, too, going, “Okay, I’m going to endure the suffering of whatever it is, the thing I don’t want to do, the activity that is maybe the most profitable, yet the most unpleasant activity that I could do that day. I’m going to endure that.

Pete Mockaitis
Like this podcast you’re enduring it

Justin Humphries
And that’s, yeah, a hundred percent. Like, the podcast. I’m going to endure that activity so I can have success in my business, but also because I know that in the long term, it makes me a better person. That’s an interesting experiment.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Justin Humphries
Yeah, favorite book, I’d say The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I mean, it’s huge. I love the concept of continuous improvement and sharpening the saw from that book. It’s kind of guided a lot of my personal and professional life, of just continually doing better.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Justin Humphries
You know, it’s really simple and it strikes me as rather basic just to say it, but just having an alarm that wakes up at the same time every day, regardless of the day, you know, Monday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, I found that, I mean, it’s a cornerstone.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share that is a bit of a mantra or slogan that you roll with?

Justin Humphries
It’s funny because I think about this, and one of the key mantras I find myself saying is something my dad told me when I was about five years old, I was on a football field. And as I dissected, I think about it and I’m like, “Hmm, this may not be a good thing.”

But it is the idea that if you start something, you finish it. And so whatever that looks like. Now, maybe that means that in business, you start something and you iterate, and you iterate, and you iterate, or you make the decision to stop if it doesn’t work.

But this idea of always taking the start of the journey to its completion, whatever completion that may be, I think, is huge. Just that persistence, as something I mentioned earlier, persistence. And if you start something, you finish it. It sticks with me.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Justin Humphries
Yeah, so they can always, my cellphone, being a mortgage lender, is always open and public knowledge. So cellphone is the best way. Call, text, 615-438-8125. I do have a website, JustinHumphries.org. I’m sure that’ll be in the show notes as well. And an email address that I’m sure Pete will throw in the show notes. So feel free to get in touch with me at any time, all things mortgage, or any other items.

Pete Mockaitis
And can you actually say the email address?

Justin Humphries
Yes, the email address is jhumphries@loanDepot.com.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Justin Humphries
Just everything that we’ve talked about today. When you’re on the job search, putting yourself in the driver’s seat, creating and continually maybe keeping a record of those quantifiable moments in your job career as they happen.

So if that’s, “Hey, I improved this by ABC amount.” So kind of create and track a record so that as needed, you can draw upon that, put it on paper for the job search. I would challenge everybody to have that running record.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Justin, thank you.

Justin Humphries
Yeah, thanks, Pete. Great to be on here. Great chatting with you today.

Apr 16
0

1146: How to Reclaim Your Focus and Unlock Your Genius with Memory Champion Nelson Dellis

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Memory champion Nelson Dellis shares simple techniques to upgrade your thinking to genius level.

You’ll Learn

  1. The core skills behind genius-level thinking
  2. How to learn faster and better using one powerful tool
  3. Why you shouldn’t write off your intuition

About Nelson

Nelson Dellis is a six-time USA Memory Champion, two-time Guinness World Record holder, Grandmaster of Memory, keynote speaker, and world-renowned memory coach. He teaches at the university level, holding degrees in computer science and physics, and is also an accomplished mountaineer with four Mt. Everest expeditions. 

Beyond the classroom and the mountains, Nelson has medaled in international competitions, contributed to remote viewing research on stock prediction, and even played on a professional card-counting Blackjack team that won over $100,000. He shares his passion for unlocking the mind’s potential with over 300,000 YouTube subscribers, where he makes complex skills practical, fun, and accessible to anyone willing to train their brain.

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

Nelson Dellis Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Nelson, welcome!

Nelson Dellis
Hey, thank you. Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to talk about becoming more of an everyday genius. You are a six-time memory champion. Could you tell us one of your most amazing feats of memory ever?

Nelson Dellis
Let’s see, I’m most proud of having memorized 10,000 digits of pi. That was a good one.

Pete Mockaitis
10,000 digits. Wow! Now that sounds like a record to me, I don’t know.

Nelson Dellis
Oh, it’s not. Although, you know, if we’re talking about how many digits someone has used their memory to store, it’s many tens of thousands. The unofficial record is, like, a hundred K, but the official record is 70,030. Yeah, both are insane.

Pete Mockaitis
That is wild. How does a person do such a thing?

Nelson Dellis
Well, first you have to have the desire to do such a thing. I’ve known of people who have done it without really much of a technique other than brute force repetition and a lot of time. That sounds horrible. And I would ask the question, “How?” That sounds crazy.

But those who are more well-versed in memory techniques would look at numbers and have some way of converting them into more meaningful things, things that are easier to visualize in your mind than these abstract symbols. And then encoding it all into some elaborate story that connects them in order.

And that is the basics of memory techniques in a nutshell, honestly.

Pete Mockaitis
So now I remember reading a book about this in terms of, like, each digit becomes a letter or sound, like one becomes T or D, and two becomes N and so forth. Is that what you’re talking about in terms of making them more meaningful?

Nelson Dellis
That’s one of the methods. With abstract symbols like numbers, for example, the system is to, yes, convert it into words that, then, you can visualize, right? You look at numbers, it’s maybe hard to visualize them, maybe not individually, like, if I see a seven, I can visualize a seven or seven things.

But if you are talking about a huge sequence of numbers, there’s only 10 different digits. So if there’s a lot of digits, you’re going to get a lot of those repeating. So it’s hard to think of, like, “Oh, I’m picturing a seven, then I’m picturing an eight, then I’m picturing a seven.”

It would be easier if you could collect groups of numbers and then have images preset for certain combinations. So instead of saying, I don’t know, 124, I see Michael Jordan, maybe, you know, that would always encompass with one and two and a four together, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, okay. So, like, he’s number one, and his number is 24. So he’s one, two, four.

Nelson Dellis
Yeah, you’re not too far off. My system is a little…

Pete Mockaitis
Wait, wasn’t he 23? Wasn’t 23 his number? And I’m not a sports guy.

Nelson Dellis
Exactly, No, no. So 024, the 24 is Kobe Bryant. That actually was his number. So all of the 24s, this is the way I do it. There are different ways to do it. Some might argue that my way is a little more complicated, unnecessarily, but it works for me.

Anyways, so 024 is Kobe Bryant. So all the 24s, things that end in 24 are shooting guards in the NBA. So 124, I made Michael Jordan because, you know, after Kobe, he should be number one, right? Yeah, and then I just go through a bunch of different NBA stars there for the 24s.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that was fun. So then you’ve taken some time in advance to construct this whole rubric.

Nelson Dellis
Language, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
And it’s like a Nelson only. It’s pure custom, what does 24 mean to you? What’s one-four mean to you?

Nelson Dellis
Yeah. And that’s the most important part about coming up with visuals to remember is the more meaningful they are to you, the more rich they are with associations to you, the better they’re going to stick.

So, yes, somebody could learn my system. And, again, this is, yes, a pre-learned system so that when I’m encountering numbers in competitions or day-to-day life, I have a way to look at them and already have something set up to visualize instead.

But it is maybe not advised to take my system and learn it as is because there’s going to be a lot of images for numbers that mean nothing to you. Like, I have my personal friends in there. I have characters from books and shows that I’ve enjoyed throughout my life.

Some people might have never seen those shows, you know. Or, basketball, maybe nobody cares about basketball. And while you could, I guess, learn to visualize Michael Jordan, but why not choose something that’s, you know, you like to visualize or that’s easy for you to visualize?

Pete Mockaitis
But I think that speaks to a principle. Well, you tell me, a potential principle in terms of, if something is deeply meaningful and emotionally resonant to you, it is more memorable. Yeah, sometimes, people say, “Pete, you have the most amazing memory that you remembered this thing.” And I was like, “Well, no, that thing was very important to me in that moment of my life,” versus, I guess, for everyone else, was just like, “Yeah, whatever.”

Nelson Dellis
Yeah, exactly. Our brains are designed to remember novel things that stick out, and then the stuff that’s every day, commonplace. Like, it decides usually to drop that information. It treats it like noise.

And if you think kind of evolutionarily way back when, our brain was designed to remember these novel things, because it usually was tied to survival, right? Like, “This plant here has this pattern on it,” visual, “if I eat this, I will die because it’s poisonous with this pattern on it,” right? So simple things like that.

Nowadays, there is so much information, I think our primitive brain doesn’t do a very good job of isolating the things that are actually important because it’s not so tied to survival anymore, versus things that are noise.

Even though you may have the intention of you’re completely interested in this thing, your brain might be not so convinced, you know? And so it doesn’t stick, even though you’re paying full attention to it.

So it does start with things that you’re more interested in, that are paying attention to, tend to be memorized better, but it’s a complicated world out there, and our brain is trying to figure it out.

So if you can tap into kind of its evolutionary traits, which is we remember pictures that are associative and filled with sensory information and are meaningful, those are the things that you’re going to remember.

A great example is like, think of 9/11, right? We all remember where we were, what we were doing, sometimes even what we ate that day, what we were wearing that day, what somebody said that day, and that’s because that day was all of those things.

It was memorable. It was emotional, terrifying, scary, and it was out of the ordinary, for sure. We saw things on TV that we will never see in our lives probably, so it sticks out. Versus, you know, last Tuesday, what did you do?

Probably went to work. Did the exact same thing you usually do. Maybe a slight variation here and there, but nothing to the effect of something that dramatically different.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so we learned, your subtitle is “Hacks to Boost Your Memory, Focus, Problem Solving, and Much More.” We talked about a hack for numbers, which is kind of interesting.

But I’m guessing for your person who is interested in becoming awesome at their job, memory contests are not their job, but you’ve got some goodies for us. Tell us, what’s sort of your main message or big idea in the book, Everyday Genius?

Nelson Dellis
Yeah, so the main point of the book is that I believe that there are plenty of mental abilities that we can train and learn that are associated with genius. And in the process of learning them and mastering them, you tap into that and could even convince yourself that you have a higher intellect, that you are genius, or can tap into genius from time to time.

What I learned over the years doing the memory thing, I didn’t have a background in memory techniques. I had an average memory, but I learned about them. I trained them obsessively, to a point where I could win these competitions and do break records and such. But it wasn’t a gift I was born with.

And that was always an amazing thing that, “Oh, wow. I thought memory was a fixed thing. And that super smart people had good memories and dumb people had bad memories,” right? But it’s not like that. It’s memory is a skill. And that was a huge thing for me to kind of unlearn.

And then, over the years, doing 10,000 digits of pi or 20 decks of playing cards in an hour, crazy feats of memory, people will throw out that label of genius just because they don’t understand it or don’t think it’s possible.

And I hate that. I’m not a genius. Like, I’m just like anybody else. I just have a skill that I learned. And I could teach you how to do this skill, and the person down the street, how to do this skill.

So genius is definitely a subjective term, ultimately, you know? People use it very flippantly. If they see something that looks smart, you consider someone smart, but that might not be the end of the story. Someone might not actually be as smart as you think. They just showed some quality of intelligence in a moment, in some situation. but I think we all can kind of uncover that.

And that’s what the book explores, the different pockets of mental abilities that can be taught and learned if you spend a bit of time on them, or understood how they worked. And then you can have some fun with it, right?

You can do it for show. You can do it for improving your life. You can do it to just be a better person. It’s up to what you what you want to do with it, but we all have access to it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you lay out a few core skills of genius. Can you share those with us?

Nelson Dellis
Yeah, so I started the book off, the first half of the book kind of laying this foundation, which, and again, this is largely my opinion, but I think many people might agree that memory is a cornerstone of genius.

I think if you have a good memory, you can do a lot with that to do some genius kinds of abilities. So that’s talked about at the beginning of the book. And in tandem with that, long-term learning, better study tactics. So being able to take your memory and use it for the long-term.

Reading faster. I think if you can read more, that’s how you learn more. That’s how you learn more about the world. So if you can consume more written content, more books, you can increase your knowledge base.

I also talk about focus and attention. So if you can master the ability to hone in on something when it counts and to block out distractions, you, of course, can put more efforts into learning things or outputting more, right?

And then, using those foundational techniques, I go into more nuanced parts of genius. Social genius, like how to interact with others around you. Mental calculations, so being able to calculate with numbers faster. Creativity, problem solving, even in the last chapter, it’s a little woo-woo out there, but intuition.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, well, that’s a lovely lineup. Well, let’s hear, when it comes to, let’s talk about memory and social at the same time, if I may. How can we do a better job of remembering people’s names and faces?

Because I think that can make a huge impression in terms of like, “Oh, wow, like that person, he remembered my name and he said it to me. He seemed happy to see me.” It’s just like it skyrockets your likability real quick. So give us some hacks for this one.

Nelson Dellis
I mean, Dale Carnegie said that the most interesting person is the most interested person. And I think there’s nothing more than, bigger than, or showing more interest than if you remember somebody’s name. And it’s just a little memory trick, right?

And it’s such a small thing, it’s just this little word, sometimes a longer word, but a word that represents this person, but it’s so powerful and so meaningful. So I treat it as this very special, delicate thing that a person can present to me.

And I want to know this thing. I want to store it in my mind because I know how powerful it could be. And so memory techniques will serve you perfectly for this situation. And, again, tapping into what I mentioned about the numbers, you’re taking some piece of information. It’s not a number this time. It’s this word, this label of a human that’s in front of you, and turning it into a meaningful picture.

And so what that typically means is you hear a name, hopefully, maybe, but sometimes maybe not, it reminds you of something. Maybe a person you know, close to you, or a celebrity, or someone, an athlete, whatever has that same name. You can think of that person. There’s a picture suddenly in your mind for that name now.

Or, maybe if you don’t, maybe if you can take a syllable, the first syllable of the name, or a couple of the syllables, and those individual atoms of the name, maybe come up with a picture, create a picture for you. Like Nelson, maybe you think of Nelson Mandela, okay?

Maybe you don’t, maybe you’ve never heard the name before. So what could you do? Well, Nell, Son, okay, maybe Nell makes you think of like a nail, like a hammering nail. And then Son, sun in the sky.

So both are pictures, right? Either Nelson Mandela, even maybe Nelson from the Simpsons, if you’re a Simpsons fanatic, he’s a character on the show, or you have this image of a nail being driven into the sun. So that’s a representative thing for the name. That’s a little more tangible than this collection of letters that’s somewhat abstract.

The next thing is to find a way to always be able to reliably pull it back when you need it, pull it out of this person when you have to call them that name to remember it. And that’s where this other part of memory is super important, which is how we organize and store information.

There are methods to do this, and we don’t really think about it when we try to remember something. But one of the techniques, and this applies for names, is anchoring it to something that will be helpful to retrieve it.

And for names, it’s the person. The person is who’s going to show up, whether it’s online in the form of a picture or in front of you at a party. They are the one that shows up, and at that point is when you usually have to remember their name, right?

So you can attach it or anchor it to a physical feature. I think that’s the best way to do it because you’re usually looking at the person in the face, so why not choose something that you notice on the person’s face?

So whether it’s a big nose, like a five o’clock shadow, a big forehead. I’m just pointing out my flaws here. But it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t even have to be a flaw. It’s just whatever you notice. Maybe they have pretty eyes or like a little dimple or a little wrinkle, whatever.

And you could come up with a story or some kind of way to attach the image to that feature. The weirder, the better, the crazier, the better, but that’s what makes it memorable, unforgettable.

