Business School Professor: This Is How To Figure Out What To Do With Your Life! (Suzy Welch)

0:00Hey, business besties. Welcome back to Female Founder World. It's Jasmine. I'm the host of the I've ever had on this show. You are. I'm really happy to be here. I'm a mother of four and I've got three crazy dogs. How about that? Okay, well, I'm nearly a mother of two and that feels like enough for now. It is. It is. Okay, let's talk a little bit about your background and your history and how you got to where you are today. We've got some really pointy stuff to focus on in the show, but I want to talk a little bit more about your origin story and your background and how you got here so people understand who you are.

0:42Okay. Well, it seems relevant to say that I'm from Portland, Oregon. That's where I was born. I had a really kind of feral, earthy upbringing with two hippie parents. I mentioned this because my whole life is business now, but I mean, my dad was an architect. My mom was and still is an artist. And we had this hippie-dippie upbringing. And I just very luckily ended up getting sent away to a good boarding school because a teacher suggested it. My mom was like, hey, want to go to boarding school? And I was like, okay. So I ended up going to boarding school and then went off to Harvard where I fell in love with writing for the Daily newspaper and lacrosse and a boy, but it all worked out.

1:18And I ended up working at the Miami Herald as a crime reporter. I mean, life is crazy. Miami Herald was hiring and I was looking for a job. And I learned a lot about life and people that I'm really grateful for as a crime reporter in Miami. But accidentally and serendipitously, I was reassigned to cover business because the business reporter quit. And it was like that Harry Potter scene where he goes over on another platform and discovers there's a whole other world. That happened to me. I discovered business. I was in my early 20s. I was managing 12 people in the newsroom at that point. So I was also a manager.

1:51And I had twinklings of the fact that I had no freaking idea what I was doing. And I fell in love with business. And I remember saying to my family, I think there's this thing called business. And my mom said to me, what they do in those buildings downtown? And I was like, yes, that mom. And to this day, my folks don't really, my mom doesn't really understand what I'm up to in this world, I ended up thinking I needed to know a lot more about business. So I went to business school. I was very lucky, got to Harvard Business School. And after that, my life took off in directions I could have never predicted.

2:21I ended up becoming a business journalist, combining my ability to write and process information with my love of business. I ended up writing books. I met and married my second husband, Jack Welch, who was a CEO. And so I learned even more about business from him. And my life was kind of a combination of those two worlds of writing and of business happily. I was also raising four children along the way. And it was really exciting and fun. It wasn't exactly like how I would have designed my career, but it was good enough because I had a lot of stakeholders in Susie Inc., if you know what I mean.

2:54The kids and my husband and family. And I wasn't really hearing my own voice very loudly in those years. And then life, you know, it has its own story for you. And my husband got sick and he passed away in 2020. Sorry. Yes. Thank you. And it was the period of COVID. We all went into the woods. I went into the woods and I thought I was never coming out. But eventually everybody left the woods. I was literally in a house in the woods with my children and their spouses. And I was asked to come back on the Today Show where I had been working. And I went back to work almost kind of out of a favor to Hoda when they asked me to come on.

3:31And I had this gigantic eureka, which is that the cure for my grief, which I thought was incurable at the time, I really thought this is it for me forever. I'm going to wander in the woods walking my dogs, was work. Like once I was working again, I was like, oh, wait, I was like happy for an hour. And so I decided that's it. I got to go back to work and I got to throw myself into it because I can't keep living like this. It's grief is hard. And I had an idea, a long time idea for a class that I wish I had taken as a young person, which was how to figure out what to do with your life, which I was pretty sure I hadn't quite yet figured out.

4:06I had had two shows on CNBC. One was called Get to Work with Suzy Welch, and the other was called Suzy Welch Fix My Career. And I had been telling people what to do with their lives. And I had this idea about how you could help somebody do that, a methodology, really. And so I created it into a class. And I was talking to my kids one night. And I said, I've got this idea for a class. I don't know what to call it. And my oldest son said, what about becoming you, mom? That's what it's about. It's about becoming who you should be. And I was like, that's the name. I packaged it up. I took it to the dean at Stern, who I knew from my previous life.

4:38And he said, well, try it. And we did. And next thing you know, I'm on the faculty at Stern teaching this now in very large mega sections, along with teaching management. And it became a phenomenon, I guess. I feel very, you know, cringy saying that because it's embarrassing. You know, I don't want to sound like an asshat if you put my French. It is. It is. Because my timing was immaculate, you know, in that people were wondering after the pandemic, I don't want to postpone joy. What do I do with my life? But also much to my amazement and in total credit to a team that I built around me of data scientists and psychometricians and very, very smart people, the methodology really works.

