You're about to listen to a Second City Works presentation brought to you in partnership with WGN Radio. Subscribe on your favorite podcast streaming platform or listen on WGNRadio.com. And be sure to share. The Second City is a world famous comedy theater and it got so famous because it has produced generation after generation of comedy superstars. That didn't happen by magic. Second City's improvisational pedagogy fuels great performance and the same practices.
that have made stars of everyone from Bill Murray to Tina Fey, can be applied for success offstage, at work, at home and in the world. I'm Kelly Leonard, Vice President of Creative Strategy, Innovation, and Business Development at The Second City. This podcast is about collaborative conversations, discovering connections, and building a better future.
My podcast today is with Bob Moesta, who is a founder, a maker, an innovator, speaker, and a professor. He is the president and founder of the Rewired Group, as well as an adjunct lecturer at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern and a research fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute. He's the author of a number of books, and his latest is co-written with Ethan Bernstein and Michael Horn. It's called Job Moves, Nine Steps for Making Progress in Your Career. Enjoy the pod.
Bob and Wes, welcome to the podcast. Hi, Kelly. Thank you so much for having me. Excited. Big fan. Love Chicago, but love Second City very much. So happy to be here. Thanks, man. Yeah, and I'm a big Detroit fan, so we're all good. In the introduction to your new book, you write, quote, every year, an estimated 1 billion people switch jobs worldwide. Most regret at least some aspect of that process, end quote. So my guess is that this was likely...
always true to some extent, but it has become more true as the very nature of work has evolved over the last 140 years and really in the last 10. That's right. I would say in the last 20 years, it's changed dramatically. By the way, this is not my area of expertise. I'm an entrepreneur and innovator by training, and I've worked on 3,500 different products.
So this is one of those things where as I talk to all my colleagues in the space, they always talk about how hard it was to find good people and to keep good people. And so I just started with the basic premise of why do people leave a company? What causes them to say today's the day? And again, when you start to really dig into the nitty gritty of it, it's way different than we thought it was.
Yeah. And I thought it was interesting, too, is you say that a lot of people think about switching jobs, but actually don't do it. So that's a great starting point because you're like, well, why? Yeah, yeah. And so my thing is, the phrase I use is, and I apologize for the language, but it's bitchin' ain't switchin'.
Just because you want to complain about it. But the other part is there's like you start to realize there's an equation here, which is I've got to be I got to have something wrong with my current job that literally is like like almost like, you know. irking me and it's got to be in my gut. And then there's also has to be a place to go. And if you don't have a place to go, all you do is end up complaining about all the things that are going on, but you actually don't make a change.
It's not studying people who want to change. We only study people who actually change. And you realize it requires a certain amount of energy and effort to do so. And so this is where you start to realize, like, at some point, there's a lot of people who want to change, but don't. And one of my mentors would call that non-consumption. People who want to do something but can't, that's actually a very large market.
And then the other part is those people who do actually don't do it successfully. How do we actually study the people, not only who did it and who were successful, but what did they do about it? And you start to learn there's two very fundamental questions that they study and that they actually get good at. One is, who are you? And ultimately, who are you not? And the second is what do you want?
And you start to realize that through your life, what I wanted when I was 20 is different than when I'm 30 is different. I'm 60 now. And so you start to realize, like, I have very different goals. And it's not that the work has changed. I've changed. And so how do I actually start to look at this as, like, I don't believe you can plan your career out, but what you have to be is learn how to be opportunistic to see the things in front of you so you can make the choices of where you want to go.
So we're roughly the same age. And what I find fascinating is there was nothing early in my career that taught me to look at work as anything but... That's right. Work is just work. And it's like you have two lives. You have a work life and you have a home life and we grow up this way. And then what you start to realize is you actually only have one life. You don't have two. That's right. Yeah.
The answers to various things are not different at work than they are at home or in your life, whether they're So the book is filled with stuff like, I know it's going to sound simple, but write it down. But write it down. That's right. And do some soul searching. Let's talk a bit. Go ahead. Let me just add to that because the thing is, is that that's where people kind of hacked it. And what we tried to do is come back and hear all these different people and say like,
Some people brought up this notion of like, this is what drives my energy and I want to do more of this. And so we ended up calling it like, so how do you analyze your life by not the things you love to do or the things that bring you back? It's like, where do you walk into a moment and you actually get energy from it?
