Speaker 1: Hi.
Speaker 2: I'm Laura Vanderkamp. I'm a mother of five, an author, journalist,
Speaker 2: and speaker.
Speaker 3: And I'm Sarah hart Hunger, a mother of three, practicing physician, writer,
Speaker 3: and course creator. We are two working parents who love
Speaker 3: our careers and our families.
Speaker 2: Welcome to best of both worlds. Here we talk about
Speaker 2: how real women manage work, family, and time for fun.
Speaker 2: From figuring out childcare to mapping out long term career goals.
Speaker 2: We want you to get the most out of life.
Speaker 2: Welcome to best of both worlds. This is Laura. This
Speaker 2: episode is airing in early July of twenty twenty four.
Speaker 2: I am going to be interviewing Jesse Humple, who is
Speaker 2: the host of LinkedIn's podcast Hello Monday. She is also
Speaker 2: a longtime tech and finance journalist and the author of
Speaker 2: the memoir The Family Outing. Well, what of the things
Speaker 2: we talked about in this kind of wide ranging conversation
Speaker 2: is how people's jobs changed so much instead of the
Speaker 2: career rules we need to think about given that we're
Speaker 2: often doing very different things over any period of say
Speaker 2: five to ten years. So I was thinking about this, Sarah,
Speaker 2: what was your job like ten years ago and is
Speaker 2: it anything like what you are doing now.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's so fascinating to think about. So let's see,
Speaker 3: it's twenty twenty four ten years ago, it was twenty fourteen.
Speaker 3: I was just working, not just but I was working straight,
Speaker 3: full time hours clinically as a pediatric endocrinologist. At that point,
Speaker 3: I hadn't even done anything in graduate medical education yet,
Speaker 3: so I hadn't really taken on any kind of leadership things.
Speaker 3: I was focused on. You know, I had my maternity
Speaker 3: leave that year and then I came back. Since I
Speaker 3: do have a ten year old that math checks out,
Speaker 3: so it.
Speaker 1: Was really different. I had no podcasts.
Speaker 3: I did blog for fun and really enjoyed it, so
Speaker 3: that was maybe a little harbinger of what was to come.
Speaker 4: But I would say certainly some similarities.
Speaker 3: My mondays today look very similar to my mondays back then,
Speaker 3: for example, but I'm doing.
Speaker 4: A much wider range of things and I find it
Speaker 4: a lot of fun.
Speaker 2: So yeah, no, I mean, we certainly were not podcasting
Speaker 2: ten years ago. I was trying to remember how many
Speaker 2: podcasts there even were ten years ago, as sort of
Speaker 2: a the dawn of the podcast era. Perhaps I know
Speaker 2: that a lot of the podcast that I became aware
Speaker 2: of was more around twenty sixteen, twenty fifteen, I guess,
Speaker 2: and then we of course started in twenty seventeen, so
Speaker 2: we've been around for a long time.
Speaker 1: The same it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, five years ago was pretty similar probably to what
Speaker 2: I'm doing now, but ten years ago a little different.
Speaker 1: Yeah, No, life changes. Life changes a lot.
Speaker 2: So Jesse and I talk about that and her various
Speaker 2: career rules. We also spend a bit of time talking
Speaker 2: about her family setup. She is in a two mom
Speaker 2: family and so it's always a little different how people
Speaker 2: make decisions about who does what when there aren't kind
Speaker 2: of the assumed gender roles that you would have in
Speaker 2: a couple where people were male and females. So we
Speaker 2: talk a lot about that as well.
Speaker 4: That's super interesting. I can't wait to hear that.
Speaker 2: All right, Well, let's go ahead and hear from Jesse. Well,
Speaker 2: Sarah and I are delighted to welcome Jesse Hemple to
Speaker 2: the program. Jesse, can you introduce yourself to our listeners?
Speaker 5: Sure, my name is Jesse Hemple. I am Goodness, is
Speaker 5: hard to explain exactly what I am because I am
Speaker 5: a longtime journalist, but also I am a podcast host
Speaker 5: of the podcast Hello Monday, which is a career podcast.
Speaker 5: Plus I write memoir stuff about my family, so that's me.
Speaker 2: That's awesome, And maybe you can talk a little bit
Speaker 2: about your show for link shin Hello Monday, which is
Speaker 2: an exploration of all things careers. I mean, what have
Speaker 2: you guys been trying to do with that show exactly?
