Hi.
I'm Laura Vanderkamp. I'm a mother of five, an author, journalist, and speaker.
And I'm Sarah hart Hunger, a mother of three, practicing physician, writer, and course creator. We are two working parents who love our careers and our families.
Welcome to best of both worlds. Here we talk about how real women manage work, family, and time for fun. From figuring out childcare to mapping out long term career goals. We want you to get the most out of life. Welcome to best of both worlds. This is Laura. This episode is airing in early July of twenty twenty four. I am going to be interviewing Jesse Humple, who is the host of LinkedIn's podcast Hello Monday. She is also a longtime tech and finance journalist and the author of
the memoir The Family Outing. Well, what of the things we talked about in this kind of wide ranging conversation is how people's jobs changed so much instead of the career rules we need to think about given that we're often doing very different things over any period of say five to ten years. So I was thinking about this, Sarah, what was your job like ten years ago and is it anything like what you are doing now.
Yeah, that's so fascinating to think about. So let's see, it's twenty twenty four ten years ago, it was twenty fourteen. I was just working, not just but I was working straight, full time hours clinically as a pediatric endocrinologist. At that point, I hadn't even done anything in graduate medical education yet, so I hadn't really taken on any kind of leadership things. I was focused on. You know, I had my maternity
leave that year and then I came back. Since I do have a ten year old that math checks out, so it.
Was really different. I had no podcasts.
I did blog for fun and really enjoyed it, so that was maybe a little harbinger of what was to come.
But I would say certainly some similarities.
My mondays today look very similar to my mondays back then, for example, but I'm doing.
A much wider range of things and I find it a lot of fun.
So yeah, no, I mean, we certainly were not podcasting ten years ago. I was trying to remember how many podcasts there even were ten years ago, as sort of a the dawn of the podcast era. Perhaps I know that a lot of the podcast that I became aware of was more around twenty sixteen, twenty fifteen, I guess, and then we of course started in twenty seventeen, so we've been around for a long time.
The same it.
Yeah, five years ago was pretty similar probably to what I'm doing now, but ten years ago a little different.
Yeah, No, life changes. Life changes a lot.
So Jesse and I talk about that and her various career rules. We also spend a bit of time talking about her family setup. She is in a two mom family and so it's always a little different how people make decisions about who does what when there aren't kind of the assumed gender roles that you would have in a couple where people were male and females. So we talk a lot about that as well.
That's super interesting. I can't wait to hear that.
All right, Well, let's go ahead and hear from Jesse. Well, Sarah and I are delighted to welcome Jesse Hemple to the program. Jesse, can you introduce yourself to our listeners?
Sure, my name is Jesse Hemple. I am Goodness, is hard to explain exactly what I am because I am a longtime journalist, but also I am a podcast host of the podcast Hello Monday, which is a career podcast. Plus I write memoir stuff about my family, so that's me.
That's awesome, And maybe you can talk a little bit about your show for link shin Hello Monday, which is an exploration of all things careers. I mean, what have you guys been trying to do with that show exactly?
Well, so the show starts with this basic assumption, and that is, whatever you know how to do right now, the job that you have right now, whatever your title is, it's probably not going to be the same job you have in five years. We know that work is changing
so much. I mean, it's frankly kind of a cliche to even say that, but you look even at what AI has done to work in the last year, and you know that across every industry, those shifts are things that we're going to have to adapt to, but nobody tells us exactly how. And so Hello Monday is meant to be the optimistic playbook for you, putting you at the center of this equation, because whatever your job title is in five years, you have a set of skills, a set of passions, and a sense of purpose that
all can be put to work right. They can put to use in service of making sure that five years from now you're doing work that you care more about, and hopefully your paycheck is bigger too.
That's always a nice bonus, and it will need to be given inflation and all.
That, but that's the truth.
So, I mean, you've talked to a lot of people, and you sort of distill a lot of this career advice down to a couple of you know, Jesse's rules here and one of them that you guys shared with me before this to define your values. Now, this sounds a little bit like a graduation speech, So maybe you can tell me practically what it means to define your values as you are going about your job on Monday morning.
You're right, it does have that graduation speech nest to it, right, But so Loven, we flounder through our careers and we have to make sets of choices at various times. Do I stay in this job or take that job, Do I make a career pivot, or do I continue to do this thing I'm doing? And it can feel a little haphazard to think about how to make those choices.