And what is it about that moment that you get energy from? And then conversely, where are those points where you walk in and you literally feel like the air has just been sucked out of you? And you start to realize that that contrast helps you really understand where you should be and where you shouldn't be. So one of the things that we know we need to tackle in a very first improv class, let's say you're doing level A, you're brand new, you've done this before.
The things we're tackling are trying to get you out of your fear brain and out of your brain of judgment of self and others. And by far, we judge ourselves more than we judge others. Oh, yeah. We judge ourselves worse than anybody else judges us. We're the most harshest critic on ourselves, for sure. And what we know is you can't successfully improvise unless you're past those things. Then there's a whole bunch of work.
you know, past that. But that's very much what you're doing. The book is like, let's examine your motives, your thoughts, why you do the things you do, and then what brings you joy and start and then start to craft. you know uh and it's not even like are there careers anymore i mean no no i i i think it like if the average person is about four years younger people are like every two years and the thing is is
This is almost an evolving thing or emerging thing. And the notion to think that like, so I was trained as an engineer. But the reality is like all the stuff I do every day is like, like it has virtually no has, I would say I bring engineering to it, but the reality is like most people don't have any engineering knowledge of what I'm doing. And so you start to realize like, like. what I feel is engineering taught me how to think.
But it didn't actually, most people think about it as the box I have to stay in and always be an engineer. And the reality is like... It's just not true anymore. You can just about move anywhere you want, but you have to get the fear out of your head and realize like, hey, I've been doing this. I can only stay in the finance industry or I can only stay in this industry because of that. And you start to realize when you start to inventory your skills.
and what you're good at and what gives you energy, you start to realize like, so I was talking to somebody who's a neuroscientist and she realized like, I could be a design researcher. I could be a Nat Geo coordinator. I could be a physician assistant. Like all of a sudden, once you start to realize what you love, the whole thing starts to open up and you start to get.
meaning of like what are these different things I can do and it's the agency that we're trying to actually give them to your point of getting rid of the fear but it's really about understanding like So I hit hard this aspect of I want to know what you suck at, because most people don't like to talk about what they suck at. But the reality is, is what they suck at is like inversely to basically what they're good at. So I'm really good at driving to a decision, getting things done.
but I'm really bad at consensus. And if you tell me I got to get better at consensus, Then the reality is like you destroyed some of my superpowers to actually get stuff done. And so we start to realize that they're interconnected and that you're not meant to be good at everything, but everybody has their own set of superpowers. And what are they and how do they work? My wife runs a comedy major. And one of the things that she does is first ever BA in comedy in the country.
And she does what she calls comedy cross training. So you learn improv, you learn stand up, you learn writing, because what we know about our industry and have for years is that. You're you don't know where you're going to end up in what room and you've got to be able to walk in that room. And now that's the rest of the world. So so this this idea of going to serve skills as opposed to what jobs or careers appears to be.
how one needs to be oriented for the future. That's right. That's right. So one of the things I bring is, like, I'm what they call a product person. So I literally help develop products. And so I'm literally framing this as... If you're the product, what job should you do for people? And what progress are you trying to make? And so ultimately it's that aspect of teaching them how to prototype, how to think about it. Most people look at the job description, which by the way, is totally made up.
And just a list of things that they want you to do, as opposed to what you have no idea how to imagine. It's like imagining living in a house. by understanding the square footage and then other bathrooms and, and, and, you know, a number of bedrooms, like I need to know the neighborhood. I need to know what neighbors, I need to know where things are. Like,
Like you've got to live there. You've got to have a very different appreciation for it. And so we actually teach people how to interview people who have the job you want. So you can understand the stuff that you, I'll say the stuff, not only that you like, but the stuff that you don't like, because every job has both elements.