Speaker 5: Well, so the show starts with this basic assumption, and
Speaker 5: that is, whatever you know how to do right now,
Speaker 5: the job that you have right now, whatever your title is,
Speaker 5: it's probably not going to be the same job you
Speaker 5: have in five years. We know that work is changing
Speaker 5: so much. I mean, it's frankly kind of a cliche
Speaker 5: to even say that, but you look even at what
Speaker 5: AI has done to work in the last year, and
Speaker 5: you know that across every industry, those shifts are things
Speaker 5: that we're going to have to adapt to, but nobody
Speaker 5: tells us exactly how. And so Hello Monday is meant
Speaker 5: to be the optimistic playbook for you, putting you at
Speaker 5: the center of this equation, because whatever your job title
Speaker 5: is in five years, you have a set of skills,
Speaker 5: a set of passions, and a sense of purpose that
Speaker 5: all can be put to work right. They can put
Speaker 5: to use in service of making sure that five years
Speaker 5: from now you're doing work that you care more about,
Speaker 5: and hopefully your paycheck is bigger too.
Speaker 2: That's always a nice bonus, and it will need to
Speaker 2: be given inflation and all.
Speaker 5: That, but that's the truth.
Speaker 2: So, I mean, you've talked to a lot of people,
Speaker 2: and you sort of distill a lot of this career
Speaker 2: advice down to a couple of you know, Jesse's rules
Speaker 2: here and one of them that you guys shared with
Speaker 2: me before this to define your values. Now, this sounds
Speaker 2: a little bit like a graduation speech, So maybe you
Speaker 2: can tell me practically what it means to define your
Speaker 2: values as you are going about your job on Monday morning.
Speaker 5: You're right, it does have that graduation speech nest to it, right,
Speaker 5: But so Loven, we flounder through our careers and we
Speaker 5: have to make sets of choices at various times. Do
Speaker 5: I stay in this job or take that job, Do
Speaker 5: I make a career pivot, or do I continue to
Speaker 5: do this thing I'm doing? And it can feel a
Speaker 5: little haphazard to think about how to make those choices.
Speaker 5: And one thing that having a clear sense of your
Speaker 5: values does is it gives you a framework or filter
Speaker 5: for how to make the big choices and frankly the
Speaker 5: little choices too. Their values change over the course of
Speaker 5: your career. Right, But I know this is something that
Speaker 5: no one told me when I was younger and I
Speaker 5: was listening to those graduation speeches. It just seems like
Speaker 5: people ahead of me they just had that stuff figured out.
Speaker 5: And it was only in retrospect that I could look
Speaker 5: back and say, oh, gosh, you know, when I was
Speaker 5: twenty four, whatever it was, perhaps it was travel. In fact,
Speaker 5: I know it was travel. Travel was so important to
Speaker 5: me that must have been one of my values. So
Speaker 5: if you can do that looking backward, then it becomes
Speaker 5: a powerful thing to think about it a little more proactively,
Speaker 5: to think, Okay, well let's look forward. What are the
Speaker 5: things that matter to me most right now, and how
Speaker 5: can knowing those in articulating those help me make good decisions?
Speaker 5: Does that make sense, Laura?
Speaker 1: It does?
Speaker 2: It does well With that, though, then what does it
Speaker 2: trust yourself, which I guess is Jesse's rule number two.
Speaker 5: I like these Jesse's rules. I like your rebranding of them.
Speaker 5: What you're talking about is like, so we've been going
Speaker 5: as a podcast now for five years, which in podcast years,
Speaker 5: I think that's like a century, because.
Speaker 2: Podcast we've been on around since the Neanderthal Age of podcastings.
Speaker 5: Which is like twenty eighteen, right, yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 5: So, as I was looking back over now close to
Speaker 5: three hundred episodes, I realized that people kept giving the
Speaker 5: same types of advice young people, old people, famous people,
Speaker 5: not so famous people. And one thing that came up
Speaker 5: over and over and over again was people would say,
Speaker 5: you know, I just wish I had had more faith
Speaker 5: than myself. If I had been able to listen to myself, well,
Speaker 5: I would have known what to do in any given context.
Speaker 5: And so that sort of leads me to this, let's
Speaker 5: call it Jesse's rule number two because I like that, Laura,
Speaker 5: which is that trusting yourself is like imperative, it's integral
Speaker 5: to being able to manage your career.