And one thing that having a clear sense of your values does is it gives you a framework or filter for how to make the big choices and frankly the little choices too. Their values change over the course of your career. Right, But I know this is something that no one told me when I was younger and I was listening to those graduation speeches. It just seems like people ahead of me they just had that stuff figured out.
And it was only in retrospect that I could look back and say, oh, gosh, you know, when I was twenty four, whatever it was, perhaps it was travel. In fact, I know it was travel. Travel was so important to me that must have been one of my values. So if you can do that looking backward, then it becomes a powerful thing to think about it a little more proactively,
to think, Okay, well let's look forward. What are the things that matter to me most right now, and how can knowing those in articulating those help me make good decisions? Does that make sense, Laura?
It does?
It does well With that, though, then what does it trust yourself, which I guess is Jesse's rule number two.
I like these Jesse's rules. I like your rebranding of them. What you're talking about is like, so we've been going as a podcast now for five years, which in podcast years, I think that's like a century, because.
Podcast we've been on around since the Neanderthal Age of podcastings.
Which is like twenty eighteen, right, yeah.
Yeah.
So, as I was looking back over now close to three hundred episodes, I realized that people kept giving the same types of advice young people, old people, famous people, not so famous people. And one thing that came up over and over and over again was people would say, you know, I just wish I had had more faith than myself. If I had been able to listen to myself, well, I would have known what to do in any given context.
And so that sort of leads me to this, let's call it Jesse's rule number two because I like that, Laura, which is that trusting yourself is like imperative, it's integral to being able to manage your career.
Well, can you give me an example of when you have had to trust yourself with your career?
Yeah? Oh, let's go back to the moment when there's always a moment when we go from thinking about trusting ourselves as a that was a nice to have, good thing to do, to actually having to make the decision to live in the action for me. I had been writing as a technology journalist for magazines very successfully. I had been lucky enough that I hadn't had any headwinds
in my early writing career. I had been a star writer at Fortune magazine for many, many years, and then I had been recruited over to Conde Nast to become a senior writer for Wired magazine and Laura, it is impossible to understate how much I love tech. This was a dream job for me. I loved Wired. I was
the only woman at my level at the magazine. Most of my peers who loved technology as much as I did at Wired were men, and that was part of I think why I ran into some headwinds, but also largely I just had a different perspective than the editor in chief of the magazine. And I would pitch stories and he would say that's not interesting, not that and he would cut them. And I would pitch stories and
he would cut them. And finally I got a really good interview, and I just knew that this particular interview with this particular technologist, he had developed a virtual headset. It was so cool. And this was twenty sixteen, when the idea of putting this hokey piece of plastic on your head and playing in virtual reality was even weirder than it is right now. And frankly, it's still kind of weird.
It's still kind of weird.
It's still kind of weird. And so I called up the editor in chief and I said I've got this interview, and get a call back from his deputy who says, I'm so glad you got the interview. We're going to take that interview and give it to someone else because we don't think you're strong enough as a writer. And I remember I was sitting in the baggage claim of
the Fort law Dale Airport. I was coming back from having gone to visit this guy in person so I could get his sign on for this story, and I just started crying, and like not that sort of dainty cry where you can just say that you have allergies and hope nobody's looking, but like that gross cry that's coming out your eyes and down your nose, where people want to, like strangers want to sort of approach you and ask if someone has died and what they can
do for you. And I remember it because I took a picture of it on my iPhone because I knew in that moment that I needed to choose to trust myself and leave or trust the editor in chief's opinion of me and continue to stay small. And that for me was a pivotal trust yourself moment. And that was also the moment that I decided it was time to leave Wired, and it was what eventually got me to hear LinkedIn awesome.
Well, on that note, we were going to take a quick ad break and we'll be back with more from Jesse. Well, I am back with Jesse Hemple, who is the host of the LinkedIn podcast Hello Monday, sharing lots of career advice. So, I mean another one of Jesse's rules, I forget what number this is, but to.
Think long term.
And you know, you're telling a little bit about how your career is a long thing. I mean, there's a moments where you're crying in the Fort Lauderdale Airport. There's also more triumphant moments too. But what does it even mean to think long term given that we are switching jobs so frequently, and you know, whatever you are doing now may not be what you are doing in five years.