So if I imagine Nelson Mandela jumping off the edge of my huge nose, the next time you see me and my big nose, you’re going to think, “Oh, there’s Nelson Mandela jumping off his nose. Nelson.” You say this all in your mind though. You don’t say this out loud. You can get into some trouble there.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, talking about getting into trouble, I’m wondering, like if I did choose your five o’clock shadow, and then you showed up clean-shaven, like am I out of luck, like, “Oops”?

Nelson Dellis
Yeah, I would lean towards not choosing things that could change but, again, yeah, somebody could get a facelift, too, and then what do do, right? But I honestly think that the technique is really good for in the moment, getting the information in your mind quickly.

And then a big part of being able to remember it, say, the next time is a bit of review. So when you’re learning the person’s name and interacting with this person and talking to them, or you’re perusing around the party, like schmoozing, learning other people’s names.

When you come back or say goodbye to that person, or maybe you look around the room and you see that person, tell yourself, “Okay, this person, that was Nelson, okay,” you review. Like, we need to review things to remember them for the long term.

The technique I just said is very good for getting information in your mind quickly, and it often imprints for quite a while. But if you truly want to remember names for a long time, you have to be super intentional about all of it. You have to review it.

I do a tremendous amount of review for the people I meet. I’m a different story because, as a memory champion, of course, everybody expects me to remember everybody’s name. So there’s a lot more riding on me remembering a name than most people.

But I keep, like, a name journal, so when I meet people after the event or the party or whatnot, the meeting, I always keep track of the mnemonics, and the names, and the people and the context of those people, and I review that from time to time.

And some of those people in that book, I will never see again. They’re just filling up pages in my name book for no reason. But in the off chance I bump into one of those people, and I can say their name months later, years later, it’s so powerful, right?

They’ll think like, “Wow, that person remembered me? Whoa, I must have made an impression,” or, “What an interesting person. Wow! It shows a lot that he thought about me,” and who knows what they’ll think, but it’s usually a good thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Very good. Well, now can you give us a hack for just learning better, in general. Like, I’m trying to pick up a skill, whatever that might be. It’s coding. It’s AI. It’s copywriting. I’m trying to figure out some new stuff.

Nelson Dellis
So now you’re getting into the process of learning, right? And so to learn, obviously you got to have techniques to remember things quicker. That helps. The review part is so much more important because, if you truly want to know something to your core, it needs to be almost automatic, right?

So there’s this idea of two kinds of memory. There’s declarative memory, where you can pull things out, think about it, and then declare it. Kind of like remembering somebody’s name. And then there’s procedural, which is another fancy way of saying muscle memory.

So let’s take the example of remembering somebody’s name. This is a good example. When I’m learning somebody’s name for the first time, I’m using this technique, right, to store their name. And then, when I see them, I’m going to have this effort to kind of collect it, to declare it.

But there’s a point where, let’s say, you know, you just started this job, you started working with this one person, you learned their name using a technique, and you use it every day, and they become close to you, you become friends. You’ve worked together for five years.

In five years, let’s say you are very close to this person, you know this person’s name, you don’t have to declare it anymore. They are Bob instantly. Like, it’s part of you. You don’t even have to think about it. Like, think about your siblings and your mother, like you know their name. You don’t have to pull it out of your brain. It’s just there, right?

That’s procedural. It’s something that’s rehearsed so much that you just know it, right? So the goal is, with long-term learning, whether you’re learning a language or some programming language, you want to get it to a point where you don’t have to sit there and get it out of your brain.

But there will be a point at the beginning where that has to happen. That’s just how our brains work, unfortunately. So the question is, “How do we hack getting things from our declarative, which is always the first step, into a procedural process, into muscle memory?”

And, unfortunately, while declarative has tons of little hacks, all these little memory techniques, and that’s what all of chapter one is about, the procedural isn’t as easy to hack. The best strategies we have are active recall. So actively trying to access the information in our mind.

So by closing your eyes, and you don’t have to close your eyes, but just to prove the point further, you know, when you’re trying to get the information out, the more you access it, the more you kind of fire those neurons, those connections, the better it’ll become automatic.

And that shouldn’t be a surprise to many people, right? The more you do something mentally, the more automatic it becomes. You strengthen those neural pathways and then it becomes more automatic.

But a lot of us, when we study, we think about it wrong, right? We think we have our notes in front of us and we just look at it again and again and again. And you feel like you have this sense of familiarity with the information. You’re like, “Oh, yeah, I’ve got it.”

You’re going even through it and you’re maybe even ahead of where you’re reading saying, “Yes,” and saying it before you read it. But that’s not active recall because you have the information in front of you. It’s not true declarative, right?

So if you can put that information away and struggle to get it out, which it always is a bit of a challenge, but that’s where the magic happens, right? When you do that active recall, go through that process of the nitty-gritty of pulling it out, that’s where you are building these neural pathways, strengthening these neural pathways to procedural.

Space repetition, so there’s plenty of studies around this where, if you are doing everything, studying for something all in one session, well, yes, you could use memory techniques and it might work for the short term. In the long term, you will forget more of it.

Our brain likes to work on things for a little bit, take a break, and then come back, because I guess there’s that, in that moment when you come back to it, you do have to kind of struggle with it to get it back to where it was. And I think that repetitiveness of, or that repeated action of going back to it, almost starting a bit more from scratch is where you strengthen those neural pathways again.

And then the last tip on that is something called interleaving. So if you can, in a study session, let’s say, interleave, in a similar set of what you’re studying, different kinds of things.

So let’s say if you’re studying for a language, and you do a lot of problems or questions or quizzes or testing yourself on verb conjugations, and then maybe you just do straight up vocabulary training, and then maybe, I don’t know, you study basic phrases or something like that.

They’re all different, right, but they all have to do with you learning language. But if you can go in between and kind of alternate, maybe every 15, 20 minutes, that is proved to be better than just studying for one big chunk of time, say, verbs, right?

So we found that if we switch up the task, but keeping it in the same domain, actually we learn better. And I think it’s a similar principle to space repetition. But, yeah, it’s a tedious process to learn. But if you understand how to hack the brain in that sense, you can learn more efficiently and faster.

Pete Mockaitis
And what’s interesting with active recall, in some ways, you need a little bit of a prompt in terms of like, “What is that thing I’m retrieving?” And so, I suppose there’s many ways you can do this. Like, people use flashcards, or I guess now with AI, you can just say, “Hey, this is what I’m trying to learn. Ask me questions now, one at a time. Go.” And so then you’re practicing the active retrieval.

But I’m hearing you that the key point there is I’m not looking at the thing. I am hiding, I’m covering up the thing, and I am depending on my ability to pull it out from the depths of my memory.

Nelson Dellis
Yeah, that’s better for learning, and there’s different ways to do it. As you mentioned AI, you know, it’s proven to be, or increasingly been proven to be detrimental to our memories because we’re doing a lot of cognitive tasks, using the tool rather than ourselves.

But, I think, as a sparring partner, as a coach, or a quizzer, I think it could be super powerful because it can give you all sorts of ways to do that active recall. Another great method, I don’t know if it was invented by him, but it’s been coined as named by him, it’s the Feynman method.

So Richard Feynman was a legendary physicist who was really well-known for being able to explain things, complicated things, in physics really well. And the technique is, basically, when you’re learning something, try to explain it to somebody else in the most basic way possible.

And as you explain it, you’ll quickly find out what you truly know and don’t, and it’s a way of kind of refining the weaknesses and strengths of what you’ve studied. And, again, it’s active recall in disguise.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s cool. Well, now let’s hear about focus in terms of just being able to hunker down and do stuff.

Nelson Dellis
Well, in this day and age, it’s extremely difficult to focus, and so I feel like a big part of finding how to pay attention to something is figuring out what are the points of distraction for you, and being ruthless in kind of eliminating them preemptively.

Thinking about there’s, like, this planner in your mind that says, “Okay, in the future, Nelson needs to focus on this. So I’m going to make sure that, when he’s working, the distractions are at bay.”

And there’s plenty of tips on how to do this. It depends on what is the source of your distraction, but, oftentimes, it’s the internet or your phone or some device. So blocking that in some case, maybe going analog during a session, putting your phone out of sight while you work on a task.

The goal with paying attention, you want to have this deep work at your disposal. And oftentimes, we’re really doing what’s called shallow work, where we’re like low value, low focus tasks that don’t really push you forward, like you’re checking your email, you’re responding to messages. You’re not doing the deep work that you need to do, the deep focus.

And it often comes to your environment. Like, put yourself in a place isolated and work on this problem or thing that you need to get done, and you’ll have tremendous focus on that thing.

Another thing is we get tired, especially nowadays, where we’re so used to being stimulated all the time. It’s not our faults. Devices around us are designed to distract us as their main purpose.

And so, if you can put these things at bay, but also train your mind to work for longer and longer periods of time without being interrupted or needing to kind of satisfy yourself with dopamine hits somehow, so there’s this idea called a Pomodoro technique, where you can set a timer, preferably an analog timer so you don’t have your phone near you, but for 20, 25 minutes.

And the idea is that you work intensely for 20, 25 minutes, and that’s doable, right? If you can say that to yourself, “I’m just going to work hard, focus on this one thing, nothing else for 20 minutes,” and then you get a five minute break to do something mindless.

And then you dive in back again. Do another Pomodoro session for maybe 20, 25 minutes again. And you can stack these, and then every maybe three or four, you can take a longer break.

And it turns out it’s a lot easier to get work done. And, oftentimes, you maybe get started with 20 minutes, and you end up working for an hour because you just needed to get started.

So, oftentimes, the focus thing is a trained ability. And the more you work on it and the more you set yourself up to have success without getting distracted, the longer you’ll find that you can focus on things more intently. And when you can do that, you can get more work done, you can have better memory, read more, all those things.

Pete Mockaitis
Now I’ve heard with this, it’s cool, we can practice, we can get better and better. I’ve heard that the quote, “human limits”, given ultradian rhythms, is something like 90 minutes. Like, you probably need a break by then.

Although, occasionally, I don’t know, every once in a while, I get uber fascinated by something and it goes way longer. So what’s your take on this one?

Nelson Dellis
I agree. I mean, I think we all will get burned out at some point. And so I think, over time, I think prepping for that eventual mental deterioration in the session by breaking it up, it’s like in a workout, you have a lot of reps to do. It’s tempting to just get them all out of the way, but you might crash pretty quick versus breaking them up early into sets of 10.

Something that seems too easy, but you could do 10 at a time, and you could almost never stop, right? So I think the same kind of idea applies mentally that, even though it seems like, “Oh, I’m going to get an hour and a half of studying in,” it might be better to break that up into multiple shorter sessions so that you can actually be productive, fully productive, really not mentally fatigued for longer, and make more progress that way.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And this speed reading, how much of that is a real thing?

Nelson Dellis
Yeah, I’m careful about that term, and even though I call the chapter’s title “Speed reading,” I quickly changed it to “Focus reading” because I am aware of some of the associations or the connotations with speed reading.

There’s a lot of history in scam-y programs and bogus claims of people being able to speed read thousands of words per minute. The average person is somewhere between 300, 400 words per minute.

And so what my chapter is truly about is learning how to optimize or make your reading more efficient, and having the skills to be able to turn up the dial of your speed and to turn it down, right, because not everything needs to be speed read or read fast.

There are going to be things you just need to drink right and chug, versus like a fine wine where you’d rather smell it, take a sip, enjoy it, maybe even go back and have another glass, you know?

So I think reading is really up to what the person is trying to get out of it, and being able to kind of work with how they know their mind works and how to read better, and remember what you read better using some basic strategies.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And what are the strategies?

Nelson Dellis
Well, there’s a big part of, again, paying attention, so putting yourself in the right frame of mind to read, having an intention to read. A lot of people want to read a lot of things, but they just pile up books.

So being more intentional about getting through the books you’d like to actually read, which means making time for it. There are so many things that we spend time on that do not advance us in our books.

And if you can just make it more of a thing that you purposefully do every day, whether that means you have to carry a book around with you all the time, I always do that, or you have always got a book by your bedside or on your desk, and you take five minutes here, even just to get like a little chapter out of the way.

You’re always reading in some form. It’s like what you do. Just like maybe you’ve made working out an exercise just as important in your life. Reading should be as well. And I think there are so many benefits to reading. So it’s hard to tell me that maybe that’s not a good thing to read so much.

There are some other more physical, tangible techniques. For example, if you want to increase your reading speed, some suggestions in the book are, if you use some kind of pointer, I know it sounds very infantile, but what happens to most readers is, if they don’t have some kind of guide, they’re often subject to their eyes bouncing around the page or backtracking a lot.

So if you can have some pointer, whether it’s your finger, a pencil, a spaghetti noodle, I don’t know.

Pete Mockaitis
Uncooked, yeah.

Nelson Dellis
An uncooked spaghetti noodle, to guide your eyes across, you’ll find that you backtrack way less, if at all, and you can make more progress through the pages, the chapters that you’re trying to go for.

Another thing to keep in mind is that, when we read, we don’t read every single thing. Our eyes are constantly jumping in what’s called saccades. And if you look at somebody, for example, if you look at someone on a train looking outside of the train, you’ll see their eyes are like jumping, jumping, jumping, jumping.

That’s because it’s kind of trying to track the moving landscape. And even though the person looking out the window doesn’t feel like their eyes are like jumping like that, that’s just naturally what our eyes do. And we do it when we read as well.

And so what you can do, since we don’t need to read all the words, we’re actually skipping around a lot because we can cluster words, we can actually see things in our peripheral as well, and oftentimes we can piece together clumps of words, like just by context, right?

We know what’s going to come next, so do we actually need to read the word? Sometimes we aren’t, even though we feel like we have to. So what you can do is play around with this. I like to draw some, with pencil, some margins inside. Maybe, like, you can start kind of shallow, so maybe a half inch or an inch on each side of the page.

And then as you’re guiding yourself, you just stay between those lines and you realize that, “Oh, shoot, I’m not reading the outskirts of each line of the page. Like, I’m maybe missing hundreds of words per page if I do that,” but you still can remember and read what is on the page partly because peripheral is picking up on that, but also again, context, you can figure it out.

And so if you can even narrow that further, you find you’re just, like, reading a very central narrow part of the page, you can still read the page. It’s really fascinating and fun to play around with.

And this is just to train you, right? Like I’m not saying go through all hundreds of pages of your books and put margins. But if you can train a little bit, this purposeful practice, again makes you better, this training, you can get better at doing that kind of automatically without having to guide with your finger all the time and write these margins in there.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Nelson, tell me, what are some of the top hacks that absolutely most professionals could benefit tremendously from adopting that we haven’t already covered?

Nelson Dellis
I’m a big fan of the chapter on intuition. I know it’s a less of a thing that you can kind of hold and, like, purposefully grasp in your mind the results. But I think there’s some kind of intangible thing to it where people can recognize that it’s doing something for them or not.

And so that whole chapter is about tapping into kind of, like, this gut feeling and how to listen to it better and to hone it better for things that don’t necessarily seem like they’re in your vicinity to make decisions on or perceive.

And I know that sounds a bit out there, but there are techniques out there to hone that. And I don’t want to get too deep into it because it gets a bit weird, but I think the short of it is to listen to your intuition more.

Not that it’s always correct, but if you do listen to it more and open up to it, you’ll find that it often has something important to say, whether it’s about a deal you’re about to say yes to, or some turning point in your life, or the people that you hang out with.

I think if you listen to them, you get those bouts of intuition. I think you get more information about the world, and then you can have more at your disposal, right, more information. I think about what’s happening around you can only be better.