Speaker 2: Well, can you give me an example of when you
Speaker 2: have had to trust yourself with your career?
Speaker 5: Yeah? Oh, let's go back to the moment when there's
Speaker 5: always a moment when we go from thinking about trusting
Speaker 5: ourselves as a that was a nice to have, good
Speaker 5: thing to do, to actually having to make the decision
Speaker 5: to live in the action for me. I had been
Speaker 5: writing as a technology journalist for magazines very successfully. I
Speaker 5: had been lucky enough that I hadn't had any headwinds
Speaker 5: in my early writing career. I had been a star
Speaker 5: writer at Fortune magazine for many, many years, and then
Speaker 5: I had been recruited over to Conde Nast to become
Speaker 5: a senior writer for Wired magazine and Laura, it is
Speaker 5: impossible to understate how much I love tech. This was
Speaker 5: a dream job for me. I loved Wired. I was
Speaker 5: the only woman at my level at the magazine. Most
Speaker 5: of my peers who loved technology as much as I
Speaker 5: did at Wired were men, and that was part of
Speaker 5: I think why I ran into some headwinds, but also
Speaker 5: largely I just had a different perspective than the editor
Speaker 5: in chief of the magazine. And I would pitch stories
Speaker 5: and he would say that's not interesting, not that and
Speaker 5: he would cut them. And I would pitch stories and
Speaker 5: he would cut them. And finally I got a really
Speaker 5: good interview, and I just knew that this particular interview
Speaker 5: with this particular technologist, he had developed a virtual headset.
Speaker 5: It was so cool. And this was twenty sixteen, when
Speaker 5: the idea of putting this hokey piece of plastic on
Speaker 5: your head and playing in virtual reality was even weirder
Speaker 5: than it is right now. And frankly, it's still kind
Speaker 5: of weird.
Speaker 1: It's still kind of weird.
Speaker 5: It's still kind of weird. And so I called up
Speaker 5: the editor in chief and I said I've got this interview,
Speaker 5: and get a call back from his deputy who says,
Speaker 5: I'm so glad you got the interview. We're going to
Speaker 5: take that interview and give it to someone else because
Speaker 5: we don't think you're strong enough as a writer. And
Speaker 5: I remember I was sitting in the baggage claim of
Speaker 5: the Fort law Dale Airport. I was coming back from
Speaker 5: having gone to visit this guy in person so I
Speaker 5: could get his sign on for this story, and I
Speaker 5: just started crying, and like not that sort of dainty
Speaker 5: cry where you can just say that you have allergies
Speaker 5: and hope nobody's looking, but like that gross cry that's
Speaker 5: coming out your eyes and down your nose, where people
Speaker 5: want to, like strangers want to sort of approach you
Speaker 5: and ask if someone has died and what they can
Speaker 5: do for you. And I remember it because I took
Speaker 5: a picture of it on my iPhone because I knew
Speaker 5: in that moment that I needed to choose to trust
Speaker 5: myself and leave or trust the editor in chief's opinion
Speaker 5: of me and continue to stay small. And that for
Speaker 5: me was a pivotal trust yourself moment. And that was
Speaker 5: also the moment that I decided it was time to
Speaker 5: leave Wired, and it was what eventually got me to
Speaker 5: hear LinkedIn awesome.
Speaker 2: Well, on that note, we were going to take a
Speaker 2: quick ad break and we'll be back with more from Jesse. Well,
Speaker 2: I am back with Jesse Hemple, who is the host
Speaker 2: of the LinkedIn podcast Hello Monday, sharing lots of career advice. So,
Speaker 2: I mean another one of Jesse's rules, I forget what
Speaker 2: number this is, but to.
Speaker 1: Think long term.
Speaker 2: And you know, you're telling a little bit about how
Speaker 2: your career is a long thing. I mean, there's a
Speaker 2: moments where you're crying in the Fort Lauderdale Airport. There's
Speaker 2: also more triumphant moments too. But what does it even
Speaker 2: mean to think long term given that we are switching
Speaker 2: jobs so frequently, and you know, whatever you are doing
Speaker 2: now may not be what you are doing in five years.
Speaker 5: It's a great question. I think I'm going to tell
Speaker 5: a story to explain what I mean by this went
Speaker 5: to early on in my career. I felt like I
Speaker 5: was failing if I didn't see my name sort of
Speaker 5: on a byline in any given day. And I was working.
Speaker 5: This is early again, So I was working at four magazine.
