Careers, Ambition, and the Next Generation — with Suzy Welch

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Speaker 2 Episode 363. 363 is the URA code covering Nassau County, New York.
In 1963, Alcatraz prison closed after 29 years in operation.

Speaker 2 I have a friend who has sex three to four times a week, reads two books a week, and all he does is complain about prison.

Speaker 2 Go, go, go!

Speaker 2 Welcome to the 363rd episode of The Prop GPod. What's happening? It's Scott-Free August, but we're still bringing you thoughtful conversations all month long.

Speaker 2 In today's episode, we speak with Susie Welch, an award-winning professor at NYU Stern, a three-times New York Times best-selling author and host of the podcast Becoming You with Susie Welch.

Speaker 2 We discuss with Susie why happiness is an outcome, not a goal, how to build a career that aligns with who you are, and what AI means for the future of work and meaning.

Speaker 2 Professor Welch is just an interesting person, and I really enjoyed trying to figure out, I think a lot about happiness because I struggle with it, but I love the idea that it's not, we're studying to the wrong test.

Speaker 2 Anyways, with that, here's our conversation with Susie Welch.

Speaker 2 Professor Welch, where does this podcast find you?

Speaker 3 I am in Santa Monica, California.

Speaker 2 Let's bust right into it. Your new book, Becoming You, is based on your popular class at NYU Stern where we're colleagues.

Speaker 2 What is the core idea behind the book?

Speaker 3 The book grew out of a sense that there was something missing for people who were coming out of college and

Speaker 3 graduate programs, it was just they had no purpose. They were taking jobs, but they weren't building lives.

Speaker 3 And this felt familiar to me because it's not like it's a, even though it's a growing phenomenon, it's a really, it's not a new phenomenon.

Speaker 3 And I've thought, geez, when I was in business school, I wish I'd had a class to help me figure out what to do with my life because I just got on the conveyor belt to consulting.

Speaker 3 And I was deciding between consulting and banking. And so I had this idea to come up with this class that would answer the question, what should I do with my life? What the F should I do with my life?

Speaker 3 And I brought it to our shared idol, Ragu, the dean at the time at Stern. And he said, let's give it a try.
And so the idea was that there would be a methodology.

Speaker 3 I hate all the woo-woo BS out there telling people to live their purpose in even worse gak material, to live their passion, which I revile like you do.

Speaker 3 And I thought, maybe there's a methodology to help people figure out what the... what the F they should do with their lives.
Let me try it. And it went from there.
And I started to do it. And

Speaker 3 it wasn't an experiment for very long because people kind of needed it.

Speaker 2 Define purpose. Like what, if someone says, I haven't found my purpose, how do you dissect what that actually means?

Speaker 3 All right. Well, I have my definition of it.
I mean, there's philosophical definitions of it. I mean, and I hear them all the time because

Speaker 3 this is the pond that I swim in and I hear all sorts of philosophical, but I'm actually a really practical girl. I'm a really practical person.
I have four adult children. I needed an answer for them.

Speaker 3 And so, the way I define it, and you can take it or leave it, but the way I define it is that your purpose is at the intersection of your values. And nobody knows what their values are.

Speaker 3 Nobody, I mean, I'm researched to prove it, but your values, which I have a really strong definition of, not virtuous values, your aptitudes, which is your cognitive and emotional wiring, what your personality is and what you're actually wired to do.

Speaker 3 Are you specialist or generalist? And then

Speaker 3 the areas of economic growth that call you intellectually or emotionally. And in that

Speaker 3 overlap, which is incredibly beautiful, rare,

Speaker 3 gorgeous real estate, that's where your purpose is. And you can get really philosophical and you can get really woo-woo about it, but that's not what I do.

Speaker 3 And if you want that, there's lots of people you should go talk to. But I'm about getting people into career paths that are not drudgery and that are not

Speaker 3 the onslaught of nihilism, which is which is afoot.

Speaker 2 Professor, you opened your book by saying, happiness is not a goal, it's an outcome. What did you mean by that?

Speaker 3 Well, I'm the sworn enemy of the happiness industrial complex, although I have friends, good friends who are part of it.

Speaker 3 But this whole sort of optimism peddling and sort of like you've got to chase your happiness, chase your bliss.

Speaker 3 And so I am with Mother Teresa on this one. That

Speaker 3 I think happiness is really hard and very fleeting. I'm not even sure you can be happy for that long.
I mean, so that's just me.