It's a great question. I think I'm going to tell a story to explain what I mean by this went to early on in my career. I felt like I was failing if I didn't see my name sort of on a byline in any given day. And I was working. This is early again, So I was working at four magazine.
It's probably around thirty one thirty two. I had this job that it allowed me to write big, long, ambitious stories that I might work on for six weeks to three months at a time, but also it expected me to write shorter stories couple every week for the magazine, and that kind of cadence that'll make you a little loopy, right. You're like trying to go really really quickly, but also you're trying to think really really broadly. And I was
kind of failing at doing both. I was just sort of like my work was just a big old melange of mediocrity. And a mentor pulled me aside and said, you got to stop doing the little stuff entirely. I mean, just phone it in like nobody will really notice. You got to put all of your energy into those longer swings.
You got to make sure that if you write four stories in a year, those stories have all of your best energy and that made no sense to me early in my career, because I measured the length of my career at that point still in months and maybe sometimes in years, but I put my focus there, and now, looking back at it, of course, I can see that those larger stories actually propelled me from big opportunity to
big opportunity. And then, much later on, Laura, I went on to write a book, and I discovered this in an even grander sense. Right, the timeline on a book, well, you've written many of them. It happens in months and years, not weeks and months, And putting all of your energy into that big swing is actually the pivot that moves
your career forward. Gosh, I hear myself saying this, Laura, and I want to turn the question on you, and what have you learned about long term thinking from having written books.
I mean, I agree with you, it's hard to keep the cadence of doing both little things and big things, and there have been times in my life when I have quit the little things in order to put more energy into the big things. But on the other hand, I have also noticed that sometimes they playing around with the little things that tips you off to what will be interesting.
To people for the big things completely. Yeah, so it's but then I've generally trying to.
Do both, right, you know, keep the little experiments going so you know where to put your money for the big.
Bets, right.
But in doing both, you are still thinking long term. Right. You may be doing little things and doing big things, but here like you are doing them in service of some broader goal that you have, that you have laid out for yourself, that you understand. And that is what I think when we're shortsighted, we forget to do.
Yeah, well, thinking long term is a you know something we talk about a lot on this podcast. We're really big on, you know, big goals setting and things like that, and one of our recent episodes we actually check in on our annual goals to hold ourselves accountable for making those happen. But I want to pivot a little bit here because you know, you have written a book now and it's called The Family Outing, which is a bit of a play on words for your family background. And
just to talk about this a little bit here. A lot of our listeners, as you might imagine, it's women, it's women married to men. And when you are married to a man, no matter what you do for a living, there are certain assumptions that people wind up making about who does what, how things are split, no matter what the income is or whose preferences are for different things. There's just a certain cultural story that you're working with. Now you are married to a woman raising a family
with another woman. So I think a lot of our listeners might just be curious about how one winds up making decisions with that rubric. So even just for instance, when you guys decided to start a family, like, how did you talk through those decisions and make those decisions on how this family was going to be formed?
I love that framework. You're asking me to think about something a little differently than I've thought about it, and I appreciate that, Laura. And I'm realizing now that one thing about being a same gender or family is that you can't rely on any of the implicit roles before you revisit them. You actually have to decide at the
outset about how things aren't going to work. And I know that when my wife and I had been together for I think eight years when we decided to have children, and so we'd already lived together long enough to understand sort of how our household functioned, and we didn't need to talk about much before we added the complexity of more human beings. We could sort of just scape by and figure it out. But when it was time to do that, we actually sat down and talked about it.