And ultimately it's about having, make sure that you're doing, you know, if you can do 50% of the work you love and 50% of the work you hate, you hate to do, like you're not working. Most people are doing 95% of the work they love, they hate. to get to the 5% they love. And it's just, it's a travesty to me. And it's partially related to HR because the way we hire and the way we actually, the processes we have around HR that actually kind of are broken. And so this is kind of waking up that.
sleeping giant to say, how do we look at this really differently? yes and yeah yeah yeah i i know when i so i i wanted to be a playwright that was what i thought i wanted to be And the advice I was given was if you want to work in theater, work in a theater. It doesn't matter what. First gig out of college, I was a dishwasher at Second City. Yeah. So the, you know, and I become a producer here and ended up writing, not being a playwright, but being a writer.
as well but it was that experience of you you don't know until you're there what what the energy is and what they're like oh and they do this and they do that and you and then you start to be able to figure out where you might belong or what might be appealing for you. I don't think that's changed.
No, I don't think that's changed. I think what's happened is we've made it to your point. In the book, we're just making this explicit. It's almost like the notion, to be honest, when we're doing innovation. But they say like, well, you need a plan. And I'm like, I'm not smart enough to have a plan. I don't know enough about the world to have a plan. I actually plan when I'm the stupidest.
And then management holds me accountable to my stupid guests that six weeks later, I'm like, oh, wait, I want to do this instead of that. They're like, yeah, you said you were going to do that. You got to keep doing that. And so you start to realize like.
It's one thing if there's a bunch of knowns, but the world is so full of unknowns that we have to realize that at some point we have to have some emergent things. And there are some just basic truths of like, what you love to do yesterday doesn't mean you're going to love to do it today.
But the skills you have, the inventory of things you can do, it's like, again, most people talk about what we did. Your resume is what you did as opposed to what you can do. And what happens is we end up putting all these accomplishments on our resume because we think people want these outcomes. Like I would say, when I'm hiring somebody, I'm not hiring you because you know, I'm hiring you because you can figure it out.
I actually express explicitly, explicitly believe that you have, you shouldn't know the answers. You should know how to find the answers. And that's really what I'm looking for. And most people, that's what we actually want. And most people don't know how to ask for it. So we say, oh, you have to have five years experience. What does that mean?
Right. It's just, it's a cop-out to saying like, I don't want to talk to people who don't have experience as opposed to unpacking the experience of like, I need somebody who knows how to do this and they can do that. And they don't do this. Be explicit. And the more you can, the thing is, there might be somebody who has three years experience who might be perfect, but you're ruling them out because you said five years. They're making it so precise when it's actually not a precise thing.
to have that kind of learning. orientation. Do you feel like that is something that is happening now in a way that They're waking up or no. No, I, so again, I'm not really in the space, but I would say in the entrepreneurial space that like, this is where there are no job descriptions. So we actually can like look at a person and go, here's this.
here's the skills you have here's what's on and we can write the job description around them it's when we get to where we have a job description and we try to actually find a person who fits the mold and ultimately we know they don't nobody fits But the reality is like the way we make job description is
We literally go to LinkedIn. We find somebody else who has a job similar. We copy and paste that. And then we pass it around and people add other things. So it starts to turn out to be like a unicorn. I need somebody who does this and this and this. And oh, all the stuff I don't want to do, I'm going to add in there too. right and then it becomes this notion of trying to find somebody who can do all those things and we don't realize like
there are basically contradictions in our abilities. If I'm good at one thing, I'm going to suck at something else. So it's like, I need somebody who's really creative and can manage a budget. Like, that's probably a very small portion of people. Yes, that's right.
And so the fact is that you hire somebody that knows how to run a budget or somebody who's very creative, and then you beat them up for the other stuff that they suck at, as opposed to finding somebody else and pairing them with somebody who's really good at basically holding. basically building a plan and building a budget and somebody else who's creative and teaching them how to interact better than trying to have somebody deal with all that themselves.
Yeah, I think it's interesting. I use this comparison a lot in sports and in the arts world. We have we have teams just like you do at work, but you would never make the principal chalice. play oboe. Exactly. And you would not have your leadoff hitter hitting fourth. So in any high-functioning... ensemble or team you have a bunch of different people who are good at different things that's what makes it
A powerful team. Diversity is what makes it so powerful. And the thing is, is we've actually looked at diversity in a very different way, as opposed to trying to talk about diversity of skills and diversity of the team and diversity of thinking and diversity of approaches. And so ultimately we're never taking inventory of what I think are the right signs of diversity, which is I need actually a creative team has to have things from so many different perspectives.