Speaker 5: It's probably around thirty one thirty two. I had this
Speaker 5: job that it allowed me to write big, long, ambitious
Speaker 5: stories that I might work on for six weeks to
Speaker 5: three months at a time, but also it expected me
Speaker 5: to write shorter stories couple every week for the magazine,
Speaker 5: and that kind of cadence that'll make you a little loopy, right.
Speaker 5: You're like trying to go really really quickly, but also
Speaker 5: you're trying to think really really broadly. And I was
Speaker 5: kind of failing at doing both. I was just sort
Speaker 5: of like my work was just a big old melange
Speaker 5: of mediocrity. And a mentor pulled me aside and said,
Speaker 5: you got to stop doing the little stuff entirely. I mean,
Speaker 5: just phone it in like nobody will really notice. You
Speaker 5: got to put all of your energy into those longer swings.
Speaker 5: You got to make sure that if you write four
Speaker 5: stories in a year, those stories have all of your
Speaker 5: best energy and that made no sense to me early
Speaker 5: in my career, because I measured the length of my
Speaker 5: career at that point still in months and maybe sometimes
Speaker 5: in years, but I put my focus there, and now,
Speaker 5: looking back at it, of course, I can see that
Speaker 5: those larger stories actually propelled me from big opportunity to
Speaker 5: big opportunity. And then, much later on, Laura, I went
Speaker 5: on to write a book, and I discovered this in
Speaker 5: an even grander sense. Right, the timeline on a book, well,
Speaker 5: you've written many of them. It happens in months and years,
Speaker 5: not weeks and months, And putting all of your energy
Speaker 5: into that big swing is actually the pivot that moves
Speaker 5: your career forward. Gosh, I hear myself saying this, Laura,
Speaker 5: and I want to turn the question on you, and
Speaker 5: what have you learned about long term thinking from having
Speaker 5: written books.
Speaker 2: I mean, I agree with you, it's hard to keep
Speaker 2: the cadence of doing both little things and big things,
Speaker 2: and there have been times in my life when I
Speaker 2: have quit the little things in order to put more
Speaker 2: energy into the big things. But on the other hand,
Speaker 2: I have also noticed that sometimes they playing around with
Speaker 2: the little things that tips you off to what will
Speaker 2: be interesting.
Speaker 1: To people for the big things completely. Yeah, so it's
Speaker 1: but then I've generally trying to.
Speaker 2: Do both, right, you know, keep the little experiments going
Speaker 2: so you know where to put your money for the big.
Speaker 1: Bets, right.
Speaker 5: But in doing both, you are still thinking long term. Right.
Speaker 5: You may be doing little things and doing big things,
Speaker 5: but here like you are doing them in service of
Speaker 5: some broader goal that you have, that you have laid
Speaker 5: out for yourself, that you understand. And that is what
Speaker 5: I think when we're shortsighted, we forget to do.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, thinking long term is a you know something
Speaker 2: we talk about a lot on this podcast. We're really
Speaker 2: big on, you know, big goals setting and things like that,
Speaker 2: and one of our recent episodes we actually check in
Speaker 2: on our annual goals to hold ourselves accountable for making
Speaker 2: those happen. But I want to pivot a little bit
Speaker 2: here because you know, you have written a book now
Speaker 2: and it's called The Family Outing, which is a bit
Speaker 2: of a play on words for your family background. And
Speaker 2: just to talk about this a little bit here. A
Speaker 2: lot of our listeners, as you might imagine, it's women,
Speaker 2: it's women married to men. And when you are married
Speaker 2: to a man, no matter what you do for a living,
Speaker 2: there are certain assumptions that people wind up making about
Speaker 2: who does what, how things are split, no matter what
Speaker 2: the income is or whose preferences are for different things.
Speaker 2: There's just a certain cultural story that you're working with.
Speaker 2: Now you are married to a woman raising a family
Speaker 2: with another woman. So I think a lot of our
Speaker 2: listeners might just be curious about how one winds up
Speaker 2: making decisions with that rubric. So even just for instance,
Speaker 2: when you guys decided to start a family, like, how
Speaker 2: did you talk through those decisions and make those decisions
Speaker 2: on how this family was going to be formed?
