L&D In Action: Winning Strategies from Learning Leaders - The Happiness Quotient: Giving Employees Opportunities to Craft Their Own Work Wellbeing Journeys

Episode Date: November 14, 2023

Author of Career Self-Care Minda Zetlin joins us this week to explain how organizations and their employees can double down on genuine wellbeing for all by refocusing on what matters most and stepping back from toxic competitive tendencies. Minda’s approach centers the principles of hard work while forcing us to reconsider platitudes like work-life balance, pursuing one’s passion, and even the nature of hard work itself.

You're listening to L&D in Action, winning strategies from learning leaders. This podcast, presented by Get Abstract, brings together the brightest minds in learning and development to discuss the best strategies for fostering employee engagement, maximizing potential, and building a culture of learning in your organization. This week, I speak with Minda Zetlin. Minda is an author, speaker, and journalist. As contributing editor and twice-weekly columnist for Inc.com, she weaves together stories from prolific business leaders,

pop culture, and industry trends to deliver poignant lessons on small business success. Her articles have also appeared in CIO.com, Computer World, CNBC, and more. Her book is titled Career Self-Care, Find Your Happiness, Success, and Fulfillment at Work. She and I discuss what it means to consciously develop work-life balance in the modern era, but we also don't shy away from pointing out the forces at play that make pushing the limits at work so attractive. Let's dive in.

Hello, and welcome to L&D in Action. I'm your host, Tyler Lay, and today I'm speaking with Minda Zetland. Minda, thank you so much for joining me today. Well, I'm so happy to be here. Great. So I keep a close eye on the conference board. They release a workforce survey a few times a year, and it just so happens that they released their most recent one literally yesterday. So as I was actually finishing up reading your book, Career Self-Care, which we will dive into, I decided to go in and check what their latest information was. And they have officially recorded the responses from 1500 workers between, I think, September and October. So pretty recently, questions about how they feel at work and what's important to them at work. Usually this relates to learning and leadership and compensation and well-being and all of those things. And I love getting these numbers. Anyway, according to the conference board, flexibility in terms of hours and location where you work is officially the number one non-salary thing that workers consider

the most important at their place of work. Very few, in fact, the bottom two items in this list where people actually chose five of the most important out of a selection of 15 or so, I think, the bottom two were mentoring and coaching programs and employee wellness programs. They were both around 10 to 15% of people selected them, whereas flexibility, as I mentioned, was up at 65%. And also, I think retirement and additional compensation packages were just below that 65%.

But that flexibility thing way up there. And it wasn't the case the last time they did this. I think flexibility was second or third. So I want to ask you, what's happening here? Are people starting to reject organizationally imposed wellness and the systems their organizations put in place for their well-being and for their advancement? Are people starting to reject that in favor of autonomy and building their own life around work? What do you think? Well, I think you can't really make that comparison. It's a little

bit like saying that people rejected a ham sandwich in favor of a trip to Hawaii. It doesn't necessarily mean that they don't like ham sandwiches. It means that the other thing is much, much more appealing to them. And I think that that's what we're seeing here. Also, Adam Grant, whose work I love to follow, his research also shows that people put flexibility at the time that they work, I think, first, and the place that they work, I think, first, and the place that they work second. I could be wrong about that. Above Eason, the four-day work week, which, as I'm sure you know, is an extremely popular thing. People are much more interested in the possibility of flexible work and flexibility as to both when and where they work and I think people discovered during the pandemic

that this was actually possible and once people know that something is possible that they can do their jobs well and that you can have the meetings you need to have and still pick up your kid after school if you need to or get a morning workout in and then work whatever works for your particular workout in and then work or whatever works for your particular circadian rhythms and work preferences, people do like that and they don't really want to go back. Ham sandwich versus Hawaii. That's the title of this episode. I've decided already. But speaking of this, you have a really good sense of humor. So I'm glad you started off with a nice little joke there. Your book, Career Self-Care, I read through it. of humor. So I'm glad you started off with a nice little joke there. Your book, Career Self-Care,

I read through it. And I have to say, I've read a lot of books about career optimization and work life balance. It's been a part of my career for the past five or so years. And you don't pull any punches. Very few are doing the things that you do. First of all, you're very, very candid. There's a moment very early on where you describe the places in life where you feel that you have some shortcomings, the things that you just feel you haven't quite optimized. And you're just very candid about that. I'll let our readers discover what those things are for themselves. You make a few jokes about customer service and how customers feel as if customers are the most important thing to a business, whereas that is something that can cause a lot of turmoil for workers and for organizations.