Speaker 3 And so I think the sort of a more attainable goal and one that I advise my students to go for is

Speaker 3 a meaningful, productive life, which I think is your best guarantee of happiness. I kind of like the Thomas Aquinas quote that joy is when the good you seek is fulfilled.

Speaker 3 And I think that if you are living in this territory I described at the overlap of your authentic values.

Speaker 3 Again, with the caveat that you've got to find out what those are, your aptitudes and your economically viable interests, you're more likely to have a meaningful, productive life.

Speaker 3 And then happiness is like the likely the outcome of that or the byproduct of that. But to chase happiness,

Speaker 3 i think it's kind of ill-advised look i want people to be happy i mean it's not like i'm like you know the happiness bully here it's not like i don't want people to be happy i want people to be happy but i'm a person who like many people have had everything going for you that should make you happy and not been happy right because people that you love die and um other crappy stuff can happen to you or you get a kid with anxiety or whatever.

Speaker 3 And so since happiness is kind of a difficult thing to hold on to, why not just go for a meaningful life? And happiness usually accompanies that when it does, when it does.

Speaker 2 I relate to this. THC and Netflix give me happiness, but I can only do them in limited amounts.
It's trying to feel a certain sense of comfort, absence from anxiety, purpose.

Speaker 2 That's the stuff that kind of sustains you. You describe in the book that there are three parts to becoming you, values, aptitude, and economically viable interests.

Speaker 2 Break all of that down for us. And you also, you also talk about something called the area of transcendence.
What is that and how does someone find theirs?

Speaker 3 Okay, so the area of transcendence is that purpose stuff that I was talking about that's at the intersection

Speaker 3 of your values, your aptitudes, and your economically viable interests. We call it area of transcendence.
I used to call it area of destiny, and then I didn't like that very much.

Speaker 3 I call it area of transcendence because our old friend Masloff had the hierarchy of needs. And at the top, he had self-actualization for like 14 years after he first came out with the theory.

Speaker 3 He was at Brandeis as a professor. And he called it self-actualization.
That's real oprah territory. It's fine.
The problem was that I wasn't finding that that's what my students necessarily wanted.

Speaker 3 They wanted to do something beyond self-actualize. They wanted to give back.

Speaker 3 And you can say what you will about Gen Z, but they have this impulse to be, to give back and to be connected to something larger than they are.

Speaker 3 And he actually revised his hierarchy of needs in sort of the last years of his life to say there's actually something above self-actualization.

Speaker 3 Self-actualization plus what he called cosmic connection, which is being part of something larger than yourself, is what he called transcendence.

Speaker 3 And so I call this sort of when you find your purpose, you are in your area of transcendence. And you know what? It feels that way.

Speaker 3 Like there are moments when I'm in it, and I would say I'm pretty damn close to it most of the time, and you feel like you're going to levitate.

Speaker 3 You feel like you're exquisitely alive, exquisitely alive. And that's your area of transcendence.
And it exists at the intersection of these three data sets, if you will.

Speaker 3 So the first place we go is values. And can I just be like a broken record and say,

Speaker 3 my whole

Speaker 3 life has been a journey? I mean, I wrote my PhD thesis about how the journey that I went on to figure out what my values were because I grew up in a family and I thought I must be adopted.

Speaker 3 And there was like one, because they were so different from me.

Speaker 3 And the one sort of mitigating factor on the fact that like I was convinced I was adopted is that I was the literal spitting image of my grandmother.

Speaker 3 Like you could put our faces right next to them and then I would say, I must be adopted in this family. I would say, yeah, look at Nana and we were like pictures of each other.

Speaker 3 So I, how could this be that I was so different from my family? This was the beginning of my journey to figure out what's going on. Of course, I finally got to low, we have different values.

Speaker 3 I love my family, by the way. They're fabulous.

Speaker 3 And we can love people with different values all the time. So values, big academic topic that has never somehow passed the fourth wall into the general population.

Speaker 3 And so part of my work and part of the work of becoming you is saying, look, there's 15 human values. Everybody has a different level of them.
You've got a kind of values DNA profile.

Speaker 3 What are your values? Are they achievement, belonging, beholderism, non-subbe? I mean, we've got these 15. And to find out who you really are.
And look,

Speaker 3 the word values has been hijacked by the political discourse. You know, Christian values, progressive values, conservative values.
And nobody, everybody's afraid of values.