Speaker 5: I love that framework. You're asking me to think about
Speaker 5: something a little differently than I've thought about it, and
Speaker 5: I appreciate that, Laura. And I'm realizing now that one
Speaker 5: thing about being a same gender or family is that
Speaker 5: you can't rely on any of the implicit roles before
Speaker 5: you revisit them. You actually have to decide at the
Speaker 5: outset about how things aren't going to work. And I
Speaker 5: know that when my wife and I had been together
Speaker 5: for I think eight years when we decided to have children,
Speaker 5: and so we'd already lived together long enough to understand
Speaker 5: sort of how our household functioned, and we didn't need
Speaker 5: to talk about much before we added the complexity of
Speaker 5: more human beings. We could sort of just scape by
Speaker 5: and figure it out. But when it was time to
Speaker 5: do that, we actually sat down and talked about it.
Speaker 5: I was still working as a journalist in and she
Speaker 5: was a social worker, and we thought, well, one of
Speaker 5: us is going to have to figure out how we
Speaker 5: pay for this family, and one of us is going
Speaker 5: to have to fit figure out the doctor's appointments and
Speaker 5: what they have for lunch and the nitty gritty of
Speaker 5: the like keeping them going. And that's not to say
Speaker 5: that both of us wouldn't collaborate on both, but each
Speaker 5: of us was going to be the final decision maker
Speaker 5: on sort of one aspect of life. And so I
Speaker 5: around that time left my job in media and moved
Speaker 5: into a media job at a tech company. Laura that
Speaker 5: was in large part to create some financial security for
Speaker 5: our family. And then my wife she shows when our
Speaker 5: second child was born, actually, and it was the middle
Speaker 5: of the pandemic. And I know everybody has a pandemic story,
Speaker 5: but Laura, we had a fifteen month old child. We
Speaker 5: went into a pandemic and then we had another child
Speaker 5: in the midst of a pandemic. We were tired human beings,
Speaker 5: and my wife decided to stop out of the workforce
Speaker 5: and be home with our children a little bit. And
Speaker 5: when she introduced that she wanted to do this, it
Speaker 5: was very confusing to me, Laura, because I I'm cut
Speaker 5: from a certain cloth. I am a very of an
Speaker 5: efficient person. I am very professionally ambitious. And I was like, Frances,
Speaker 5: you don't have to do this. We can pay for
Speaker 5: all this childcare. We're older parents. And she was like, yeah,
Speaker 5: but but I want to do this. And I was like, yeah,
Speaker 5: but you'll have to and she said, you don't get it.
Speaker 5: The feminist movement was about creating opportunities for women to
Speaker 5: make choices about how they spend their time. You need
Speaker 5: to let me make my choices, even if they're different
Speaker 5: than yours. It was a sort of like aha moment
Speaker 5: for me, and it has been a wonderful collaboration that way,
Speaker 5: because my wife is home now. She's home about seventy
Speaker 5: percent of the time with our children, and I am
Speaker 5: here much more often. You're seeing me in my podcast studio,
Speaker 5: I'm in LinkedIn's offices and yet I feel my children
Speaker 5: benefit so much from having that parental commitment that is
Speaker 5: sort of about a same sex couple, right, Like I
Speaker 5: like to joke around here, like, you know what I
Speaker 5: have as a working mother, I have the benefit of
Speaker 5: a stay at home mom for my kids, like most
Speaker 5: people don't have that. But also, there are a lot
Speaker 5: of same sex couples for whom those roles wouldn't fit
Speaker 5: so perfectly. We got really lucky that way. And I
Speaker 5: also know a lot of male friends who play much
Speaker 5: larger caregiving roles in their homes. So at base, it's
Speaker 5: different for every family. But one thing that is definitely
Speaker 5: for sure certain about same sex families is they have
Speaker 5: to talk about the roles. They can't take things for granted.
Speaker 2: Well, even deciding like which, you know, having the children,
Speaker 2: like carrying the children.
Speaker 1: I mean, how was that decision?
Speaker 5: Made I feel like the luckiest person in the world,
Speaker 5: because frankly, we had two ovens, so we didn't have
Speaker 5: to use both. And I knew for myself that I
Speaker 5: never wanted to carry children. I'd always been clear on that.
Speaker 5: I mean, quite frankly, Laura, I felt pretty clear that
Speaker 5: I didn't want to have children, and I got to
Speaker 5: children through this very intellectual exercise. We got to a
Speaker 5: certain age my wife introduced that she really wanted to try.