And ultimately, we hire people who might have different skills, but we all have the same perspective. That doesn't help. Yeah. In chapter five, you talk about cataloging your capabilities. And I want to get into this a little bit because I think it's nuanced and interesting.
So you say, quote, assets are not strengths. They are investments we have made in ourselves to stay relevant to our current and future employers, such as mastery of a particular skill or certain set of connections in our network. They also lose value over time. Yes. Unpack that because there's a lot inside that.
Yeah, yeah. So for example, I love math, but the reality is I actually have a side gig where I actually just do math modeling for people because I want to keep that skill relevant. And ultimately, things are moving different things.
The core of my work is not basically rooted in math, but it's a skill set that I know that I want to keep going. And the fact is I get a lot of joy from it. So I'm actually spending time and making sure I'm investing in it so it does not go away. Because if I don't do kind of my... I have clustering at different algorithms. If I don't go write an algorithm at least once a month, I can feel that I'm getting farther and farther away from it. And it's harder and harder to get back to it.
So the other part is to be explicit about the investments and think of it as the rate of depreciation of that asset or that skill if you don't use it. And so part of it is when we get to a new job, we actually don't necessarily use all of our skills, but you need to be explicit about some of the skills you want to maintain as you're kind of going through this experience you have. Let's talk about liabilities. You say, quote,
Liabilities are not weaknesses. They are tradeoffs we make. Borrowing from the future to invest in the present in order to be relevant to the job we want to do. And also you say, quote, if you don't have liabilities, then you probably haven't been doing enough to build your assets. That's right. That's right. So for example, in writing this book, right?
So I've had three close head brain injuries. I can't read and I can't write. The dyslexic is the label, but the label is like I've had that since I've been about seven or eight years old. And the reality is, is like nobody said I could actually write a book. Yes. And so part of it, you could say that's a liability. But the fact is, is my counter to it is I have such a strong network that literally I've written six books.
Literally, I go do the research. I come up with the ideas or we come up with that. But then I go find people who can write, who love to write, but don't have a topic to write about. Right. Or that they're very interested in the topic. So like this book, I actually partnered with Ethan Bernstein, who's at the Harvard Business School and Michael Horn, who's a I've actually co-authored another book with them. But ultimately, I brought a lot of the ideas and then.
Ethan and I built a class around it first. And then we just kind of prototyped that for a couple of years. I mean, we've been working on this for 10 years and it's more like a side gig that became something like, we should write a book about this. Right. And so ultimately, and as I said, like, I can't write a book about this one, I have no credibility in the space. And two is like, I really can't write, but I can, I can, we can find somebody. And ultimately that's how it came about.
And so to me, it's acknowledging your liabilities and being able to figure out what you're going to do with them. Liabilities don't mean bad. It just means that you have to figure out a workaround around it, or it's a trade-off you have to make to say like, I can't be an author if I have to write the work.
But the reality is, like, I just changed the equation to say, like, I can actually write it with other people. And ultimately, it's not plagiarism. It's not like I'm making it up. I'm not a ghostwriter. It's literally I'm just collaborating in a very different way. But I never thought anywhere in my life that I would be an author. And all I can think about is all these books I'm writing because I've got so many ideas about how to get it out.
I mean, I think a superpower is the ability to reframe in all certain different kinds of ways. And it's interesting. The other thing that we've talked a lot about on the podcast is the power of relationships. Yes, they're everything in business. And I'm pretty sure you can talk about. Strong ties, weak ties, dormant ties. And Wayne Baker at the University of Michigan is sort of the king of this stuff. And I want you to talk a little bit about those because I think often we spend too much time.
tending to our strong ties and not understanding that the weak ties and the dormant ties can be just as powerful, if not more powerful. If not more. So let me give you an example. So I had a relationship with a Harvard Business School professor named Clayton Christensen, and he's the father of disruptive innovation. But I only, I would say we had a loose, he was one of my best friends, but we had a loose tie that we would only meet once a quarter.
So there would be a whole bunch of stuff that would happen between. And so every time we'd meet, it was like we were meeting for the first time because there was so much that happened in between. And we had four hours with no agenda. And so ultimately we had a chance to like, and to be honest, over 27 years, we basically built this relationship up.