And there are just many cases where you make jokes here and there. And I just, I really enjoyed reading through the book because you have a strong sense of humor and you're just, your honesty throughout it is very refreshing. And at the same time, you really go after a few different things that are happening in the workplace, in industry. You actually call out Jeff Bezos and the billionaires and their sort of business war that's been going on. I think since you wrote the book, we've had the Zuckerberg, Elon Musk. Cage fight. Yeah. I'm sure you would have included something along like about that if the book had been written more recently. But you have no fear when it comes to saying, OK, career self-care,

we need to identify how to take better care of ourselves in the frame of our work life. But let's talk about what's really going on here at the higher industry level and the expectations that our companies have for us and the way that we are expected to be always on and the habits that we develop with digital business and all of those things. You really, you pull no punches. And you are speaking to individuals here. At the end of the day, you're telling us that it is within our power to improve our well-being in the frame of our career. But where does the onus ultimately fall? How is the onus shared among business leaders and individuals to make professional life healthier? Wow, that's an interesting question. You're right that I wrote the book for individual employees and also

individual entrepreneurs, which is what I am and what most of this grew out of my columnist for Inc. Obviously, Inc. is for entrepreneurs. So I do think there's a synergy there. Human beings who employ other human beings, if they bring their humanity and an awareness of the humanity of the people that they're employing to every decision they make, everything is going to go better. Research shows over and over again that when employees are happy, well, people, when human beings are happy and rested and feel autonomy, you mentioned autonomy before. Autonomy is actually, I don't have the research

at my fingertips, but I read some research recently that having a sense of autonomy and control over your job is the biggest thing that reduces burnout, which isn't what you would expect. That's what the research shows. And it makes sense if you think about it. When people feel somewhat in control of their own work and their own lives, they are able to be so much more effective. And I think that's reflected too in the conference board numbers that you just cited. People understand that autonomy makes them both happier and healthier in their own lives, but also better at their jobs. So there's kind of a win-win, but you know, I mean, so many executives that you talk to don't say human beings, they say resources, Right. When you talk about people as resources, then you look at things a little bit differently. So, you know, I mean, we could say the onus is on leaders. I think for every leader, look at what works for the employees, first of all, have the employees that are aligned with your purpose, your mission that are good for your company in the first place. And once you have those people, give them as much

autonomy as you can. Think of them as whole human beings. And in most instances, your company will thrive as a result of that, particularly in times when there's war for talent and it's hard to hire people. And I know there's a lot of layoffs going on, but I believe that's still true for skilled employees or for employees who are good at whatever job they might be doing. But ultimately, it's on each of us as an individual to make sure to the best degree we can that the place that we work and the work that we do is aligned with both our values and what makes us happy. Because I think for any part of success, any definition of success has to take happiness into account. Yeah, of course. We see so much competition these days, especially since we've had, you know, big tech wars. The industry competition is just so vast and so serious. And I mean,

I've expressed this many times on the show, but I think that's why AI is blowing up as it is right now, because so many large companies are looking to get ahead in such a radical way that the investment is just flooding into AI developers in hopes of greater efficiency and all of that. all of that. And I think it affects everybody. It's a trickle down effect in terms of who it impacts. And you talk about one concept. So instead of FOMO, fear of missing out early on in the book, you switch that up to JOMO, the joy of missing out. And I think about this both from an individual lens and from a company lens, because I feel like most organizations are afraid they're missing out if they're not innovating, if they're not competing, if they're not putting in the extra hours and making sure that their competitors don't disrupt them or get ahead of them. There's also that fear of disruption nowadays too, which I think guides a lot of this. But JOMO, I like that concept. It reminds us that things are less important than we think in most cases. And it's also just a

critical idea for larger scale planning. When you disconnect yourself, the central idea here is disconnection. When you disconnect yourself from what you're doing, you know, being in the weeds and spending so much time with your head down at work, that's when you actually have time for creative planning and deeper innovative thought and, you know, that important level of strategic activity. So my question to you is, how should organizations be systematizing disconnection? I'm a huge advocate of company getaways and excursions and team escapades and whatever other fun words you can come up with for these sorts of things. But should we be continuing to systematize these things? And how do we do so in a post-COVID decentralized world? Well, I think maybe it's more important in a post-COVID decentralized world, because if you have remote team members, and particularly if you have team members who are not in the same geographic location as the office or each other, which I think is increasingly the case these days, especially in large organizations, you have people who may rarely, if ever, have the opportunity to, you know, go out for a drink after work, to take a like a classic and boring example. So then the two or three times a year or whatever you do when you take everybody away on a retreat, people can fly in from wherever they are for that,