So I’m really happy about that chapter in the book. And I encourage people to kind of explore that a little more.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I think that there’s a lot to that in terms of intuition. I don’t know the neuroscience, but I think I’ve heard, or at least my hot take is that our advanced brain nervous system has just oodles of associations all over the place from all of our experiences. And sometimes it’s not yet conscious.

Like, I could not articulate why I’ve got a weird feeling or a bad feeling about this contract or this deal. And yet, there’s something to it. And I like what you said. It’s not necessarily correct, like, “Oh, absolutely, trust your guide every time. It’ll never lead you straight.” I don’t think that’s true.

But it is surfacing information, and I think it’s funny. It’s almost like, well, I’m thinking about, we had Joe Navarro, the FBI agent who does body language stuff. And I think he said it well, in terms of like, you can’t like prosecute someone based on, like, a body language situation, like, “Judge, jury, there you have it, you know? He crossed his legs at the wrong time. He’s guilty of sin.”

But what you can do is say, “Hmm, this thing right here seems worthy of additional investigation, additional resources. Let’s go search the apartment of his mom. Oh, and what do you know? We found the key item there because we listened to those clues from from the body language.”

And, likewise, I think that when you listen to your intuition, and say, “Hmm, something about this deal feels off. I’m just going to run it by a lawyer.” And the lawyer says, “Oh, my gosh, this is a terrible deal. Look at all the things you have to do, and almost nothing that they have to do. Do not sign.” It’s is like, “Oh, okay, well, it was good move that I checked my intuition.”

Or you might talk to multiple trusted advisors, and said, “Ah, yes, it could feel sketchy. But, in fact, that is just how this whole industry operates, so you got to choose. Are you down with that or are you not?”

And then I think it really can be a valuable tool or indicator to point you into where we’re going to dig deeper.

Nelson Dellis
Yeah, and I think, more than anything, our brains are very logical and rational, and we tend to always think with that, and I think that’s great. I mean, we should be logical about the real world and information around us.

But our brain isn’t always, like, what we think logically. It’s not always getting it correct, you know? There are many things that can alter what we think is correct, and the brain is not quite getting it correct.

So I think this mix of having a well-founded logic in life, but also using intuition when it needs to and listening to it more often, again, not necessarily to make the decisions, but to maybe factor in as part of your decision-making can really make a difference in how you navigate your life or your job, how to be awesome at your job.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, thank you. Well, anything else you want to share before we hear about your favorite things?

Nelson Dellis
Yeah, no, I’m so happy with this book. I always talk about memory, and over the years, I’ve just been always fascinated by the brain, clearly. And I’ve kept little notebooks of all these cool tricks, mental tricks that I’ve been taught or stumbled upon because of my memory explorations, and it’s all in this book.

And I’m so over the moon about this book. And I think it’ll help a lot of people. And it can be fun, it can be serious. You can use it in so many different ways. And so I hope people go and check it out.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Lovely. Well, now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Nelson Dellis
This is always changing, but this one has always stuck with me, and it’s by Albert Einstein, who I talk about a lot in the book. and it’s that, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”

And I’ve always loved that because, especially coming from him, you know, you’d think like of Einstein, he just knows so much. That’s how he figured everything out, but he actually figured everything out his staple discoveries from just imagination exercises.

And oftentimes, silly ones that, like, broke the boundary of what you’re supposed to think about, I guess, for some physics examples. And that’s how innovation came about for him. And I think that’s, in general, how innovation comes out is by bending the rules, which can only happen in your imagination.

And so I think if you think that way, that it’s more valuable to have these imagination, visualization skills, which you can train and practice, it’s often more important than what you know.

Pete Mockaitis
And can you share a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Nelson Dellis
Yeah, I’m a bit biased, but I was a part of a study at Washington University in St. Louis, where they were, you know, there’s been memory studies forever, and people have been subject to fMRI scans to look inside the brain, but they’re largely uncomfortable machines to sit in for very long.

So, typically, studies in the past have taken a lot of large quantity of people in the machine for very short periods of time, and kind of taking averages. They’ve never really done in-depth long hours in the machine study.

So they took me, how many hours did I do? It must’ve been at least 15 to 20, maybe more. And then they have maybe 10 controls, who also volunteered. I don’t know who these people were. They must’ve been incentivized, somehow.

But anyways, the results are finally, they were published this year, and they’re trying to get it published in some well-known journals. But, ultimately, what came out of it, there’s a few things that came out of it, but one of the most striking or kind of, I don’t know, controversial, but against what most people might’ve thought is that the hippocampus for most people is where the magic happens with memory.

There’s a lot of activity when somebody is using their memory. And for a lot of the tasks they had me do in the machine, it showed a very different structure, that I’m actually not using, well, I am using my hippocampus, but I’m using more of my brain, that the pathways and the parts of my brain that I’m using when I’m memorizing is completely different than the normal person.

And this is trained, right? So the ultimate finding of the paper is that memory training literally rewires your brain. And that’s always been said, you know, anecdotally, but now there’s proof.

This is literal proof that anybody can change the way their brain works. And also that memory doesn’t fully work the way we think it does because how can Nelson here be memorizing all these sorts of crazy things, and it’s not through the conventional systems that we see when people use their memory.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Nelson Dellis
I’d have to say Godel, Escher, and Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite tool?

Nelson Dellis
My brain, seriously. You know, it might be easy to say, like, “Oh, I have this app for this, and then I use tech or AI for this.” But, honestly, my favorite tool is my brain, and I really try to use it whenever I can, even though there might be an easier way, more efficient way. I don’t want to lose the ability to use my brain and to think.

And I feel more terrified than ever in modern day, just because I feel like we’re losing the ability to think. We’re outsourcing it so much that I don’t know what our future looks like, honestly. So I’m loving my tool in my head that I’m purposefully using to keep it strong and to fight the trend.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Nelson Dellis
My favorite habit is just always working out early in the morning. The first thing I get out of bed, and I do some intense exercise, that, to me, I don’t even, I mean, yeah, it’s just what I’ve programmed myself to do. And if I don’t get that done, my day just is shot. When I get my workout in early, it’s just sets the tone for productivity throughout the day.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks, you hear them quote it back to you often?

Nelson Dellis
Yeah. I mean, I think it’s using your memory, being intentional about memory, and understanding that the memory is something that can be worked on. If you say to yourself that, “I don’t have a good memory. I forget names. I’m just that person who is forgetful,” yeah, sure, you’re going to be that person.

You get to decide what your memory is. And I find that’s the most profound thing people get out of my talks or my content is that the brain is malleable, and that nobody has a bad memory. They just have untrained memories. And that’s usually the nugget that changes a lot of their perception on what their brain is capable of.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Nelson Dellis
Best is just to go to my website, NelsonDellis.com. You can find everything about me there, my books, my coaching, memory coaching, my YouTube channel. A lot of content out there teaching how to do this stuff, and, yeah, exploring my books. But NelsonDellis.com, you’ll find it all.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome with their jobs?

Nelson Dellis
Yes, use your brain more. I know it can be challenging right now, and oftentimes, you use it and you’re maybe let down, but it’s, again, it’s plastic. It can be molded. It can be trained. So the more you use it, the stronger it gets. So give it a shot. You won’t regret it.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Nelson, thank you.

Nelson Dellis
Thank you so much.

Apr 06
0

1143: How to Build a Career that AI Can’t Replace with Aneesh Raman

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Aneesh Raman guides you on how to use AI and turn it into a competitive advantage.

You’ll Learn

  1. Why you shouldn’t see AI as competition
  2. How to make the most out of AI in your workflow
  3. What AI can’t replicate–and how you can double down on it

About Aneesh

Aneesh Raman is the chief economic opportunity officer of LinkedIn, where he works with leaders across societies and sectors to shape the global response to the historic changes hitting work. 

Previously, he served as senior adviser on economic strategy and public affairs to the State of California, led economic impact at Facebook, worked as a presidential speechwriter, and was a war correspondent. 

A graduate of Harvard College and a former Fulbright Scholar, he serves on the boards of the College Futures Foundation and Shanti Bhavan Children’s Project

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

Aneesh Raman Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Aneesh, welcome!

Aneesh Raman
Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to hear your insights about AI and economic opportunity. Could you maybe kick us off by sharing what’s the most surprising or counterintuitive thing you’ve discovered about us career professional folks and AI?

Aneesh Raman
Ooh, it’s a big one. It’s an existential one that we have internalized this diminished sense of self as humans at work across the industrial age. When AI broke out, what now three, four years ago, immediately, there was this great fear.

Immediately, the conversation was, “We’re done. We’re at the end of the road for humans at work. We’ve got this thing that can beat us at these things. It’s going to beat us at those things next. It’s going to beat us at everything soon.”

And I just sort of, like, intrinsically, didn’t believe that. I was starting from a place where, for a long time, I had thought the labor market did a horrible job matching talent and opportunity, indexed on pedigree signals like your college degree, “Where did you work?”

So I just knew there was so much human potential out there that had been blocked out or locked out of economic opportunity all over the world. And so I just didn’t believe that humans were done. I kind of felt like we hadn’t even begun yet.

And the more I sort of thought about it, the more our CEO and I talked about it, what led to the book was this realization that humans are more than we’ve been at work for a couple hundred years now. For a couple hundred years, we have been about one thing above all else – efficiency.

And we sort of told ourselves a story that the knowledge economy moved us out of the industrial age, of people working on factory floors on assembly lines. But it didn’t. Even if you were with a laptop in an office, you were doing more, better, faster, more, better, faster, more, better, faster. Everything was about efficiency and productivity.

And we had derided almost these skills that make us, us. We called them soft skills. We said they were nice to have, not must have. And all the math worked in terms of the industrial age and what the economy valued in terms of technical and analytic abilities.

But I think what’s been most surprising to me is that AI is forcing us to reassert ourselves because it is going to out-machine us, it’s going to out-efficiency us. And yet, our human brain, which is I think still the most incredible object in the known universe, it’s been around for tens of thousands of years, long before the steam engine arrived, and the industrial age descended upon us.

And so we’re going to pull from these strengths that we’ve had for millennia, that we talked about in the book, and it’s going to be a moment to reassert ourselves and our capability, I think.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, wow! These are big ideas.

Aneesh Raman
Welcome to my brain.

Pete Mockaitis
“Internalize the diminished sense of self.” My goodness. You know, it’s funny, I was just chatting with Claude last night because I think the First Lady was with a robot doing an education event. And I was like, “Oh, can that robot finally load my dishwasher for me? And when can I buy one?”

And so, I was looking at that, and it said, “Oh, this robot is impressive because it could figure out how to fold a towel with just 80 hours of video.” I was like, “Oh, well, my five-year-old figured out how to fold a towel in about four minutes of instruction with a hug.”

So, yeah, I’m with you, our brains are spectacular. But, yeah, there are some domains in which we are being out-efficienced by the AI.

Aneesh Raman
Yeah, and I think that’s okay. It’s not okay right now because it’s causing a massive disruption to work. It’s changing the rules of the game, which are hard to manage if you’ve been playing the game the old way and you’ve done everything right and, suddenly, you know, old math won’t solve new equations. But I think it’s an opening for people that see it.

We were never meant to be machine-like. We were never meant to spend our days doing the work of efficiency and more better faster, more better faster, more better faster. I mean, at one point, as we were reporting in the book, you know, thinking about those people on assembly lines who are fastening that one widget over and over again, or the knocker uppers that we talk about, the people who their job was to shoot peas at windows to wake people up as this sort of human alarm clock.

I looked up and they were just at this coffee shop, four people sitting next to each other, on their laptops, just slamming through emails. And it just connected for me that this is all still ever been efficiency work. And so, I think the real opportunity we talk about in the book is to see this as a big change to everything, to be understanding of the fear that that’s going to cause, because the human brain is wired to fear change. It is not wired to get exponential change. We are in a moment of exponential change.

But then act despite that fear, push past it, because while it’s understandable, it’s also unhelpful. And if you start using these tools and using them not in ways that then just take all the work out of your day, but start to take away the stuff that’s mundane, routinized, efficiency work, free up time to do more cool things with these tools, to learn new things in new ways, to build new things in new ways.

And then to open up space to do the things we uniquely do, to give yourself time to think critically, to think about ethical implications of what you’re building if you’re an engineer, to spend time brainstorming or partnering with other humans.

The turning test started us down this path of AI versus human, and then it beat us here, it beats us there. But that’s not where the story goes. There’s no innovation. There’s no growth if it’s just all about AI. Humans are illogical. We’re unpredictable. What works for us requires someone to be us, to be human, to in-tune that.

So, really, the test we should be doing is human versus human with AI, versus humans with AI, because we always do the coolest stuff together. And that means think about yourself five years ago, think about yourself today, “What are you doing that’s new and better and energizing that you couldn’t do without these tools five years ago?”

And in the book, we talk about an easy way to start this. Put your job title aside. It doesn’t matter if you’re a CEO. It doesn’t matter if you’re a senior director. It doesn’t matter if you’re the newest hire at a company. Your job title is irrelevant for the purposes of this exercise.

Every week, you do about a dozen tasks, list them down, and then you’re going to put those tasks into three buckets. The first bucket are tasks that AI can now do or can soon do. So coding is in there, quick summary, quick analysis, first draft of content, meeting notes, like all that stuff’s in bucket one.

Bucket two is stuff you’re doing with AI that’s new. It’s not just additional stuff that you’re putting in bucket one. It’s, “Are you learning something new with AI?” “I’m on marketing, I got to talk to the sales team. They speak a different language. How do I close that expertise gap in what I’m trying to pitch them?”

Are you building something new? “I have to present. What’s a cool image I could associate with this idea? A video? How do I make this land in a more visceral way to the people I’m trying to convince to back this project?” So that’s bucket two.

And then bucket three is, with the time you’re saving in bucket one, with the cool new stuff you’re doing in bucket two, what are gyou doing that’s uniquely you? And that starts with what’s uniquely you as a human, your ability. We have the five Cs in the book, but with those, think critically, “What’s an ethical implication of what we’re doing?”

But then are you spending new time with people to try new things, to test something out as a partnership, to get advice on how to pitch something. And as you sort of move the tasks of your job away from bucket one towards bucket two and bucket three, you’re adapting your job. You’re redefining your job.

We have a statistic at LinkedIn, 70% of the skills for the average job will have changed by 2030. Now, the old way that disruptions hit meant that, at some point, in six months or a year, your boss, your boss’s boss would come to you and say, “Here’s how your job has changed by 70%.” Because old disruptions from the steam engine to electricity to the internet, they played out over years and they came top down.

This one is different. Your boss actually doesn’t really know how your job is supposed to change. Their boss doesn’t know how their job is supposed to change. CEOs are trying to figure this out at an organizational level. So we get to change our jobs now. We get to start figuring out where these tools come in and then what that opens up in bucket two and three, not just because we’re human, but because we’re us.

We have a chapter in the book, “No One Beats You at Being You.” That’s where it’s going, is that you’re going to shift your job and then re-center your career around your unique curiosities and capabilities.

Pete Mockaitis
No one beats you at being you. And it’s funny, I’m thinking about, you know, so me here now, here we are having a podcast about professional skills development, and there are a lot of places where you can get such things.

And it’s interesting how, if I talk to an AI about such a matter, I might get the answer, and it might be quick. And yet, it is not as satisfying, complete, thorough, giving rise to new ideas and connections, the way hearing a full blown conversation between two folks on a matter is. And I think that that really resonates.

