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Re-Enrolled
#3 Designing Your Life: Intentional Living Through Design Thinking and Genuine Networking
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Ever wondered how to shape your life with intention using design thinking? Join us as we unpack the transformative ideas from "Designing Your Life" by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. Through our engaging anecdotes and practical insights, we’ll guide you on how to identify and reframe dysfunctional beliefs to pave the way for a more fulfilling existence. We delve into the power of experiential learning and the use of the health/work/play/love dashboard to achieve balance and satisfaction.
Discover the significance of proactive life design and why it’s essential to navigate careers and life choices with a curious and experimental mindset. We share real-life stories about overcoming the emotional impact of unpredictable career paths and emphasize the importance of making small, incremental changes for substantial improvements. Learn how to prototype different life solutions and embrace curiosity to explore new directions, all while ensuring you periodically reassess your work-life balance.
In the latter part of our episode, we tackle the intricacies of job searching, from enhancing your LinkedIn presence to tapping into hidden job markets through genuine networking. We'll reveal why face-to-face interactions often trump traditional resume submissions and how viewing networking as an opportunity for mutual growth can transform your career prospects. Wrapping up, we reflect on living life as an adventure and the continuous process of thoughtful decision-making in designing an authentic and regret-free life. Tune in for actionable insights and transformative advice!
dude, but for sure this book was like, was it? It was hard in the sense, like it's very like a practical book, you know, because it's not like just reading, like it's trying to engage you, you know, do things so.
Speaker 2:So it's hard when you're this is the first, is it? Is it the first self book, the first self book that we do?
Speaker 1:I guess the previous one Self help book.
Speaker 2:Self help book. I believe the previous one was sort of self help, but this is like it takes it to the next new level. It has places where you have to put in your ideas and fill it out.
Speaker 1:No, this is straight up a self-help book, right Like? It's like. I have a little summary for the book. I'm going to share this. Do you have one? I'm going to share this one I have here.
Speaker 2:No, I think it's perfect To all our listeners what we read this week.
Speaker 1:Okay, this week we read Designing your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. So Burnett and Evans are both professors at Stanford University. They guide their readers through a series of practical exercises and mindsets to help them build their way forward. The book introduces the concept of using design thinking to create a fulfilling life. It emphasizes that everyone can benefit from approaching life as a designer, focusing on building and iterating rather than passively waiting for things to happen. That's kind of a little summary of the book.
Speaker 2:That's a pretty good summary, I mean. That gives our listeners a perfect idea of what we went through this last couple days as we took on the journey of designing our life I think we have to acknowledge that.
Speaker 1:Uh, a little caveat for who's listening. We did. Our goal for this podcast is do weekly books right, and this was the longest book we've read thus far. It's 199 pages on my tablet.
Speaker 2:I don't know how much actual pages not only is I mean it's not that long per se in word count, it's kind of you could probably do it in a week pretty doable if you don't stop to think about it, but it's yeah kind of a heavier book. So when you, when you hit a part, that kind of like resonates with you and you start thinking you can spend 20 minutes just thinking about a chapter and it makes it a slower read.
Speaker 1:So yeah, and it even invites you, invites you to stop, it invites you to, you know, write things down. Uh, it even gives you time limits. Try to your best to do in 30 minutes. So it is a book you need to be engaged with. And then, anyone who purchases book I mean not everyone, but if you're buying this book, it potentially means that you feel like you want to change in your life and maybe you some guidance, some practical guidance of what you could do differently than what you're doing now.
Speaker 2:It's kind of like a little background story to this book. Throughout this podcast we pick books at random sometimes, but this first couple of weeks there's been kind of a story behind all the books. We picked the Little Prince, the one we did last week. This one has a little bit of a deeper story. So when I was introduced to this book, actually someone bought it for me. I didn't buy it for myself. I found this online post advertisement where they were advertising I believe it was career counseling, Like you can meet with someone and talk about your career goals, what you want to do and what changes you want to make. So I said you know what? I don't lose anything, let's meet with this person. And actually it ended up being a very good conversation. At the end of that counseling session we could say she told me she recommended this book and, to my surprise, a couple days later she mailed it to me. The the counselor really so yeah, so it was.
Speaker 2:It was a pretty. I mean, I didn't pay for the counseling session and I got the book and it was a pretty. I mean, I didn't pay for the counseling session and I got the book and it was a pretty good book. That's why we're doing it today.
Speaker 1:Well, that means that she's really passionate about helping people. She's just, you know, she saw something in you and then like, let me give this for free. This guy can get a little extra push.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah and like, and I think her entire, maybe not her career, but at least this part of her career with as part of like, as far as like I went, and in my goals, she, her goal, if I were to continue with her, was to kind of go over this book together, right, so she got it for me in the hopes that I hired her and then we ended up doing this, this journey of designing your life and your career.
Speaker 1:Her marketing tactic didn't work.
Speaker 2:I mean, maybe it did, I don't know, maybe in the future, we'll end up doing it.
Speaker 2:So now let's kind of introduce or kind of segue into how it would benefit our listeners If they don't get to read the book. What are the key points that they can take from this? But even if they decide to read the book, what to watch out for, like and to introduce that like. One of the things that I really liked about this book is that throughout the book it I really like about this book is that throughout the book it asks you to think or like it labels it dysfunctional belief and then a reframe. So a lot of times we hold on to this idea like it can be a common saying, you know. For example, this first one is if you are successful, you will be happy. That's a dysfunctional belief.
Speaker 2:A lot of people have that idea that it takes success, whatever their definition of success is to be happy and a possible reframe for that is true. Happiness comes from designing a life that works for you, and I think there's a lot less pressure in that, because a life that works for you doesn't have to have, you know, a lot of money, signs or a lot of things that people might equate to success in their eyes. It just works for you. That's kind of what works for you. And for some people, being frugal and living a life of freedom is a lot more important than having a high paying career, and this book kind of allows you to allow yourself or gives you that freedom to. You know what I can design a life that works for me and be happy doing that, instead of trying to make my life fit this other mold that people have for their life.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think it introduces to question what mold am I in, you know, am I following a mold? That just isn't working for me? And I think that is a key component of this book. I, I think I really I mean we can. Just if we just talked about all the dysfunctional beliefs that, right, there is probably the episode, because there's so many that these dysfunctional beliefs that I agree with I feel like a lot of people have. The one I I had that I felt like I'm not related to, but I've heard before is, especially when you're going out of high school, that you should already know what you're going to do with your life, and the reframe is life is an iterative process of exploration and discovery. It's OK not to have all the answers and to change paths as you learn and grow and to change paths as you learn and grow.
Speaker 1:That mindset, that pressure more so, is so real, especially again in first world countries that have a normal schooling system that pushes college. I think it gave an example of a counselor that someone asked for advice and I said, oh, what are you passionate about? And the person says, well, I don't know what I'm passionate about. And the counselor replies and says, well, come back when you find out what you're passionate about. People use this word as passions, like this one thing that you were meant to do, but the reality is, as humans, we like multitude of things and that's okay. And I feel like this reframe again, like you mentioned, kind of put some weight off your shoulders like try some, try this out and see how it works, and if it doesn't work, it's OK, it's not a failure, you learn something new. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I mean not only that, but it's never too late, right? Like some people think that you have to have it figured out, since you're 15, 18, 20 years old what you want to do, what you're passionate about, and pursue that without any hiccups, like you're just going to go from point A to point B and it's going to be a perfect ride, but the reality is that it doesn't work out like that.
Speaker 2:In fact, I think it gives a data point here. It says in the United States, only 27% of college graduates end up in a career related to their major. So that means only 27% of the people actually got it right, in a way of saying this is what I want to do, and they ended up doing that thing. A lot of people don't have that journey from you know, point A to point B in a straight shot.
Speaker 1:That blows my mind, like when you read that stat, how did that impact you? I feel like I've heard other versions of this stat, but like seeing it like concrete, what the number was like, it really impacted me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, it's a sad realization to see that in a way. It's a sad realization to see that in a way, because when you're young and you're trying to start a life, when you're in high school, if you try to transport yourself back to that time when there's a lot of questions, not a lot of answers at least for me there wasn't a lot of answers I didn't know what to do and a lot of pressure.
Speaker 2:You think that if you're smart, if you're intelligent, it figured out. But that's not the case, you know, and I mean it's a sad thing that life is designed that way for young people to kind of create this or make these big choices so early on. I mean, I feel like it is, um, because even in the book I mentioned a very good example it said when you buy a car, like you test drive it first, right, you go and you test drive it and then you commit to it in life, like we take on new jobs, like across the states, across you know a continent, without even knowing if you actually like this career, and a lot of times you find out there's a scenario or there's a, there's an example, because this book kind of, you know, opposite of what we see mostly with books, where there's a book first and then a movie, there's something before this book and that's a class In Stanford. If you go to Stanford you can take a class, an elective class that is designing your life, and they go throughout. They basically go through this book in class. The course takes you through that and in it one of the students, um, that went through.