Speaker 5: I felt completely realized in my marriage, and I realized, like, well, okay,
Speaker 5: my first obligation in life is to myself to be
Speaker 5: a healthy, flourishing human. And once I've done that, my
Speaker 5: next obligation in my life is to do what I
Speaker 5: can to make sure that my wife flourishes. And so
Speaker 5: if she says that we should have children, we should
Speaker 5: have children. And I say that laughing at myself a
Speaker 5: little bit now because it's so in my head, right,
Speaker 5: And then I had these children, and now there's nothing
Speaker 5: in my head about parenting. Right. It is a full
Speaker 5: body experience, and it is the biggest for me. My
Speaker 5: experience of it is that it is the biggest life
Speaker 5: exercise and opportunity I could enmission for myself. But I
Speaker 5: will just go back to say, because I bet some
Speaker 5: of your listeners are in this situation, I would have
Speaker 5: had a really great life without children too.
Speaker 2: There are lots of ways one can build a life
Speaker 2: and create meaning and all that, but certainly, you know,
Speaker 2: for a lot of our listeners, both your and family
Speaker 2: are part of it, And certainly that's one of the
Speaker 2: things we're trying to do with this show, is that
Speaker 2: show that you can have both, and for many women,
Speaker 2: that is not going to look like having a stay
Speaker 2: at home partner, right because that's for many reasons, right
Speaker 2: that it's just not going to be the situation a
Speaker 2: lot of people are going to wind up in. But
Speaker 2: it also doesn't have to look like that, right that
Speaker 2: there's so many different ways to make a family.
Speaker 5: Well, what I really appreciate about your show, Laura, and
Speaker 5: I am a listener, is that you invite me to
Speaker 5: be the full breadth of who I am as a
Speaker 5: really ambitious professional and as a mother, and is somebody
Speaker 5: who wants to have a lot of time with my
Speaker 5: children because I do. I really want to have a
Speaker 5: lot of time with them, and who also wants to
Speaker 5: have a lot of my own interests. And in the
Speaker 5: larger culture, we've kind of arrived at this assumption that
Speaker 5: you can have it all, but not at the same time,
Speaker 5: and that's that's a fine assumption, but that hasn't been
Speaker 5: my experience in life. I actually feel like I'm having
Speaker 5: it all at the same time, and I don't feel
Speaker 5: stressed out about that, and I don't want to be
Speaker 5: embarrassed to say that out loud.
Speaker 1: Life is good.
Speaker 5: We can say it, but it does work, right, And
Speaker 5: in my experience of it is that it does work.
Speaker 5: And then I am not as stressed out shadow of
Speaker 5: myself as I do that that I can live a
Speaker 5: fully realized life. And I look at you, and I
Speaker 5: look at Sarah, and each in your own ways you
Speaker 5: also live by showing models of that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I did want to talk about one potential source
Speaker 2: of stress, which is something some of our listeners do
Speaker 2: deal with, is you are the primary breadwinner for your
Speaker 2: family of four, and I wonder how you think that
Speaker 2: may have influenced some of the choices you have made
Speaker 2: the long term thinking you have done, I mean even
Speaker 2: something that's speculative like writing a memoir. Right, how did
Speaker 2: you think about that in terms of well, I also
Speaker 2: have to keep us housed, pay for people's bracest on
Speaker 2: the line, whatever, right, Yeah.
Speaker 5: Right, I decided that I was going to be able
Speaker 5: to do both. But I will tell you, Laura, I've
Speaker 5: had a writing practice since I was probably eight years old.
Speaker 5: It's been really central in core to who I am.
Speaker 5: But I would not have been able to give myself
Speaker 5: permission to write a memoir if I hadn't sold it first,
Speaker 5: you know, And this goes back to long term thinking.
Speaker 5: I think sometimes people would to run at the dream
Speaker 5: project without building the scaffolding that allows them to realize
Speaker 5: the dream. And I started very early on writing for
Speaker 5: financial magazines because financial magazines had really great mentors and editors,
Speaker 5: but they also had bigger paychecks than newspapers or what
Speaker 5: I really wanted to be writing for, like poetry scenes,
Speaker 5: and that was by design. But I also knew that
Speaker 5: if I cut my teeth writing three thousand to six
Speaker 5: thousand word magazine stories about BlackBerry, which was probably a
Speaker 5: company that barely anybody remembers today but seemed very important
Speaker 5: in two thousand and seven, and Facebook and the CEOs
Speaker 5: of these companies, I would learn important things about how
Speaker 5: to write, about structure, about suspense, about why people read,
Speaker 5: and eventually I would be able to take those lessons
Speaker 5: and take the reputation that I had built and do
Speaker 5: something that was more meaningful to me personally with that.
