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

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1:28the next one. Get started today at linkedin.com slash campaign. Terms and conditions apply. Episode 363. 363 is the area code covering Nassau County, New York. In 1963, Alcatraz prison closed after 29 years in operation. I have a friend who has sex three to four times a week, reads two books a week, and all he does is complain about prison.

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2:02Welcome to the 363rd episode of the Prop G Pod. What's happening? It's scot-free August, but we're still bringing you thoughtful conversations all month long. In today's episode, we speak with Susie Welch, an award-winning professor at NYU Stern, a three-times New York Times bestselling author and host of the podcast Becoming You with Susie Welch. We discuss with Susie why happiness is an outcome, not a goal, how to build a career that aligns with who you are and what AI means for the future of work and meaning. Professor Welch is just an interesting person, and I really enjoyed trying to figure out, I think a lot about happiness because I struggle with it, but I love the idea that it's not, we're studying to the wrong test.

2:41Anyways, with that, here's our conversation with Susie Welch.

2:53Professor Welch, where does this podcast find you? I am in Santa Monica, California. Let's bust right into it. Your new book, Becoming You, is based on your popular class at NYU Stern where we're colleagues. What is the core idea behind the book? The book grew out of a sense that there was something missing for people who were coming out of college and graduate programs. It was just they had no purpose. They were taking jobs, but they weren't building lives. And this felt familiar to me because it's not like it's a, even though it's a growing phenomenon, it's a really, it's not a new phenomenon.

3:31And I've thought, geez, when I was in business school, I wish I'd had a class to help me figure out what to do with my life because I just got on the conveyor belt to consulting and I was deciding between consulting and banking. And so I had this idea to come up with this class that would answer the question, what should I do with my life? What the F should I do with my life? And I brought it to our shared idol, Raghu, the dean at the time at Stern, and he said, let's give it a try. And so the idea was that there would be a methodology. I hate all the woo-woo BS out there telling people to live their purpose and even worse, GAC material to live their passion, which I revile like you do.

4:04And I thought, maybe there's a methodology to help people figure out what they should do with their lives. Let me try it. And it went from there. And I started to do it. And it wasn't an experiment for very long because people kind of needed it. Define purpose. If someone says, I haven't found my purpose, how do you dissect what that actually means? Well, I have my definition of it. I mean, there's philosophical definitions of it. I mean, and I hear them all the time because this is the pond that I swim in and I hear all sorts of philosophical. but I'm actually a really practical girl. I'm a really practical person.

4:39I have four adult children. I needed an answer for them. And so the way I define it, and you can take it or leave it, but the way I define it is that your purpose is at the intersection of your values, and nobody knows what their values are. Nobody, I mean, I've researched to prove it, but your values, which I have a really strong definition of, not virtues values, your aptitudes, which is your cognitive and emotional wiring, what your personality is and what you're actually wired to do. Are you specialist or generalist? And then the areas of economic growth that call you intellectually or emotionally.

5:15And at that overlap, which is incredibly beautiful, rare, gorgeous real estate, that's where your purpose is. And you can get really philosophical and you can get really woo-woo about it, but that's not what I do. And if you want that, there's lots of people you should go talk to, but I'm about getting people into career paths that are not drudgery and that are not the onslaught of nihilism, which is afoot. Professor, you open your book by saying, happiness is not a goal, it's an outcome. What did you mean by that? Well, I'm the sworn enemy of the happiness industrial complex, although I have friends, good friends who are part of it, but this whole sort of optimism peddling and sort of like, you've got to chase your happiness, chase your bliss.

5:58And so I am with Mother Teresa on this one that I think happiness is really hard and very fleeting. I'm not even sure you can be happy for that long. So that's just me. And so I think it's sort of a more attainable goal and one that I advise my students to go for is a meaningful, productive life, which I think is your best guarantee of happiness. I kind of like the Thomas Aquinas quote that joy is when the good you seek is fulfilled. And I think that if you are living in this territory I described at the overlap of your authentic values, again, with the caveat that you've got to find out what those are, your aptitudes and your economically viable interests, you're more likely to have a meaningful, productive life.