I was still working as a journalist in and she was a social worker, and we thought, well, one of us is going to have to figure out how we pay for this family, and one of us is going to have to fit figure out the doctor's appointments and what they have for lunch and the nitty gritty of the like keeping them going. And that's not to say that both of us wouldn't collaborate on both, but each of us was going to be the final decision maker
on sort of one aspect of life. And so I around that time left my job in media and moved into a media job at a tech company. Laura that was in large part to create some financial security for our family. And then my wife she shows when our second child was born, actually, and it was the middle of the pandemic. And I know everybody has a pandemic story, but Laura, we had a fifteen month old child. We went into a pandemic and then we had another child
in the midst of a pandemic. We were tired human beings, and my wife decided to stop out of the workforce and be home with our children a little bit. And when she introduced that she wanted to do this, it was very confusing to me, Laura, because I I'm cut from a certain cloth. I am a very of an efficient person. I am very professionally ambitious. And I was like, Frances, you don't have to do this. We can pay for all this childcare. We're older parents. And she was like, yeah,
but but I want to do this. And I was like, yeah, but you'll have to and she said, you don't get it. The feminist movement was about creating opportunities for women to make choices about how they spend their time. You need to let me make my choices, even if they're different than yours. It was a sort of like aha moment for me, and it has been a wonderful collaboration that way, because my wife is home now. She's home about seventy percent of the time with our children, and I am
here much more often. You're seeing me in my podcast studio, I'm in LinkedIn's offices and yet I feel my children benefit so much from having that parental commitment that is sort of about a same sex couple, right, Like I like to joke around here, like, you know what I have as a working mother, I have the benefit of a stay at home mom for my kids, like most people don't have that. But also, there are a lot of same sex couples for whom those roles wouldn't fit
so perfectly. We got really lucky that way. And I also know a lot of male friends who play much larger caregiving roles in their homes. So at base, it's different for every family. But one thing that is definitely for sure certain about same sex families is they have to talk about the roles. They can't take things for granted.
Well, even deciding like which, you know, having the children, like carrying the children.
I mean, how was that decision?
Made I feel like the luckiest person in the world, because frankly, we had two ovens, so we didn't have to use both. And I knew for myself that I never wanted to carry children. I'd always been clear on that. I mean, quite frankly, Laura, I felt pretty clear that I didn't want to have children, and I got to children through this very intellectual exercise. We got to a certain age my wife introduced that she really wanted to try.
I felt completely realized in my marriage, and I realized, like, well, okay, my first obligation in life is to myself to be a healthy, flourishing human. And once I've done that, my next obligation in my life is to do what I can to make sure that my wife flourishes. And so if she says that we should have children, we should have children. And I say that laughing at myself a little bit now because it's so in my head, right, And then I had these children, and now there's nothing
in my head about parenting. Right. It is a full body experience, and it is the biggest for me. My experience of it is that it is the biggest life exercise and opportunity I could enmission for myself. But I will just go back to say, because I bet some of your listeners are in this situation, I would have had a really great life without children too.
There are lots of ways one can build a life and create meaning and all that, but certainly, you know, for a lot of our listeners, both your and family are part of it, And certainly that's one of the things we're trying to do with this show, is that show that you can have both, and for many women, that is not going to look like having a stay at home partner, right because that's for many reasons, right that it's just not going to be the situation a
lot of people are going to wind up in. But it also doesn't have to look like that, right that there's so many different ways to make a family.
Well, what I really appreciate about your show, Laura, and I am a listener, is that you invite me to be the full breadth of who I am as a really ambitious professional and as a mother, and is somebody who wants to have a lot of time with my children because I do. I really want to have a lot of time with them, and who also wants to
have a lot of my own interests. And in the larger culture, we've kind of arrived at this assumption that you can have it all, but not at the same time, and that's that's a fine assumption, but that hasn't been my experience in life. I actually feel like I'm having it all at the same time, and I don't feel stressed out about that, and I don't want to be embarrassed to say that out loud.
Life is good.
We can say it, but it does work, right, And in my experience of it is that it does work. And then I am not as stressed out shadow of myself as I do that that I can live a fully realized life. And I look at you, and I look at Sarah, and each in your own ways you also live by showing models of that.
Yeah, I did want to talk about one potential source of stress, which is something some of our listeners do deal with, is you are the primary breadwinner for your family of four, and I wonder how you think that may have influenced some of the choices you have made the long term thinking you have done, I mean even
something that's speculative like writing a memoir. Right, how did you think about that in terms of well, I also have to keep us housed, pay for people's bracest on the line, whatever, right, Yeah.
Right, I decided that I was going to be able to do both. But I will tell you, Laura, I've had a writing practice since I was probably eight years old. It's been really central in core to who I am. But I would not have been able to give myself permission to write a memoir if I hadn't sold it first, you know, And this goes back to long term thinking. I think sometimes people would to run at the dream project without building the scaffolding that allows them to realize
the dream. And I started very early on writing for financial magazines because financial magazines had really great mentors and editors, but they also had bigger paychecks than newspapers or what I really wanted to be writing for, like poetry scenes,
and that was by design. But I also knew that if I cut my teeth writing three thousand to six thousand word magazine stories about BlackBerry, which was probably a company that barely anybody remembers today but seemed very important in two thousand and seven, and Facebook and the CEOs of these companies, I would learn important things about how to write, about structure, about suspense, about why people read, and eventually I would be able to take those lessons
and take the reputation that I had built and do something that was more meaningful to me personally with that.