Aneesh Raman
And I think that it’s really important. Yeah, I’m glad you’re saying, because right now there’s this sort of idea to AI or not AI, as if it’s binary. And if you AI, you’re doing everything AI. If you’re not, you’re rejecting it for righteous reasons, and that’s where you’re at.

And in the book, we have the story of Neil Pretty, whom really, he embodies this idea that you need to use AI, but you cannot misuse it, nor should you overuse it. And Neil starts using this tool to help him prepare for different presentations, and he overuses it and realize it doesn’t sound like him and it’s not going to distinguish him. And he dials it back and he uses it differently.

Instead of asking it to tell him what to say, it says, “What would this CEO say about what I said, or this academic? Give me 12 reactions to what I think.” And then he would use that to even get better at what he was going to say that would have taken much conversation with many people ahead of a meeting.

So you can overuse AI. And MIT has done cognitive scans and come up with this term cognitive debt. Like, if you’re sitting at work and your boss asks you something, you copy and paste it in the tool, then you copy and paste the answer back and send it to your boss, you might be doing efficiency work more efficiently.

But if you run into your boss a week later, and they’re like, “Hey, that was a great idea. How did you think of that?” you might not even remember that exchange because your brain is not tracking it, and you will have brought no critical thinking to it. So that muscle is atrophying. So you got to make sure that you are using this tool to do better things yourself. You cannot outsource to it.

Pete Mockaitis
So in the universe of more, better, faster efficiency work, how would you suggest is the contrast? If I’m thinking efficiency work AI stuff is in the land of more, better, faster, what is the land of our humanity?

Aneesh Raman
This is the first time someone’s asked me that. Because what’s crazy is we had to define what makes us us. We had to define what makes humans unique in the arena of work.

It turns out not much work had been done around that. As you started talking to neuroscientists, behavioral psychologists, behavioral economists even, when I’d ask like, “Who from companies or from the world of work comes and talks to you?”

One neuroscientist said, “Not many. Like, athletes will come because they want to push their brain to the limit. The military will come because they can’t hire from another military. Hedge funds will come because they want a cool like summit speaker. But you were not getting incoming from everyday practitioners of work.”

But now the mind is going to the center of work, not the machine. And so what does it all lead to? You know, in the book, we identify the five Cs that we think are at the core of human capability – curiosity, compassion, creativity, courage and communication. Those are what we offer up at the intersection of our IQ and EQ of our consciousness and conscience.

Then we say there’s some habits we all need – resilience, adaptability, handling hard well, failing fast, learning quick. And we sort of bundle it all into this idea of being entrepreneurial in our habits and in our thinking. And we know that in saying that, we lose a lot of folks who think being entrepreneurial means starting a business, and that is not for them.

Paul Cheek from MIT, who’s a professor on entrepreneurship there, has an amazing definition for it. “Entrepreneurialism,” he says in the book, “is doing more than is reasonable with the resources you have.” So every one of us every day has a task, has a project, has something we’re doing at work, what’s more than is reasonable that we could do with these tools and with others with the resources we have?

And then what that leads to is a flip. Instead of more, better, faster, I think we’re doing new, bigger, bolder. We are creating a whole bunch of new ideas, a whole bunch of new ways for businesses to grow, a whole bunch of new businesses to go after, a whole bunch of new areas from climate to healthcare to all sorts of stuff that we could create technology for businesses to address, at the local level for just a community, or at the country level, or at the global level.

So, to me, “more, better, faster” becomes “new, bolder, better” and not just in terms of work. Like, I think if we do this right, and it isn’t just us as individuals. Institutions need to completely redesign the systems of work from employment to education, entrepreneurship.

But, ultimately, we get to better work for each of us, better work for all of us, better defined by just more human work, more fulfilling, more high value, more impactful. But that all leads to greater prosperity and progress because of this sort of innovation explosion, this entrepreneurialism that can take root.

Pete Mockaitis
And to these notions of efficiency work versus newer, bolder stuff, I’d love your hot take on these AI layoffs. I mean, some say, “Oh, well, that’s just AI washing. They over-hired, interest rates are worse. It makes a better story for Wall Street to say, ‘Oh, it’s because of AI efficiency.’” But others say, “Oh, no, no, no. Sure enough, one person can now do what things that previously require two, three, or four, and thus it makes sense to shed those jobs.” You’ve got an interesting vantage point. What’s your take on this?

Aneesh Raman
I mean, we’re seeing jobs get added, one million plus jobs around AI. That’s not just the sort of like hardcore engineering jobs. That’s also the data centers. We know sectors are hiring, like healthcare. Look, there’s these two truths we have to hold at once that are somewhat inconsistent.

The first truth is we know at the other end of all of these moments of disruption from technology, we generally see an increase in employment, and the Fed is out there sort of repeatedly with that. Jobs change, new jobs emerge. MIT has a stat, 60% of employment in 2018 didn’t exist in 1940. Creator wasn’t a career 10 years ago. Data scientist wasn’t a job 20 years ago. So we, generally, do see employment go up.

That happens after a messy middle where a lot of lives get upended and it’s really hard for people. But we do see employment go up. That sort of thing one, truth one. Thing two, truth two that contradicts that is we’ve never been here before in terms of this technology. It is fundamentally different in terms of what it’s able to do.

And I think predictions are unhelpful right now. Anyone with absolute certainty about what’s happening to a job category or to all jobs or to jobs in this sector, let’s see how it turns out in five or 10 years. Like, I think it’s just impossible for anyone to know with certainty anything absolute.

The one thing we do know, to contradict myself a little, is the only thing that matters right now is what we believe, and what we choose to do, and what decisions we make, and what steps we take. And that is true for us as individuals. It’s true for us as organizations. It’s true for us as societies. It’s true for us as humanity.

If we decide that worse is more likely, and we make decisions that make worse more likely, worse is more likely. If we decide that better is more likely, and we make decisions that make better more likely, better is more likely.

So in terms of where employment goes, there’s so much in the air. I mean, we’re going from an old world to a new world of work. There’s so much macroeconomic muckup that’s going on on interest rates and geopolitics. Every company is going through its own moment of business transformation.

Some over-hired and now they’re managing that. Some are built with an org chart for stability, order, predictability. That isn’t going to help you innovate, be agile, and grow. They’ve got to manage that. There’s no one truth to everything that’s happening.

And so I think for folks who are looking for a single answer, who are looking for someone to tell them what to do, who are looking for an off-the-shelf playbook as an individual or as a company, like, that’s not this moment. It’s not like back when it was like everyone get a CS degree or bootcamp certificate in coding if you can find one, because that’s the ticket.

There is no “it” right now, but that’s it. We’ve all got to start to figure this out on our own, use these tools, and with these tools start to understand our own unique interest, capabilities, where those could go, where we would pitch ourselves across a broader set of job opportunities that we might, otherwise, have looked at. And I think that’s what we’ve got to do is look. It’s a metacognition sort of moment.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. But you do have some interesting data. 85% of people are in jobs where AI can automate at least a quarter of routine tasks. Can you tell us a little bit about that data and what sorts of things we’re seeing automated now with AI?

Aneesh Raman
A big thing we’ve been trying to push people on is to look at jobs as a set of tasks, not as titles. A good example of how not to do it, I would say, is looking at software engineers. And for a bit coming out of the gate with AI, everyone said that title describes all software engineers in one way, and that one way is that they code. And as AI got better and better at coding, it became, in that line of argument, intuitive that software engineers were done.

We’ve actually seen recent data where the hiring for software engineers is going up because as AI is able to do more coding, more companies want to build tech, so they’re hiring. And the job of software engineer was never limited only ever to coding.

Some of those jobs, entry level jobs, even middle, they were, but the job doesn’t have to be just that. In fact, as AI is able to do coding, it shifts to reviewing the code, or talking to customers, or having those conversations about ethical implications of what’s being built. It’s the same three buckets and things move.

ATMs are a good example, we talk about in the book. When ATMs hit in the late ‘70s, everyone thought bank tellers were done. We have a quote from the New York Times. It basically says bank tellers are done. Bank teller jobs, like, doubled between that moment and 2010, and they doubled because you had more banks opening so you needed more tellers because ATMs allowed it. The job of the bank teller shifted to being more about relationship banking.

Now, there were some debate over whether the quality of the job went up, but in an absolute term, you know, the jobs went up. They came down after that because of the iPhone and the smartphone and all the banking we’re now doing. But you couldn’t have predicted that in the ‘70s.

So that’s all to say our data doesn’t look at job titles. It looks at jobs. It looks at the tasks people are doing. And it says, if you are in a job where a lot of your job is that bucket one, that’s worth knowing. That doesn’t mean that entire job is going away. And it doesn’t mean you are done at work. It means you’ve got AI coming for well over 50% of the jobs in that task. So you want to start on your own moving tasks in your day to day to bucket two and bucket three.

And if you do that, don’t worry about the job category or the job title you have. That’s all secondary now. It used to be job title mattered first because you’d reverse engineer from it. Job title matters last now because we’re going to be reshifting work.

And so depending on your number, and you don’t need us to tell you this data, you can do an evaluation of the tasks in your job and look at where you’re heavy. Anyone who is heavy in bucket one, okay, what do you got going in bucket two and three? How can you build out from that?

If you’re in a job category that feels really volatile, okay, what are the transferable skills you have across two and three that could take you into other job functions or job categories? But it’s not an overnight, everything is done end of day sort of thing. It’s a step-by-step incremental of, “How do I manage this change sort of thing?”

Pete Mockaitis
And we had a really good chat with Jeremy Utley, who suggested shifting perspective from AI is not the oracle with the answers, but rather like a collaborator, a teammate, and that’s been pretty helpful. I’d be curious to hear, for those whose AI use is limited to sort of an enhanced Google or enhanced Bing, where do you think are the most promising opportunities, like, “Hey, go do this right now with AI, and you’re going to see some cool career benefits”?

Aneesh Raman
This is another one where there’s no one answer for everyone. I’m sorry to tell folks. Like, you’re going to have to go to the gym. You’re going to have to try things out, test things out, and figure out what is the high value of AI for you.

It could be learning new things. It could be building new things. It could be coaching you on new things. You got to keep trying the tools. Like, to your point, I think too many folks either are afraid of AI and don’t want to touch it. Or, if they’re using it, they’re using it just for a better search.

We have five Cs I talked about, and curiosity matters most right now as individuals. And the first place to start is be super curious about these tools, because their capabilities are changing every day. It’s almost like a skill of tool dexterity.

I use multiple tools every day. Every once in a while, I shift to the dominant tool. I use them for all sorts of things. Every week, I’m trying to push a new task out to the tools so that I’m constantly testing what new things that I’m working on can it help with.

It helped with writing at first, and then that pushed me to realize, “Okay, I got to focus on how I elevate what I can get help with on the research or first draft side. But also how do I spend more time doing in-person communication?”

So I started studying, like, theater actors who have it down, who know how to command a room, command energy. What can I learn from them now that my bucket three is going to be more of this? Right now, I’m using the tools for a lot of coaching. I want to send this email. I’ve told the tools what I’m working on, which is sending less emails that are less lengthy with less ideas to people like Ryan, who I can bombard with ideas.

And so it’ll say like, “Hey, you just got yesterday, like take a day off,” you know, like stuff like that. So it’s not so much about the tool capability. It’s what is the human capability you’re working on in that moment? Because we’re all going to want to keep growing right now in new ways, which is fun. It’s hard, but it’s fun.

And then you’re going to use the tools differently based on what you’re working on. If you’re just doing search, that’s an issue. So the easiest way to do it is find the hardest part of your tomorrow. You got something at work tomorrow that you’re not looking forward to, that is either monotonous and drudgery or complicated and a hard conversation you got to have, or you’re suddenly going to have to come up with an idea and you’re bit freaked out about that.

Whatever is your hardest thing tomorrow, start going to the tools and asking them how they can help you with that. And they might not be able to help you. Okay, that’s like a good example of a tool that isn’t there yet, or a task that isn’t there yet, but they’ll give you something. And that’s the sort of rhythm you want to get in.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, could you give us some fun examples of folks who saw some really great tactical good things flowing from tools into what they’re up to tomorrow?

Aneesh Raman
My favorite from the book, probably, I mean, they’re all stories of individuals who are using these tools to get jobs, keep jobs, and change their career, build businesses, like, all of it. But Jonetta Gresham is in her 50s, and because of her age, she came to AI with, in her words, a “Hell, no to AI,” mindset, because she had seen Terminator and Terminator 2 and Terminator 3, and really felt like this was a robot apocalypse come to life.

Again, she had a task at one point, which was to get her resume ready. And she used a tool to just help her do that. And she was blown away at how the tool helped her articulate skills that she had and better organized experience that she had in a way that made her so much more employable for the job she was going after.

And so that sort of opened up her eyes to like, “Okay, maybe this can help me.” And a little bit later, she was taking an IT certification course. And she is someone who, in various moments of education, didn’t feel like she was being taught in the way that she would like to learn, in the way that her brain process information, and in the way that would feed her curiosity.

So she told the tools to help her learn all the stuff she had to learn in the ways that she likes to learn, with stories, with analogies. The tools did that, she passed the test, she got the certification.

It can personalize against your needs in a way that no technology has before. It can close learning gaps. It can close entrepreneurial gaps or building gaps. You just got to get in the rhythm with it.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like that a lot in terms of, if you’ve got a laser focus on, “This is the thing I need to go learn,” and then how can the tool facilitate that, I found that rather handy. Like, I found myself getting in the Mac OS Terminal bash command line, and I don’t know what I’m doing, but it’s like, “Hey, if you want to, you know, do this automatic downloading of stuff, you’re going to need this tool.”

So I was like, “Go to GitHub,” it’s like, “Okay, no, you’ve already lost me.” And so I say, “Explain it like I’m five.” And it’s really funny, it’s like asking the robot to go to a store. It literally explains it like I’m five. But that was very handy. And I’ve heard that theme from a number of people.

It’s, like, they know a little something about the domain that they’re after or looking to enter for perhaps the first time, but not nearly enough to actually achieve anything. But with this sort of mega-crutch, they’re saying, “Oh, okay, I can kind of fake my way through step by step.” And then afterwards, like, “Oh, hey, I guess I know how to do this now. How about that?”

Aneesh Raman
Yeah, we’ve got a great story of a guy named Diego, who’s in Texas and is trying to push for rural entrepreneurship with AI to really inspire more folks to realize they can build businesses. Often, folks who couldn’t afford to go to college for whom entrepreneurship is, as he calls it, this permissionless path, this ability to go build your career on your terms.

And he has a great line, which is, “We are no longer limited by what we know. We are only limited by what we can think to ask.” And just imagine what that means for all people all over the world who have access to these tools, who hopefully have electricity and AI infrastructure.

But you’re only limited by what you can think to ask. All of us as humans are innately curious about things, wildly different things. That’s what’s amazing. We all have different perspectives, different things that drive us. But imagine now having this tool that can sort of feed that curiosity and help us align it with the work we do and the impact we want to have and the purpose we want to bring to our jobs.

That’s where you start to get excited. I think we are collectively doing a horrible job telling that story and making it clear, that hiding in plain sight is this thing that is going to make all of our jobs more interesting and more fulfilling, and all of our efforts lead to greater impact for good in the world.