6:38And then happiness is likely the outcome of that or the byproduct of that. But to chase happiness, I think it's kind of ill-advised. Look, I want people to be happy. I mean, it's not like I'm like, you know, the happiness bully here. It's not like I don't want people to be happy. I want people to be happy. But I'm a person who, like many people, have had everything going for you that should make you happy and not been happy, right? Because people that you love die and other crappy stuff can happen to you or you get a kid with anxiety or whatever. And so since happiness is kind of a difficult thing to hold on to, why not just go for a meaningful life?

7:14And happiness usually accompanies that when it does, when it does. I relate to this. THC and Netflix give me happiness, but I can only do them in limited amounts. It's trying to feel a certain sense of comfort, absence from anxiety, purpose. That's the stuff that kind of sustains you. You describe in the book that there are three parts to becoming you, values, aptitude, and economically viable interests. Break all of that down for us. You also talk about something called the area of transcendence. What is that, and how does someone find theirs? Okay, so the area of transcendence is that purpose stuff that I was talking about that's at the intersection of your values, your aptitudes, and your economically viable interests.

7:59We call it area of transcendence. I used to call it area of destiny and then I didn't like that very much. I call it area of transcendence because our old friend Maslow had the hierarchy of needs. And at the top, he had self-actualization for like 14 years after he first came out with the theory. He was at Brandeis as a professor. And he called it self-actualization. That's real Oprah territory. It's fine. The problem was that I wasn't finding that that's what my students necessarily wanted. They wanted to do something beyond self-actualize. They wanted to give back. And you can say what you will about Gen Z, but they have this impulse to give back and to be connected to something larger than they are.

8:37And he actually revised his hierarchy of needs in the last years of his life to say there's actually something above self-actualization. Self-actualization plus what he called cosmic connection, which is being part of something larger than yourself, is what he called transcendence. And so I call this sort of, when you find your purpose, you are in your area of transcendence. And you know what? It feels that way. Like there are moments when I'm in it, and I would say I'm pretty damn close to it most of the time, and you feel like you're going to levitate. You feel like you're exquisitely alive, exquisitely alive, and that's your area of transcendence.

9:10And it exists at the intersection of these three data sets, if you will. So the first place we go is values. And can I just be like a broken record and say my whole... My life has been a journey. I mean, I wrote my PhD thesis about how the journey that I went on to figure out what my values were because I grew up in a family and I thought I must be adopted. And there was like one because they were so different for me. And the one sort of mitigating factor on the fact that like I was convinced I was adopted is that I was the literal spitting image of my grandmother. Like you could put our faces right next to them.

9:44And I would say, I must be adopted in this family. I would say, yeah, look at Nana. And we were like pictures of each other. So how could this be that I was so different from my family? This was the beginning of my journey to figure out what's going on. Of course, I finally got to Lulbe. We have different values. I love my family, by the way. They're fabulous. And we can love people with different values all the time. So values, big academic topic that has never somehow passed the fourth wall into the general population. And so part of my work and part of the work of Becoming You is saying, look, there's 15 human values.

10:13Everybody has a different level of them. You've got a kind of values DNA profile. well, what are your values? Are they achievement, belonging, beholderism, non-to-be? I mean, we've got these 15. And find out who you really are. And look, the word values has been hijacked by the political discourse. You know, Christian values, progressive values, conservative values, and nobody, everybody's afraid of values. And you're never taught what values are in school, even though they're the most important piece of data about yourself. And so the part of becoming you is teaching people what values are completely separate from virtues, of which we should all have more, like kindness and integrity.