Speaker 2:It mentioned that they had decided they were going to open a coffee shop. So they saved up, they opened the coffee shop huge success, right like a lot of people were loving it. But the owner found out that she was miserable, like she hated it because she had jumped into this new career, into, like all the way, committed a lot of money and resources and time without actually realizing if she even liked owning a coffee shop. And I feel like young people are forced to do something very similar when they're 18 years old, when, like, you're forced to make a decision on what you want to study and do the rest of your life and maybe you haven't even had a chance to do something and figure that out.
Speaker 1:I think part of it is because you feel like you don't, you don't know what to do, right, like you. You feel like, like it's like lack of knowledge, almost, or and almost, and lack of guidance Not to hate on any guidance counselors out there, but because it gives the example to your point where it poses the questions what could she have done differently? Or he have done differently? He could have shadowed someone at a local coffee shop. See the back end of it, see if he could see the managerial side of owning a coffee shop, oh, like, and seeing how that affected them emotionally. Maybe, instead of like lacking like owning a coffee shop, maybe this person likes designing coffee shops, you know, like. But because, again, nothing.
Speaker 1:And that's where where I have a trouble thing, because I kind of relate to the full throttle mindset. For me it's like just run and gun it, but there is a lot of wisdom to see a little bit the life that you potentially might live through the experience of someone else, to do it, to take advantage of it, shadowing somebody, even if it's for free, the time you save, right, like if you go to college six, seven years for whatever degree, and then you realize once you're in the job, in the career that you don't like it. It's not a waste because you learned so much, but maybe you could have learned it earlier. You could have learned that lesson earlier.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I think this is kind of the book we can go in order, in chronological order, and the first chapter introduces us to this concept of knowing where you are.
Speaker 2:start where you are if you haven't gone to college, start from there, start designing your life at that point. If you already went to college and you love it, but there's some aspect of your life that you don't like, we'll start designing there. And if you've gone to college and you don't love your career, well, there's no reason to. Just I feel like I've heard this from a lot of people. Where they've committed a lot of time or resources into a career, it turns out they hate this. Whatever it is that they're doing, whether they're in the medical field or another type of job that they just despise, and they think that, just because they already spent the four years or the amount of money that they spent in the career, that there's no going back and now they're stuck for the next 40 years. They have to do this thing that they hate.
Speaker 2:That's crazy and you know to some degree you have to be responsible. Right, you're not going to just quit your job that pays you well and go pursue some crazy dream. But if you start designing your life, it might take you three, four, five months to figure out a path forward, but you can start taking these small little steps to figuring out something that makes you a little bit happier. And in here it goes over the dashboard the health slash, work, slash play, slash love dashboard.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's kind of an invitation for anyone that reads this book to kind of be honest with themselves and respond the question where am I now Like? How happy or fulfilled am I in every one of these areas? You could be extremely successful at work but find that you're not happy because you're lacking in these other three areas, which are also important. So if you know where you're at, then you can kind of figure out okay, what can I do to improve my life and make this something that I enjoy more?
Speaker 1:And the book highlights or the authors highlight more so that there isn't a perfect balance. I think that there's not a perfect anything, that there isn't a perfect balance. I think that there's not a perfect anything. The important thing is to finding maybe the areas that you're lacking the most and start there and work and take actions to fix that area of your life. I want to pose that question because you mentioned that quote that you can't know where you're going until you know where you are. How important do you think is self-assessment to actually make progress? And do you think people even do any self-assessment, especially in like, especially young people, right like. Do you think that's common?
Speaker 2:yeah, well, I think it's kind of one of those things that it's really hard to be honest with yourself, especially if you're unhappy, right, if you sit down and you say, okay, I don't like this, you might feel attacked by yourself and that's not an easy feeling, right Like you may feel like.
Speaker 2:Oh, but I should like this. I should do like this is what I decided, and if you take the time and you have the honesty enough to be able to determine where you are, I feel like it's the only way to get somewhere else, because if you don't know where you're going, then maybe you're already there, maybe you're completely going in the wrong, in the wrong direction. But if you assess, though, if you have a good assessment of where you are right now, I feel like that's like the first step, and I mean that's what the author described. Like you start where you are you're at and once you know that I have like a pretty good compass of where you belong and what makes you happy, then you can start trying to head in the right direction.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and something that was cool that I I found cool is that they're in stanford. They have in that class that you were mentioning in the beginning. They have a quote that says you are here, and it highlights that very point that you're alluding to, that you can't change the past, like the decisions you made, like good or bad, like were made and and and the important things that you're here now. And what are you going to do about it? Right, like are you going to continue this pattern that you're living, even though you're unhappy, potentially, or are you going to just do something different, change that pattern? And I think I really value that quote. I think that's I'm going to have to fill up this wall of just quotes of all these books that we're reading.
Speaker 2:That was a really good one.
Speaker 1:I mean there's so many, but that was one that I liked. You're here like what are you gonna do?
Speaker 2:yeah, exactly yeah, and I feel like what I really enjoyed about the book is they're not really promoting one way of life over another. Everyone's different right. Like some people, college and career and being a professional might be the only path they see, for whatever reason. If you you read this book, it's not going to attack that idea that you have. Other people might be completely contrary to that and they don't want to spend the money or the time to go to a four-year college and get a degree. They want to pursue a different route.
Speaker 2:If you read and understand some of the concepts in the book, it's going to help you design your way forward and what you want to do in life, because I think the book, other than teach me like different exercises that I can do to kind of know what I want to do and how to move forward. It also highlighted some of the dangers of not being aware of this right, because we as humans can spend a lot of time working on a problem but then realize, oh, that was the wrong problem. I solved it in a way, but it wasn't really what. The issue was right. And think of all the people that jump from job to job because they're unhappy and then they go to the next job and maybe they get paid more. Maybe they get paid a lot more. Within a couple of months, they're unhappy again. I think it comes back to the fact that they were attacking the wrong problem. The pay wasn't the problem. The job wasn't the problem.
Speaker 1:Maybe there's something else in their life that's leading to that dissatisfaction in what they're experiencing. Yeah, and I think this and it's such a simple, little gauge, little dashboard he compares it to a dashboard of a car and like seeing like a check engine light on if, if it isn't fulfilled, are we gonna put ourselves on blast like, oh, did you fill this out for yourself?
Speaker 1:I actually didn't have the time to do all the exercises, but I did fill that one out okay, you don't have to share all the red lights we got going on in our lives, but I can, I, I did.
Speaker 2:I was surprised at the one that was lowest for me okay, share yours and I'll share mine, because mine surprised me as well.
Speaker 1:I did do this exercise, I mean it's not so the dashboard, and we've already mentioned it, but it's work, play, love and health, and you just measure it. It's basically split in quarters and you can fill it in as you wish, as you please. For me, the lowest was play. I wrote down like the things that I genuinely enjoy. I think that's why it poses it, because, like before this, I thought like, oh yeah, I have a healthy balance and I, like you know I and it defines play as just things you do for enjoyment.
Speaker 1:Uh, yeah, it didn't talk about like, like competitive things, like, oh, because I want to beat somebody. That's, that's joyful, that can be fun. But it doesn't talk about that. It compares it like the child joy of playing with mud as a child, like it's just purely this brings you joy and for me, like I didn't really have a lot of things, I just brought just complete, just joy.
Speaker 1:I think let me see what I wrote down. Um, but two things I wrote down. That way, I just enjoy the time that I'm spending in regards to play. Is this what we're doing here? I just really truly enjoy this. It's a lot of fun and and just like watching youtube videos, uh, to learn like things that I like to, whether it's photography or whatever. Those are the two things and the things I remember. Um, I used to love to do a lot that I haven't been able to do since I moved to mexico. It was like, for example, playing soccer with my friends, like that was something that brought me so much joy. It wasn't about winning, it was just going, hanging out with friends and and like it reminded me of like man, I haven't done that like, and that brought me so much satisfaction.
Speaker 1:So anyway, that was one bar. For me that was a little low and I put health at 50. I don't think I'm terrible, but I can improve my work. I feel like it's like three bars. I think there's goals I want to keep growing on. I'm trying to grow these work goals and I love like like four, like almost full. I I'm really good. I'm very grateful for that too. So yeah, that was kind of my little assessment it's funny that you know we we shared that.
Speaker 2:I was surprised to find that the play bar was pretty low as well, and I think maybe the reason is that I'm kind of thinking incorrectly about some of the things I do, because I've have this concept of life where you should enjoy what you do, whether it's a responsibility or not, like. But if you start thinking of all the benefits, maybe you're not doing it just for fun and merit like, you're doing it for some benefit.
Speaker 2:For example, I can tell you about soccer like I regularly play soccer with friends but, maybe behind it I'm thinking, oh, it's good cardio, it's for my health, like that's why I didn't count it for play like it is more like I'm thinking of the benefit of that, and the same thing can happen with other things.
Speaker 2:But I think, yeah, I mean doing things just because you enjoy doing them is something that kids probably have a leg up over us, where we start thinking of the best way to, you know, improve our life and do things that are different, but I mean things that make you happy, and play is a big part of that. We, we should, we should work on that one we should fill it up more.