And that's kind of exactly what happened. And then I will say I will just put a plug in for like dumb luck timing right, and in April of twenty twenty, when most people were looking around trying to figure out how they were going to get some childcare so they could figure out how to report into their new Zoom offices and stay healthy during the pandemic, I had this literary agent who just kept calling me Laura, and she
was like, my name is Suzanne Gluck with wme. She was like a force, and she's like, now is the perfect time for your dream project? And I was like, no, it's not. I don't know if you notice, but I'm currently living in over my wife's childhood bedroom in Tupelo, Mississippi. Like now, it's not a good time, not a good time. She was like, no, no, no, you don't understand. Every single writer is really terrified right now, and they're going to be terrified for a long time and tired and miserable.
How you're feeling, I understand everybody feels that way. Publishers are also pretty scared right now because they need some guarantee that they are going to have books to sell in three years, and they got no deal flow, they got no pitches coming in two months from now. They're still going to be tired, but the writers will have revived and they'll have lots of pitches coming in. So get me something, Get me something this week. Just sit
down and write it. Just go into your bathroom, close the door, and give yourself fifteen minutes and see what comes. And I sent her this haggard little email. I was like, I guess I could write a profile about a tech exact. Then she shot me back an email and said, that's boring. What have you got, Like, what's the dream thing that
you could never write in any other market? And I was like, well, if you're really asking, did you know that everybody in my family is basically gay or queer, or buy or trans. And she's like, now that is a book I would read. We'll call it The Family Outing. I'll sell it and get back to you. And you know, Laura, that's what she did. And I will just say that because she sold it before I wrote it, I then
made it a priority. And I don't know if I could have in the same way if I didn't know that it was going to help me pay for my kids to go to college.
Exactly, Well, we are to take one more quick ad break and we'll be black with more from Jesse well I with Jesse Humple. We've been talking career advice. We've been talking about navigating roles in parenthood and work in a two mom family, and we love to hear from our guests about a day in the life.
So what does a day in the life look like for you? These days?
It begins around five AM, when I pop out of bed, not because I'm a hugely disciplined person, but because I'm deeply a morning person. Always happen. I have like an hour or so to myself where I read or write and have a little bit of time for myself, and then my children show up. And my children Laura, are three and five by around six, with lots of wants and needs and right now a lot of big feelings,
so many big feelings. We live in Brooklyn, New York, and we have from about six to seven thirty to get the children and the dog and me and my wife somehow prepared for a day in out the door. And that whole period of our day is usually defined by noise. It's like raucous.
It's just a loise.
I'm not sure what happens. My wife has like her zones, like she does the lunches. I have my zone, which is I can usually convince the children to you well, I can't usually get them to brush their teeth. I try really hard, but i'd say we're like batting fifty
to fifty on that. But like to get them dressed and get the dog walked, and then I take my son to his little He goes to an outdoor kindergarten in our neighborhood, and my wife takes our daughter off to her preschool, and I get on the subway and I come into like nice quiet work where adults say slow, quiet things and have a sort of a wonderful, peaceful nine to five and Laura. I usually stick in some exercise there. I try really hard first thing in the morning.
If I don't get it in there, sometimes I can get it right before I leave. We have a gym in the basement, and if I don't move during a day, the whole day kind of goes flat. So try to prioritize that. But I got to get out of here by four forty five because somebody has to relieve the nanny by six, So I'm always running to do that. And usually my wife, you know, she's home with the kids for a lot of the day, but she's usually at swim lessons or she's picking up somebody from taekwondo.
There's I didn't realize this. I know, I'm just coming into a league of parenting that you've been in for a while, but there's just so much taking them places. It just seems like the job gets bigger instead of smaller, which is.
Why you still need childcare even with your wife. Oh yeah, working part time or whatever it is she's doing now, Yes.
Yes, totally so. By six o'clock, everybody ends up on the playground. And I live in this sort of like Sesame Street esque building in Brooklyn, New York. And at some point one of the parents in the building says to all of the kids, come on, guys, it's time to come upstairs. And they all sort of on mass, maybe like eight of them tumble home from the playground and up the stairs, and we take our two and throw them in the bathtub and get them to bed
around seven thirty. And we really have to aim for seven thirty because Laura, if I'm not in bed by nine, then I'm just asleep wherever I am at nine. That's how it goes.