5:15And we have thousands of test cases where it works very well. It helps you figure out what it is you should be doing with your life in a way that's very systematic and science-based. And it's not woo woo. It's sort of people are always told to go live their purpose and no one tells them how. Well, we tell you how. So it ended up going outside the walls of NYU with NYU's blessing. And I teach at NYU, but we also teach it in these three day intensives, these immersive classes. I go around the world and teach it. The book came out. And so that is what I'm doing now. That's how we ended up right here.

5:48I am a founder myself. I founded a music tech company during the pandemic and we ended up selling it, which was great and a great learning experience. It was only 55 people, but we were a mighty fighting band, and we were able to get out alive after the startup. This is a company I'm going to stay with forever, which we call it Becoming You Labs, and it is the group of us, mainly data scientists and other people in technology, creating the tools and building the method so that more people can take it than students at NYU. Now our students range from ages of 16 to 78, and we're finding all sorts of new applications for it in all sorts of settings.

6:29And VCs are starting to use it, and people in private equity use it. And so we're riding that wave and growing. I think it's so incredible that you took it out of the business school because people are asking these questions well beyond their early 20s. Everywhere. I mean, we have a whole group of people who take it and are passionate about it who we call third halfers, who are people sort of 55 who say, OK, I gave my life to the man. I gave my life to now I can own now I can write my own story. What is my story? And we say, well, let us help you write that story. And so there's a whole application for it, you know, in all different places.

7:04It's finding an application in the recovery space where people are coming out of recovery who have had various forms of addiction, who have forgotten who they are. and this is helping them figure out who they are again and what they should do with their lives. We just got a call from a major teaching hospital that would like to use it with people who have had brain injury. And then when we were approached by VC to say, we would love to use this methodology to see if we've got the right founding team, if we've got the right founders working together, do they have the right C-suite? We're like, we would love to help you if that didn't dawn on us, but you're right.

7:38That's an application. Incredible. Yeah. For people who are asking these questions around their own purpose and what they should be doing with their own lives. All of these applications are incredible, I think, for people who are in business. But for people asking those questions about themselves, what are kind of like three things they can think about to help come to that kind of conclusion? So if you're trying to find your purpose, I'm really systematic about this. Please don't hate me for it. I'm very, very like, you know, methodological, like, you know, you cannot pluck this out of the air.

8:05I don't think you should ever have magical thinking when it comes to your purpose. You have one wild and precious life. So we excavate three data sets, if you will, your values, which no one actually knows their values. People generally think values are virtues, which they're not, or they think values are either like my family and financial security, but there's actually 16 values. So we excavate what your values actually are and how much you have of each one. Then your aptitudes, and I'm talking about your cognitive, your intellectual aptitudes, which are actually good at, not sort of good at, but very good at.

8:36And then your emotional aptitudes are just your personality, which we codify. I mean, your personality is not the words you use to describe yourself in every case. Because if you ask people to describe themselves, they say things like, I'm kind, I'm loyal, I'm a very good listener, but we've got to figure out how the world experiences you. So the second data set is your true aptitudes. And then the third are your economically viable areas of interest. What kind of work calls you intellectually and or emotionally, but also will pay you what you want to be paid according to your values around affluence.

9:08And so we get very clear on those three data sets. And then we have a tool that figures out the intersection and basically hands you five jobs. So this is the work that sometimes takes our entire lives to do. We kind of do this zigging and zagging, you know, all the way through our lives, a little of this, a little of that. And sort of when we're 55, we figure it out, but this can sort of get you there faster. Amazing. What questions can somebody ask themselves? Obviously, we want people to go on and do, you know, do this a little bit more in depth. But as they're listening, what can people ask themselves now to kind of start thinking about this stuff?

9:42Yeah. I mean, in general, we say to people, just take 22 minutes and do the values bridge. But if you don't have 22 minutes and you want to think about it right this minute, I like to ask three questions, which I think can really surface your values and you can use them immediately. So the first question is, what do you want people to say about you when you're not in the room? And you can answer that a lot of different ways, and it's very revealing. So for instance, you could say, I want them to say, I'm an incredible founder who, you know, created a niche where there wasn't one before, and, you know, I'm an inventor.

10:11Or you could want them to say, what a fantastic mother. And these are, you know, you only get to answer one way with this question. And so the first thing that comes to your mind, you know, you've just been in a group of people and you walk out. I have heard everything from that. that woman must be, you know, I'm just giving you some examples of what people said. That woman must be very rich all the way to she's not crazy like her mother, you know, all the way to she saved the family business. What your answer is, is a way, is a real reflection of what one of your values is. I mean, you can answer around family.