Speaker 1:And the thing I started, like this is where it stopped me a little bit this book of like, okay, like what, what do I? You know what brings me joy, like true, like just normal joy, and I realized, like it's things that I could practically do. You know, like I did it yesterday because I was, I was reading this book, finishing it up and, for example, like I love, like watching the sunset, I love that it brings me joy. But like because of work, because what I'm doing, I just don't take the time to like sit down and just just do that. Just don't do anything else, just do that.
Speaker 1:So yesterday my wife and I went up and I went up to the, the top floor, and watch the sunset. Like that brought me so much joy. But like the thing is like the first sign is acknowledging something you got to work on, but then the second thing is like the first sign is acknowledging something you got to work on, but then the second thing is like okay, what can you practically do now? And then do that thing. So that was like my first little step of like trying to better that area, I guess yeah, and apply it in your life.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, and I think this exercise of building that dashboard kind of takes you or it's like a perfect segue into the next chapter of building your compass in life. Right, because the reason you want to know how you're doing all these places of life like work, love, health Is so you can find out if you're living a life that's true to your worldview. But also, I think it mentions your your work view and your life view, right, and the difference between these two is one of them could be related more to, like, your career you know the things that you do for work and the other one is just life in general. I think here it gives a very good description of what he means by life view is simply your ideas about the world and how it works. It's a pretty simple, uh simplistic, way of finding if you know what your life view is and your work view is more related to work, and go ahead.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'll just, you know, mention that, these questions that he poses the reader to question himself or herself, like why am I here? What am I doing? Why does it matter? I think it's questions that a lot of people don't ask themselves that much anymore, for whatever reason, because we're always distracted. We just go, like in life, like we don't. We just go, we don't stop and like, okay, what, like what am I standing on? Don't stop and like, okay, what, like what am I standing on? Like why, why am I doing what I'm doing? And again, this is a great book to do these exercises, to pose these questions and and see what you could do differently yeah, exactly, and at the end of the day, what you want to have is like a life that integrates, right?
Speaker 2:You don't want your work for you or whatever you do for work, to completely clash with what you think of life. Right? If you're a vegan but you work at a slaughterhouse, you're going to have some issues, you're going to have some problems in your head.
Speaker 1:You'll be crying every day as you go to work.
Speaker 2:So the same thing, man. If you're doing something that you love for work and it's very successful, but you're spending too much time doing it and your life view is more like spending time with family and doing things that you volunteer for, things that don't involve money, then you might feel that, you know know, internal conflict growing inside of you, like maybe I should change the direction of where my life is going yeah, and and he.
Speaker 1:There's this example of parker palmer that I, that I love, that I feel like could potentially be related to, really relatable to people, that he was very successful and he emulated these like famous leaders what he?
Speaker 1:thought would be a good life and he thought that imitation was more important than being authentic to himself. But he was using someone else's compass to basically lead his life and, even though it's not a bad life, he was able to admit that. He realized this, that he was being guided by someone else's standards, even though they're not bad. Nothing's wrong with acknowledging someone's great life course. It doesn't mean that you can copy and paste it to your life and then you're going to be happy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, actually, that's one of the parts of the book that I highlighted to share with the listeners. Is this actually? This paragraph kind of summarizes this is there's a lot of powerful voices in the world and lots of powerful voices in our heads all telling us what to do or who to be, and if we're not careful, we all run the risk of accidentally using someone else's compass and living someone else's life. And that's very true, right, especially with social media and all these important things that happen and all these things you listen to. You can start wanting like, for example, parker. He wanted to be like martha, luther, king and gandhi, but then later he realized that he didn't have to walk that same path to learn from them and take those lessons and extract them how I mean, again, this is like man for me.
Speaker 1:like it, I'm very grateful that of being, uh, whatever influences has gotten me to this point, that I'm, I am now, um, I'm very grateful because it's scary to think I'm.
Speaker 1:I'm scared of regret. I think it's something we've talked about, even when we're you know, we're younger, just together, like I'm, I'm, I'm really scared of regretting a decision. Um, so my, my way of combating that is I'd rather regret a decision I made than a decision I never made. Like I hate regretting a what if? Like, just do it and then, if it fails, it fails. Like I'd rather regret the failure than regret not knowing what would have happened. And like, when I read this, like man, I wonder how many people are just going through life almost like in cruise control, with someone else driving their car, so to speak, not knowing where they're going, why they're going there, and they're dissatisfied, and that's such a sad and scary thing. So that's why it's so important to readjust or see if your balance, your work-life balance, is correct, because you can get there, you can fall back to those habits, because we're being influenced heavily by everything.
Speaker 2:really, yeah, I mean, I think that paragraph in that chapter in general made me meditate on that right, because even if you're doing the right things, even if you're, you know, ticking those boxes and people are applauding you along the way if it's not really you, if you haven't done enough self-reflection to make that path yours, what could happen? You know, maybe years down the line, maybe at an age that I can't even comprehend. Yet you know, 56 years old, looking back now, you might be like, oh dang, why did I do that? Like that wasn't really me, I was just doing it because my friends were doing that or because someone else was taking that path and the good thing is that, if you have the right relationships and they're good friends.
Speaker 2:I feel like those mistakes probably won't be as big as you imagine, um, and if you're listening to the right people, but it's still not going to be yours, right, it's still not going to be the real you yeah, and whenever let's say you're 60, right, like the important thing is what are you going to do next?
Speaker 1:right, like again, like what benefit is there to ponder and and just hurt yourself of past decisions? You can't change the past. So, again, like it's never too late, so to speak, you can start changing certain habits or trying to reach certain goals and plan just yeah, and it and it highlights the uh, the quote.
Speaker 1:Let me pull it up that what we're discussing reminds me of, of this uh, designers don't think their way forward. Designers build their way forward. So it's referencing that it's, it's something in motion. You're doing something to design that life. You're not just thinking about it. You're not just drafting that whatever right, building right. You're actually putting hands to work and doing something about it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's kind of a cool little concept right, and it's kind of the center of this book, this idea that you can design your own life, very similar to the way products are designed, like the way our phones get to us or where you know different tools that we use get to us, whether they're complex or simple, there's design behind it and the same thing can be done around your life, and rarely do people do that. I mean, I've never had a class in high school up until now that I'm reading this book that kind of took that approach towards life. It was more like decisions were made at you instead of you making decisions about your life. Like I don't know if that makes sense. For example, you apply for college but they're the ones that get to reject you. Like you really have no control over some of these things and it's just the way life is kind of panned out, Whereas if you design your own life, even if that's a closed door, okay, you keep designing forward.
Speaker 2:A failure, something that fails, doesn't make you a failure. You can continue going and if you have that approach of I'm building something, it's not going to matter as much as if you think life is just you know something that happens to you and you're a victim in a way that I mean. That's a big issue, especially with younger generations, where we feel like, oh, I'm a victim to something that's happening to me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and and to your like, to your point. It's almost like through life there's been roads paved for us. Like you can choose a road, basically, but this book is inviting you just build your own road. Like, yes, there's default roads to take if you want, but the reality is that the likelihood of your happiness is better if invested, if you just build your own road and your own pathway instead of just following whatever you feel like everyone's doing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think you're right.
Speaker 2:You know like I was gonna try to get the the listeners to focus on one point of this book, because, I mean, the reality is, designing your life is more than just about your job or your career, that there's different components to it.
Speaker 2:There's family, there's your relationship, uh, with others, with the community. Um, your health is a big part of designing your life and what you do towards that. But if you focus just on your career, just on your job, which I imagine a lot of people that read this book actually pick it up for that reason, for that purpose, they want to make a big change in their career, whether it is in a career that they already have or one they want to pursue. Now, here it talks about that. And if we focus the conversation on getting unstuck right, let's say, you feel stuck, whatever it is that you're doing, if you feel like you're not moving forward, or you don't like where you're at but you don't know what else to do, like, what advice did you get from the book that our listeners could apply and potentially get unstuck? What did you find?
Speaker 1:I think the practical thing that that I feel like you can start with was identifying the things that bring enjoyment in your life. So chapter three or I'm not sure if it's chapter part three talks about wayfinding to understand where to go next, understand where to go next, and the practical point that I found useful is to start a journal. He called it a good time journal and it says when you learn what activities reliably engage you, you're discovering and articulating something that can be very helpful in your life Design work Remember that designers have a bias to action, which is just another way of saying that we pay a lot of attention of doing things and not just thinking about things. Logging when you are and aren't engaged and energized will help you pay attention to what you're doing and discover what's working. So the first thing to do, or the advice I would give, based on this book, is do not change anything, don't freak out, don't quit your job, don't let me start selling my liver or something. First see what you enjoy, what are things that are bringing happiness and engagement. Talks about the flow state, which is something that you're totally engaged, that you feel like time just blurs by, and identifying those things you can now.
Speaker 1:Okay, I really enjoy, let's say, during my work. There's a time where I'm problem solving and I just love that. It makes me feel valuable. Knowledge for the work I'm problem solving and I just love that. It makes me feel valuable. You know, knowledge for the work I'm doing. That brings me a lot of happiness, but I hate all the meetings I'm in. Well, it gives you a problem to be solved instead of like, oh, I have to quit my job.