And that’s now on us to try and reset that story and that conversation, which is like the big reason we did the book.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that, “What you can think to ask.” Have there been some power questions that you found transformational?

Aneesh Raman
I think a lot of it is, right now, for folks around, “Where do I start?” or, “What do I do about? How do I think about AI? How should I use AI? When should I not use AI?” You can just dump that in as a voice memo into one of these tools, and it gives you a start. It gives you something to react to.

Again, it doesn’t give you the answer. It gives you an option. And it’s your job to push back on it or to pull from it, and then try and learn something here. Ask it to challenge your thinking over there. One of the things we talk about in the book is like the, I think, it’s a hundred to one rule.

I mean, “You pick your number, but give me like 80 versions of something,” and then you react to which of those you like. And then you can start to think about why and build from that. Or, “Give me the five best arguments against the thing that I think is true about what I’m going to do tomorrow.”

That’s where I think people are really starting to get good results from it. Not, “Give me the answer,” but, “Give me a way to get to a better answer.”

Pete Mockaitis
And I like what you’re saying with regard to the challenging is because it seems like that’s the default setting is sycophancy in these AI tools. It shows me a study. I was like, “Wow, that’s very compelling.” I was like, “Do we think this is real?” It was like, “Actually it has all the hallmarks of being a fraudulent paper mill submission.” I was like, “It’d be nice if you proactively shared that.” But, yeah, to ask it to do the challenging is great.

And you said voice memo and I think that’s a brilliant hack right there in terms of not just the one sentence, but the five minutes of verbiage can make all the difference.

Aneesh Raman
And you can just dump it all in and it’ll organize it. I know someone who does a call with AI every day. They do the chat functionality because you can also, without having to type in or do a voice memo, you can literally converse with these tools.

And they go out for a walk, and they just talk about everything on their mind, “I’m like thinking about this, I had a hard conversation with this person.” And over time, what these tools start to have is longitudinal data on us. They aren’t another person. They are just a collection of insights and knowledge that’s out there. And then, increasingly, if you give it context and give it info, insights, and thoughts on us over longer and longer periods of time.

And so in these conversations, the tool will start calling out, “Hey, you’ve talked for a few times now about wanting to learn more about neuroscience, or how that’s going to relate to work. Here are some, like, podcasts you might want to listen to.” Or, “I’ve noticed, like, anytime you have to have a conversation that’s tough, and it is how you end your day, it really upends your day. Like, have you thought about making those conversations happen at the start of a day?”

It starts picking up on stuff for us that we might miss in the day-to-day of just life being busy. So the key thing is, like, this is a tool that is the easiest technology humans have created for humans to use. It is literally like just talking to someone else at the most basic level. You don’t have to go learn AI. You just have to, like, sign up for a free tool or watch a couple of free videos on it, and then just start using it.

Pick a thing. It can be an exercise plan, a meal plan, or something at work, a project, or a set of tasks you’ve got going, and just start using it. Like, it’s sitting there for any of us to use. So you got to just start using it and keep using it but don’t outsource to it. Use it to then start building you into a better person.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Aneesh Raman
I think it goes back to your opening question. Like, it has been surprising how we have internalized a diminished sense of self, and yet it is a reality. And so the biggest thing I would tell people is, like, what matters most right now is your belief in yourself.

You’re going to have to bet on yourself. That’s the future of work and then push your leaders, and we’re pushing them, to build systems that make that bet pay off. But the thing that starts it all is going to be that you believe in yourself and you’re going to bet on yourself. And that’s going to take some work because we are all coming out of an era for work that wasn’t about betting on yourself.

It was turning yourself into whatever the job description needed, whatever the job category needed. So it’s going to be a flip for your brain. The good news is, and there’s a great book, Tiny Experiments, a bunch of them on neuroplasticity and how we can rewire our brain to become a different person.

The good news is you got a human brain and it is able to be rewired and you can become a different person. You can get to belief. You can get to a place where you know exactly how and why you’re going to bet on yourself, but it’s going to take some work. But that’s where it starts. That’s what I would say.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Aneesh Raman
I like the, “Some men see things as they are and ask why. I dream of things that never were, and ask why not.” That drove me for a while. I think, right now, it’s more “Be curious, not judgmental.” I think it gets appropriated to Walt Whitman.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite study or experimental or bit of research?

Aneesh Raman
Mine, I mentioned at the MIT one, 60% of jobs in 2018 didn’t exist in 1940. That’s just like a good number for us to keep in mind.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Aneesh Raman
A bunch of them. My favorite hits at a certain moment in life, that sort of like hits me deep as it relates to this conversation, Sapiens. I read that in August 2023, GPT had gone global the prior year, and it is a brief history of humankind.

And so it just helps you have a sense of, like, how incredible the human brain is, but just also how much has happened across millions of years when we all focused on a few hundred years. So that really widened my perspective.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool?

Aneesh Raman
Copilot, I’m using it a lot because I work at LinkedIn. My co-author is working on Copilot. So it’s kind of a default because I can go tell someone if there’s something we should make better out of it. But it can really give me good advice on, “Should I send this email?” or, “What am I overspending my time on?” because it’s got my calendar, it’s got my email, it’s got the team’s messages. So, for me, right now, because a lot of my growth is growth I want to do at work, it’s been helpful.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Aneesh Raman
This is probably controversial, because I don’t know if people would say this. My favorite habit is small talk, actually. I love small talk. I think every human is like a documentary unto themselves. There’s this great word, sonder, that I won’t do it justice, so people should look it up. It’s a word someone made up, I think, five, 10 years ago. But it’s that every human around you is living a life as complex and interesting as your own.

And that’s true across human history, or at least since we’ve had the brain we have with the ability for complex thought that we have. So I find small talk just amazing. I love meeting new people and just, I’m sure I’m awkward about it because I ask like deep questions sometimes really quick, but I just, like, love learning about people.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget you share that people really connect and resonate with and quote back to you a lot?

Aneesh Raman
Hard things are hard. That’s a good one. You know, at one point, someone asked me, “What’s been the hardest part of your career?” And I was like, “You know what? All of it.” And I did it kind of, like, begrudgingly. And then as stuff has stayed hard in just figuring this story out, I revisited, you know, when I worked for President Obama, he had a “Hard things are hard” plaque on his desk because at certain moments when legislative victories were hard fought, people would remind each other hard things are hard.

And that just has led me to become a real believer in the bigness and value of hard. I have, like, an ode to hard things. It’s got, you know, quote from a stoic Marcus Aurelius, who’s like, “The obstacle is the way,” to “Hard things are hard,” to Carl Lassen, the Duke women’s basketball coach who has a viral video that’s amazing about how the whole thing in life is, “How do you handle hard well?”

Roger Federer had a commencement speech a few years ago about the mastery of hard things. Nvidia CEO Jensen was at Stanford Business School and said, “I wish upon you pain and suffering,” because his point to these Stanford Business students was, “You got to build resilience and you got to go through hard for that.” So, yeah, hard things are hard. I think I’ll take that.

Pete Mockaitis
And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Aneesh Raman
LinkedIn. The sleeper functions on Linkedin, I think, that people don’t know enough about is you can follow people without connecting to them.

You can go follow folks and they’ll be in your feed. So I am, I’d say, regularly, every three months, unfollowing some people where my curiosities have moved somewhere else, following new people who are talking about the things that I’m newly curious about.

So follow me until you get bored of me. Follow others. All the people in the book are on LinkedIn. And then the book, Linkedin.com/opentowork, that’s where you can go find out about the book.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Aneesh Raman
Bet on yourself. Find your way to betting on yourself and you’ll be okay.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Aneesh, thank you.

Aneesh Raman
Thanks for having me.

Jan 22
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1122: How to Find the Work You’re Wired to Do with William Vanderbloemen

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William Vanderbloemen discusses how professionals can find both success and satisfaction in their careers.

You’ll Learn

  1. The one habit that puts you ahead of 90% of people
  2. How to learn what you don’t know about yourself
  3. The one skill to work on—regardless of your job

About William 

William Vanderbloemen has been leading the Vanderbloemen Search Group for 15 years, where they are regularly retained to identify the best talent for teams, manage succession planning, and consult on all issues regarding teams. This year, Vanderbloemen will complete their 3,000th executive search.  

Prior to founding Vanderbloemen Search Group, William studied executive search under a mentor with 25+ years of executive search at the highest level. His learning taught him the very best corporate practices, including the search strategies used by the internationally known firm Russell Reynolds. Prior to that, William served as a Senior Pastor at one of the largest Presbyterian Churches in the United States.

Resources Mentioned

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William Vanderbloemen Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
William, welcome!

William Vanderbloemen
Thanks so much, Pete. Appreciate you having me here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about some of your wisdom. Your book, “Work How You Are Wired,” great title, great messages. I want to kick it off right at the beginning, I’m intrigued, we’ve got right off the bat, chapter one titled, “Almost Everyone Hates Their Job.” What a bummer! Can you tell us, what’s the underlying research data for this assertion?

William Vanderbloemen
If you do a pretty thorough search, and we did, of reputable surveys, of really honest looks at happiness and engagement in the workplace, the resounding conclusion is most Americans hate their job.

And it’s probably also true globally, but most Americans hate their job. Not we’re mildly dissatisfied or we’re a little bit unengaged or when is hump day or that sort of thing. They really don’t like their jobs. And life is just too short to spend the majority of your waking hours doing something you hate.

And to add onto that, most Americans hate their job, most managers say their team is just okay. Now that’s a really messed up world, where you’ve got people that hate doing what they do and managers thinking on your best day you’re okay. Is it possible to find work that you enjoy and are good at?

That’s like the alchemy we were trying to study from an empirical, data-driven method to figure out, “Who is happy at their work and good at it? And how do we distill that into a pathway for readers to be able to find work they’re happy with?”

We wrote a book on how to behave at work and get promoted. It did wildly well. It’s called, Be The Unicorn. It’s like, “Wow, if I just do all this, I’ll get promoted,” and it works. However, if you’re getting promoted within a workplace that you don’t enjoy, that’s really not the whole ball game, you know, “What does it profit a man if they gain the whole world, but lose their soul?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Okay. Well, so now I’m intrigued by the almost part. So I know that we’ve heard about the Gallup Engagement Study many a time on the podcast. It’s a favorite research piece to cite. So with that and other sources, are we looking, William, at 2%, 6%? How many people are digging their job and flourishing in it?

William Vanderbloemen
Yeah, not many. Not many that I can find. If you look at who’s disengaged, you’re going to find a widespread of this percent, that percent, but the majority is more than half. Some will go as high as three-fourths. So I guess you could deduce that less than half of people are really enjoying their job. And then you get to, “And are they any good at it?” It’s pretty small.

I run an executive search firm, which means companies hire us to find their best talent. And we’ve been doing it a long time. We would do a pretty high volume of that, so we have lots of data at our fingertips. And we went and found the people that are the absolute best at their job and happy with it, that we know, and I mean, like 30,000 of them.

And we tried to draw some common denominators about, “What work did they choose based on what kind of personality they have? And is there a way to distill that so that somebody reading could pick up a book like that, and say, ‘I need to find work that’s going to be fulfilling and make me feel good and that I’ll be good at’?” Because it doesn’t have to be that way.

And, thank goodness, we’re no longer in a day where you get one job out of high school, you stay with the company 55 years, you get some form of watch at the end, and, “Yay! Yay!” No, there’s a lot of career mobility. If you’re not happy, it doesn’t have to stay that way.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. Well, could you give us perhaps the overview mindset shift or perspective that we should take on as we’re exploring these kinds of questions?

William Vanderbloemen
Yeah, you need to get to know yourself. That’s it. Get to know yourself. Get to know what you’re good at and what you’re not. Get to know what you like, what you don’t. Get to know what gives you energy, what doesn’t. Know yourself. And that sounds so simple, but to go way back in the wayback machine, I don’t use my philosophy degree for a lot, but Socrates, maybe the founder of Western thought, his top teaching was, “Know thyself.”

And when we studied the 30,000, we called them unicorns because they just stand out in the crowd. They’re this kind of people. Pete, you ever get in an elevator and ride for 30 seconds with somebody on the elevator, and by the end of elevator ride, you’re like, “I want to know more about them. I want to sign up for their email list. I want to be a part of their…”?

Or, you run into them at a cocktail party, there’s something different about their countenance, right, and you want to engage. Those are what we call unicorns, and it bleeds over into work. They behave a certain way. They choose a certain type of work based on their knowledge of themselves. And what we found, when we studied these unicorns, is they have about 12 habits they follow that are not hard to follow, but very few people follow them. And one of them is the practice of self-awareness.

Now, this is a little long, so stay with me just for a minute. But we surveyed the 30,000 unicorns we had, and we said, “Force-rank these 12 habits, what are you really good at and what are you not?” And the “What are you really good at?” was different all across the board because some people like speed, some people like studying methodically, people are wired differently.

But the one common denominator, when they’re force-ranked what they’re good at, the unicorns, the best of the best said that their worst habit of the 12 is self-awareness. Like, across the board, they’re all like, “I got to work on that.” Now, hold that thought.

We also surveyed a quarter million people, just Gen pop, you and me, everybody out there. And when it came to self-awareness, the average people, like me, 93% of us said we were above average in self-awareness.

Pete Mockaitis
Ninety-three percent?

William Vanderbloemen
Now I’m not a math major, but there’s not a group on the planet where 93% is above average. Average is 50% and half’s above and half’s below.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s like Lake Wobegon going on over here.

William Vanderbloemen
Right, people think they’re exactly, exactly. That’s exactly what it is. And the best way I can describe it is, do you remember the first time you heard your voice recorded?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah.

William Vanderbloemen
Oh, it was terrible for me. I don’t know, how was it for you?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, well, it was not pleasant. It was a voicemail situation, and that’s a whole other thing.

William Vanderbloemen
Oh, and you heard, and you’re like, “That’s not me.”

Pete Mockaitis
It was disappointing, like, “Oh, really?”

William Vanderbloemen
Yeah, I mean, I was like, “Who’s this guy talking, and why is his voice so bad?” And it was me. It’s that disconnect. People are not willing to take objective, hard looks in the mirror and see what they’re good at. If you really want to find work that you’re wired to do, you need to spend some time getting to know yourself on a, “How am I wired?” basis.

And the good news is we’re living in an age where you can find that stuff out quicker than ever, whether you use an Enneagram, or a DISC inventory, or Myers-Briggs, or what have you. You can figure out how you’re wired easier than any generation in human history. And if you’ll start there, get to know yourself, “What do you enjoy? What are you good at? What drains energy from you?” if you start to get to know yourself, you’ll be able to find work that you’re wired to do.

In the book, we took the 12 habits that unicorns practice, which is in the Be the Unicorn book, and we said, “This sounds like 12 lanes of work.” And, sure enough, it is. So, like, one of the habits is speed, “Do you get back to people quickly? Do you do it intentionally? Are you driven to go faster and faster?”

There are types of work that are really good at that – sales, marketing, executive assistant. That is speed driven. Neurosurgery is not, right? So you can have good, talented, smart people with different wirings that don’t need to be in certain kinds of jobs.

I sat with a friend of mine who actually is a neurosurgeon, and we met years and years ago. It was the first time I’d met with him. We went to a nice restaurant he picked for lunch. And let’s just call him Pete to save the identity, okay?

So, Pete sits down next to me, and the table gets set. I looked at my watch, he spent three solid minutes, arranging his forks and knives and silver just perfectly. And I just kept watching and watching. And, finally, he looked up and saw me watching him, and he kind of smiled, and I said, “Pete, have you ever considered studying OCD?”