gives people a chance to do that connecting and bonding and forming the real human relationships that are so incredibly valuable, particularly when the chips are down and, you know, you have to scramble to make a deadline or fix a problem or something when those relationships really become important. So I think that getting people together away from the direct pressures of work on a regular basis is probably even more important than it was before this whole remote work world. That said, that's the kind that's one kind of disconnecting. big picture look at the work and the company and realize that, oh, we're pouring all this energy into X, but actually X is not the future. Y is the future. And maybe we should be rethinking our priorities. Oh, that's really valuable. It's also valuable for people to be able to step away from work altogether, which you cannot do if you're surrounded by your colleagues, you know, even if

you're at a ski resort or something. So I think both things are valuable. So yes, I think systematizing some kind of regular getaway, some kind of regular venue for people to be together and socialize and talk and even talk about their families or whatever outside of the context of work is really healthy and important. It's also really healthy and important for people to be off work, completely off work. And I think the people who say, okay, we have one day a week when there are no meetings, not even Zoom ones. No one is ever expected to answer an email after hours or on the weekends. Those are all really important things too. Making sure that people take time off. There's this trend towards unlimited vacation time, which sounds like really neat, except that often unlimited vacation time means no vacation time, because if

you have vacation time that you're obligated to take, then you will go on vacation, even if there's a big project at hand, you know, as you're running out of time. Making sure that people do take time off and all of that is really important, too, for, again, the health and the effectiveness of the human beings who work in a company. Work-life balance is the most common broad term to describe all that we're discussing here. And I think that work-life balance when you work from home and when more people work from home than did, you know, pre-pandemic, it's a whole different ballgame. What really goes on at your home while you're doing work, I think life is different if your office is in your living space and you're engaging with whoever's there with you, done to, you know, embrace more of life at times and less of work and kind of actually going in between the two directly, you know, really from work to life. But you also talk about others who integrate work-life

integration as a term that you actually, I think, pulled from somebody else and talked about their practices there. And you don't do the thing where you take like a hard line stance as to what that should mean. And I think that's a thing where you take like a hard line stance as to what that should mean. And I think that's a fair perspective because everybody's work and life is going to be very different. You know, some of us do not have families at home. Some of us have bigger families at home, that sort of thing, whatever it is. But I'd like if you could just kind of give an overview as to how you think we should treat that concept of work-life balance. And if you had any particular examples that you enjoyed from the book or from your own life, I'd love to hear them as well. I do think that work-life balance is really

important, whether we call it balance or integration, and something that employers should think about. Tomorrow, I'm going to interview the author of the book, Seek, who just proposed in Harvard Business Review that there's some sentences that every leader should use with the people who work for them. And one of them is, I understand that you are more than your job. And I think that that is a super important thing for every employer to understand and for every employee to understand. If you are in a job that expects you to be nothing but your job, then that can be really challenging. And I know that there are a lot of jobs like that out there. Ultimately, we each set our own boundaries for how much we're willing to be on the work side of that work-life balance. But I think that it can be a seesaw. That's what the person who gave me the term work-life integration said, because sometimes

there is a big project or there's a big push or there's something that you have to finish or there's a big problem. And then it's all hands on deck. And then, you know, maybe your spouse is the one who takes care of the kids for those few days or you give up other pieces of your life, but it's temporary. It can't be that way all the time. And conversely, and this is the thing that employers also have to remember, there's a flip side too. You have a family member who's ill. You are facing a health challenge yourself. There is something going on, good or bad,

in your life that's going to make you a little bit less focused on work. And when that happens, it's good to remember that there's two sides to the seesaw and that caring for the whole human being means sometimes if someone is a valued employee, then understanding that there are times when they're going to be more focused away from work. And both things are good. And that's part of work-life balance, too. Ultimately, I think it looks different for everyone, but there's some things that we know. We know that when we stop focusing on a task at hand and we do something else, it allows other parts of our brain to come into play. That's why the brilliant idea in the shower is such a cliche, right? There's some truth behind that.