Speaker 1:Maybe we can just talk to our boss and acknowledge that things are really good and we're really enjoying and see if we can do less of the other things that right, there can be one step closer to just improving your life, and it's such a practical thing is just being engaged in the moment and then tracking those things what about you?
Speaker 2:would you recommend? I really, I think you touched on the point that I had almost skipped, and that is the idea of flow, right? And the authors call it those activities that you do where you feel like time stands still, like you don't really if this took another hour, you wouldn't care. If it took another two hours, you probably don't care either. You're just enjoying it. And it mentions here you're neither bored because it's too easy nor anxious because it's too hard.
Speaker 2:So you could be doing something that you love and you're not going to find it. You're not going to be bored doing it. It's not going to be that easy that you just like clicking enter on a spreadsheet, but it's also not going to be so demanding that you're like, oh, I can't do this. And if you find things in your life, you know it might be even more related to play than anything right, and you start thinking and kind of writing those things down, at the best you're gonna end up with a list of things that you really enjoy doing and from then you can move on to getting unstuck right, because if you're doing something you hate, and move on to getting unstuck right, because if you're doing something you hate. The idea would be to do something that you can make a living on but you don't hate, or, potentially, that you love. Well, what if you don't even know what you like? Well, it's like the first step right create a list of all the things that you enjoy doing, the things that maybe you you find that you're entering a flow state where you, um, where time kind of stands still, where you're enjoying this and it's something that really resonated with me in that chapter about getting unstuck is that there's more than one right. If you think that there's only one possible version that you can live your life, you're wrong. Like you could be a teacher, you could also be a mechanic, a pilot, a lot of people, if you share those interests, could take different routes, whereas if you think, oh, there's something better, I can be doing.
Speaker 2:That idea of, oh, there's a better way, there's a best way, is very dangerous to life design, according to the authors, because it kind of makes your mind only think about one option. If you're doing this, okay, I should not be doing that. I should be doing this one thing, whereas if you start to see about all the different things you enjoy, maybe even start attaching other ideas about work related to those things that you enjoy. You start creating these different paths right.
Speaker 2:On one version of this, carlos can be a business owner and he has control of his time, and he does this. In the other one, he's going to be a full-time employee for a non-profit that you know does something that he really enjoys and he wants to promote. That's another version that carlos would be very, you know, happy doing. Well, if you create, you know, multiple versions of this, you might start getting an idea of, okay, what kind of things where I want to pursue, and I think that's the first step to getting unstuck right, having already ideas in your head. If you have this concept of, oh, I can create ideas, it's actually one of the dysfunctional beliefs. It says I am stuck. You can reframe that to I'm never stuck because I can always generate a lot of ideas. Yeah, that's such a powerful thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's just one idea away but an actionable idea, right? That's the whole concept of this is like. I want to just reiterate the danger of thinking there's only one option only if I get a raise or only if I make X amount of money will then I be happy. Or, you know, like sometimes we make these absolutes instead of attacking the real problem, and that's what this book is trying to guide you. Like, what is the real problem? Are you lacking materially? Oh no, I'm not.
Speaker 1:Then why would money solve anything? Then, what are you okay? What are you lacking materially? Oh no, I'm not. Then why would money solve anything? Yeah, then what are you okay? What are you frustrated about? Like, oh, I don't have control my time. If I may make more money, maybe I can build another business to then free up more, more of my time. Okay, then, money isn't the issue, it's okay, you want to have more time. So it just it breaks down these problems um, just chewable pieces where, okay, like I can solve this one brick at a time and then eventually you'll have a wall, you know. But like you can slowly start building instead of being overwhelmed. That only if this happens will I then be happier. And then you just, you're just stuck. If you have that mindset, you just really are stuck yeah and then you just you're just stuck.
Speaker 2:If you have that mindset, you just really are stuck. Yeah, and you know, it's kind of a funny, a funny phrase that the authors came up with what they call some problems, gravity problems oh yeah, and that's really cool because you know they're.
Speaker 2:They're basically saying, if your problem is so big, like something like gravity, right, like if you're taking a bike ride and you're like, oh, I hate it that it gets really heavy when I'm going uphill, well, that's gonna happen. Like you can maybe try to getting a lighter bike or getting stronger, but it's always going to be there. Gravity is always going to make it hard for you to go uphill. The same thing with some of the the problems that we complain about. Right, like it gives an example of a poet. It's like, oh, writing poetry doesn't pay enough, boy, maybe you'll never pay enough. Like if you're yeah, you're a poet, you're doing it for the love of poetry, like you shouldn't be for money. Those are gravity problems and I think it's very important, when we're analyzing our life and kind of where we feel stuck, that we're not battling this gravity problem because we're not going to win. Like it's just not going to happen. These, these are as big as gravity itself.
Speaker 1:Like you cannot go against it for long and I think a lot of people fall into that mistake.
Speaker 1:You know where well, I can't change my circumstances because because of x, y or z, you know like, and I relate to that because I mean, again, I didn't have the worst upbringing, but I didn't have it easy and I had. I knew a lot of people that, in my opinion, I didn't know everything they're going through, but what they, but, based on what I, what they shared, I didn't feel like their life was that hard, you know like, not that it wasn't hard in their perspective. What I'm trying to get, what I'm trying to get to, is that they get stuck thinking there's nothing they can do, like their circumstances are defining them, instead of acknowledging okay, I can't change this, like, why am I fighting it? Just accept it. What can I change? What can I work on? Okay, like you know, and then attacking that people don't move, thinking that, oh well, this is my situation, poor me, woe is me. You know like, but in reality, like, like, when you accept it, you can then do something else to change it and that's I mean.
Speaker 2:That's one of the first steps to designing your life. The next one would be getting into the thick of it, talking about Odyssey plans. Oh, yes. And before we get into that, actually I like this little paragraph where it says we all contain enough energy and talents and interests to live many different types of lives, all of which would be authentic and interesting and productive, asking which life is best is asking a silly question. It's like asking whether it's better to have hands or feet.
Speaker 2:And I go back to the idea that inside of us or maybe that's a weird funny way of putting it but within our interests and what we can be good at, we can end up in different careers or in different cities or in different you know even countries and we can be good at. We can end up in different careers or in different cities or in different you know even countries, and we can be perfectly happy and productive. So stop hanging on to this idea. There's only one way. There's only one way that Hoyle or Carlos will have a productive and happy life.
Speaker 2:There's multiple ways, and that's one of the dysfunctional beliefs that people fall prey to is know they mentioned here I need to figure out my best possible life, to make a plan and then execute it. But in finding out the best possible life, they never actually get anywhere because they there's just too many like there's the reframe would be there are multiple great lives and plans within me and I get to choose which one to build my way forward to next. That's it. Just find out what the next three to five years, I think. I think that's the time period that the authors share, like below. Three is maybe too short to make a significant change. But after five, you know, maybe it's too long to for you to like hurry and actually get things done.
Speaker 1:But you know three to five years is a good time period yeah, and I I mean, I completely agree with what you're getting to is like these little tidbits, these little pieces of advice that the authors are giving, can just really be powerful if you put them into practice. Um, there's a let me see, there's a an experience here, or, as I say, an experience in that maybe we can. I can share it real quick about the melanie she was. She taught sociology and liberal arts and there was a thing she wanted us, she wanted to do, and and I'm not going to share the whole experience but, long story short, she wanted 15 million dollars to make a big change in her small college and she spent so much time to try to do this, and not that she could have never, ever reached this goal. She probably could have, but it would have spent so much time for this one goal.
Speaker 1:But she reanalyzed that she was being stuck unnecessarily, that she found a different route where she could still have an impact in her college and ended up being something with dorms and the real problem she wanted to attack was wanting to make a lasting impact on her college through social innovation, not funding an institute. She even acknowledged that she doesn't even know where she got the $15 million price tag, she said. She just thought about it one day and she thought that that's what she needed to do. So it just taught me this lesson that if we reframe the problems and use curiosity and prototype different problems and use it here, he says, by reframing the problem, using curiosity, prototyping, in a little radical collaboration, melanie made a permanent change in the campus culture. So just changing, reframing whatever problem we're feeling, things that we're being frustrated by, yeah, just just. Just change the perspective and then attack that and see what results happen.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think, actually, you brought up a perfect story to illustrate this idea of prototyping. Right, because when you think of a prototype, I mean personally, before reading this book, I thought of architects. Right, when they create, or when they're about to build a building, they create this little model of it. Maybe that's a model, not a prototype, but you know, products usually have prototypes, you know. So, if you're creating a cell phone, maybe before you even spend money on, you know, making the real one, you're going to have multiple prototypes. Test them out, talk to people, see which one they like more.
Speaker 2:Well, the same thing with our life. Right before we spend the amount of money to it takes to build a skyscraper, or maybe build a small model and see how it looks, do you like it? Would you change something? It would be a lot more expensive to change the way a building is going to look once it's already built than it would once it's on the table and you just you can touch it and see and play with it. Well, the same thing, you know. For example, she wanted 15 or 50 million dollars. It was 15 million dollars, yeah, yeah, it's a crazy amount. If she would have tested her idea before, maybe she could have done some of that stuff for less.