Speaker 3 And you're never taught what values are in school, even though they're the most important piece of data about yourself.

Speaker 3 And so the part of becoming you is teaching people what values are completely separate from virtues, of which we should all have more, like kindness and integrity.

Speaker 3 Values are these choices that we make about how we're going to live our lives, who we're going to marry,

Speaker 3 how much we're going to work, the sort of the beliefs that we have that drive what we do with ourselves.

Speaker 3 And this is the last moment I'll nerd out on you, I think, which is that there's a whole school of research around values formation, which is how we come by our values. Like, is it trauma?

Speaker 3 Is it culture? Is it, right? There's a huge school of academic research and sociological research on how we come by our values. And I don't really care about it.

Speaker 3 I don't care how you came by your values. I think it's sort of vaguely interesting.
My students are always trying to tell me how they came by their values.

Speaker 3 And I say to them, you know, take it up with your therapist. I don't, that's not my business.

Speaker 3 My business is figuring out what your values are and helping you figure out what kind of work you should do given those values. But that's not enough.

Speaker 3 You got to know what you're good at.

Speaker 3 Because I don't care if your values are fame, if you're a really bad singer, you know, it just doesn't make any difference. So we have eight big cognitive aptitudes.

Speaker 3 I'm not telling you anything you don't know, and there's testing for them. But I actually believe that the harder part is figuring out what our emotional aptitudes are.

Speaker 3 Like what's going on with our personality and how the world experiences us.

Speaker 3 One of the hardest messages I have to tell my students is that your personality is not the words you tell yourself about yourself. Like, I'm kind.
I'm generous. I'm a great listener.

Speaker 3 I'm a really good friend. Well, maybe you are.
But how's the world experiencing you? And I think everybody would agree.

Speaker 3 You can be great at a job because of your personality and you you can suck at a job, pardon my French, because of your personality, but you've got to know your personality.

Speaker 3 And one of the most shocking experiences for my students, and one of the most shocking parts of the becoming you process is when people are confronted with what they're, how the world is actually experiencing them.

Speaker 3 So you got that data set, you got your values, you got your aptitudes. And then the third data set is what are the industries and jobs within those industries that are that are calling you.

Speaker 3 Now, look, here's the problem. Students' apertures and everybody's apertures get smaller and smaller as they get older.
You just think there's these are the five jobs available to me.

Speaker 3 There's incredible research that shows when kids come out of high school, they think there's five jobs and two of those jobs are their parents' jobs.

Speaker 3 And then the other ones are like teacher and fireman or whatever. And then you think college would really open the aperture, but it doesn't because of groupthink.

Speaker 3 And then God forbid you should go to get an MBA because then the aperture closes down to two jobs, consulting and banking. And so part of the becoming you process is just to force open that aperture.

Speaker 3 There were my sound effects on forcing open the aperture. And then you get all that data and you do the hard work of looking at the center of it, what's the overlap, and that's where you got to go.

Speaker 2 We'll be right back after a quick break.

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Speaker 2 So one of the nice things about Stern, where we where we serve on the faculty, is at orientation they say, oh, your professors want to see you drop by their office during office hours.

Speaker 2 The bad news is the students actually believe that and they stop by. I can't imagine how many people swing by your office hours and want essentially what is kind of life coaching or therapy.

Speaker 2 And so I'll go back to when I was a second year business school student. And if I'd taken your class, my objective was very singular, which is good.
I wanted to make a shit ton of money.

Speaker 2 That was all I wanted.

Speaker 2 I had grown up without money. I was worried at that time about taking care of my mom.
I wanted the accoutrements of wealth,

Speaker 2 experiences, power, broader selection, set of mates. All of that really appealed to me.

Speaker 2 If I came in and said, Professor Welch, my mission here is to just be as economically viable or secure as possible. What would you have said back?

Speaker 3 First of all, I had the exact same set of values.

Speaker 3 I was when I was at business school, I wasn't looking for a mate because I was already married to my first husband then, but I was driving a car where I could see the highway through the floor.

Speaker 3 And the dean of HBS came to me and he said, Susie, you're going to be an academic someday. Why don't you just stay right here at HBS and do it with us? And I thought to myself, No

Speaker 3 effing way, I'm poor. And I want to be rich.
And I wanted, I was so poor. I had paid for business school out of pocket.
And I wanted to go to Bain because Bain was going to take care of my dad.