So allowing people to be away from the task that they're doing is actually a way to engage their creativity and their innovation, if you want that, from the people that are working for you. And I certainly hope you do. I know from my own experience, and experts also say that we should all have at least one day out of every seven that we are doing no work at all. I try really hard to stick with that. at all. I try really hard to stick with that. It's been a huge change for the better for me because I had many years of, you know, working seven days a week and driving everyone around me crazy. And as I say in my book, around that time, I heard about a copywriter in Southeast Asia who was working for Young and Rubicam, I think it was, and actually literally worked herself to death. And I didn't even know that it was possible for someone to work themselves to death if they were sitting at a desk until I read about her. And I discovered that she wasn't even the first person to work herself to death. She was that way. She was just the most high profile one because she tweeted as she was working herself to death. She tweeted

about how she was 30 hours of straight work. Right. Her very last tweet was 30 hours and still going strong. S-T-R-O-O-O-N-G. Strong. And then she died. You know, that's the flip side of it. So we all have to find that balance for ourselves. I think as employers, we have to allow and encourage people to find that balance for themselves. And I think we all have to take breaks. And I think we are better when we do. Yeah, that was a really sad story to read in the book. And you also gave a few other examples of people working themselves a little bit too hard. So Brad Willis, now Baba Ram, was a reporter, I think a wartime reporter who severed his spine

and had some crazy vertebrae injury and And then it just kept going until his back effectively snapped. And then he had to do, you know, years of recovery. I think it was actually your own personal story where you had pneumonia at one point or something along those lines. And you just kind of got on a call to take care of a conversation that was going to be otherwise just put off every 24 hours until you were feeling better. And, you know, I think we've all been there at one point just because we live in such a competitive society. And, you know, when it comes to getting ahead, like somebody else is going to do better or rise above if you do not. I think there's just a constant pressure to avoid that and prove yourself. And, you know, there's some stats

also from the conference board. Earlier in this year, they interviewed about 200 different HR leaders. And those HR leaders reported that among 43% of them, mental health and well-being among their employees had decreased in the first six months of 2023. And that's more than half or about half didn't decrease. But I think that a 43% decrease among entire organizations on average is kind of scary. So I think this is pretty serious here. And that's kind of why I asked about the onus earlier, you know, is it on the organizations or is it on us? But at the end of the day, like, do you have any additional advice for just how we overcome that desire to compete and to prove ourselves and to win the business and to just overcome and keep going? It's hard. You're right that it's a society

we live in. By the way, not every society on earth is like this. And I know that Get Abstract is a very international audience. I think the United States is particularly bad in this respect. It's not the only nation that's like that, but it is maybe not even the worst, but it is particularly bad. Brad Willis Bob Aron, he had a motto, and his motto was, I will work harder and longer than anyone else. And he was certainly in extremely competitive, high-pressure kind of profession, where probably there would be somebody else in the next cubicle or whatever who would work harder and longer than you and would get the plum assignment to wherever it was but the reason i put his story into the book is because

it's a good object lesson and where that can lead right i mean i think he's happier but he left that little world kind and became a yoga instructor and meditation leader because the way that he was living and working was literally killing him. So those are some of the choices that you have to make. And it's easy to say, I can just tough it through, but you can't always just tough it through. He discovered he couldn't. He thought, oh, you know, I'll just take a lot of pain pills and my back will be fine. And I won't admit that I'm injured and therefore probably shouldn't be sent to a place where there are bombs going off. Because going to the places where the bombs are going off was his whole ambition. He wanted to be in war zones.

But what I thought was really interesting about that was that, I mean, this is a guy who was fearless, right? He would go to these incredibly dangerous places. He would associate with these incredibly dangerous places. He would associate with some incredibly dangerous people. And he did all this fearlessly, but he was too afraid to say, I have an injury I need to take. And it was initially, I think, four weeks off. And he had taken four weeks off when he first got this injury early in his career, he was about to start a new job with NBC. Had he just said, I am so sorry, I have this injury, I need four weeks to deal with it, I will be there in four weeks, raring to go, I think very likely his employer would have granted him those four weeks.