And you could say it was a tight tie, but ultimately I only saw him once a quarter. I didn't see him really that often. And at the same time, it made it so much stronger. And so I feel like there are people who like, so. There's this notion I have, it's called a spousal discount.
And it's a derivative of this notion of like the people you are very, very familiar with, you end up discounting their advice. So I look at my wife, she's coming down the stairs one night and we're going out for dinner and I say, oh my God, you look gorgeous.
I get no reaction like words even exited my mouth, right? We get in the car. We drive over to my friend's house. He opens his front door. He looks at my wife. She goes, God, you look gorgeous. She goes, thank you. Big hug, big kiss. I'm like, wait a second. What did I do? And ultimately, she says, like, look.
The fact is, is we've been married for 34 years. And the reality is like, you can say that, but I know you say that when I'm not necessarily at that beautiful. And at the same time, the fact is, is like, I don't know whether to believe you or not. And so it's this notion that when you have very close relationships.
There's a discount and it's not personal. It's because you're so close. And so these more distant relationships, they're actually going to be more brutally honest. And in some case, you're going to get more from it because you're not discounting what they're saying.
Oh, that's interesting. Do you see, I mean, does that make sense? I don't know if that's... It completely makes sense. Well, I mean, again, we speak a lot of the same language in terms of the behavioral science around anchoring and, you know... whether it's sunk cost or whatever. So... there's all sorts of reasons that we do the things that we do that are not rational. And when we understand those,
it doesn't mean that we stop doing it that way. It just means that hopefully we, in the parlance of my work, we talk about replacing blame with curiosity. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can get angry about it, or you can actually just be curious about it in yourself and others and understand that there's a lot of stuff going on here that's an iceberg. It's below the surface. The way that I say it, though, is I don't actually believe anybody behaves irrationally.
The fact that when you hear something irrational, you don't understand the rest of the story. So context makes the irrational rational. And so the moment you hear something that's irrational, that's where, like you said, curiosity kicks in to say like, all right, what am I missing in the story? Because there's no way that this makes any sense that they do that. So there's a big...
bulk of the story that's missing. And I would say in improv, that's what you're looking for is what's the missing part of the story that makes this now rational. Yeah, yeah, I jive with that. So we co-created a class with Sunil Gupta at the Farley School at Northwestern around storytelling for entrepreneurs. Yeah, yeah. And basically using improvisation and sort of theatrical storytelling as a way for them to get people to back them.
And it's been fascinating because this is not an experience any of these people have had. Engineers, first of all, we're mostly introverts. The notion of people judging us, like the other part is the way we've been taught. Like the thing is, is there's two lies we were told. One is the lie is build it and they will come.
which is just just a lie the other part is the fact this is like we were told that we need to be the smartest people in the room and the reality is is like what i want to say is we should be the dumbest people in the room because you got to ask the most questions and the fact is they don't like
So the rule they told us is never ask a question that you don't know the answer to. That's ridiculous. So my superpower, think about it. I'm dyslexic. I can't read. I can't write. So I can't learn from books. So the only way I learn is through questions.
Yeah. And so that's the gift. Like everybody would say, oh, it's so bad that you have this disability. I look at it and go, it's the greatest gift I ever got. Are you kidding me? Like I get to ask people questions that nobody else will ask. Everybody else is afraid to ask. because they don't know the answer. And usually the person's like, oh, that's an easy answer. And so I've been able to get ahead only because I have to learn through questions. And that's how I see it as an asset.
The first year of the podcast, we had on the then head of the Chicago library system. He is now the head of the New York library system. He can't read. Yeah. How does that happen? But you realize like at some point, some of you can't read actually can see organ. Like one thing I will tell you as a reader. So the way my mom taught me to read is the first thing she says is like, what do you see? And I said, I see spaces.
And she said, what do you mean? I'm like, oh, there's a space here and a space there. She's like, you don't see letters. I'm like, well, there's letters, but I see all the spaces first. And then she basically said, all right, I want you to circle the five largest words on that paragraph. And then guess what it would be about. Built my superpower of pattern recognition. Like I've been doing this since I've been seven years old. That's how I actually read something.