10:40You can answer around affluence. You can answer around legacy. There's a lot of different subtleties, but I would ask you to listen to your first answer. You've walked out of room. What do people say about you? You know, she's CEO material. I would lend her money. Or do you want them to be saying, she's so kind? I mean, that is a different, that reflects a different value. You may want them to say 10 things, but the first thing that comes to mind, very revealing. The second question is, what did you love about your upbringing and what did you hate? And this is a question that gets at your values around lifestyle.

11:14And people can say things like, I loved all the love all the time, but I hated the secrecy. Or I love that we lived in an exciting city, but I hated how I didn't have good enough friends. And whatever your answers are to both sides of the love and the hate are values around how you, you want, you want to live. You want to live in accordance to the love part and you want to be living in, you know, differently from the hate part. Now, unfortunately, sometimes we also follow the hate part because family, family narratives are strong. But that's a topic for another podcast. But I would say that those are two really interesting answers.

11:49And the wide variety that I've heard over the past five years doing this work reveals so much about your inner values and how you want to live and build your life. How do you make sure people are honest with themselves when you answer those questions? Because you're saying it. And I think the first response definitely is the most honest. Yes. But then I can convince myself of something else. There's one part of running a business that ChatGPT or Google just can't solve for me. And that is business finance. It is one of the most gatecapped areas of business, and yet it is what separates running a thriving company from really just having a very expensive hobby.

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13:35You know, you ask a brilliant question because this is why we created the Values Bridge, because people lie. People lie to themselves. They lie to themselves. They lie to themselves. And identity issues come in. I mean, I, in my early work in excavating values, didn't have the values bridge. We had to develop it in the lab. And I would see people literally physically manipulate their values, move something up from the bottom of the list to the top because they didn't like the stink off of it. Like, ooh, why does my family, my 10th value, that doesn't feel good, move it up to number one, even though it's not.

14:03So you're right. I mean, look, it's like manufacturing, you know, quality in, quality out. You have to be honest. but people typically aren't. That's why at the beginning I said to you, almost no one knows their values because we separate ourselves from them all the time. Now, the last question though, people tend to be pretty honest on, and that is I ask people to fast forward themselves to their 85th birthday. Some birthday off in the distance when you think I've done, I've been done, I'm done with what I'm, my work, maybe 90th birthday as longevity increases. And a picture of yourself at that birthday and think to yourself, what would make me cry from regret?

14:40Not from joy, from regret. What unfinished piece of work? What unfixed relationship? What unmet goal? And if you could just like close your eyes and allow yourself, okay, I'm at that birthday and I've heard everything from that I'm alone, that I never had kids, that I never started the company, that I never wrote the book, that I never found my soulmate. I think that this reveals a very deep value because I, again, just one answer. What would be the one thing that would make you cry the most at your 85th or 90th birthday from regret? Amazing. I watched a video that you posted a clip on Instagram the other day and you were talking about, you know, don't project your values on me that was kind of the premise of the video and I thought it was really interesting um especially as we kind of think about Gen Z and maybe they're you know shifting values around work and and other parts of life and when you're talking about what you're going to regret on your 85th birthday actually like some of the things that I think about when you're saying that I like very dominant around work and achievement and that's um like something you actually can feel quite uncomfortable to admit to yourself.

15:55Right, because you're supposed to, the common line is that nobody goes to their deathbed saying, I wish I'd worked more. I wish I'd spent, you know, everybody goes to their deathbed saying, I wish I'd spent more time with my family. And my reply to that is, really? Does everybody say the exact same thing on their deathbed? Why must we have some kind of like doctrinaire statement about what everybody is saying? I mean, you know, I think that values are choices. They're not virtues. Everybody agrees about virtues. kindness, integrity, resilience, everyone agrees. These are good. But values are choices.

16:29How much you want to work, if you're not hurting somebody, how much you want to work and how much you want to achieve, that's personal. I am 99 % sure I'm going to be on my deathbed saying, I have one more thing to do. And it's not going to be about, I love my family. I say to my kids all the time, I wouldn't give you one kidney, I could do both. I mean, I love them, but I didn't organize my, I was a working mom. And I said to them, you know, one day you're going to grow up and be gone, but I'm still going to be here. I'm going to work. And I said to them, I'm going to spend my entire life helping you, you be you.

17:00Will you help me be me? And thank God all four of them bought in. I made the case and I did love them. And I was there when it was important, but I suited up every day and went to work. And they understood that was my job. And now they all have wonderful careers and families and they get it. And they saw what I did. It was pretty courageous when I was doing it. I mean, this was, you know, 30 something years ago to basically say, I love my work and I'm not going to be disingenuous about it. We have a lot of women who listen to the podcast and yesterday we had our big end of year summit and I am very visibly pregnant.