And if not, there was certainly another opportunity because he was kicking ass in his job. Truthfully, you know, really fantastic reporters don't necessarily grow on trees. I think he would have found another fantastic way to move forward with that career. And so in the book, I kind of imagine what would have happened, what would his career have been? He might still be a beloved television reporter today if he hadn't made that choice to just ignore his own injury and dive into a new job. So that kind of thing, this is a very lengthy way of saying that kind of thing can really backfire. And I think even if it doesn't land you, you know, as it did with him, completely immobilized

and in very great pain and at risk of your life, it can still land you someplace you don't want to be. It can land you not healthy, not with supportive relationships in your life, right? Because every single one of us, including you and me, at some point, our career is finite. And at some point, we hope there's going to be the rest of our life afterward. And if we haven't built a life that has all this other stuff in it, things that we're interested in, people that we love, family, community, all that stuff, at some point, we're going to be left very bereft because a career can't take you absolutely all the way.

So those of us who are, and again, yeah, I'm talking to individuals here, those of us who are individuals need to remember that. Those of us who are employers need to remember, too, that once again, we are hiring whole human beings and they will have a life outside of work. And if they don't, that's a problem. Community to me is the thing that you write about that you just mentioned that has had the biggest impact personally. So for my career well-being since I've been working, it's always been finding a tribe that has really kept me going, that's had the most impact for me. And you have a section in the book on this. Should we seek a tribe in our workplace? That's kind of my question here, because the team that you work for, the division that you're in,

may or may not be full of people that you get along with very closely. Depending on the work that you do, you might be the same kind of people and you might have very similar interests, but that's not always the case. And in some cases, it actually shouldn't be the case. You know, it might be healthier to seek a tribe elsewhere, you know, in your own community, within your family, in the place that you live, in relation to your hobbies or in relation to your interests external from work. That's a very common way to find a tribe. But do you think that it's important to find a tribe at work? And should leaders facilitate that? Should business leaders and organizations try to facilitate community

within their organizations to some extent as well? First of all, in answer to your last question, absolutely. You know, because I said it before, when things go wrong and everybody has to pitch in and solve a big problem or chase after a big opportunity, those relationships among the people who work for you is what's going to make it work. So if you have people who either dislike each other or just don't have much of a relationship at all. It's just going to be harder because what makes people put themselves out, they may be engaged with your company. They may be chasing a big financial payoff

if something goes well. Your company may serve some purpose that really aligns with their values that they really care about. All of that can be true, but I think still what really will drive people to do their best and go above and beyond, especially when it's really needed, is the relationships that they have at work. So everything that an employer can do to bring people together and make them feel like more of a

community and encourage those kind of relationships at work, I think benefits you as well as the people who work for you. And by the way, it also will help you with things like retention, because when people have strong relationships at work, that's a thing that will encourage them to stay or make it harder for them to leave and go someplace else. Just as conversely, when people do leave, the conventional wisdom is very often it's because they're frustrated by somebody they're working with or somebody they're working for. So yes, everything an employer can do. And you talked about some of those things before, getting people together outside of work, you know, all this,

there are all kinds of different ways to do team building and we don't need to dive into all of that right now. But anything that you can do to encourage people to bond with each other and create a tribe is great for your organization. And it's usually, you know, pretty easy to do and not extraordinarily expensive compared to some other things you might do for retention. So having said that, I mean, I think that people should be greedy about their tribes. I don't think we need to have just one. I think having a tribe at work is great. If you're like me and you work by yourself or you work remotely, that might be harder. I have tribes of other people, multiple tribes of other people who are engaged in similar work as me. My husband is a musician. We're part of a big community of musicians here. That's another tribe that I'm part of. husband is a musician. We're part of a big community of musicians here. That's another tribe that I'm part of. Tribes and groups happen all over the place and all over our lives. And that's a good thing. Well, when it comes to developing community at work, a really effective way of ingratiating oneself into a new company is, I think, through mentoring and coaching. And I've already downplayed the importance of this at the top of the episode by reminding

everybody that apparently, according to the conference board, very few people actually really value this at their companies when compared to things like retirement planning or flexibility of work or compensation packages. But it's hard to argue against mentoring and coaching relationships when it comes to meeting people at a company. You know, having somebody who's been there for a while, who knows the ropes, who knows the systems, who knows the people and can maybe introduce you to other branches and divisions and departments and teams. I think that's really important. And you do spend some time talking about mentorship, the many different flavors of it. So informal versus formal, internal versus external, you know, seeking mentorship from an external organization or something like that, even multiple mentors versus one mentor, singular versus multiple.