Speaker 3 And so I had the same values as you did. That's not every student, okay? I had plenty of classmates who had money and that wasn't their concern.

Speaker 3 So if you'd come to me and you'd said, I want to be rich, I would have said, well, we don't need to use the values bridge to tell.

Speaker 3 I have a test that everybody takes called the values bridge, which I developed, which tells you your values, because most people have a lot of junk between them and their values.

Speaker 3 Most people don't admit they want to be rich, by the way, professor. They don't admit it out loud.

Speaker 3 There's a little stink off of it with the young people with the youth today. But your number one value, it would have been affluence then.

Speaker 3 And probably second to that would have been achievement, which is seen success, success that other people see, winning, in other words. And I would have said to you, well, you know what?

Speaker 3 You are the perfect person to go into banking or consulting. Let's see if you're good at that.
Let's see if you actually have the aptitudes for those jobs.

Speaker 3 And then I would have asked you, does it in any way interest you?

Speaker 3 So my problem was that I went to Bain because I wanted to make as much money as I possibly could. I was deciding between Bain and Goldman Sachs.

Speaker 3 And because I was a Baker scholar, Bain paid me more, blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 3 And I went there and I was okay at the work, but they ended up putting me into client services because actually I was just much better with the clients.

Speaker 3 I was just good at making rain and bringing in the business. It was, I did it for seven years and I made the money I needed to make.

Speaker 3 By that time I had four children and I had to get out of Dodge because in those days there was no partner track for people with babies.

Speaker 3 And but the work didn't interest me at all.

Speaker 3 And so I would have been not, I shouldn't have done it. I mean, and in fact, what I didn't understand, I show this slide to my students that freaks them out.

Speaker 3 There's like, you could hear, there's like a pall in the room. Okay.
And this is, let me try to describe this slide. It shows what your life looks like if you go into consulting or banking.

Speaker 3 And it shows that for the first 15 years, you're making quite a lot of money. And then sort of 15, 20 years out, your money sort of plateaus.

Speaker 3 You become partner and you kind of plateau at a certain amount.

Speaker 3 But if you go on a different route and you go into industry or you go into a job where you're unbelievably good at it, okay, you sort of at the beginning years, you're making nothing.

Speaker 3 You're making like $40,000 to their $200,000.

Speaker 3 But at a certain point, if it's your values and your aptitudes and it calls you unbelievably, there's this moment sort of 15 years out where your line rockets up and passes their line.

Speaker 3 And you have the potential to make so much more money if you actually go early on into the area that's your area of transcendence. It just takes a while.

Speaker 3 I mean, I could think of a million examples of this, but it's, it's, they just think, they take this sort of short-term solve for their, for their money desires and needs, and they're not ever going to get the money that they truly desire.

Speaker 3 They're private jets.

Speaker 3 They're one helipad per child kind of money desires if they go into consulting. But they will have two BMWs in the garage in Greenwich, Connecticut.

Speaker 2 There you go. So I started in investment banking at Morgan Stanley and then started a consulting company in my second year of business school.

Speaker 2 I'm curious, because I'm not sure I know how to articulate this. What do you see as the primary

Speaker 2 qualifications or skills that distinguish someone who would be good in banking versus someone who'd be good as a consultant?

Speaker 3 Let me say that I could have answered that question six months ago, but all those jobs are going away now anyway.

Speaker 3 I think that what's going on,

Speaker 3 what I did, look, I was seven years as a consultant and everything that I did can be done by AI now. Everything.

Speaker 2 Really?

Speaker 2 You really think it's that dramatic that you think consulting firms are going to be a shadow of their human capital solutions?

Speaker 3 I think the jobs that people have in the first five years are going away, Scott, completely.

Speaker 3 Here's the thing is the jobs later on are not going away because a consultant with 25 years of experience has wisdom and has something. I'm rubbing my fingers together.

Speaker 3 They have something that they kind of know. Like there's this pattern recognition that they've seen.
They've seen the people who blow up. They've seen the mergers that don't work.
You don't have that.

Speaker 3 So in your early years, you're doing all this grunt work, which can now completely, not completely, but can largely be done by AI and will be more and more done by AI.

Speaker 3 But the only way you get to that wisdom is to have done the junky work at the beginning as you kind of are observing out of the corner of your eye how the real work's getting done.

Speaker 3 And so there's something's about to go on that's going to blow up both those industries and those jobs.

Speaker 3 I don't know what's going to happen. And I think that I could venture a guess about what's.