Speaker 5: And that's kind of exactly what happened. And then I
Speaker 5: will say I will just put a plug in for
Speaker 5: like dumb luck timing right, and in April of twenty twenty,
Speaker 5: when most people were looking around trying to figure out
Speaker 5: how they were going to get some childcare so they
Speaker 5: could figure out how to report into their new Zoom
Speaker 5: offices and stay healthy during the pandemic, I had this
Speaker 5: literary agent who just kept calling me Laura, and she
Speaker 5: was like, my name is Suzanne Gluck with wme. She
Speaker 5: was like a force, and she's like, now is the
Speaker 5: perfect time for your dream project? And I was like, no,
Speaker 5: it's not. I don't know if you notice, but I'm
Speaker 5: currently living in over my wife's childhood bedroom in Tupelo, Mississippi.
Speaker 5: Like now, it's not a good time, not a good time.
Speaker 5: She was like, no, no, no, you don't understand. Every
Speaker 5: single writer is really terrified right now, and they're going
Speaker 5: to be terrified for a long time and tired and miserable.
Speaker 5: How you're feeling, I understand everybody feels that way. Publishers
Speaker 5: are also pretty scared right now because they need some
Speaker 5: guarantee that they are going to have books to sell
Speaker 5: in three years, and they got no deal flow, they
Speaker 5: got no pitches coming in two months from now. They're
Speaker 5: still going to be tired, but the writers will have
Speaker 5: revived and they'll have lots of pitches coming in. So
Speaker 5: get me something, Get me something this week. Just sit
Speaker 5: down and write it. Just go into your bathroom, close
Speaker 5: the door, and give yourself fifteen minutes and see what comes.
Speaker 5: And I sent her this haggard little email. I was like,
Speaker 5: I guess I could write a profile about a tech exact.
Speaker 5: Then she shot me back an email and said, that's boring.
Speaker 5: What have you got, Like, what's the dream thing that
Speaker 5: you could never write in any other market? And I
Speaker 5: was like, well, if you're really asking, did you know
Speaker 5: that everybody in my family is basically gay or queer,
Speaker 5: or buy or trans. And she's like, now that is
Speaker 5: a book I would read. We'll call it The Family Outing.
Speaker 5: I'll sell it and get back to you. And you know, Laura,
Speaker 5: that's what she did. And I will just say that
Speaker 5: because she sold it before I wrote it, I then
Speaker 5: made it a priority. And I don't know if I
Speaker 5: could have in the same way if I didn't know
Speaker 5: that it was going to help me pay for my
Speaker 5: kids to go to college.
Speaker 2: Exactly, Well, we are to take one more quick ad
Speaker 2: break and we'll be black with more from Jesse well
Speaker 2: I with Jesse Humple. We've been talking career advice. We've
Speaker 2: been talking about navigating roles in parenthood and work in
Speaker 2: a two mom family, and we love to hear from
Speaker 2: our guests about a day in the life.
Speaker 1: So what does a day in the life look like
Speaker 1: for you? These days?
Speaker 5: It begins around five AM, when I pop out of bed,
Speaker 5: not because I'm a hugely disciplined person, but because I'm
Speaker 5: deeply a morning person. Always happen. I have like an
Speaker 5: hour or so to myself where I read or write
Speaker 5: and have a little bit of time for myself, and
Speaker 5: then my children show up. And my children Laura, are
Speaker 5: three and five by around six, with lots of wants
Speaker 5: and needs and right now a lot of big feelings,
Speaker 5: so many big feelings. We live in Brooklyn, New York,
Speaker 5: and we have from about six to seven thirty to
Speaker 5: get the children and the dog and me and my
Speaker 5: wife somehow prepared for a day in out the door.
Speaker 5: And that whole period of our day is usually defined
Speaker 5: by noise. It's like raucous.
Speaker 1: It's just a loise.