It could be on the floor of the kid's room. Yes, on the TV.
Something is actually where Yeah, yeah.
Well that's the thing about being an early bird, is you tend not to stay up?
Yes, yes, And if you occasionally and this probably never ever happens to you. But if I make the mistake of opening my phone and start scrolling and then I look up and it's ten like that is, it's never good. It just it always ends badly. The next day.
Well, yeah, it's a little later for me, but I don't wake up at five. Sarah does. Sarah does, She's usually up at like four forty five, But you know that's she's a very dedicated runner in the morning. I am not a dedicated runner in the morning. I'm not dedicated to anything in the morning.
Frankly, I love that. Though I love I can't do that, Like physical movement is not where I can land early in the morning. And I always wanted, I've aspired to be one of those people who just wakes up in laces or shoes and goes not me.
Yeah, yeah, I can do it. But it's sort of a later what many people would consider a later morning. It's not a five am sort of thing. Ever around here. But yeah, yeah, so we always end with a love of the week, which is something that is you know, that we're enjoying now. I would say that I was in New York City the weekend before we were recording this with my eldest son who is now seventeen, and he and I have been to the top of a lot of tall buildings together, like over the years. This
is just something we've done in New York. And so we went to One Vanderbilt so Summit at one Vanderbilt a couple of years ago, we went to the top of the Empire State Building. Two years ago, we went to the top of the World Trade Center. We're in a hotel that had a roof deck on the forty six floors and went up to the top of that. So yeah, when I'm in a big city, I like to be up and seeing things that you're not seeing when you're out in the burbs.
So really enjoying that.
You can get so much from doing that. Well, when it's time to come with your next child, come back here, because I'll take you to the top of the Empire.
Stap exit you're taking with the Empire State Building.
We have a record in the Empire State Building, and that is really my son's favorite thing about it, which is that he can go to the top with his friends.
Well, that is cool.
A mommy's workplace is a little bit more cool than a lot of workplaces.
From that perspective. So what's your love of the week?
Jesse?
I do have a love of the week, and that is that this is the week every year that my family road trips down to Tupelo, Mississippi. Tue Below, Mississippi is not the love. It's a great place, but the love goes to the road trip because when my wife
introduced this idea, it was during the pandemic. Before the pandemic, I only flew to Tupelow because it's an eighteen hour drive, But when faced with no choice, we put the baby and the dog in the car and I sat in the back between them, and she hit the gas and we stopped at a Baptist church in Hollywood, Alabama, so that I could go to the bathroom. But apart from that, we really just did not stop until we got to Tubelow, Mississippi.
And since then we have road tripped once or twice a year with the entire family and as they get older and their attention gets harder to hold. I have gone from really despising the time to feeling like it is our family special time together where we make our memories and we have our traditions and our rituals and places we stop and I always know my kids better on the other side of it. So, if you happen to be anywhere between New York City and Tupelo, Mississippi, this weekend, maybe I'll see.
You exactly exactly.
And then it's summer in Tublo, Mississippi, which sounds a little hot to me, but you tell me there's a pool involved.
And a lot of air conditioning, a lot of central air. That is good.
That is critical.
Well, Jesse, thanks so much for joining us. H Can you maybe just tell our listeners where they can find you.
Sure you could find Hello Monday with Jesse Heemple, which is LinkedIn's flagship podcast anywhere you listen to podcasts, or you can follow me on LinkedIn. I'm easy to find and you can always find me my website, which is Jesse j Hemple. Let me take that again. I should know my own website. It's Jessejhimple dot com.
That's good. We'll get that down right, all right, Jesse, thanks so much for joining us.
Thank you, Laura.
Well we are back.
I was just interviewing Jesse Hemple, who's the host of LinkedIn's Hello Monday podcast. So our question for this week is also a career related question. So this list o writes in, do you have any ideas for resetting or momentum planning after a big goal of accomplishment, Like let's say this person is an academic who achieved tenure, or it could be someone at a law firm who made partner or anything along those lines. So you've gone through the major hoop. Now what, Sarah, what would you say?
Yeah?
So fun fact, this came from someone who did achieve tenure, and she did so after completing best Lead Plans academy. I'm not going to say those two things are related.