Speaker 3 There's more ways to succeed in consulting than there are ways to succeed in banking. In banking, you just got to be very good at finance.

Speaker 3 I mean, finance is just a skill, it's a knowledge, it's a way of brain, it's a numerical reasoning kind of stuff.

Speaker 3 You can get by in consulting without that because you can be good at other stuff, but I think all the jobs.

Speaker 3 And I will further say this: I've got a ton of data on values now because 15,000 people at this point have taken the values bridge. And so we have a, and I can cut that data by generation.

Speaker 3 And what we're seeing is that

Speaker 3 Gen X, at Gen Z,

Speaker 3 our real youth

Speaker 3 have very distinct top values.

Speaker 3 Their number one value is what we call eudaimonia, which is self-care, everything that feels really good. And then their second top value is voice, which is creative self-expression.

Speaker 3 None of these values are being expressed, by the way, in their consulting and banking jobs. And then their third value is what we call non-civi, which is helping other people.

Speaker 3 But I did a big survey of hiring managers at banks and consulting firms. And the last thing they want are people who've got eudaimonia, voice, and helping other people as their top values.

Speaker 3 I mean, they want people who want affluence and achievement. They want the young Scott Galloway is what they want.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 when, are there certain,

Speaker 2 I want to come back to AI in a second, but are there certain signposts or tells as you're advancing through your 20s and workshop in your career around

Speaker 2 this is when I should leave. This is when I should switch careers.
Maybe I'm pretty good at this.

Speaker 2 Are there hacks or

Speaker 2 code breakers?

Speaker 2 What are the patterns you should be looking at as a young man or woman around where you're going to find your purpose, so to speak?

Speaker 3 I'm going to give you a highly technical answer. Like, an uh-oh feeling is your first hack.

Speaker 3 Uh-uh-oh feeling. Like, I was a reporter in Miami.

Speaker 3 I had worked at the college newspaper at the Crimson, and I thought, well, the only thing I can really get paid for with my fine arts degree from Harvard, the only thing I can ever get paid for is writing.

Speaker 3 Guys, I'm a decent writer. So I go off to the Miami Herald and I'm a crime reporter.
They put me on the police desk. It's fantastic.

Speaker 3 Started every day in the morgue, would walk down the bodies at the morgue. This was very exciting.
And we'd find out each person how they died. This was the middle of the Miami vice era.

Speaker 3 And I loved everything about it because I had so much opportunity and the people were so fun and interesting, all the young reporters. And Miami was a fantastic place to live.

Speaker 3 I lived there for a whole bunch of years when I graduated from college. And everything about it was kind of fantastic.

Speaker 3 I had a lot of opportunity because Night Ritter had had a big strike and they had fired all the reporters.

Speaker 3 So all these young reporters who came in from college, we all had a huge amount of opportunity. We were all in the city desk, so forth.

Speaker 3 But I had a big uh-oh feeling sort of one year in, which is I thought that reporters were mean.

Speaker 3 I thought that they were hypocritical and that every reporter I knew was filled with vices, drinking, smoking, and cheating on their spouses.

Speaker 3 And yet they were in the business of calling out sort of public officials who did the exact same thing. And then I thought, God, they're just hypocrites and they're really mean.

Speaker 3 And I'm kind of this like sort of sincere gal. And I don't like being mean.
And I don't like sort of openly criticizing people when I'm doing, when I'm the same sinner that they are.

Speaker 3 And this was the sort of this uh-oh feeling. Anyway, it took a couple of years for me to say I'm in the wrong.
Even though I think reporting is great and I loved my friends there.

Speaker 3 I love the fellow reporters that I had. They were so cool and interesting.

Speaker 3 But I had a values, a gigantic values disconnect with the values of other reporters. Like they were lone wolves, and I'm like big on the value of belonging.

Speaker 3 Like I'm a big group girl, like I love going to church kind of thing. Okay.
And there was just a lot of values disconnect. And the way values disconnects show up is with an uh-oh feeling.

Speaker 3 And so I'd say, listen to it.

Speaker 3 Highly technical. I know.
I mean, this is why I created the Values Bridge test because people don't listen to their guts. They shut it down.

Speaker 3 They

Speaker 3 put their fingers in their ears.

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Speaker 2 We're back with more from Susie Welch.

Speaker 2 So let's return back to AI.