And where did you, so do you consider yourself a good storyteller? I would say yes, I am. How did you practice that? Where did that muscle come from? So part of it came from three of the people that are my mentors were engineers. And they basically taught me how to almost, so they taught me something what I call empathetic perspective.
How do you see the world through other people's eyes, including science and time and space and other things? So you start to realize, I got to be able to see things through time and space. And so ultimately, for me, it was this aspect of how do I integrate? three or four different perspectives and put it into one thing, it's by telling a story.
And so to be honest, it's like building the characters, understanding the context, understanding what's the trajectory they're on, where do they want to go? I didn't really learn the hero's journey to later, but it was like literally every story is about a change. What change are we trying to make?
For the most part, my expertise is this notion of what we call jobs to be done, that people don't buy products, they hire them to do a job in their life. And that's where I learned how to extract stories from people to actually build product. And so everything to me is about the story and understanding how the story weaves together and what's the important storyline in their life. And so this is about products fitting into people's lives. This is about products for people.
It's who, when, where, and why. It tells me then what and how and how much to build. And so that's how I learned it and learned storytelling because I had to put together the who, when, where, and why to build a story to tell my engineers what to build. One of the things that I think is very similar between... startups and theater kids, entrepreneurs and improvisers, is that we recognize that the story is about the person in the audience. Yes. It's not about us. It's about them.
So when you understand that, you tell a very different kind of story and you also will adjust your story based on what's happening in that audience. That's right. And so whenever I speak, one of the things I always ask is like, I need the house lights up. And they're like, why? I'm like, I need to see people's faces.
because based on how they react to certain things, I will change my presentation live to tell more stories or less stories or different stories based on their reaction to the stories. And if I can't see their eyes, it's horrible. Yeah, I feel the same way. I have a keynote today at 630 downstairs here. And I over prepare for that reason where I'm like, if they're not buying this particular set of, you know, concepts, I can switch to this.
And what I would say is good listening. Is it over? Is it really over preparing or you're just literally being able to basically like, again, I think of like, you know, people would say luck is when opportunity, you know, basically meets preparedness. And so it's the preparedness that you're doing to get there. But the reality is like, people say, God, you prep so much. It's like...
It gets to the point where you, I just need to get myself in the right mindset to basically have that conversation and to know that. I have a starting point and I have an end point, but I have no idea what's going to happen in the middle. And I tell people like that where I do keynotes or any kind of teaching thing is like,
I've got a plan, but I'm going to break the plan if I get different signals. And so it's learning how to read the signals and adjust and do all that other stuff. It's amazing. Yeah, for me, it's, you know, I don't script. which would be weird for the improv guy. But I have like, you know, I've got 75 songs and I'm probably only able to do 18. So I just have the songs there in case I want to look and be like, oh, this one might work well.
So it's that sort of weave. And then also, I mean, this was interesting. So, you know, for a certain, like a person your age, you look up who I hired at Second City and you're like, man, oh man, it's like the Mount Rushmore of comedy. But I was in front of a bunch of like... 24 year olds that, you know, they, they know who Stephen Colbert is kind of, they don't really care.
That's right. Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Keegan-Michael Key. I'm like, I'm like, are you kidding me? Like, come on. So I'm like, oh, I'm this my gratuitous name dropping joke is not going to work because they don't care. But what they were interested in, they don't know. I wouldn't put it that they don't care, but they just don't have that understanding. They don't have the schema. Yeah.
But they did care about the content. They actually cared about the ideas. And they responded to this, you know, the ideas of you're navigating. ambiguity and how do you do that and in most places we don't get And improvisation offers you a practice in divergent thinking, among other things. That's right. This is the thing is, is like, I think we need to realize like, so my children played ice hockey, right? So the wings and the Blackhawks are always a good kind of always a good one.
But the reality is what the goal was, is to teach my kids to learn how to love practice. Because if they love the games and they hated practice, they were just going to be horrible. But if they learn to love practice and work and do the grind, if you will, they could then basically, you know, they would perform in the games, but they'd always go back to practice. And all of my children have basically that skill set because I feel like.
You can outgrind just about anybody. The people who have natural smarts are there, but most people who are very naturally smart actually tend to be more lazy. And the grind is what actually gets you to be part of life. That's interesting. Yeah, I had not thought of, and I did that. My kids all did theater and sports. Yeah, yeah. And they like rehearsal and they like practice.