Speaker 2:The same thing with us, right? Like if we think that we hate where we're at, we don't like what we're doing, oh, but in order to be happy, I need to move to Europe, work in this fancy corporate job, make a lot of money and have a beautiful home. Well, that's probably not going to happen, right? You need to find a way to make that smaller and more achievable. Maybe start with one, maybe. Okay, first is getting a corporate job. I need to find that. Then it's maybe moving to Europe, and if you bite down those ideas you have, you might be able to actually get somewhere.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because you can overwhelm yourself with these gigantic changes you want to make. With these gigantic changes you want to make, and at the end of this chapter he highlights how a lot of people are paralyzed by fear of that change he mentions. It's a pretty common paradoxical human behavior. Change is always uncertain and there is no guarantee of success, no matter how hard you try. It makes sense to be fearful. The way forward is to reduce the risk and the fear of failure by designing a series of small prototypes to test the waters. So just highlighting your point that sometimes we're overwhelmed with the big goal we want to achieve. But just start small, make little prototypes to get you there and then you'll with with time. Potentially you could get there. I truly think you could, it's just. But if you make it too big you might overwhelm yourself and paralyze yourself and you do nothing and you're just stuck again.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's kind of a scary idea for someone like me, as we mentioned in previous books and in previous episodes. You know I don't feel like I'm a creative person, so sometimes when you feel like you're not creative, you miss out on some of these. You know important lessons. You know, for example, like one of the big warnings I got from this book was most people fail not for lack of talent, but for lack of imagination. And that's that's the reality, right like when we look at people that maybe don't get to where they want to be, it's not because they didn't have the talent to do it, it's because maybe they got stuck on one way of doing it. They wanted to get from point a to point b, but maybe it was point a to point c, to point d, then to point b. And if we start reframing that and using our imagination, we might be able to get what we want more.
Speaker 1:And the book encourages to do mind mapping. I had a lot of fun with this exercise personally. I think if anyone puts this into practice, it's really fun. The way they encourage about doing this mind map is to put a central focus in the center, and maybe you've done it before at school or whatever. I I don't remember doing it. On this, I mean, I kind of have an idea of it, but yeah, it's like I did it a lot, but practically speaking, it's it's uh, it's fun, but it connects different ideas and it makes you see how you can achieve whatever goal you're trying to get to by creating all these different ideas to get there.
Speaker 2:And it's a little tidbit that I thought was useful yeah, I mean the book kind of flows and it's interconnected. Unfortunately I didn't have the time to do some of these exercises, but I do plan on doing it in the next couple of days, and the first one we discussed was finding the things you enjoy, logging them, you know, writing them down. Once you have those things you enjoy, you can might be able to get some ideas to brainstorm and put into the mind map that you're discussing right where you just start writing ideas.
Speaker 2:If, for example, if one of your, your things was biking in the mountains, you might write down different activities or careers or things that come up to your head when you think of that. And the trick here, according to the authors, is to put a time period that way you don't overanalyze and to not judge. Just write down whatever comes to your head. You know, as long as it's related, you know it's in there, just put it down. The first step is just to get the ideas on paper or on a whiteboard or wherever it is you're using. Once you have those, then maybe you can start, you know, finding some patterns. You know some of the things that are the main things that interest you, right? And once you have that, you can create what they mention in the Odyssey plan.
Speaker 2:And these are three different, at least three different unrelated plans that you can do. Right, it's not plan A, plan B, plan C, it's not like your favorite, your least favorite, and going down. These are three things that you would love to do, but they're in conflict with each other. They might take place in a different country or in a different setting, or just involve a completely different career path and the way you end up doing them is just put them down. Write them down on paper for the next five years, what you'll be doing and they can't be related right Like it gives an example of if you want to be like a stockbroker and you write down your life of okay, I'm going to work at a finance company, move to New York, do these things for the next five years. Okay, well, if the stock market closed down and there was no more stocks, what was your next plan? What?
Speaker 1:else would you do.
Speaker 2:If that didn't work anymore, what else would you do? And then that's when you create your second, totally different life plan and odyssey plan.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and with this exercise you attack this dysfunctional belief that I need to figure out my best possible life, make a plan and then execute it. The reframe is there are multiple great lives and plans within me and I get to choose which one to build my way forward next. So I think, this exercise allows you to do this. It allows you to admit to yourself well, there's actually multiple things I like doing and I probably would enjoy doing so. You don't feel overwhelmed.
Speaker 1:If something doesn't work, you're like okay, well I tried it it was fun, the lessons I learned, but what else can I do? Well, you have other ideas you can work on and then work, work from there up exactly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think we're getting to a pretty. It's a short chapter, but it's actually a pretty cool chapter because it completely goes against what I thought. The name of the chapter is how not to get the job.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, that was a great chapter. I mean, you get there.
Speaker 2:And you know to anyone listening when you think about the process of getting a job or at least what I thought the process of getting a job was. You know you go online, you look for job posts, you submit your resume, your cover letter, you write an email, you call them and you wait for an interview. And if you're really serious about a job, you might follow up, give them another email seeing if they're going to do anything. Unfortunately, what I learned is that 90% of job seekers use that same method, but it has a success rate of less than 5%, which means if I submit 20 job applications, maybe one will actually call me back and schedule an interview call me back and you know, schedule interview.
Speaker 1:yeah, that this was like eye-opening, you know personally, uh, because yeah, you can go indeedcom, right, and it's like, oh, there's work for days, right, like there's so many job posts. And something that he highlighted was that these large companies typically post their most interesting jobs internally, only visible to those that work in the company. And you also highlighted a lot of this is not politics. What is it called Like, where they just do it publicly so they don't get sued. They'll do a job listing, they'll interview a couple of people, but they already have a choice in mind. Yeah, it's like como tipo politica, you know, like I gotta do this legally, so I gotta give people options and technically, if you already have someone in mind, you have an argument. Why?
Speaker 2:because you know their, their experience yeah, yeah, yeah, right, yeah, but he calls it a phantom job listing. Yeah, phantom job yes fake job, like you think you're applying for a job, but they already have someone in mind that they want to give that job to and that like broke my heart a little bit.
Speaker 1:I think a lot of people like that, like love, oh man, this is a perfect job for me, you know, and they do all this work. And then, yeah, actually sorry, the job has been taken for the past three weeks. We just got to do this, so you don't sue us.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I mean that can be especially heartbreaking if you feel I mean a lot of people feel this. I mean I haven't applied for a job in a while, but I feel like sometimes when I did, I was like this is the perfect job, like this, is it Like my experience would make sense. I think I could do this job just to not hear back, you know, for months and then eventually you learn that they're not going to call you back. Well, imagine how it must feel like if you're an executive like applying for Google, facebook or one of those you know big companies that have a lot of different applicants, right, and a lot of them are not only qualified but overqualified for the job that they're searching. And it mentioned that it's not really because these companies are mean and evil.
Speaker 2:Right, it's really hard, it's a difficult process to hire the right fit, but the way it's worked out, the way the risk and reward is, you know, set out, it's kind of really risky for a big company or any company to hire the wrong person.
Speaker 2:Hiring wrong can be costly, you know you can get sued, you know, terminated incorrectly, you end up paying a lot of money and, if you also think about it.
Speaker 2:If you're posting a job, it's because you need some work to get done. So not only do you run that risk, but also, if you hire the wrong person, you are missing out on them doing the right, like the work that you needed. So what that does for a Google or a Facebook or a big company, even your local area, is that they might even let go of a couple great candidates just because they can't risk it. They're looking for that one that perfectly. It doesn't mean that they don't make risk it. They're looking for that one that perfectly. It doesn't mean that they don't make mistakes, but they're looking for that one that in their mind, it's the lowest risk to reward ratio, where it's just going to work out. This is going to be a great fit from day one, and even if you would have been a great fit, they might be willing to lose you because they have a long list of other applicants waiting.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and one of the points that these that this book highlight or gave me some insight in, is that a lot of these job postings are are designed in a way where, like, it sets up the applicant to fail almost, because they're almost like wishful thinking oh I want this perfect employee, so you're asking way too much. You know, I've actually been in that circumstance before in New York when I worked for this dealership or company, not dealership this automotive photography company and I was part of the hiring process where I had to hire people, you know, interview them, see if it would be a fit. I mean, this is a, I mean it was a fairly large company but but the quality of candidates were quite low, the pay wasn't amazing. So, you know, a lot of people who applied were people that just are trying to use it as a transition, trying to get out of the funk or whatever.
Speaker 1:So for me, like as the hire, as the interviewee or no interviewer, it was like exhausting bro, like I remember, like hating it because I keep repeating myself and then and then people like are just bad employees and then they get the fire. I'm able to redo this all over again. So for me, like it gave me some insight of why maybe they create these hire within situations, even though maybe in your case you're a great employee and hard working. But like being the guy hiring man, it was so exhausting, like if I could, just there's someone I could hire with and I would have, honestly because because of how exhausting it is, yeah, there's something to be mindful of that the odds are against you, but this book gives good practical advice of what you could do if you're trying to still do it the I guess old-fashioned or the or the way everyone does it through the internet yeah, and one of the things they if you are going to do it that way, the Internet is going to be your source of employment.