And he kind of laughed and he looked at me, and he said, “William, here’s the thing. You want your neurosurgeon to be OCD.” And I was like, “You’re right.” So he understands himself. He’s in a field of work that requires that. He’s in one of those 12 lanes.

And the book is basically a 101 guide to saying, “How do I figure out myself enough to know which of these 12 lanes I’m most naturally wired for? And what are the jobs that really show up in those 12 lanes?”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, William, to rewind a smidge, that notion of self-awareness, it’s fascinating. We had Dr. Tasha Eurich on the show, and that’s one of her big pieces, is you’re not as self-aware as you think. And that is the case for, I guess, 93% of those folks there.

And it’s intriguing that the unicorns think their self-awareness is worst. The rest think their self-awareness is great. And so, it kind of speaks to that notion of the true master recognizes that there is much more to learn in a given domain. And it is the sort of amateur or intermediate who thinks, “Oh, yeah, I got all that figured out.”

So, I’m intrigued about that very notion, is that sort of, I’m sure there’s a riddle or a quotable gem about this notion that, “If you think you’ve got it all figured out, you sure don’t. And it pays to have some humility and dig deeper into gaining a greater mastery of that thing.”

William Vanderbloemen
And if you’ll just commit just a little bit of time to it, learning a little bit about yourself, you’ll be ahead of 90% of everybody. It doesn’t take a lot of work.  That’s the good news about these statistics. Just learn a little. It’s like I’m a level two sommelier. And level one, I thought I knew something. Level two, it’s like, I don’t know anything.

But by just getting to level two, where I don’t know anything, if I’m at a dinner party, I know way more than most everybody around the table. It’s the same with self-awareness. We’re so bad at it. If you’ll just get a little bit better, you’ll have a competitive advantage in all of your human relationships and definitely in finding work that you’re wired to do.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so let’s talk about the self-awareness notion in terms of what does good self-awareness look like such that we might have a wake up call, and be like, “Oh, wow, William, I guess I’m not self-aware at all now that you mentioned it”?

William Vanderbloemen
Well, how about we do a little, here’s a fun little exercise. Nearly everyone, I think, listening has probably interviewed for a job where one of the questions is probably the one out of the gate is, “So tell me about yourself.”

It’s a pretty paralyzing question, “Okay, I came home from the hospital. I was born on a Saturday. I came home from the hospital on a Tuesday, I didn’t walk till I was…” I mean, does it need to be that thorough?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, there’s a thousand directions you can take with that one. Yeah.

William Vanderbloemen
It’s so liberating, it’s paralyzing. How’s that? It’s not specific, right? So what if you did this instead? What if you said, “Tell me about yourself,” and I’m interviewing to work for you, Pete, and you’re running some really fast-growing podcast? I mean, Joe Rogan is nervous about you, right? So, like, you’re moving big time up the chart.

Pete Mockaitis
But more because of my ultimate fighting skills, William.

William Vanderbloemen
That’s right. Well said. So, you are interviewing me for a marketing position, and you said, “Tell me about yourself.” Well, this is very careful sentence, “Here’s what I’m learning about myself,” that’s interesting. Just steal that line, use it if you’re listening, “Here’s what I’m learning about myself.”

And that shows I don’t have it all figured out and I’m very aware of it. I am working on it. That’s great. Now what you can’t do is say, “Let me tell you what I’m learning about myself,” and then go into what you’re talking about with your therapist about childhood trauma, and, like, not that, right? That’s certainly something worth learning.

But in a job interview, what if you said, “Here’s what I’m learning about myself, Pete. I’m learning that, you know, on the Myers-Briggs, I’m a very high I. I like to plan the next party. And, you know, if you look at me on the Enneagram, I’m a seven. That’s like the social coordinator, the rush chairman. And what’s really interesting about people that are I’s and 7’s is they love trying new things. Okay, so that’s me.”

“If you look at my last three jobs, and where I’ve listed on my resume, the things I actually accomplished,” which, by the way, is a freebie thrown in there. Don’t talk about objectives in your resume. Talk about things you got done. “If you look at where I got the highest marks in my last three jobs, every single job, it was when the boss asked me to, ‘Go figure something out we’d never done before.’ That gives me energy, right?”

“What doesn’t give me energy is showing up at work and being told, ‘Do the same thing every day and make it a little bit better every day, same routine task and engineer it better.’ Like, I can do it, but I’m going to lose energy. You’re not going to give me a good review. Put me in a place where I’ve never seen it before and I have to. And I know that about me. I’m learning it. I’m a seven. I’m an I. I’m learning these things.”

“Let me tell you why I’m saying all this. I’ve looked at your company, Pete, you’re growing like crazy. It’s not just Joe Rogan. Mel Robbins is talking, too. They’re worried. And I’m guessing you, with all this world of algorithms and AI and marketing changing, you don’t need somebody who has a fixed playbook that’s going to come in and try and run it their way. You need someone who really enjoys the curiosity of trying to figure something out.”

“Someone who says, if you said, ‘Jump out of the plane and build a parachute on the way down,’ I would get excited about that. And I’m guessing that’s what your company’s facing. So what am I learning about myself? There’s a lot more to learn. But the way I’m wired might match the kind of challenges you’re facing with this job. And I’m super excited to dive into that with you today.” That’s a whole different way to answer.

And, by the way, you’ve just won the interview and you’ve prevented them from asking you the question, “Well, what is your greatest weakness?” I hate that question. So, does that help?

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. So, it’s ongoing. We’re learning about ourselves and, in so doing, there’s great stories to be told and matches to be found and options to be ruled out based upon what you’re seeing there. That’s super. So you mentioned the DISC, the Myers-Briggs, the Enneagram, and those are cool. Do you have any other go-to approaches, methodologies, questions that are super impactful in terms of getting meaningful self-awareness upgrades?

William Vanderbloemen
Well, the main thing is do you have friends that will actually tell you the truth? I mean, that’s the ultimate test. And one of the ways you can look for that is, “Do your friends always tell you things you like or not?” My wife, I love her, there’s no one I’d rather spend time with on the planet than her. And I’m not saying that to be like saccharine or anything. It’s true.

And she tells me things I don’t want to hear every day. And it’s usually to pull something out of me, some self-awareness I need to develop. So, do you have friends who actually tell you things you don’t want to hear that you reflect back and say, “You know, they’re right about that”?

And then the second way is to use some of these inventories – DISC, Myers-Briggs, Enneagram. We developed one around these 12 lanes called the Vander Index, which will very quickly tell you, “Here’s my top lane of these 12, and where I probably ought to look first. And here’s my bottom one where I’m probably not going to be happy. And then some things in the middle that maybe are worth a look and maybe not.”

Pete Mockaitis
And I am digging the notion of you need friends to tell you the truth. You’re bringing me back to, in college, I was selected to be the student speaker at the College of Business Commencement ceremony at the University of Illinois, and that was kind of fun and cool and yay. But I played this joke on people, and they said, “Oh, you’re going to be the speaker. What are you going to talk about?”

And so I would do the shtick, and I’d say, “Okay, I got a crazy idea. All right, check it out. So people think graduation rite, it’s like the end? But, no, no, I’m going to flip it on its head and say, ‘No, check it out.’ Actually, it’s the beginning. And that’s why they call it commencement, right?” So that’s like super cheesy, been done way too many times speech.

And so, I like to mess with people by getting super fired up about it, right, just to see what they would do. And you could tell good friends, they’re like, “You’re joking, right?” That’s what a good friend says. And then the not-so-great friends are like, “Oh, interesting.” You know, they just sort of smile, nod, and move along.

So, I love that, is to have the friends and then to, you don’t have to subject them to joke tests. But I think it does pay to, and again, Dr. Tasha Eurich had a technique she called the Dinner of Truth, where you’re actually asking these good friends the key questions because they might not know that that feedback is welcome, needed, desired from you to go there.

William Vanderbloemen
And here’s a little secret, Pete. Maybe you’ve experienced it as well. I’ve had the chance to be around a lot of successful people, way more successful than I am. I’ve also been blessed to see this company grow more than I ever thought it would.

I think most uber successful people will tell you, “The more successful you get in life, the fewer people there are that will tell you the truth.” I have a friend who says, “The first day you’re the CEO is the last day you hear the truth because everybody wants to tell you how wonderful things are.”

My COO, and I hired her, said, “What’s the main reason you’re hiring me?” And I said, “To tell me the truth. Like, that’s all.” And she’s like, “That’s it?” I’m like, “That’s it.” So, as you, I imagine people were taking time to listen to your podcast are progressing in their career, they’re moving up.

Probably a lot of listeners, mid-30s or under, just realize, establish those friendships now before you hit the top of whatever ladder you’re climbing because once you get to the top, it’ll be very hard to find friends that’ll be honest with you.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, good friends, ask questions, take the Vander Index. Can you give us the rundown? What are these 12 lanes?

William Vanderbloemen
Yeah, sure. They are, we can start with the fast, because it’s my favorite. But, you know, the fast is people who respond and respond quickly and love doing it. Like, I probably ought to be in therapy. If you text me, it really doesn’t matter what time of day it is, I’m probably looking at it.

And I know that’s on the way out and the Brick is the thing everybody’s putting their phone on, all my kids want it, to disconnect from the addicted phone and all. But there is still an art. Business is won by speed of response. And there’s all kinds of research in the book to talk about it. But that’s one.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah, Jay Baer, on the show, talked about this. It could be huge, in sales particularly.

William Vanderbloemen
And it’s not hard. The reality is it’s just not hard, but very few people follow through on it. Very few, but that’s one. If you’re one that’s like, “I just need to get back to them real quick,” if you find yourself constantly answering a text, that might be a sign that you’re one of the fasts.

And rather than run through all of them, I’ll give you just a couple others. The prepared is another one. And it’s almost the opposite of the fast. The prepared is someone who comes to work with everything neat. Like, my wife’s pantry is this way. She is prepared. Everything is in the same place. And if we rent a house for vacation, the pantry gets set up pretty much the same way.

So there are some people like that and those are people that you want in compliance roles, train masters, brain surgeons, pilots. These are people that speed isn’t as important as quality control.

Another habit that I’ll just hit on real briefly is some people have a lane where their work needs to matter more than just what they get to do. Like, I love selling stuff. I always have. I am a salesperson at heart. However, if I were selling something that didn’t leave the world better than I found it, I’m not going to be as energized. We call it purpose driven. Are you driven by something higher than just getting the check?

And some people aren’t, or some people are, but just by little things. Some people are about giant things. If you are purpose driven and you go into a business with zero purpose, you’re going to be very, very unhappy. Authenticity is another one. Do you have to be authentic? Is that who you are?

And not to use too many personal stories, but we had one of our seven kids that didn’t pass the Driver’s Ed test when it was time to go get the license. Like, they just messed up one turn. Perfect on everything but that one thing.

And they’re like, “Oh, my gosh, I don’t know what I’m going to tell my friends.” “Well, just tell them you’re taking the test tomorrow.” But that’s a lie, “Well, are you taking the test tomorrow?” “Yes, but it’s not telling them I failed today.” Like, this particular child is very authentic, “I’m not going to hide the truth.” You know what she would be terrible at? Politics.

Pete Mockaitis
Politics.

William Vanderbloemen
She’d be horrible at it. Because there is, you say, “Well, politicians are disingenuous.” Actually, to run for president of the United States, you have to know how to talk to people in Yakima, Washington, which is way different than Seattle, Washington, and in Illinois, which is way different than in Texas. And so you have to mold and adapt and shift.

And people who are very driven by authenticity will not do well in that role, nor will they do well in a sales role. There are other jobs for them. And the cool thing about the book is we actually unearthed jobs that you would think all the jobs that are listed are CEO, CFO, COO. No, no, no, no, no.

Mailman is in here. Like, things, brick mason, which is a great career to go into right now for a whole lot of reasons, not the least of which is AI. But there are clear examples within each lane. You should read the chapter about a lane and say, “That’s me.” You don’t have to go take a test. “That is actually who I am. Okay, here’s the kind of work I need to look for. Here’s the kind of work that’s going to make me crazy.”

So, hopefully, within each, and you can read them in any order, but by the end of the book, you should find one, two, or maybe three of these lanes that are like, “I was made for that.” And one, for sure, and maybe two, I don’t know about three, that you’d say, “I don’t ever need to go near work like that.” Because you can behave well at work and be awesome at your job and hate it, and what’s the point if you don’t enjoy what you’re getting to do?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, William, I dig this. So fast, prepared, purpose-driven, authenticity. Could you share one that’s maybe surprising? Like, folks say, “Huh, that’s a strength, that’s a lane I can lean into? I thought I was just weird”?

William Vanderbloemen
Yeah, well, there’s something about curiosity that is a lane for work, it’s a habit of unicorns, and it’s a bit counterintuitive to how a lot of people were raised. I was raised, “Don’t ask too many questions. Do what you’re told and you’ll do well at your job.”

In today’s world, you need to always be asking questions. You need to always be curious, “Why are we doing it that way?” The greatest value add of a longtime employee is their institutional memory which cannot be transfused in a day, right? But the greatest gift of a new team member is their ability to look at how we do things, and say, “Well, why do we do it that way? Why don’t we do it that way?”

The curious, who are always looking and always shifting and always asking the why, that might have been out of favor in an old-school world. But now that we’re in an open source, AI-driven world, it is everything. And one other that shows up that it’s not counterintuitive, but there’s a counterintuitive piece to it is agility.

There’s a lane for people who want to try new things. They’re always learning a habit or a hobby or something. The unhealthy version of it is the person who you say, “So what’s your favorite book you ever read?” And they say, “Oh, I just finished it.” And you ask them six months later, “What’s your favorite book?” “Oh, I just finished it.” It’s almost like a shiny object thing.

But the agile are the kind that can…I hate this word. It’s been five and a half years since the shutdowns and I still can’t hear the word pivot without thinking it’s a four-letter word. But people who can pivot will own the future because the world isn’t just changing annually now. It’s changing minute by minute with technological advances and such.

And here’s the surprising piece about agility, okay, “Oh, William, that makes sense. Agility, that’s a no-brainer.” Agility atrophies. It goes away a little bit every single day. And here’s the living example of that. I’m a jogger or a runner, it’s probably a matter of opinion, but I got into my 40s and I had to start stretching so I didn’t get injured. I hate doing all this stretching and preparation and I just want to go run.

Well, the stretching turned out to be harder than the running. And one time I was stretching, trying to touch my toes, and our littlest one walked in, and she sat down next to me, she tied herself into some form of human knot, and she untied herself, looked up at me, smiled, laughed out loud, left the room without saying a word. Just making total fun of me, because little kids can bend more than super Stretch Armstrong, right?

And as she left the room, it dawned on me, “Little kids can stretch, old men can’t.” Every day I’m alive, I get less flexible. So even if you’re naturally wired for agility, you have to work on it or it goes away. Every day a team is alive, it gets less flexible. Every day a company is alive, it gets less flexible. This is like a law of thermodynamics.

So the surprise about agility is not that it’s one of the lanes that you’d be looking at. The surprise is, even if you’re good at it, you’ve got to keep working at it. And if you’ll work just a little tiny bit every day, you’ll be way ahead of people as you get farther down the career road.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s interesting. In some ways, it’s sort of inversely correlated with wisdom because it’s, like, you do some things, “Hey, that worked great. Let’s do that next time,” “Hey, that worked not great. Let’s not do that next time.”