But of course they are.
But she was super happy to share that with me, and I was so excited for her, and I thought it was.
A really interesting question.
I think the first thing I would say is not to jump straight into the next thing, but to make sure you've taken time to savor that accomplishment and really celebrate, like where you've gotten.
I would do that in.
A number of ways.
Celebrate with yourself, take time to reflect, maybe do some sort of treat that's just for you, and then also with others, whether that might be throwing a little celebration to help people, to thank people who helped you along the way perhaps, or like doing a little family celebration, like really mark that milestone, because most likely many years went into that and it can be tempting to just move on, but really valuable to reflect and celebrations help
us do that. Then I think that think about what you want to do and not with a lens of like well what would the next logical thing be, because if I'm associate professor, then it should be full professor or whatever.
I mean, I just made that up. I'm not an academic.
But instead of thinking like what would the guidebooks say to do, think about like, well, what do I want to do with this role? Like what do I want my day to look like? What do I want my life to look like in ten years? Call Newport calls it lifestyle centric career planning, And I do kind of like that concept of like maybe thinking about outside the box of what you're going to do with this new milestone based on what you want your day to day
existence to feel like. And then I would also just be really really patient because anytime you have a transition like this, things can just feel messy when you start with and I personally get into the trap of feeling like, Okay, I'm at this new thing and I did some planning, so it's going to be like super smooth and awesome from the very beginning, and a lot of times, like I have learned the hard way that no, it like
takes adjustment you're figuring things out. I remember when I kind of even went to sixty percent with my job, which sounds like it would be a really easy transition, I was like, oh my god, like what do I do? How do I structure my days? Like what do I you know, going from a day packed with meetings to a day where I had to decide when to do things was really different. So give yourself time to analyze, think about it, settle in, and maybe figure stuff out
through trial and error. And my final idea I had a lot of ideas, I guess, is to think about perhaps if there are ways you could give back by helping those under you, like especially if you receive the benefit of being mentored by someone, then being in the next level might mean that you're ready to do some mentoring of your own. I think as women were always like, oh, I'm not at that point of being a mentor, because
you know, I'm just still new with this. But really, if you've reached that tenure position, then you're really awesome and impressive to anyone who hasn't. So you probably have a lot that you could impart on the next generation. So those are a few of my thoughts.
Excellent, Yeah, I was thinking back to this. I have a section in one hundred and sixty eight Hours, which is a book I wrote many many years ago, but the chapter was about achieving the career breakthrough. In the last section it was called be ready to ride the wave. And that's because I think a lot of people you get so focused on like, this is the thing I have to achieve, and it is a big thing. But
life keeps going after that. I mean, you wake up the next morning, you sweep up the confetti and the balloons.
And then you keep going forward.
And so being ready to ride that wave means having some back burner projects that you know, maybe may weren't your main thing that you used in your you know, tenure committee, media or whatever. But you have these things that you still want to keep moving forward on. You can reach out to everyone as you're sharing the good news, and as part of that, have these conversations about what your colleagues are working on and what areas they feel are right for discovery that might form the basis of
your next project. Whatever good habits you have, it's probably
not the time to get rid of them. So if you have good creative habits, like devoting time every week to reading new research, or coming up with lists of ideas to pursue, or writing five hundred words a day, just to keep yourself in that mindset, keep going with those right like, because they're going to lead to new things in the future, and you know you're going to need some other big idea, and so you want to keep laying the groundwork for that big idea to happen.
And then of course be open to opportunity as well. I mean, especially as you get more seen, you're probably people want you to do lots of things, so you're not going to take on everything that people are suggesting. But on the other hand, you want to know what looks like good to you, and so you are ready to seize opportunities that look fairly close to what good looks like for you.
And then you can ride that wave.
I'm always fascinated by the people who are sort of the difference between the one hit wonders of the world and then the people who keep coming up with good stuff. And I think it really is that being open to new opportunities, to seeking them out, and to maintaining those good habits even if you don't technically like have to awesome.
I love that.
All right, Well, I've been talking with Jesse Hemple, host of LinkedIn's podcast Hello Monday. We will be back next week with more on making work and life fit together.
Thanks for listening.
You can find me Sarah at the shoebox dot com or at the Underscore Shoebox on Instagram.
And you can find me Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. This has been the best of both worlds podcasts. Please join us next time for more on making work in life.
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