Speaker 2:You're going to do applications and submit resumes Is it stress the importance of having a strong LinkedIn and Google profile? Right, if you know how to use LinkedIn and make those connections, you're going to be a lot. How to use LinkedIn and make those connections, you're going to be a lot more likely to find a good job and one that you end up getting the interview, at least the interview, and possibly the job offer One main thing that I wanted to mention now is kind of another scary statistic is in the United States, only 20% of all jobs available are posted on the internet, or anywhere for that matter.
Speaker 2:So when we're thinking about being successful, about, you know, submitting a resume and a cover letter, a lot of the jobs that you're getting access to in Indeed or all these other you know hiring websites, are not going to be the great jobs. The great jobs, as you mentioned, they're going to be filled in internally, by word of mouth, you know, or you just have the connection with someone in the authority to give that job. So if you have to do it that way, you know you can take some steps to improve your chances. But essentially, what you want to do is get access to that other 80% of jobs and I mean I want to get into what we can do to do that. But I don't know if you have any thoughts on that fact that only 20% of jobs are posted on the internet.
Speaker 1:For me that could be scary, but it can also provide hope. Right, that means that there is a job out there or a career that majority of the population doesn't have access to. But this book gives you advice of how to gain access through networking and we're probably going to hit that point later but for me it can provide some hope, thinking like, okay, well, no one's responding to my emails, my cover letters, all this other stuff, all this work I'm doing. Sometimes it can be disheartening and may paralyzing. You don't do anything else. But this stat can may motivate you like, okay, I got gotta do things differently. Like, let's not apply this way, let's let's try another route, and maybe you want to go into that other route yeah, because you know, I wanted to highlight that point, or what we're discussing in the beginning of the chapter.
Speaker 2:It talks a little bit about kurt's life. Right, and Kurt was a Yale graduate, and not only that, but I think he did a two-year fellowship in Stanford as well. So this was a highly educated individual. But he had to move from Silicon Valley to Atlanta because he was having a baby and he wanted to move closer to his wife's family. So in that move he decided, okay, I need a job. Obviously he failed. You know, due to his degrees, that he was gonna have an easy time and he worked really hard. He submitted 38 applications the the good, old-fashioned way of, you know, just emailing your resume with I've done that I've done it was a numbers game, unfortunately even for someone like kurt, highly educated from fancy universities.
Speaker 2:He got eight no's and 30 nothings, like they didn't even bother responding imagine our odds, bro. Yeah so that's kind of the the reality. If you're looking for a job and you only have less than a 5% success rate but not only that you're missing out on 80% of the jobs out there you're going to have a hard time. It doesn't mean it's impossible. I mean I've gotten a job the good, old-fashioned way before.
Speaker 1:You've done it as well too.
Speaker 2:But I would never say that I got a dream job right away from any of these places. Those are not the ones that make it to the online posts. So how do you get the ones that do make it there? Well, it talks about getting live design interviews or doing some live design interviews, and this is, to me, the main point that I want to take with me from the book doing more live design interviews. Do you want to kind of explain what those are?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so live design interviews is speaking to people, reaching out to people that are living the life you want to live or you respect in the career field that you enjoy, and the whole concept is you're not calling them or email them to get a job. You're not like selfishly like, oh hire me. No, like what they're encouraging is genuinely invite them for a coffee. Let me see if I can pull up the actual, because he provides like word for word, where you can even email them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, as you're doing that, you know, I wanted to mention kurt a little bit, okay because, he brings him back into this, this point of the book.
Speaker 2:Right, he was not happy after the those 38 failures. We could say, right, he applied for 38 jobs. He got eight no's and 30 nothings. But then he had remembered the lessons that he learned from this class. So what he started doing was doing some live design interviews. So he contacted people in the area, not as an interview and not as saying, hey, do you have any openings?
Speaker 2:That probably wouldn't have worked, but just kind of a conversation. You know, like, how, what do you do? How did you get there? You know, being more interested in what they were doing instead of, you know, appearing interesting and kind of selling himself. Well, in that process, we could say accidentally, with 56 conversations that were probably very enjoyable, he got seven different high quality job offers and included was one dream job. Right, look, we can call this like maybe not a fantasy dream job, but like a really, really good job. All from doing 56 of this, from 38, he got nothing, but for a little bit more he got eight quality offers, and that's kind of the benefit of taking this approach to looking for work, even though it's going to be a lot slower. You might feel like you're not making enough progress, it's. The success rate of doing this method is a lot higher.
Speaker 1:And I think the reason for the success rate being so high is because one you put a lot of these resumes that these chapters kind of highlight is that no one, no one, sees a physical resume anymore. It's, it's all you know. They, they, it's key word base, key search word base. But in this case you're sitting in front of somebody who doesn't have to impact your life, but could has a potential to do so, and you get get to express your passion, get to show interest in them, get them talking, expressing their passion and highlights how a lot of them brought it up to him. Right, like oh, you seem very interested in this. Are you looking for a position? Like they offer themselves? And I think that's such a cool little hack.
Speaker 1:And the thing is don't go again. The advice isn't do this maliciously, right, like oh, I'm doing it, you know, for my own personal game only. Yeah, but if you, if you just do it for the goal of learning and growing and seeing how they did it, how do they make it to their position? Yeah, one at least, at least bare minimum, gives you guidance of what to do next. Oh well, they did this, they, they, they, they shadowed a career here for a little bit, and that's something I can do.
Speaker 2:It gives you an actionable thing to do, yeah and no go ahead, no go ahead I was gonna say something the book doesn't mention, but I think it's important in this case is to be genuine right, if you go into this live design interviews, thinking they're a job interview, like you're gonna start selling yourself and saying when you're a good fit, they're gonna read right through it they're're going to be like. Okay, what Carlos or Joel wants is to get a job. Unfortunately, like when they decide that their mentality is going to change completely, now they're judging you.
Speaker 2:Now they're like is this the right fit for this? And if they have openings it might work. But you just decrease your chances, whereas if you go into this interview kind of thinking I'm going to meet this interesting person that's doing something that I find interesting and I'm going to learn more about them and nothing's going to come out of it, a lot of times something will, and if it happens to be that in the conversation you know everything's going really well and you feel like you know what I'm going to go for it, I'm going to take this risk. It's a higher risk. You should wait for them to initiate it from a genuine conversation, but I found I think what you were referring to.
Speaker 2:It says you can tell them the more I learn about XYC company and the more people I meet here, the more fascinating it becomes. I wonder what steps would be involved in exploring how someone like me might become a part of this organization and the way he you phrase that is very important. Right, because you might feel tempted to just be like, oh, are there any job openings? That's not the right answer, because he can easily just say no, kind of a default answer just, oh no, there isn't in the other question.
Speaker 2:It's more of an open-ended question. Right, like he might tell you, oh, the first step is to get this degree or get this license or, you know, do something else that you haven't done. Or he might tell you actually, you know, there's nothing right now, but stay in touch, maybe in the next couple of months something comes up. We can, we should do this again, um, and if you do that 50, 60 times, it's going to be a lot more fruitful than if you submit 60 different random resumes online that they may be able to see, maybe they don't. You know, I saw something funny in a movie once where they had a stack of resumes and the hiring manager it's kind of like it's supposed to be a funny scene but he, um, he gets rid of half. He's like what do you mean you're getting rid of? How? You're not even reading them? He's like those? That half is unlucky.
Speaker 1:I don't want to hire an unlucky person the odds are against him if he landed in the bottom half of the.
Speaker 2:It sounds funny, but even if they're actually taking their time to analyze, it might end up being luck at the end. It might end up being something like that yeah, the odds are just against you.
Speaker 1:The thing is they're not like. They're not like, they're not going to spend that time because by doing so they're sacrificing whatever their other job is like. That's, their job isn't just to hire people, they have other responsibilities. The odds are just severely against you when you just apply the old fashioned way. But there is so much value of just reaching out. I want to talk about the bad rep the word networking has. How do you like, especially you, right? You work in the real estate world, right, and I feel like networking is something that's talked about a lot in the real estate world and the dysfunctional belief says networking is just hustling people. It's slimy. Before I give the reframe personally, is this something you've experienced yourself, like being in that world where networking helps a lot in real estate and all that good stuff? Like, what's your opinion on this? Or was your opinion until you read this book?
Speaker 2:Well, there's a common saying amongst real estate investors and that is your net worth is your network or your network? Is your network Right? And that kind of highlights the points that they give Right. The more people you know that are doing the things that you're doing, the more likely that you'll come across deals or different opportunities that you can partake in. But I definitely like Resonated with the with this functional belief right, because I personally am not very good at networking. I'm hoping to become better after reading this book and applying some of this uh lessons. As I mentioned, my main takeaway is doing more design life interviews, so I want to meet with people that are doing cool things. Maybe take them out to coffee, lunch and kind of see what they're doing, kind of like how they're doing it, what's going on how do you?
Speaker 2:get there. That's gonna, you know, kind of tick two boxes for me. One is I'm gonna get to meet cool people in their careers, but also at the same time I'm gonna be networking and, and you know, getting to meet some of the people that are doing cool stuff here in the local area.