Speaker 2 It sounds like you believe that at least in the short run, there's going to be a lot of job destruction among these information-intensive industries, including banking and consulting.

Speaker 2 As Americans, we always like to think there's an answer, and there may not be an answer here.

Speaker 2 But if you were advising the administration or the Secretary of Commerce or, I guess, the business school on how do we prepare these kids to get past that first five years when there isn't going to be that apprenticeship, that training.

Speaker 2 I was in the analyst program at Morgan Stanley, and I was not very good at it. And it was so good for me, though, because it taught me an attention to detail.
It taught me discipline.

Speaker 2 It taught me just how unfair the corporate world was, which I think is a really important lesson that people aren't just going to like you.

Speaker 2 No one owes you a living and you're going to have assholes and corporate and injustice the rest of your life. That's called the corporate world.

Speaker 2 What do you think? Are there solutions or safety measures we should be implementing around the way we teach these kids or government programs if we're this destruction of first year or jobs

Speaker 2 out undergraduate or graduate institutions. What advice would you have to soften the blow that's coming here?

Speaker 3 I think the answer is that you have to get very good at knowing the one thing

Speaker 3 that you'll, the one and only thing you'll ever know for sure in this world, and that is yourself. I think that you graduate from school and you know about everything that is unimportant and changing.

Speaker 3 And that wouldn't it be crazy pants if what you learned at school was a huge amount about who you are?

Speaker 3 I just don't think, I think we go into therapy and we take years to learn that, whereas there are a lot of shortcuts to where we can learn what our values are really fast.

Speaker 3 We can learn what our aptitudes are. Imagine if you just walked out of school knowing

Speaker 3 about your software and knowing what your personality was. Like I always say, your currency is your currency.
Okay.

Speaker 3 That the more you know about the world, the more you are valuable to an organization. And yet with all the information coming at kids today, they're like this.
They're like crouching down.

Speaker 3 They They don't want to hear it. Like I crowdsource in my classes.
What do you read? What do you watch? Besides you, Scott, Professor Galloway, they're not watching much else.

Speaker 3 Maybe they don't need to. But like they got to be wretching open their apertures to know what's going on in the world and see around corners.

Speaker 3 And so business school is teaching people a lot of stuff that may not be relevant one year after they're out.

Speaker 3 And so I think that's one thing that's got to really change.

Speaker 3 I also think I was at a conference and the great Barry Daylor was speaking and he said, right now, at the board level we're riveted on finding out more about ways we can invest in the human experience because the the AI and all of its variations is going to replace everything but the human experience like I think maybe the only thing that's going to last through all of this is love like it's just the one feeling that a machine cannot replace is that feeling when you fall in love with somebody

Speaker 3 or that just that feeling of how good it feels when you're doing something with someone you love.

Speaker 3 I think that that's, there's going to be industries that grow up oddly around experiences that you can only have with another person in the room.

Speaker 3 Maybe I'm, maybe, I don't know, maybe it's not true. I hope it is.

Speaker 2 A couple of years ago, you noted a trend called fun employment among Gen Z workers. What is fun employment and how is it, how has it evolved since then?

Speaker 3 It may have been the first time a professor actually screamed, screamed in a classroom at Stern. I just screamed.
So I was talking to my students about what they were going to do.

Speaker 3 And this one student raised her hand and she said, I'm going to do X and then I'm going to have some fun employment and I'm going to do Y.

Speaker 3 And she kept on talking and everybody understood what fun employment was. And I said, wait, wait, wait, stop.
And I said, what did you just say?

Speaker 3 And she said, you know, fun employment, the fun you have when you're unemployed.

Speaker 3 And I like literally like let out a scream because I come from an era like where when you're unemployed, you're unbelievably neurotic and freaking out.

Speaker 3 And you're thinking about when you're going to get your next job. And like there's nothing fun about unemployment.
But this was this new notion.

Speaker 3 that unemployment could be really fun and you would just do a lot of self-carry kind of things in that period.

Speaker 3 And then you'd go back to to work, which you would have some drudgery in until you went into your next period of fun employment.

Speaker 3 And so I think, look, I've learned a lot from my students and I've stopped screaming when they teach me these

Speaker 3 notions and I've tried to sort of extract myself from having, and I try not to have any judgment about it. It's fine.
Maybe they're right.

Speaker 3 Maybe I've been wrong my entire career and that we should be living and thinking that way. But for me, work was life.
It still is. I mean, that's all my meaning.