And so then, over time, you’ve got a series of associations and memories in terms of, “This is good. This is bad,” “That works. That doesn’t work.” And then you’re naturally, I felt it in myself. I’m naturally less inclined to go try that wild thing. It’s like, “Hmm, that seems a lot like these other four things I’ve tried that didn’t work. So I don’t think I want to do that.”

William Vanderbloemen
But the pace of change, I read a study some years back that said there’s been more change – this is pre-pandemic – more change in the last 10 years than in the hundred years prior technologically. And now we’re on the other side of a pandemic, and we’re into the AI world. And the study went on to say, “More change in the last 10 years than the hundred prior. And the next 10 are going to make the last 10 look slow.”

So even if you aren’t working in a job where agility is your main lane, everyone needs to work on their agility because the world, where everything stays the same, first of all, it never existed. But, secondly, if it did exist, it exists a little less each day. The rate of change is growing. My personal ability to adapt to change is shrinking. And no matter what kind of job I’m doing, I’ve got to do everything I can to narrow that gap.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, William, tell me, anything else you really want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

William Vanderbloemen
No, I would just say, if you’re interested at all in these things, you can just go to Vanderbloemen.com. You don’t have to know how to spell it. Just try in whatever search browser you use, and you’ll find us. And there are probably five or 6,000 resources on how to be awesome at your job, how to win at work, how to manage employees, how to ask for a raise. There’s lots of stuff there that might help people past the two books we’ve talked about.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

William Vanderbloemen
“Know thyself.”

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

William Vanderbloemen
The easy answer is go read Atomic Habits. There’s great stories in there about how to build habits. And I think probably 15 million people have done that now, so it’s doing all right as a book.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

William Vanderbloemen
I have made a switch to trying to write things down rather than type them, and to try and be more present with people. So I have ditched the laptop in meetings now and I’m using reMarkable. I don’t know if you know this device.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah.

William Vanderbloemen
It’s a Notepad that feels like paper and then it uploads straight. It digitizes everything and it uploads straight into my Google Drive. I have all my notes from all my meetings, and I’m writing. And it’s, like, if you don’t have that laptop open.

It’s like the Simon Sinek talk, where he’s like, “Hey, let me show you the difference between distracted and not.” And he talks to people, and he says, “Now, you in the front row, give me your phone.” And he just holds it, and he says, “I’m not looking at this. Do I feel more or less engaged with you right now?” And, of course, the answer is less.

So I’m trying to remove things that make me less engaged with people, and one of those is the screen. It makes it hard to get back to people with a text within a minute, but I use my little reMarkable in every meeting now.

And I’ve heard it, growing up, I’m actually believing it more than ever, “What’s written is what’s remembered.” So the actual slowness of writing out each letter instead of typing 120 words a minute, there’s something to that that ingrains it in my brain, and I’m hoping it makes me more engaged and present with folks in the coming years.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks, you hear them quoted back to you often?

William Vanderbloemen
We have nine core values. They’re built around how we behave. One is called ridiculous responsiveness, and it’s just the power of getting back to people quickly and intentionally. And it’s in both books. You can read about it.

And I’ve had people say, “I took our whole staff of 500 people through the first chapter of Be the Unicorn and we built an entire strategy on getting back to people quicker, and it changed our business.” Like, over and over and over, I’m hearing people quote ridiculous responsiveness. I don’t know whether we came up with it or not, but it’s what I hear.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

William Vanderbloemen
Try spelling Vanderbloemen into any search engine, you’ll find it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

William Vanderbloemen
Yeah, just get to know yourself. And that sounds selfish. It’s not. Once you know how you’re wired, you’ll know where you’re going to flourish the best.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. William, thank you.

William Vanderbloemen
Thank you, Pete. Appreciate you having me on.

Dec 08
0

1116: How to Take Control of Your Career with Confidence with Kimberly Brown

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Kimberly Brown shares practical steps on how to take charge of your career and steer it with intention.

You’ll Learn

  1. The framework for improving your reputation
  2. How to cultivate relationships that advance your career
  3. How to identify and amplify the one thing that makes you stand out

About Kimberly

Kimberly Brown is a globally recognized career and leadership strategist, bestselling author, and international keynote speaker. As the founder and CEO of Brown Leadership®, a premier learning and development firm, she helps mid-career and senior professionals amplify their brands, accelerate growth, and drive performance. Her bestselling book, Next Move, Best Move: Transitioning Into a Career You’ll Love, has empowered thousands to take control of their careers with strategy and confidence. 

She also hosts the Your Next Move Podcast, where she shares actionable insights on career advancement. A trusted expert, Kimberly’s work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, Forbes, CNBC, NPR, and more. Find her online at kimberlybonline.com and brownleadership.com and follow her (@kimberlybonline) on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.

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Kimberly Brown Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Kimberly, welcome back!

Kimberly Brown
Thank you so much for having me. I’m very excited to be here again.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to chat. We’re talking about reputation and legacy. Could you start by sharing what do you think is the top mistake most people make when they’re thinking about building reputation?

Kimberly Brown
I think the first big mistake folks make is that they think reputation is just tied to execution. And I think, earlier on, I think folks are just really focused on task execution, “I got A, let me finish it. Okay, now we’re going to do the next thing. Now we’re going to do the next thing.” And they don’t think about the personal side of their reputation, how people feel when they’re around them.

And then I think the other side is exactly the opposite. Some people think that their personality, that the relationship can supersede not doing great work. But I think that not doing great work catches up over time. And people are always surprised when that happens. Like, “Oh, I know, but we were so good. Like, I thought we had a great relationship. Like, we get along.”

But it’s like, “No, they can’t trust you because the work quality is poor.” I think it always ends up being on both sides of the coin, that people don’t consider bringing both of those together. You have to do great work, but also have the great relationships and how you make people feel matters in that reputation as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Tell us more about how we make people feel. It’s interesting because I totally know what you mean, in that working with some folks is a delight and working with others isn’t. And it’s not that folks are being total jerks. You know, there’s no screaming or outrageously, clearly, bad problematic behavior but, overall, there are vibes in terms of, “I really enjoy being on that team, and I really don’t enjoy being on that team.” So, what’s behind the vibes?

Kimberly Brown
So, I think when we break down executive presence, I think that’s where it comes in. And, again, this is another term that people here, don’t necessarily know what it is. But when I teach executive presence, I say that it’s the gravitas, it’s communication, and it’s your appearance. And the vibes you’re talking about is that gravitas. And I think that’s the most confusing part about executive presence.

But that gravitas is your approach. It’s how you talk to people. It’s how you interact. It’s how you respond to positive and negative feedback, how you give positive and negative feedback.

When I think about someone who really has that gravitas, it brings me all the way back to college. There was a, I think she was a provost at the time at the university, and she used to do these meetings with student leaders. And students would come and have these grandiose ideas of all the things they needed to do.

And it was the first time I saw someone get turned down, but it felt good. Like, it was clear that she wasn’t going to move forward, clear that she didn’t like the idea, but the way she thanked them for giving their feedback, the way she acknowledged their presence and allowed them to speak within reason about whatever they wanted, that was the first time.

I didn’t know it then, but I always kept that in mind that you could say no and it doesn’t have to be nasty. It doesn’t have to hurt someone’s feelings. And I think about that in the workplace when we think about how people feel. When I talk about your brand, I think about the moments people have with you.

So how do people experience you when you’re having a really good day, when you’re running late, when you just got terrible feedback and now you have to show up in another meeting, when you are giving feedback to someone who’s doing well, someone who’s doing poorly, when you are being super casual. I think a lot of folks mess up their reputation sometimes when things get a little casual after hours, happy hours, conferences.

I used to do a lot of work with sales organizations, and we used to joke at sales events, it’s like, “Hmm, many people will have their job after this conference?” Because when people get casual and alcohol, someone always ends up losing their job because they did too much in front of someone who was super senior who they didn’t recognize.

So, when we think about reputation and how people feel around you, it’s like all of those moments that you create, related to your work and unrelated to your work, “What is their overall feeling in being around you?”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m curious, do you remember what this provost said, did, that made rejections feel just fine?

Kimberly Brown
I think it was the acknowledgement. So, my master’s is in counseling. So that whole like building rapport, reciting back what someone says for clarity, she did that consistently. How she responded to good ideas and bad ideas were exactly the same. I think a lot of times leaders, when they hear an idea that’s bad, they’d be like, “Oh, yeah, no.”

But she still gave them the same respect. She acknowledged, “Thank you for sharing.” She recited the idea to make sure she understood it. Sometimes she’d even explain, like, “Well, why this couldn’t work.” Or other times, if she needed to like wrap the conversation, like, “You know, I will get back to you on that.” And she always did. She just knew in that form it probably wasn’t the time to go into a deeper explanation. She just always gave people the moment and didn’t rush them.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I’m thinking of the kookiest things connecting in my brain here. So, are you familiar with Nathan Fielder, the comedian?

Kimberly Brown
No, I’m not.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, he’s got a show called “The Rehearsal.” And so, it’s just thought-provoking. And he was exploring how people are interacting in different contexts and, specifically, in cockpits with co-pilots, and why the co-pilot doesn’t speak up when the other one’s making a terrible error. And so, it’s comedy, but it’s also like kind of high stakes.

And so that’s what he likes to do. He likes to confuse everybody with, “What are we doing?” But he had a situation where he was seeing how it is possible to reject people, but them to feel okay. And so, he is videotaping all this stuff and seeing all of these judges rejecting people for like an American Idol-type singing contest.

And it’s fascinating how it’s quite possible to do that. And he had a transformation where, and he gave a little speech about, “Hey, you know, unfortunately, we can’t make you move on, but I want to congratulate you because many people have this dream, but they stay in bed and you came out here, you waited in line, you showed up.”

And it was kind of inspiring in terms of, “That’s true.” And we all have that ability to take the other perspective and bring some good feelings and some acknowledgement about where folks are coming from, and what’s great about what they put forward. And it’s easy in our busyness to just kind of totally overlook doing that.

Kimberly Brown
Every single time. I tell folks, so many conversations in the workplace, we just need to slow it down. We just need to slow it down. We don’t give, especially tough conversations, the time that’s needed to do any of those things. It’s always like, “Oh, nope, onto the next. You did it wrong, fix it. It’s due tomorrow, figure it out.”

And if we give people just a little more time, not every situation is high stakes. I always tell people we’re not saving babies all the time. Like, the fate of the world is not in our hands nine times out of 10. Even if we feel like it is, most of the time it’s not, unless we’re like a doctor, right? So, we can slow things down a little bit to give people a little bit more time and give them a moment to process to feel the feels and then come back to the conversation later.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so can you share some specific actions that folks who are proactively thinking about their reputation, their legacy, and they want to make it great, what should they do in terms of surfacing these blind spots or some top best and worst practices to implement?

Kimberly Brown
Definitely. So, number one, I’d start with reviewing all the information you currently have. If you have formal performance appraisals, if you have anything documented, go through and really try to read it with an open mind. Now, I will be honest and I’ll be candid in that I know some people feel like the performance appraisal process doesn’t actually give them the thing. So, if you’re one of those people, just go right on to step two.

Step two, I want you to reach out to people who interface with you and your work. And I want you to think about various levels. So, I want top. I want people who are more senior than you, people who are at the same level, and people that are more junior. Because your reputation could be different at each level of how people see you based upon their experience.

And I want you to ask them simple questions. If you can do it in a meeting, even 15 minutes, that’s great. Some folks, they may want to do it over email. Some people I’ve seen do an anonymous Google Form, just so people can write in, “Can you describe my brand to you in three words? Can you give me an example of a situation that I handled really, really well, or an example of a situation that I didn’t handle so well?”

Other folks may like to do a start-stop-continue exercise and apply that to themselves. So, what do you need to start doing in your career and in your job? What do you need to stop doing? And what should you continue doing? So, essentially, what are the good things you’re already doing? So, when you get your feedback from either, you know, step one step two or both, and then I want you to sit and really think about, “Is how you’re showing up, is how people describe you congruent with where you’d like to go?”

One of the things I share with folks is how people describe you needs to be congruent with not only where you are, but aligned with the next logical step. People need to already see you there. So, if it’s congruent, you’re like, “Oh, how I feel like I am, what I want to do, this is aligned, great.” If not, we need to understand what those gaps are.

And then the last step I’d say is it’s time to connect with either a mentor or a coach of some sort. If you’re really conflicted and not sure what specific moves that you should make, this is a great time to bring all of this data, bring all of this information to a trusted mentor or coach, internal or external to your organization, and really work through what are the specific steps that you can take to rectify any image issues that you have.

And I think the secret that I tell folks who I work with is that when there is a gap, we have to think about, “What are the experiences tied to that gap?” So, for example, let’s say your reputation is aligned with being really short with your junior-level staff. They don’t feel like they’re coached by you. They don’t feel like they know who you are. They don’t feel mentored. They just feel like you are a task executor, “Do this, get out. Do this, get out.”

Then you’d want to think about, “So what are the moments that I’m interacting with my junior-level staff? And how can I provide a different experience in each time I’m interacting with them?” So, is it giving more time in your one-on-ones? Is it doing a little team outing? Is it scheduling dedicated career conversations?

What are the moments you need to kind of change what your image is, change what your reputation is, and then consistently do that, right? Because it’s not one time. It’s not something you can do one time and everything’s great. Someone needs to see consistent improvement in order for your reputation to actually change.

Pete Mockaitis
I want to zoom in on the simple question part. What are some best practices to make sure that folks actually give us the input and it’s actually true and real?

Kimberly Brown
That’s a hard one, right? And the caveat I’d always say is that every organization has a different temperament for feedback. So, I think that it’s best if you have a good relationship with a person, and you can really sit down and really position the conversation of, “I’m really working on my personal brand, and I’m working on bettering my reputation here. I really want to have an open and candid conversation about your experience with me, and make sure it’s as specific as possible so that I’m able to make some changes.”

So, I think setting the conversation up so someone knows that this is a safe environment for them to provide feedback. This is informal feedback. This is something that you’re taking upon yourself. I think that written feedback sometimes can be hard to get. It’s hard. People sometimes don’t want a paper trail of saying, like, “Hey, well, you messed up in this meeting. And in that moment, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah.”

So, if you can have a conversation, even if it’s like a brief 15 minutes, and lead, try and lead as much as possible with giving them both positive and negative, “So, what are two characteristics about my brand that you’d say are positive, and two characteristics that you feel like need improvement? What is one situation I did really well? What is one situation where I did really poorly?”

And then kind of dig in, “So, what was it about that situation where I did poorly? What would you have liked to have seen? What behaviors would have been more helpful for you?” So, it’s kind of giving those follow-up questions to gracefully lead the conversation to get the information that you need. Getting feedback is probably one of the hardest things to get in the workplace, especially really specific, tangible feedback.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, absolutely. And I’m imagining that many of the people you’re having this conversation with are like, “Hmm, no one has ever actually done this with me as a conversation, outside of formal channels, in terms of, okay, sure. We have our regular performance review and this is a thing that happens. But in terms of here is, say, a peer, or even a more senior individual that I report to.”

I guess, as I zoom into that conversation, I’m imagining folks could quite likely have all sorts of guards up and not really give you the raw, dirty, ugly truth about yourself that you really need.