Speaker 1:But now I don't know if you had any beliefs on networking, because I know that you network as well too. Yeah, I think what this book is helping me adjust is even my mindset with networking. I think that's the key thing to do better at networking. I, in my core, I felt the way this is described, right, that I'm just trying to hustle people, right, and that's bad, because you won't get a genuine connection with people, you won't like you can read into people's uh, that vibe that they're giving off. They just want something from you. They don't, they're not genuinely interested in you, they're not trying to help you go anywhere, they just want something for them. And I think, maybe unknowingly, that's how I approach networking, where it's like, back of my mind, that's in my head what are you going to give me? And that's such a bad mindset, right, that's such a bad mindset? Um, yeah, because it's just not genuine. I mean it becomes slimy, right, but the the reframe, if I may, may, I can give it now.
Speaker 1:The reframe the book provides, or the authors provide, is that networking is just asking for directions and the way he they further describe this situation is is like that experience of that.
Speaker 1:You're walking down in your local area and someone slows down and asks for directions and you give them directions to the local coffee shop entertainment, wherever they're going to go. After that interaction, you don't feel used right, if anything. You feel like, oh, I wasn't planning to do something good today, but look at that, I did something good today. I helped somebody get where they were going and I think this brought me some relief where, if I view that, if I view networking that way, not only can I help people right, because sometimes, even in your case, like in our personal circumstances, maybe we can help people, our personal circumstances, maybe we can help people, but we feel like no, well, like I gotta like take care of whatever knowledge I have and really create like this cage it's all mine. You're actually pushing people away from your personal growth. You know, giving is the best way to do it. If you, if you give, you will get more in return.
Speaker 1:And and I think, readjusting my mindset of seeing networking as, like we all acknowledge our circumstance, we're just all trying to be better, not by being crooked or slimy, but genuinely. I genuinely want to grow, but I also want to help you if there's any way I can grow and that will create a better interaction with whoever you're trying to network with.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think they put a great example, because I start to think about this example of someone asking you for directions and having been on both sides of that coin, right. Like there's times where maybe I've been lost in a new town or you know, asking someone, oh, what's a good coffee shop? I mean that's a that. Oh, what's a good coffee shop? I mean that's, that's another version of that. Like you're in, you're in a town, you're not a local, but you have someone that you know which is a total stranger and they seem like they would know. So you ask them hey, what coffee do you recommend around here? They're happy to help you. But if it's the other way, right. If someone's asking you, oh, what coffee do you recommend in your local town, you're happy to help them too. Right, you don't lose anything.
Speaker 2:It doesn't mean that next day you're going to talk on facebook or facetime and be best friends. It's a very low risk, uh, low level interaction. You're not going to become best friends with these people as a matter of fact. That's the reason that can happen, like if you knew that after answering this person's question, you had to talk to them the next day and the following day. You might not, you might not want all of that, but if you I mean it mentions here most of us like being helpful.
Speaker 2:It's hardwired into our DNA. We are social creatures and helping one another is one of the things that makes us feel best. There's more happiness, you know, in giving to others than it is in receiving. But if you understand that in both ways, it might free you up to network a bit more and do some of these life design interviews, right? Because if you understand that, hey, as long as I'm not putting a lot of pressure in this person that I want to meet for coffee or for lunch and I'm just interested in what they're doing, I'm not going to, you know, become their best friend. I'm not going to bother them every week with more follow-ups. And, hey, do you have any job openings?
Speaker 2:Hey, do you have any job openings, then there might be a great chance that they are willing to go and meet for a Starbucks and kind of discuss how they got into their career or they got. You know, for example, you how you got into podcasting or how did you move, you know, across a different country. You know like you can also provide value during these conversations and don't say like, oh, I'm just taking, taking, taking, it's going to be an interchange of this value.
Speaker 1:And then you start with that mindset of what can I provide? First, you know I mentioned like, and it could be something like as simple as buying a coffee. Like you're providing some sort of value, like, hey, like I just want to buy you coffee, a little lunch, a little light lunch, those little things that we do, taking that initiative to give first, might open doors for them to reciprocate giving back to you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and this is the main point that I didn't want to miss on this next chapter and is we need to reframe our job search for an offer search? Oh, yes, and you really like, let's say you desperately need a job. You moved into this new town, bills are coming up, you have a little bit of savings left and you just need a job. As long as it fits your schedule and what you're trying to do, you're going to take it. But that puts a lot of pressure on both of you right On the person interviewing you, because they're trying to decide what the best fit for this job is, and on yourself. You might start maybe not lying, but exaggerating and being oh yeah, I'm the perfect guy for this, like I've done this my whole life.
Speaker 1:Of course I'm a doctor.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you end up in a position where you don't actually enjoy what you're doing. If you have the luxury and what I mean by that is if no one's coming up to collect the bill or kick you out of your home then you should strive to do an offer search and get as many offers as you can and, yeah, that ends up being more authentic, energetic, persistent and playful while you pursue your next position or opportunity. Because, at the end of the day, people don't hire a resume, no matter how good it looks. They hire people.
Speaker 2:So if you start meeting with people, connecting with them, trying to see if they have any offers, instead of oh, I'm trying to get this job. It's going to be much less pressure and there's it's much more likely that you'll end up getting hired for the position yeah, and something that made me think when I was reading this is the impact.
Speaker 1:sometimes we view this as a one-way transaction, like they're the ones offering the job and I need the job, right, so you feel like kind of vulnerable. But you know, I think this book made me think about the reality of how you should interview them as well, like you shouldn't I't? I mean, again, like you mentioned, if you have the privilege of not being under pressure to find work is to interview them. Right, take the initiative. Okay, like, does this actually benefit me? You know, like, like, even if, if the person interviewing you usually they always ask at the end, you know, do you have any questions? Usually people end up like oh, no, no, no, no, I'm good, because you feel like, you feel that vulnerability, like, oh, they have. You know, I can't just ruffle their feathers because they won't hire me, but thinking about these offers is important to be able to. I mean, if you have many offers, this interview doesn't have so much weight, where you can interview them back and see if it's the right fit for you too yeah, exactly so.
Speaker 2:That takes us almost to the end of the book and, to anyone listening, there's a lot more information, a lot more very cool little exercises you can do in the chapters that, due to time, we just couldn't share with you. But in the chapter building a team, it we just couldn't share with you. But in the chapter building a team, it talks about the importance of having people around you that help you design this life, and it could be career, you know, professional relationships, but it could also be just your friends and family and the information they give, the counsel they provide. You know something that I really enjoyed about this chapter. It kind of broke down something that I had never differentiated, which is counsel and advice. When I think of advice and counsel, I thought they were synonyms.
Speaker 2:If someone gives you counsel or someone gives you advice, it's the same thing. Well, the authors here made a distinction between the two, and here's here the definition to start this conversation. It says counsel is when someone is trying to help you figure out what you think. Advice is when someone is telling you what he or she thinks, and it gives you a very good recipe for knowing if you're hearing advice or counsel. It says anytime you hear, if I were you, you're getting advice. If someone says, if I were you, what he really means is if you were you, you're getting advice. If someone says, if I were you, what he really means is if you were me.
Speaker 2:And that's how you know it doesn't mean that it's bad, right, because if you're talking to someone you trust, someone that has the same values as you. Advice is fine.
Speaker 2:The authors say advice is fine to get. You just want to be very careful about actually taking it. And the reason you want to be careful is not because they mean you harm, is because, as it mentions, they're telling you what they would do, but their life is different. So maybe in your circumstances you gotta, you know, take more things into consideration. And that's, that's the first bit unadvised.
Speaker 1:I don't know if you want to mention something before we move on to counsel I think that when I was reading this, it also reminded me, like because the whole point is building that team around you that pushes you forward, right, that helps you and you can help them. Um, it also just remind me that the the dangers of having maybe you think you have a team around you, right, like, you think you have that team around you, right, like, you think you have that team, but reality they're holding you back, you know, and and that's a hard pill to swallow, you know cause? Maybe you grew up with these friends all your life, or, um, you know what have you, the team that you have around you, but they can be the biggest anchor or the biggest propeller for you to go forward, right, like, and that's why it's important to build those people around you, and this book highlights the importance of supporters, players and people who are intimate. It breaks them apart from each other. What they are and I think the one that I related to the most or not the one that I thought was really valuable, is almost is players.
Speaker 1:Even though it's short, it says players are the active participants in your life, design projects, especially your ongoing work-related and avocational projects, and prototypes. These are the people you actually do things with your coworkers in the classic sense, so those people you're surrounded by that you're trying to reach certain goals, they can again hold you back or push you forward. I think that was something that I'm trying to be really mindful of and, even though it's a hard thing to do, to not let go of people, because you can still be friendly and check them, check up on them once in a while, but not let their opinion or the way they may they're unsatisfied with life hold us hold, hold me back too yeah, yeah, because a lot of times you can have the best interest, like you know, it gives an example here of an er emergency doctor who advises everyone he knows don't ever ride a motorcycle.