10:46Values are these choices that we make about how we're going to live our lives, who we're going to marry, how much we're going to work, the sort of the beliefs that we have that drive what we do with ourselves. And this is the last moment I'll nerd out on you, I think, which is that there's a whole school of research around values formation, which is how we come by our values. Like, is it trauma? Is it culture? Is it right? There's a huge school of academic research and sociological research on how we come by our values. And I don't really care about it. I don't care how you came by your values.

11:19I think it's sort of vaguely interesting. My students are always trying to tell me how they came by their values. And I say to them, you know, take it up with your therapist. That's not my business. My business is figuring out what your values are and helping you figure out what kind of work you should do given those values. But that's not enough. You got to know what you're good at. Because I don't care if your values are fame. If you're a really bad singer, you know, it just doesn't make any difference. So we have eight big cognitive aptitudes. I'm not telling you anything you don't know, and there's testing for them.

11:49But I actually believe that the harder part is figuring out what our emotional aptitudes are, like what's going on with our personality and how the world experiences us. One of the hardest messages I have to tell my students is that your personality is not the words you tell yourself about yourself. Like, I'm kind. I'm generous. I'm a great listener. I'm a really good friend. Well, maybe you are, but how's the world experiencing you? And I think everybody would agree. You can be great at a job because of your personality and you can suck at a job, pardon my French, because of your personality, but you've got to know your personality.

12:18And one of the most shocking experiences for my students and one of the most shocking parts of the Becoming You process is when people are confronted with how the world is actually experiencing them. So you got that data set, you got your values, you got your aptitudes. And then the third data set is what are the industries and jobs within those industries that are calling you? Now, look, here's the problem. students apertures and everybody's apertures get smaller and smaller as they get older you just think there's these are the five jobs available to me there's incredible research that shows when kids come out of high school they think there's five jobs and two of those jobs are their parents jobs and then the other ones are like teacher and fireman or whatever and then you think college would really open the aperture but it doesn't because of group think and then god forbid you should go to get an mba because then the aperture closes down to two jobs consulting and banking And so part of the becoming you process is just to force open that aperture.

13:08There were my sound effects on forcing open the aperture. And then you get all that data and you do the hard work of looking at the center of it. What's the overlap? And that's where you got to go. We'll be right back after a quick break.

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15:28So, one of the nice things about Stern where we serve on the faculty is at orientation they say, oh, your professors want to see you drop by their office during office hours. The bad news is the students actually believe that and they stop by. I can't imagine how many people swing by your office hours and want essentially what is kind of life coaching or therapy. And so I'll go back to when I was a second year business school student. And if I'd taken your class, my objective was very singular, which is good. I wanted to make a shit ton of money. That was all I wanted. I had grown up without money.

16:02I was worried at that time about taking care of my mom. I wanted the accoutrements of wealth, experiences, power, broader selection set of mates. All of that really appealed to me. if I came in and said, Professor Welch, my mission here is to just be as economically viable or secure as possible, what would you have said back? First of all, I had the exact same set of values. When I was at business school, I wasn't looking for a mate because I was already married to my first husband then, but I was driving a car where I could see the highway through the floor. And the dean of HBS came to me and he said, Susie, you're going to be an academic someday.

16:38Why don't you just stay right here at HBS and do it with us? And I thought to myself, no effing way I'm poor and I want to be rich. I had paid for business school out of pocket and I wanted to go to Bain because Bain was going to take care of my dad. And so I had the same values as you did. That's not every student, okay? I had plenty of classmates who had money and that wasn't their concern. So if you'd come to me and you said, I want to be rich, I would have said, well, we don't need to use the values bridge. I have a test that everybody takes called the values bridge, which I developed, which tells you your values because most people have a lot of junk between them and their values.

17:13Most people don't admit they want to be rich, by the way, Professor. They don't admit it out loud. There's a little stink off of it with the youth today. But your number one value, it would have been affluence then. And probably second to that would have been achievement, which is seen success, success that other people see, winning, in other words. And I would have said to you, well, you know what? You are the perfect person to go into banking or consulting. Let's see if you're good at that. Let's see if you actually have the aptitudes for those jobs. And then I would have asked you, does it in any way interest you?