How should we frame these options to ensure that we have the greatest success? Should organizations work to make mentorships easier and better? Should they systematize them? Should they kind of let you figure it out on your own? What do you think? I think that formal mentoring programs are great, actually. And there's research that shows that they can be good for the careers of both the people who are mentored and the people who are doing the mentoring. So it's a benefit for everyone. I don't think that people are rejecting, back to the Ham Sandwich versus Hawaii thing, I don't think people are rejecting the idea of mentoring programs. I just think that there are some other things that may be more important to

them. And mentoring programs in a way are a little bit like dating apps. You know, you may or may not really want love in your life. And that doesn't necessarily tell you whether or not you want to use a dating app. And some people do, and they can be very effective. And we all know people who met their spouse on a dating app, but there are different ways of going about it. So I do think formal mentoring programs can be highly useful. I think, again, having a culture where people feel comfortable asking for advice and mentorship is a great thing. Personally, I don't think that I've ever had a single mentor. I think perhaps showing my age in the book I talked about, Lou Grant, in the old Mary Tyler Moore show that some of our viewers have seen in reruns or something. And, you know,

that was always my fantasy of the mentor, you know, a fatherly figure who would straighten everything out whenever anything went wrong. And mentors take all kinds of different shapes. I talked to an entrepreneur once who said that he had four different mentors for four different parts of his life, one of which was work-life balance, by the way, and for other things, how to do marketing more effectively, how to do budgeting and planning. And we don't need all the answers from one person, just like we don't need to be able to find one person in our lives who can give us everything we absolutely need, right? We want a partner,

but we also need friendships. We also need family relationships. So mentoring can take all these kinds of different shapes. I do think it's great to have formal mental programs if you're a large enough organization to do that. I think it's also great if you're a leader to just take it upon yourself to be available for mentoring and to let people know, you know, and mentoring is a big word, right? It implies a lot of commitment, even if it's not a formal mental program, a mentor program, it implies, you know, some sort of structure. And that could be great, but it also could be great

to just say, you know, if you have any questions about X, or you're taking on this type of task and you haven't done it before, or what are you interested in doing? What can I do to help you get to the next level in your career where you want to go? All of that stuff comes under the heading of mentoring and all of that stuff is super useful. I'm kind of going through the book in order of the sections you're picking out an item or two from each of the five sections

that you've written. And there's a chapter about doing work that you enjoy. You have some gripes with the idea of pursuing your passion, or at least that's how I would put it. You talk about how some people have kind of rejected this idea of if you do what you love, you never work a day in your life. And how just kind of following your passion really isn't as simple as it sounds. So can I ask you to explain why you think the idea of passion falls short in some cases? I think passion is important, but I think it's part of a patchwork, if I could put it that way, of different ways of being happy in your life and your work or the combination of those two things. So somewhere along the line, I think it might have been after I wrote the book,

I interviewed this guy who was working 80 hour weeks and had a stroke in his 40s. And the doctor said, how many hours do you work? And he said, oh, none at all, because he was following this thing that if you do work that you love, you're not working a day in your life. I think his wife was there and she kind of crossed her eyes and the doctor said, OK, seriously, how many hours do you work? And the doctor told him to cut it way down and he did cut it way down to something like 25. And guess what? He was more successful after he did that. Most people I know who have found a way to impose work-life balance on their lives, and that's meant cutting out some tasks or cutting out some things they were working on, have actually gotten more success out of it, not less.

And you actually mean like work success, like you can do better and more in fewer hours. You do talk about that a lot in the book. Yeah, because for one thing, it forces you to really figure out what matters. You know, I mean, the 80-20 rule that 20% of your effort yields 80% of the results. When you force yourself to cut back on those hours, then you force yourself to figure out which 20% that is. And that's a super powerful thing. So I think that's why that is. Also, brain research tells us that a well-rested brain works better than an overtaxed brain to a great degree. So I think that's another reason. But in any case, anecdotally, I've heard

over and over from people that cutting back on the hours they work, either because they chose to, but usually people do this because they have to. Like this guy that I interviewed who was going to die. He was told he was going to die if he didn't slow down. As somebody else, another Get Abstract author, Shalmina Anji, she had children and one day her husband just walked out, essentially. And all of a sudden she was a single mother of two children and she was climbing the ranks at IBM and she had to make some very big changes to her workday because there was nobody else to help pick up the slack. Her family was not in the United States, so she couldn't call in, you know, an extended family to help her. found that that actually helped her become more successful because she had to really figure out how to be as effective as she could possibly be in the hours that she could be at work. So anyway, I think there's a lot of different flavors of it. I think some people find something they're passionate about, dive into it, have these fantastic careers and a lot of success. You know, you mentioned some of the big tech icons, Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg would probably be