Speaker 2:Why does he do it? Because he's more than anyone seen the results that could come, you know. I mean, it's plain and simple. Motorcycles are a lot more dangerous. If you have an accident motorcycle it's much more likely to result in casualty than in a car or a truck. Now, there's enough.
Speaker 2:There's another side to this, and that someone it is a fine artist, a successful artist mentioned that what he was motorcycling is when he gets his ideas and that has resulted in a lot of beautiful paintings. So does the advice of the doctor, you know, is it bad advice? Maybe not, but maybe this fine artist is not going to take it because it still provides a lot of value in his life and it's worth that risk. Well, the same thing with us, right? You can hear advice and you can take it as what it means. Someone cares about you and you know, as long as they're not really giving you bad advice, you know it comes from the best heart. Like you know, they care about you and you know, as long as they're not really giving you bad advice. You know it come from the best heart.
Speaker 2:Like you know, they care about you, they want you to do good, but maybe they just don't understand everything that's implied in it.
Speaker 2:And I personally like when I read this, this book, it kind of propelled me to seek counsel more than advice.
Speaker 2:Right, because the difference with counsel is that is when someone's trying to help you figure out what you think right, and it's more like it's totally different than advice, where it's not oh, do this, it's more like oh well, have you stopped to think about this? Have you meditated on this point? Have you taken this into consideration? You know they might remind you of things that you're not taking into consideration when making this decision, but they still give you that freedom or maybe not, we shouldn't call it freedom but that responsibility of making the final decision on you. And the reason I really like that is because if you take advice, let's say, from someone you really trust, like a parent or a teacher, take advice right, let's say from someone you really trust, like a parent or a teacher and along the way you find difficulties, you might not be able to overcome them because you might start looking back and be like, hey, you told me to take this road and now?
Speaker 2:there's a bear right in front of me like, whereas if you took that road and you realize, okay, there might be a bear coming up.
Speaker 2:Well, you you can do what it takes to fight that bear and, you know, overcome it. You know counsel is a bit more valuable to me at this point in life because it doesn't rob me of that responsibility. I still know that, whatever I choose after meditating on it and you know, analyzing all the information that I had to, I have to live with, you know I'm the one that's responsible for that decision.
Speaker 1:And it also reminds you of maybe, how you give advice right or personally. For me to, I think there is more value in putting ourselves in someone else's shoes and seeing, instead of, like you mentioned, what I would do in your shoes or what would you do if you're me.
Speaker 1:Instead of doing that, be like sitting down and actually meditating on them. And I think something loving to do even like if someone. Something I'm going to try to practice, maybe going forward is that if someone does come up to me and may ask for some advice for whatever reason, right, I don't have a lot of advice to give, but if someone did, maybe given the validation of like okay, I hear you, let me chew on this and I'll get back to you. Sometimes for me, especially because I talk so much ADHD or whatever I feel like I have to give them a response in the moment. But I think something caring to do is to like step back, like, okay, I'm hearing you, I'm sorry you're going through this or what I have. You let me sit down and meditate and see if I can find some counsel I could give you, instead of a quick answer that's not loving or beneficial to anyone that's.
Speaker 2:That's. That's a good takeaway as well, because I imagine you you give a lot of advice, or a lot of you know counsel. You're a great source of wisdom for a lot of people.
Speaker 1:No, man, I've just gone through a lot of. I've made a lot of mistakes. I think that's why, okay, maybe we can end with, like our last, you know one last quote each, or something, or what do you think? Yeah?
Speaker 2:yeah, let's do it. Um, something I found interesting were kind of the, the conclusion of the chapter. And well, actually, before I give my conclusion, I really like this dysfunctional belief and reframe because you know, once you read this book, or you know at least once you listen to this episode and you take some takeaways and you're like, okay, I want to try doing this, whether it is in my career search, a new job search, or just in life in general, I want to, you know, use some of these tools to reframe some ideas and kind of propel forward. You're never going to get there right because this dysfunctional beliefs I finished designing my life, the hard work is done and everything will be great. Now I can just lay back and relax, but the reframe, the more reasonable reframe would be, you never finish designing your life.
Speaker 2:Life is a joyous and never-ending design project of building your way forward and it's it's exactly the way it is right. Because you know I don't know if this has happened to you, but maybe when it comes to work, you can be in a stage of your life where, okay, this is doable, like I really enjoy doing this, but maybe three years on the line, okay, this is not it anymore. If you're constantly designing, you're never going to be in that position where like, oh I, I don't like this again. You know, like, don't, don't sleep, sleep there, just keep designing and you'll have the life that you're really looking for. And that leads me to my last thought, which is this idea of always being curious. Right, there's something interesting about everything, and I think that kind of resonates with the idea behind this podcast. We are finding lessons in different books, and we are not literature experts.
Speaker 1:We're not the ones that you know break it down, the theme and all the author like what he intended and what he meant.
Speaker 2:Um, but we're just getting lessons. We're curious. There's. There's something to learn from every book. Uh, we don't have the time to go over all of them, but we're going to go over the ones that we find interesting. And something that's interesting here it's nothing is boring to everyone, and that's very true. Like doing taxes might be something that we don't like doing, like we, we hate that process, but maybe there's someone out there that loves to read the tax code and you, you know, knows the ins and outs and just that's. That's his life. He really loves it, and if you have his numbers.
Speaker 2:I can do my taxes. If you have that mentality of you know I can find something interesting about everything. You're going to have a happier life, I feel like.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, no. Those are beautiful concluding thoughts or things that you found so much value in. There was two that maybe we didn't talk about. Oh no, we did.
Speaker 1:But this quote that I, again, I really liked was life is not a problem to be solved, it's an adventure to be lived, and I think that's personally how I'm trying to live my life. I think a lot of it to a lot of the problems we face, or I face personally, is to just view it as what it is a small problem in my life, but not a defining problem. This is where I'm stuck at, or nothing can change. But being enjoying the adventure and I think of, like I'm very happy where I'm at, I'm very grateful, you know how far I've progressed, or whatever, but all the little moments in my life, there's like value in that I remember I look back fondly of that adventure, like I think of you know, those who are listening probably don't know this, but Carlos and I actually worked together at a chocolate store in New York and I had a lot of fun, would I say. Would I want to do that for life? Probably not, you know, but it was fun in that moment, right, there's like this value that I look back and it was.
Speaker 1:There were some hard days, but it was fun. It was fun to me, but it was fun, it was fun to me. Again, I'll just reiterate the thing that I got from that quote that just life is an adventure to be lived is not to be focused. Because we could have been there in that moment, like bro, I'm 22. What am I doing here? Working at this chocolate store, I'm wasting time, whatever right. We could have thought really negatively, but if we saw it more so as oh, this is just a bump in my road, it's getting me, it's, it's a little stair, it's a staircase of my life this is not where I end, and and if you view it that way, your current circumstance isn't so overwhelming.
Speaker 1:It's not like, oh, like this, how my, if you're unhappy right now, I'll be unhappy forever. No like if you view it as, oh, just an adventure. This is a tiny hiccup and it's and I'll get out of it. I'll get out of it somehow some way.
Speaker 2:So I think that's why I like that, that quote there.
Speaker 1:It encourages me to shift my perspective on my current circumstance exactly, and something that you made me think of was you were explaining.
Speaker 2:That is this idea that we discussed in the beginning as well, of the book and is, if you know where you're at and you know where you're going, you don't have to know, like, the way you're gonna get there, right, but you should know the direction, right, like when we were at lint. You know, even even when we were there, maybe we were like, okay, this is not what I want to do for the next 20 years, but we knew that it wasn't in the opposite direction, like we knew that. You know, we just got to pay the bills right now and we're going to try, you know, our best, to find something else in the future. So, as long as you know that, as long as you know, okay, this is not going the opposite direction of where I want to go, the opposite want to go the opposite direction would have been having no job and continuing to increase your debt.
Speaker 1:That would have been the problem exactly, we almost got close to which we felt pretty close to uh, maybe we should do it.
Speaker 2:We should do a book on, you know, debt and I know we should, we should we were pretty close to some mistakes there, but that's it. This is the book you know it has a jacket to it, but if you guys want to want to read it, there's a lot of valuable information and we hope that you've had some value from from this episode yeah, it was a lot of fun, a lot of fun, a lot.
Speaker 1:It was just so much to get out of and, like carlos highlighted, there's a lot of chapters we actually had to jump over to, not so you guys don't hear our voices too long. Thank you for anyone who's listened thus far. We appreciate you. Uh, this is episode number three, and yeah, what's next book? What do we think? That's my choice, right, yeah, it's your choice. You recall I? There is the book recommendation here. I think it's called the paradox of choice I think okay, I think that's what it's titled.
Speaker 1:I'll get back to you to see if that's the book we're going to read. Anyway, thank you for our listeners and we'll see you next week.
Speaker 2:And that wraps up our discussion for this episode.
Speaker 1:We hope you enjoyed diving into this topic as much as we did, if you find value in our conversation. Don't forget to subscribe and leave us a review and share this episode with your friends and anyone else who loves to learn.
Speaker 2:We've got more exciting topics coming up, so stay tuned, thanks for joining us on Re-Enrolled.
Speaker 1:Until next time, keep learning and stay curious.