17:31So a lot of people came up to me to talk about a lot of fear that they have around starting a family when they have so much ambition and kind of being told that they can't do that. And I'm in the thick of it. I don't have answers for them. You know, I'm kind of like, I'm, I'm very much figuring this out now. All I know is I would not be happy if I wasn't giving everything to my work right now while I'm also building the family. And I kind of thought when I was in my early twenties, I thought there would be a big like work chapter and then there would be a family chapter and these things would be separate.

18:03And now I'm realizing, oh no, that's just life. It all happens at the same time. That's right. It's a little trick of biology, isn't it? In that the years that work needs you and your children need you are the exact same year. So it's 25 to 45. These 20 years, it's like biology just does it to you. Your kids need you heart, mind, and soul. And your work need you heart, mind, and soul. Those 20 years overlap for women. And nobody, look, they told me I couldn't do it either. And I said, just watch. I was so mad that they were. Now, look, it was freaking hard. All right. And every single day you suit up like Daenerys to take on the dragons and the world.

18:40And it's not easy. and no woman has cracked this code. I mean, I think we just have to give ourselves grace every single day. The one piece of advice I have is make your decision and live by it. Don't relitigate it every day. Make your decision. If you're gonna work, work, and don't sit there and try to decide every single day. And if you're gonna go home and stay home, go home and stay home and don't doubt it every day. Do a two-year plan. I am going to work full-time for the next two years. We're gonna do our best to accommodate it. It's gonna be a lot of dodging and weaving. There's gonna be a lot of compromises.

19:10There's gonna be a lot of trade-offs. but this is the commitment. I'm not going to relitigate my decision every day because that's what's hard is the sitting there in your mind going over and over again. Like, can I do this? Can I torture yourself all day long, every day? Just, and I made a commitment very early on. I was going to do it. I wasn't going to go home. I couldn't give up my love of my work and of my achievement personality. I was going to be the best mother I could. And so now I'm past it.

19:40My my best friends. And we talk about those years about how hard they were, but we did it together. I mean, I asked my kids to help me and I was going to help them. And we were a little team together. It was, but there were, look, there were plenty of nights. I mean, there were plenty of times I cried alone in my car, as I like to say, you know, you drop the kids off at some kind of practice. You've missed an important meeting at work because of it. And you put your head on your steering wheel and you cry. That's part of it. But that is inescapable. I want to switch gears and talk about this article that has been going pretty viral recently.

20:13Did you say it was like the most read article the last month or something like that? Yes, that's what the editor told me, the most read article in the Wall Street Journal the past month. It's a blessing, a curse. I mean, I'm telling you, I knew that it was going to get attention because its finding was explosive, but every single person has an opinion about Gen Z apparently. Tell me what their finding was. Well, we have research on values because of the values bridge. We have 70 ,000 people have taken it. So we have 70 ,000 people's data points around values. And we were able to, we are able to cut that data by generation.

20:50And so we were able to establish a list of Gen Z's values ranked one to 16. There's 16 values. And so we could see what their top values were. And then I thought, well, wouldn't it be interesting to take a look at what the values that hiring managers are looking for? because Gen Z is generally looking for jobs. And the job market right now is quite brutal. So we did a separate survey asking hiring managers in the knowledge industries, people who would be most likely to be hiring Gen Z into entry-level jobs, here's the values, here's their definitions, which are the top values you are hiring for.

21:24And when you crunch those numbers together, it ends up that only 2 % of Gen Z has the values that hiring managers are looking for. Interesting. And what are those values? Well, the values that hiring managers are looking for are not surprisingly achievement, which is the desire to have success that other people can see. The second value they're looking for is what we call scope, which is the desire to learn, grow, have action and stimulation. And the third value that they're looking for is something we call work centrism, which is a desire to work hard and organize your life around work. And when you look at Gen Z's top three values, number one is a value that is called eudaimonia, that's self-care, leisure, pleasure, recreation, flourishing.

22:07We use the Greek word because we found that when we use just self-care, people's heads exploded more than you would expect. The second thing, second value that Gen Z has is voice, which is authentic self-expression, being their authentic selves, living their inner lives outside. And then the third value is helping other people. Basically, altruism. We have another word for it, not for oneself, non-sibi. And so those are the three values, self-care, authentic self-expression, helping others. And the overlap is 2%. Wow. How do you, when you think about what that means for Gen Z, how do you think about that?

22:47Well, it has, it means a couple of things. Number one, it means that either they are going to have to temporarily or permanently suppress some of their values if they want to have a high paying job or if they want to enter the 2 % and get the jobs. Or they can live their values. It's more comfortable and easy to live your own values and try to find the companies that will accommodate them. A lot of this depends on where the value of affluence falls in your list of 16. If it falls at number four, it's a different thing than if it falls at number 16. If you want to have money and get a high paying job, you may have to think about your top three values or when you're actually going to be able to express them fully.