great examples of that working really, really well. That does work well for some people. Other people, they have a passion. The passion doesn't necessarily lead to a lot of money. be a sport or an art or something. And they look for a job that can also engage their interest and support the passion. And that works super well too. Some people find an intersection between what they're passionate about and what the market will pay them for. So there's all kinds of different ways to mix this. The idea is that the whole has to be something that is satisfying and engaging and makes a whole happy human being, if at all possible. So I think there's a lot of different ways to do it. I think the problem with passion is that it's a lot of pressure, right? You know, I mean, I probably came out of the egg wanting to write, so that was easy for me. But it's not going to be the same for everyone or anyone. develop and you can discover new passions. You're not, you know, born with an awareness of everything that you could possibly want to do. And despite what you just said, I, you know, I'm sure you had

to discover writing before you really wanted to get out there and do it. But my point is that, you know, I feel like my interests have changed radically since I started working and the things that I want to achieve at work have changed radically. And one of the recurrent themes in career self-care is pushing ourselves out of our comfort zone, which is a rather common piece of advice. But the various junctures at which you describe it, I think are very important. And you remind us to do this with basically a whole chapter at the very end, where you state that it's up to us to control our individual happiness, as we've already alluded to. I just

want you, if you don't mind, to explain the importance of pushing our boundaries and if you have any specific examples of that as well, just why it's important to get outside of our comfort zone. For two reasons. First of all, when we get outside our comfort zone, we grow, right? If we're doing the same things over and over again, I mean, be comfortable is the same, usually. So if we're doing the same things over and over again, we don't grow. And it's in, I think, human nature to seek variety or something new or to grow or to expand. So I think it's important for that reason. I also think it's important because the less we get out of our comfort zone, the tighter that stricture becomes, the harder it is to do things that scare us a little bit if we never

do them. This isn't an example that's in the book, but it's in a keynote that I recently gave some years ago. I was going along as an independent writer, as I had been for many years. I was doing okay. I kind of wanted to do a little better. I wanted to expand my horizons. I wasn't sure, you know, I was a little bit bored with where I was doing okay. I kind of wanted to do a little better. I wanted to expand my horizons. I wasn't sure, you know, I was a little bit bored with where I was. And publications that might be well-received, but they were national and targeted. And so, you know, the person in the grocery store didn't

necessarily know anything about me. So the business editor at this newspaper said, well, you know, we really pay our freelancers very badly, but we have a job open if you would like to be a reporter on the business desk. So I had never been a newspaper reporter in my whole life. I had an English degree. I didn't have a journalism degree. My knowledge of newspapers was probably limited to, you know, having watched Absence of Malice and All the President's Men, right? But it's very romantic, right? I said I had dreams of Brenda Starr or something. So I said, okay, sure, I'll apply for the job. And I applied for the job and I got the job. And it was in so many ways outside my comfort zone. I had to research and file stories every day. I was in a newsroom. I was used to working remotely by myself because that's how I'd spent

most of my career. I was surrounded, you know, where I could like reach out and touch people almost in every direction. It was also a long commute from my house. That was a whole other issue. But it was just a very, very different way of working. And it was a very different way of doing writing and journalism than I had done before. And it was a vast education. And it was also something that I spectacularly failed at. I was really bad as a newspaper reporter. And for the first and so far only time in my life, I got fired.

But I can't say that I'm sorry I did it. I learned so much, not just about being a newspaper reporter, which was really interesting, but also about myself, my limitations, the world of work, how to deal with failure. It was hugely educational. It was something that I keep coming back to in thinking and writing and speaking because I learned a lot. And if I had not jumped in and said, okay, I don't quite know how to do this, but I'm going to give it a try, I wouldn't have learned all those lessons. And yeah, I wasn't wild about getting fired, but in a way I was because I really didn't enjoy the job. And I had already decided I'm really not having fun here, but I said I was going to do this. There's a lot to learn. I'm going to stick it out for a year and just grit my teeth and get through it. And so when they said, we don't want you anymore,