It's exactly right. And so the moment that they, like the moment they can get energy out of a meeting because they're, they feel like it's practice or they're doing like your prep. Some people really like to do the prep because it makes them feel like I got this. Right. And so the moment you say, like, I don't need to prep, it's like you miss that little dopamine hit that basically says, oh, I'm there.
Right. Yep. So I have a question for you. So I'm working on, on another book, right? Or it's, it's like, it's in the, in the hopper and it's around the, I call it the anatomy of a great question. And it's led me down the roll to say the anatomy of a great question is more like comedy and a setup of a set of things to get to because it's ultimately.
I'm trying to get to when people go like, Oh, that's a great question. It's typically like, and so I'm literally trying to understand what one, what is it? How do you define it? What, like, what, why do you want it? When do you want it? And then, then how do you cause it? And you start to realize like, it's like, it almost parallels comedy to a T. And I was wondering your take on that.
Okay, so my wife and her new book on comedy theory is coming out next year at Northwestern University Press. Yeah, yeah. I'm an adjective to Northwestern, by the way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so she sort of, her theory of comedy starts with... Imagine you've got a sort of mixing board in front of you, and there's three areas that you're mixing. One is recognition, another is pain, and another is distance.
And those are the three elements that you're playing around with. So, you know, the pain and distance thing has been around for a while. People understand that. You know, it's Mel Brooks's, you know, you fall into a manhole. It's funny. I fall into a manhole. It's tragic. The recognition part is the one that people don't often get, which we do.
Some people call it truth, but it doesn't need to be true. What we know in a Second City show is if we have a side character in the first act who shows up as a main character in the second act, it will get a laugh simply because people recognize that character from the first act. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's what I'm trying to say is what are the cause and effect things? If I do that, check, I get this. And I get it consistently. And it's one of the ingredients I can add as I'm designing out.
let's say an improv situation, but I would do that also for basically products, right? That's right. And then I think the other thing I know I tried to do, especially with the first question, and it's not always – the book doesn't always hand me this. But this one did, which is,
Let me, this is how I see from my viewpoint, the world you're talking about. Does that seem to connect? And in most cases, people are like, yeah, yeah, that does. It's like, it's not my words. They're my words of your concept. And then if there's a little bit of a insight there and often there's another thing I'll do is early on, I'll ask a question from the last chapter because I want you to know I read the whole book, which I did. Yeah.
And then right away, you're going to be inclined to be like, I know that you read that thing and that thing is like, okay, he went through the whole thing. And whether you did or not, it implies it, which implies that you're engaged in it, which is great. I care. Yeah, you care. That's that's the that's the other part. One of the I've got a couple more questions before. Yes. And story.
You say, quote, one of the biggest mistakes people make in their quest for progress is not engaging others in the messy middle of their self-development efforts and job transitions. Yeah. Let's talk about the messy middle. The messy middle is this whole aspect of having somebody talk about the things you really suck at.
It's so hard for people to admit it. And so one of the ways I get it is I have them do something called strength finders, which is a test you take that gives you the top five things. And I go like, show me the bottom five.
And like, why? I'm like, because that's what you suck at. They're like, well, no, I don't. I'm just not good at it. I'm like, okay, let's be clear. And then we start to connect the dots. Like if you have this strength here and you're good at this other thing, like you're good at this strength because you don't do this well. And so you start to connect them with this messy middle of realizing like,
Being good at everything actually makes you mediocre because to be honest, your superpowers exist. And if you actually develop the wrong set of skills that you're vacant in, you actually hurt your superpowers. And so it's teaching them this messy middle and getting comfortable with saying, so like, we actually get people to talk about like, this is what I love to do. And by the way, I can do these things, but it's going to take me probably two or three times longer to do these other things.
If you want me to be part of the job description and we're getting people to literally like the companies are willing to design these parts out of their job description because now they can articulate what they're good at and what they're not good at. It's amazing. The messy middle is this aspect of admitting, what did you really do? For example, how do you interview somebody about why they left one place to go to another place? You start to realize there's a story you made up.