17:47So my problem was that I went to Bain because I wanted to make as much money as I possibly could. I was deciding between Bain and Goldman Sachs. And because I was a Baker scholar, Bain paid me more, blah, blah, blah. And I went there and I was okay at the work, but they ended up putting me into client services because actually it was just much better with the clients. I was just good at making rain and bringing in the business. I did it for seven years and I made the money I needed to make, By that time, I had four children and I had to get out of Dodge because in those days, there was no partner track for people with babies.

18:18But the work didn't interest me at all. And so I would have been not, I shouldn't have done it. I mean, and in fact, what I didn't understand, I show this slide to my students. That freaks them out. There's like, you could hear, there's like a pall in the room. Okay. And this is, let me try to describe this slide. It shows what your life looks like if you go into consulting or banking. And it shows that for the first 15 years, you're making quite a lot of money. and then sort of 15, 20 years out, your money sort of plateaus. You become partner and you kind of plateau at a certain amount. But if you go on a different route and you go into industry or you go into a job where you're unbelievably good at it, okay?

18:53You sort of, at the beginning years, you're making nothing. You're making like$40 ,000 to their$200 ,000. But at a certain point, if it's your values and your aptitudes and it calls you unbelievably, there's this moment sort of 15 years out where your line rockets up and passes their line And you have the potential to make so much more money if you actually go early on into the area that's your area of transcendence. It just takes a while. I mean, I could think of a million examples of this. But they just think they take this sort of short-term solve for their money, desires, and needs. And they're not ever going to get the money that they truly desire.

19:30They're private jets. They're one helipad per child kind of money desires if they go into consulting. But they will have two BMWs in the garage in Greenwich, Connecticut. There you go. So I started in investment banking at Morgan Stanley and then started a consulting company in my second year of business school. I'm curious because I'm not sure I know how to articulate this. What do you see as the primary qualifications or skills that distinguish someone who would be good in banking versus someone who would be good as a consultant? Let me say that I could have answered that question six months ago, but all those jobs are going away now anyway.

20:10I think that what's going on, what I did, look, I was seven years as a consultant and everything that I did can be done by AI now. Everything. Really? You really think it's that dramatic that you think consulting firms are going to be a shadow of their human capital? I think the jobs that people have in the first five years are going away, Scott, completely. Here's the thing is the jobs later on are not going away because a consultant with 25 years of experience has wisdom and has something. I'm rubbing my fingers together. They have something that they kind of know, like there's this pattern recognition that they've seen.

20:46They've seen the people who blow up. They've seen the mergers that don't work. You don't have that. So in your early years, you're doing all this grunt work, which can now completely, not completely, but can largely be done by AI and will be more and more done by AI. But the only way you get to that wisdom is to have done the junkie work at the beginning, as you kind of are observing out of the corner of your eye how the real work is getting done. And so there's some things about to go on that's going to blow up both those industries and those jobs are going to, I don't know what's going to happen.

21:14And I think that I could venture a guess about what's, there's more ways to succeed in consulting than there are ways to succeed in banking. And banking, you just got to be very good at finance. I mean, finance is just a skill. It's a knowledge. It's a way of brain. It's a numerical reasoning kind of stuff. You can get by in consulting without that because you can be good at other stuff. But I think all the jobs. And I will further say this. I've got a ton of data on values now because 15 ,000 people at this point have taken the values bridge. And I can cut that data by generation. And what we're seeing is that Gen X and Gen Z, our real youth, have very distinct top values.

21:56Their number one value is what we call eudaimonia, which is self-care, everything that feels really good. And then their second top value is voice, which is creative self-expression. None of these values are being expressed, by the way, in their consulting and banking jobs. And then their third value is what we call non-city, which is helping other people. But I did a big survey of hiring managers at banks and consulting firms. And the last thing they want are people who've got eudaimonia, voice, and helping other people as their top values. And they want people who want affluence and achievement.