I was like, who's saying? And I went back to being an independent writer and shortly after that got my first book contract. So ultimately the story has a happy ending, but I think the more we're willing to do things like that and the more we're willing to say, okay, this might just blow up in my face, but there's very few things like that that you can't recover from. Yeah, I mean, if it is, if it's something that's life-threatening

or something that's gonna wipe out your entire savings or something, then maybe think about it. But most of the time, stepping outside your comfort zone will lead you someplace better or someplace smarter than you were before. That's funny. I had no idea that you were an English major, that you studied English. I also was an English major and stepping out of my comfort zone for the first time was also a newsroom, the newspaper at school. So it was, you know, not as serious as probably a real newsroom, although it was an independent newspaper in the city of school. So it was, you know, not as serious as probably a real newsroom,

although it was an independent newspaper in the city of Boston. So it was pretty hectic and it was a full-time commitment late night during the week. It's a really good example of going outside your comfort zone because you're all of a sudden in a high pressure room with pitch meetings and, you know, you have hard deadlines and that sort of thing. And I like that a lot. I did not realize that about you. So interesting story, Minda. So ultimately, your message here is you want to relieve pressure. You want people to relieve pressure from themselves and be more comfortable at work and to live happier, better lives. We spend this whole time talking about all the different forces that make that a challenge. You know, the state of industry, the pace of technological change, post-COVID

concerns, anything that just increases the pressure of competition within an organization, without an organization, you know, externally among organizations, there's so, so much going on. And generally, you know, the key is, okay, every single person in America, take a copy of this book, read it, internalize it, and problem solved. That's the ideal solution here. So what I'm going to allow you to do, because, you know, that would be really cool, but you know how hard that is. I'm going to ask you, why should we stop working so hard? One of your final chapters, I think, is literally called Why You Should Stop Working So Hard. And I think you actually wrote an article about this, too, that gave 10 distinct reasons as to why we should. So what I'd like for you to do is just as we run out of time here, if you could just wrap that

in a neat little bow, you know, some of the things that you've already said, you can quickly rehash. But if there's anything else that's just a concrete reason why, you know, it actually makes sense for us to work less hard,

I'd love for you to just wrap things up with that. Well, sure. I mean, we all know, I think most of us know that there was research at Stanford that showed that there is a diminishing point of returns when

we work longer and longer hours. And that diminishing point of return starts happening pretty quickly after the 40-hour work week. And at some point, you just adding more hours actually gets you less work than you would have done if you had just stopped. So that's one really simple, straightforward reason, because working longer hours doesn't necessarily make you more effective or more productive or more successful or even get more work done. were not resources that can just be used over and over again. And even machines need to power down sometimes and pause for maintenance and, you know, whatever. So it is really important, I think, to work less hard or to use our work time smartly and take more breaks from it and not make ourselves so crazy trying to do the one more thing and the one more thing that, you know, I've done and that Brad Willis did and all that stuff. I think success needs to include happiness. I think that we are all responsible for trying to

create our own happiness. And there may be lots of times when we choose temporarily or even permanently to set something else ahead of our own happiness and importance, and that's fine. But I also think that we should consider our own happiness because, as the research shows, happier people actually are better employees, certainly better bosses, much better parents, better members of society, more likely to volunteer, less likely to commit a crime, all that stuff. So happiness really should be part of, you know, I mean, maybe it should be part of our GDP. Maybe we should have a happiness quotient for all of society. So those are some of the reasons. I think when we push ourselves too hard, we become ineffective and we become difficult to be around, which is, you know, not good for any organization. I think organizations thrive when the people in them

are happy, healthy, and at ease. That's a phrase that I like to use when I'm speaking. And to the degree that we can be that, and to the degree that we can have the people who work with us be that, everything is going to be better. I take it back. I think the happiness quotient might be a better title than ham sandwich versus Hawaii. So I'll reconsider that in post-production here. Well, Minda, thank you so much for joining me. This was a wonderful conversation. Can you just let our audience know where they can learn more about you and your work before you go? Sure. Probably simplest thing to do is mindazetland.com and you'll learn about,

there's all kinds of stuff. There's a newsletter, There's a daily text that I send out. There is, of course, a link to the book. There is all kinds of great stuff that you can learn to get inside my brain and find out more of this stuff. Cool. Again, thank you so much for joining me and for everybody listening at home. Thanks for joining us. We will catch you on the next episode. Cheers. Cheers.