And then there's the reality of it. And somehow you have to dig past the thing of like, you know, I was bored. Were you bored? What does that mean to be bored? And it turns out, no, I was disrespected. It wasn't that I was bored. It was that I was disrespected and not engaged. And I was bored, but the reality is it's these other two things that happened to me that made it that way.
And only friends or people who are close to you know you enough to call you out that that's kind of a cop out to say, like, I was bored. Right. And so it's that notion of pushing us to get. So I have a. People treat language as if it's a very precise thing.
And my belief is most people speak in a level of pablum that is enough to go like, hey, how was your day? Oh, it was good. And then the follow-up question, well, what was good about it? And they can't answer you. It's like, yeah, was it really good? Or wasn't that really good? And so you start to realize like, This is the messy middle is where we have to go from this pablum level past the fantasy and nightmare level down to the causal level of what caused you to get energy in this moment.
And what caused you not to get energy in this moment? And you start to realize there's very few moments in the day where you get energy. And if you can figure out how to get more energy, your day is just so much more enjoyable. Yeah. One other thing I thought about that came from the book. For decades, Hollywood agencies and managers.
have been like, I don't understand why you do not hold on to your talent. Why are you letting all these people go? And I'm like, do you know any other 65 year old successful comedic institution? I mean. The idea of every time we help one of our alums get that next gig, we have this friend for life. We have this connection for life. And you talk about that, this idea of like... Don't try to hold on, like use your network to help people. They go, but that gets paid back.
It always gets payback. And this is where it went. So I've, I've done seven startups and there's times where when, when we would sell or we'd actually, you know, we'd grow or we'd shrink and it'd be like, okay, I'm going to go help them get a job. And so part of this was one of the reasons why I wrote the book is because I just. I spend so much time trying to help people. It's kind of like we now can start in a very different spot of the conversation if you read that book first.
And all of a sudden, like my thing is, is that people who are reading it are like, oh my God, I know five people who need this book right now, because it's to your point, it's the reframing of what they're trying to do. And all they know is they're stuck and they don't know what, and it's a lot of work to try to get out of getting stuck. And so this is that notion of the moment you feel stuck is when you should be reaching for this book.
Love it. We always have the podcast asking our guests for a yes and story. Do you have one for us? Yeah. So my big yes and is. is really about this book is this aspect of like, I started to do this to help people like help. people close to me. And then it started to get out of a little bit out of control where more and more people, cause I was helping people get kind of amazing jobs and like, how did you do this? And so we then turned it into a research project and I did it primarily for.
uh kind of the entrepreneurs that i work with to help them find great talent and then it was like somebody's like you should turn this into a book i'm like my first answer was no and then it's like yes And I need to figure out how I can get some credibility in the space because I don't. And so I went and found people, Ethan Bernstein and Michael Horn. And I met Ethan in 2009. And his origin story is fabulous.
He basically was, he was talking to somebody about their career. And as we, as I went through the class and taught him this thing, he's like, oh my gosh, my conversation could have been 10 times better if I just would have used the framework that you were talking about. And from there. From 2009 to 2015, we built a class.
And the and part is like, I never, I never intended for this to turn into a book. I never intended this to turn into a class, but it's this aspect of if I can help people, then how it will scale will come to me. And so it's, I'm a. As an entrepreneur, yes, and is kind of like at the core of what we do is like, I don't need to have all the answers. All I know is that this has got to be useful to people. And the more useful I can make it, then it will have the and part of where we can take it.
So I'm always like, like as an entrepreneur, the and part is like, it's It's like Bob and because I never you never do anything by yourself. And so ultimately, it's like, I don't really like to take credit for any of it. It's more the fact that I'm a vessel that I've learned from all of my great teachers. and it's about passing it on to the next generation. The book is called Job Moves, Nine Steps for Making Progress in Your Career. Bob Moesta, thank you for coming on the pod.
Thanks, Kelly. Thanks for having me, man. Getting BSN is produced by Second City Works and WGN Radio. Our editor is Iridian Fiero from WGN. We get support at the Second City from Colleen Fahey, Mike Farinaccio, and Emma Smith. The music you hear at the beginning and end. is by jukebox the ghost for more information about the second city you can go to www.secondcity.com or you can email us directly at works at secondcity.com