Kimberly Brown
Absolutely. I think that the basis, I think, for these conversations, it’s great if you already have an existing relationship. Ideally, you need some type of relationship because you’ve been doing work and they can answer questions about you. In the most ideal world, it’s someone who works with you frequently.

So, while the conversation is new, you can’t ask someone who really has an interface with you, someone who’s only managed you for a short amount of time. And I think it also could say something if people aren’t willing to have this conversation. So, then you got to keep on poking and try and find some folks who can. Find some folks who would like, “Do you know why so and so probably wouldn’t want to have this conversation with me?”

Pete Mockaitis
Could you tell us, perhaps in some good detail, a tale of someone who did just this and what they discovered and what they did differently as a result?

Kimberly Brown
So, I had a client of mine who is currently a director in big finance, and she was looking to move into a vice president-level role, which was a really big leap at that organization. And she had applied for, I think, two other VP roles, but things just weren’t landing. She was top two, but didn’t get the final offer. And she really had a hard time, again, getting feedback, asking like, “Was there anything else that could have been better?”

Asking the interview panels, asking people who were connected, and she wasn’t really getting anything tangible. It’s like, “You know, this person just was a little bit better or had a tinge more experience here.” It wasn’t anything that was like, “Why didn’t I get it?” It felt like they kind of tossed a coin and just decided on the other candidate.

So, when she came to me, she was very frustrated obviously, because going through these big searches, and the more senior level you go, the more time you invest multiple, multiple rounds of interviews and presentations, so she was exhausted. So, we kind of did what I call like a speaking tour or a listening tour about her.

We made a list of the key areas where she wanted to go in the organization, and there were two main areas. And then we took about 60 days for her to start to schedule conversations and ask some of the pointed questions, like, “What do you know about my brand? What have you heard about my brand? What do you feel is crucial to what you need in this level of the organization? If a role were to open here, what would you be looking for?”

And the combination of asking pointed questions about her and pointed questions about the organization and the type of roles that she’d be interested in, we were able to essentially take all this information, and be like, “Okay, this is how she’s seen. This is what’s needed.”

For her, in particular, people felt like she didn’t have deep relationships. That role was heavily rooted in the organization where a lot of people needed to know that individual. She had to collaborate across the organization. And while people knew her, they felt like she didn’t essentially have roots, or her roots weren’t deep enough in the organization. And it was based on her conversation.

When she’d go into meetings with folks, she kept a very high level, very at the top, top, top, so people didn’t really see her depth of knowledge, understand her relationships. So, she wanted to stay at the organization so we spent some time really mapping out where her relationships needed to be, being much more strategic about more casual conversations, not just when there was a task at hand, so people were really able to get to know her. And she was able to make that transition in about six months.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, and what I love about that is that’s the sort of underlying root cause you’re going to have a hard time just stumbling into. Like, you’re either going to have to have someone who’s really looking out for you, say, “Okay, hey, here’s the deal…” You know? You just got to get lucky in terms of that, or you’re going to have to, as this person did, proactively pound the pavement to see what’s going on.

Kimberly Brown
Absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
Because that is a factor, that it’s real, but it’s a little bit difficult to say, and even feels risky in terms of like, “Oh, so you just like the other person more than me.”

As opposed to, “Well, hey, know what? You made some mistakes on this thing and that cost us a lot of money.” Like, that’s very open shut, you know, clear cut, as opposed to this fuzzy, gray zone, nebulous stuff. And I imagine that that’s the only way you might ever surface it is if you really get super proactive and, as you said, a listing tour, we’re getting after it.

Kimberly Brown
A hundred percent. That’s why I say you want to talk up, down, across, like, so you can really get some good facts and start to hear.

I think, in business, we joke and call it a swipe file. So, as a business owner, when you want to launch a new service, you need to hear “What do your customers want?” And you start to swipe their words so that when you market, you can throw those words right back out at them, and they’re like, “Oh, my God, this is exactly what I need. How did you know?” It’s like, “Oh, because I was listening.” And you take all those things.

But I think, as professionals, we need to do the same thing. What is like the common thread, even if it’s said in different ways, but it still means the same thing? How can we figure out what that thing is so we can change our reputation and align with wherever we’d like to go next?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so let’s say we’ve deduced, “Okay, here’s the thing,” what are some of your top tips in terms of getting the buzz, the reputational associations of you to transform, “Well, hey, before, Pete was this. But, you know, now I’m really picking up this other side”?

Kimberly Brown
It’s really about figuring out what are the experiences that are tied to whatever that gap was. So, if we take it back to this client of mine, she needed to have more one-on-one meetings that weren’t just like, “Execute on this task.” Because people only knew her as the functional expert in their area. They didn’t understand that, “No, she’s ready. She’s ready to be over a much larger room and she understands all these different areas.”

So, we had to kind of look around, and be like, “How can we have more conversations, career-based conversations, more casual coffee chat conversations, as well as like tactile conversations?” And that’s how we kind of set up. Because we thought about, “How many experiences, how many moments do people need to change their reputation or change their brand?”

I wish there was a science, where I think in marketing, they say someone needs to see something seven times to know that it happened or understand that, like, something was done.

If they’ve been seeing you as A, A, A, A, A, but now you’re A and B, they need to see it for whatever amount of time. And all of these different things come into play.

If you’re someone who has a very visible role, you may need to just go to that one conference and speak and people see and feel the difference. But if you’re someone who’s kind of behind the scenes, it could be a little, like little micro moments that need to happen over the course of six months or a year for someone to understand like, “Oh, huh, Pete’s different. He’s very different. Like, before he used to do A and now, I always see him do B. Like, wow!”

And, especially, layer on more time if you’re someone who’s made a mistake and that’s attached to your brand. I see that a lot when people have a reputation that’s aligned with not being diligent or not being strategic, someone who makes a decision but isn’t able to see, “Oh, it would have gone bad if we did this instead of that.” Those folks, especially where they’ve had that bad moment, it takes a little bit longer.

Pete Mockaitis
Now when you say, “Oh, Pete was just A, but now he’s A and B,” could you give us some more examples of reputational deficiencies that folks have uncovered from this diligence and how they rectified them?

Kimberly Brown
So, I’d say one of the biggest, the hardest thing to change in the workplace is someone who has been an individual contributor and wants to be a manager. Generally, and especially if you have not had management-level experience, it’s like, “How can you become a manager if you haven’t become a manager?” That’s what people feel like.

So, for that individual, I’d say one of the reputational deficiencies they need to work on is, “How can they at least manage projects? How could they manage their workload better? How can they manage cross-functional teams? So maybe they don’t have a direct report, but it’s people seeing them interact with multiple people across the workplace.

Another deficiency I often see is someone who lacks being strategic, who isn’t able to do that good, better, best. They just kind of make a decision and they just hope it works. And when it doesn’t, then everybody has an idea, but they weren’t able to see that ahead of time. And for them, it’s really slowing down, and allowing people to understand how they did the work.

And in the workplace, I tell people it’s very similar to long division and being able to get partial credit when you were a kid. It’s, “Can someone understand your train of thought and how you got there?” So maybe you didn’t get the right answer, maybe things went wrong, but when someone can understand that you actually went through the steps and it wasn’t just shooting from the hip, that’s also really helpful.

I think the last example I’ll give is also someone who has been shy, someone who’s been behind the scenes, someone who doesn’t share their ideas, someone who doesn’t show that they have an opinion. I think, again, it’s finding those moments, “When can you insert yourself? When can you speak up in rooms you haven’t spoken in? When can you ask for moments to kind of have the light shine on you just a little bit?”

And, I think, for introverts who have no desire to say anything but know they need to, I try and work with them and coach them through planning for those moments, like, “Don’t just expect that it’s going to come to you and, all of a sudden, you’re going to know the right thing to say.”

If you are someone who’s an introverted and shy too, the moment may not come. You need to plan and prepare like, “Okay, in this meeting, this is generally how the meeting flows. This is where I’m going to insert myself, even if I have to clear my throat to get people to pay attention.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, and what’s cool is if you are behaving so starkly opposite of a way that you have historically, it may really be sort of shocking or head-turning in terms of, “Huh?” in a great way in terms of, like, it’s making a strong impression. So, I guess we don’t know the magical number, but if it’s a really 180-type of shift, it might not take that many of those like, “Oh, okay. This is how it is now.”

Kimberly Brown
Absolutely. I think that the bigger the moment, the more the magnitude, sometimes it takes a little less. Folks may want to see it again though, just to make sure it’s consistent, especially if we’re thinking about like that public speaking. Don’t think you’re going to speak out at a town hall one time and then you’ll get promoted. They need to know this is a part of who you are.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, talking about public speaking, you speak about thought leadership as being tremendous for folks’ careers. Can you first define what does thought leadership mean? I lead thoughts, Kimberly, what does that mean?

Kimberly Brown
So, the way I think about thought leadership, it’s not the way that we think about it in terms of like being a John C. Maxwell or a Michael Hyatt or Brene Brown or Oprah Winfrey. When we hear thought leaders, we think of these like big greats who have these massive brands.

But I teach professionals that thought leadership is really you having a way of doing things, having a methodology, having an opinion that is both respected and influential in your organization. And I think it’s one of the hidden factors that help people get into leadership, that people want an opinion.

I explained it today for someone on my team recently, I said that thought leadership is two people of the same position. One of them is invited to the meeting, the other one wasn’t because you don’t need the two people there. But when that meeting happens, they’re like, “You know what? Can we get so and so to join this meeting? I just want to hear what they have to say on this. I think that how they would approach it would just be interesting.”

And if those two people are rated the same, both great at their job, it’s like, “Well, why didn’t you let person A talk about it? Why wasn’t it okay, because that person was there?” But they’re like, “No, no, no. Call B. We need to talk to B. Like, we just need to hear what they think.”

That is, generally, what thought leadership looks like in the workplace. It’s having an opinion, having an approach, having a methodology that people know, like, and trust, and they want more of. And I think it’s important that people start to cultivate a way of doing things that is unique to them, that they can maximize and share.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s really great. We had Kara Smith Brown on the show, and, it’s funny, you mentioned these huge names, like, John C. Maxwell, Brene Brown. And I think Kara Smith Brown, as far as I could tell, is one of the preeminent thought leaders when it comes to the sales and marketing of B2B logistics-related products and services.

And so, I mean, there’s a niche, and she’ll point out that she has a point of view in terms of she’ll say, “Well, hey, do you own the email address of everybody in your related market?” And that’s a thing that’s kind of unique, like, “Huh? What do you even mean? How would we do that? What?” And so, she’s got that.

So, she’s got a niche and she’s got a point of view there. And it makes it such that, if you’re considering sales and marketing-related questions in the logistics industry, you very well would say, “It’d be great to have Kara in here right about now.”

Kimberly Brown
Yes, indeed.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, you can have a niche of a niche of a niche in terms of, “This software platform we’re using for this issue in this business, by golly, Kimberly knows the insides and outs of it. So, she should probably be in any meeting where we’re discussing tinkering with it.”

Kimberly Brown
Thought leadership is, I think, a combination of unique viewpoints. It could also be like a deep knowledge in something. So, I think my last corporate job, I served as the director of Diversity Talent Acquisition Strategy. It was an inaugural role at a Fortune 100 company in financial services.

And I remember, if anyone was talking about diversity recruiting, talent acquisition, they would call me. I’d be in one meeting and I’d get a Slack message, “Can you leave that meeting to come to this meeting?” There was no conversation that happened where I was not called out to speak about it because of my knowledge.

And, at that time, it was new. It was something that was so important. People were like, “Oh, no, we need to do this.” And I would get pulled out to talk about the thing. It didn’t matter how big or how small it was. I think it could be knowledge and it could also just be a point of view.

I know, for me, in the career space, I get called in when people want to talk about building reputation, they want to talk about visibility, they want to talk about being a better leader, being a better manager. That’s what people know me for. Everyone has to have like their little thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Indeed, we do need to have our little thing. And it seems that you’re unlikely to have your little thing unless you proactively, thoughtfully, try to identify something distinctive and go deep into it. Because I can imagine it’d be quite possible to just be a great team player and say yes to anything and everything that people want your help with. And then what are you known for? Well, kind of nothing.

Kimberly Brown
Yeah, I call that being like a Jack or Jill of all trades and a master of none. You’re just that go-to person. And I think there’s a point where it’s good to be that go-to person because you learn a lot of things, you meet a lot of people, you have a lot of great relationships. But I found that those folks have a hard time getting promoted.

So, if someone has their sights on climbing whatever proverbial corporate, non-corporate, nonprofit ladder, whatever ladder they want to climb, those folks have the most trouble because people, as you get higher up, people become specialists naturally. They manage a smaller area. So, if you’re attached to all these things, it’s sometimes hard for someone to see you doing the one.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, any pro tips on how we become amazing at a thing that’s distinctive?

Kimberly Brown
I think start thinking with what you like. Start thinking about what you like. Think about what makes you feel good. Like, the title of my book is Next Move, Best Move: Transitioning into a Career You’ll Love, and something I always say is that, if you love your work, it’s a lot easier every single day. And it’s not that you have to love it like you’re like, “Oh, my gosh, I would do this every single day. If I won the lotto, I would still keep the job.”

But I believe in there being an element of happiness and love for your job because we spend 40 plus hours a week at work every single day. So, if you don’t like it, I’m pretty sure your life kind of stinks too, because we can’t make up that big of a block of time. So, I think start with what brings you joy. What are you excited about? What comes easy to you? What are your strengths?

I always tell folks, like, imagine if you were building a career where you got to strengthen your strengths every day. I think, earlier on, I felt like when I worked in higher ed back in the day, when I learned career coaching, we’d always talk about how do we address the weaknesses.

But I’m like, “Imagine if you didn’t have to work on the weaknesses. Like, if they weren’t mission critical to your job.” Like, for me, I am not a data person. If you want to see real tears, start talking to me about Qualtrics, Excel, SPSS, turning the graph into a chart and bringing it to a deck. Mine doesn’t work like that no matter how many tutorials I watch.

I had just decided I’ll hire someone to do that. Even when I’ve worked in corporate, I’m like, “I need an analyst. Someone, who their role is to do this, that’s not what I do.” But my thing is strategy. I’m really great at making a strategic plan, finding whatever the problem is, and building out the roadmap, “How can we solve this?” Whether it’s resourcing, infrastructure, people, “What is it that we need to solve this problem?” I can build up the plan, resources and execute it. That is my thing.

That’s where I spend most of my time. If I had a job, I would never put myself in a position now where I’d be in analytics all day. I’d be miserable. It’s also just not my strength.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, now could you share a favorite quote, something you find it inspiring?

Kimberly Brown
I believe it’s by Earl Nightingale, and it says, “Your problem is to bridge the gap that exists between where you are not and where you’d like to be.”

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Kimberly Brown
I’m a little old school. I use a combination of ClickUp and a paper planner.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share that folks really love and quote back to you often?

Kimberly Brown
Create a career that creates opportunities for you. I want professionals to have a career that by the function of who they are, how they show up, and what their goals are, opportunities come back to them. It’s not always this rat race of applying for the job and trying to get the opportunity and fighting for it. But who you are, your reputation, your level of visibility, attracts opportunities that you get to benefit from and enjoy.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Kimberly Brown
They can go to KimberlyBOnline.com or BrownLeadership.com.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Kimberly Brown
I would want them to, at least, ask one person, what are three characteristics they would use to describe how they show up every single day at work.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Lovely. Kimberly, thank you.

Kimberly Brown
You’re very welcome. Thanks for having me.