Speaker 3 I love work and my career has been, and what I'm doing is really my momentum. But maybe we have a new, brave new world where that's just not true of very many people.

Speaker 3 Now, the data would suggest that that's true, but there are 2% of Gen Z that have the exact same values that the baby boomers have.

Speaker 3 And maybe it's going to be a bloodbath with companies fighting for those 2% who care about achievement and affluence. We'll see.

Speaker 2 And just as we wrap up here, Professor, as someone who's obviously taught a lot about purpose and management, and also you said you have four kids? I do.

Speaker 2 How do you bridge this? Or what takeaways do you have or advice do you have for parents that you've,

Speaker 2 you know,

Speaker 2 the Ven overlap with sort of management and finding professional purpose and trying to be a good parent?

Speaker 3 You know, parenthood's messy. I have four children.
I'm a grandmother now. I got my oldest son is 36.
My youngest is 30.

Speaker 3 I think for parents, the hard thing to understand, and I wish I had known it 10 years before I did or 20 years before I did, which is that

Speaker 3 it's really hard when you realize your kids are not like you. And that's, that's the moment of truth.

Speaker 3 And so I guess I would say it's like reconcile yourself earlier in the process rather than later to understanding they're not going to be you and then go from there.

Speaker 2 That's really interesting.

Speaker 2 I like the way you frame that. For me, it was maybe it's the same thing.

Speaker 2 I assumed that my kids would be so fascinated with me and they'd have this natural, they would inherit a love for CrossFit and World War II films.

Speaker 2 And then you figure out, no, they're not into that stuff. And if you want to be a good parent, you have to, you have to get into their stuff, not expect them to be into yours.

Speaker 3 You got to enter their reality completely. And then it's really hard not to judge our kids.
And then the moment, like I had, I have four kids who have got what you might call low work centrism.

Speaker 3 They're just not interested in work that much. It's not the center of their lives.

Speaker 3 And the moment of truth for me was when I thought, I can't get up there and teach that we shouldn't be judging each other's values and be judging my kids. And I had to say, okay,

Speaker 3 you're happy. You're healthy.
You love me. You come home for Thanksgiving.
All's good. Everything after that's just ice cream.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I wish I had that self-actualized. It reminds me of this quote I just saw that just cracked me up.
I have 14 and 17 year old boys and one's about to take the ACT.

Speaker 2 And,

Speaker 2 you know, for a long time they said all these tests had real cultural bias to them, which is probably true.

Speaker 2 And I remember I read this thing saying that standardized tests are inherently biased against kids who don't give a shit.

Speaker 2 That just totally cracked me up because My son is, you know, he's studying for it and he's focused on it, but he's not.

Speaker 2 I'm sitting there going, you realize the difference between UVA and the University of Richmond is how you do on this test, right? And he's kind of like, just not that worried about it.

Speaker 2 I guess that's a superpower. I don't know.

Speaker 3 I had a really smart kid.

Speaker 3 My oldest kid, incredibly smart, great scholar, went to Stanford, did incredibly well there, got a job in consulting, got fired because he just didn't give a flying, you know what.

Speaker 3 And you know what he does now? He does marketing for Dungeons and Dragons. Okay.
That was his passion. Dungeons and Dragons.
We got so mad at him. I screamed at him so loud that my vocal cords burst.

Speaker 3 And I said, you know what? Go write the CEO at that company that makes that freaking game that you love so much. And he's never seen, you know, like whatever.
So he wrote him. This is 14 years ago.

Speaker 3 And a guy looked at me and said, we don't care that you went to Stanford. We'll put you in the basement on the phones.
And he did.

Speaker 3 He started in the basement doing customer service for Dungeons and Dragons. And now he's doing marketing there.
And he's in his, you know, I had to come around to that.

Speaker 3 He didn't, he was never going to come around to where I was. And things are really good now.
They weren't for a few years, but they're good now.

Speaker 2 Things are really good right now. I like that.
That's a good place to end it.

Speaker 2 Susie Welch is an award-winning professor at NYU Stern, a three-times New York Times best-selling author, and host of the podcast Becoming You with Susie Welch.

Speaker 2 Her latest book, Becoming You, the Proven Method for Crafting Your Authentic Life and Career, is out now. She joins us from Santa Monica, Los Angeles, and the great state of California.

Speaker 2 Professor Welch, really appreciate your time today.

Speaker 3 Thanks so much, Scott.

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