Speaker 5: I'm not sure what happens. My wife has like her zones,
Speaker 5: like she does the lunches. I have my zone, which
Speaker 5: is I can usually convince the children to you well,
Speaker 5: I can't usually get them to brush their teeth. I
Speaker 5: try really hard, but i'd say we're like batting fifty
Speaker 5: to fifty on that. But like to get them dressed
Speaker 5: and get the dog walked, and then I take my
Speaker 5: son to his little He goes to an outdoor kindergarten
Speaker 5: in our neighborhood, and my wife takes our daughter off
Speaker 5: to her preschool, and I get on the subway and
Speaker 5: I come into like nice quiet work where adults say slow,
Speaker 5: quiet things and have a sort of a wonderful, peaceful
Speaker 5: nine to five and Laura. I usually stick in some
Speaker 5: exercise there. I try really hard first thing in the morning.
Speaker 5: If I don't get it in there, sometimes I can
Speaker 5: get it right before I leave. We have a gym
Speaker 5: in the basement, and if I don't move during a day,
Speaker 5: the whole day kind of goes flat. So try to
Speaker 5: prioritize that. But I got to get out of here
Speaker 5: by four forty five because somebody has to relieve the
Speaker 5: nanny by six, So I'm always running to do that.
Speaker 5: And usually my wife, you know, she's home with the
Speaker 5: kids for a lot of the day, but she's usually
Speaker 5: at swim lessons or she's picking up somebody from taekwondo.
Speaker 5: There's I didn't realize this. I know, I'm just coming
Speaker 5: into a league of parenting that you've been in for
Speaker 5: a while, but there's just so much taking them places.
Speaker 5: It just seems like the job gets bigger instead of smaller,
Speaker 5: which is.
Speaker 2: Why you still need childcare even with your wife. Oh yeah,
Speaker 2: working part time or whatever it is she's doing now, Yes.
Speaker 5: Yes, totally so. By six o'clock, everybody ends up on
Speaker 5: the playground. And I live in this sort of like
Speaker 5: Sesame Street esque building in Brooklyn, New York. And at
Speaker 5: some point one of the parents in the building says
Speaker 5: to all of the kids, come on, guys, it's time
Speaker 5: to come upstairs. And they all sort of on mass,
Speaker 5: maybe like eight of them tumble home from the playground
Speaker 5: and up the stairs, and we take our two and
Speaker 5: throw them in the bathtub and get them to bed
Speaker 5: around seven thirty. And we really have to aim for
Speaker 5: seven thirty because Laura, if I'm not in bed by nine,
Speaker 5: then I'm just asleep wherever I am at nine. That's
Speaker 5: how it goes.
Speaker 1: It could be on the floor of the kid's room. Yes,
Speaker 1: on the TV.
Speaker 5: Something is actually where Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: Well that's the thing about being an early bird, is
Speaker 2: you tend not to stay up?
Speaker 5: Yes, yes, And if you occasionally and this probably never
Speaker 5: ever happens to you. But if I make the mistake
Speaker 5: of opening my phone and start scrolling and then I
Speaker 5: look up and it's ten like that is, it's never good.
Speaker 5: It just it always ends badly. The next day.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, it's a little later for me, but I
Speaker 2: don't wake up at five. Sarah does. Sarah does, She's
Speaker 2: usually up at like four forty five, But you know
Speaker 2: that's she's a very dedicated runner in the morning. I
Speaker 2: am not a dedicated runner in the morning. I'm not
Speaker 2: dedicated to anything in the morning.
Speaker 5: Frankly, I love that. Though I love I can't do that,
Speaker 5: Like physical movement is not where I can land early
Speaker 5: in the morning. And I always wanted, I've aspired to
Speaker 5: be one of those people who just wakes up in
Speaker 5: laces or shoes and goes not me.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I can do it. But it's sort of
Speaker 2: a later what many people would consider a later morning.
Speaker 2: It's not a five am sort of thing. Ever around here.
Speaker 2: But yeah, yeah, so we always end with a love
Speaker 2: of the week, which is something that is you know,
Speaker 2: that we're enjoying now. I would say that I was
Speaker 2: in New York City the weekend before we were recording
Speaker 2: this with my eldest son who is now seventeen, and
Speaker 2: he and I have been to the top of a
Speaker 2: lot of tall buildings together, like over the years. This
Speaker 2: is just something we've done in New York. And so
Speaker 2: we went to One Vanderbilt so Summit at one Vanderbilt
Speaker 2: a couple of years ago, we went to the top
Speaker 2: of the Empire State Building. Two years ago, we went
Speaker 2: to the top of the World Trade Center. We're in
Speaker 2: a hotel that had a roof deck on the forty
Speaker 2: six floors and went up to the top of that.
Speaker 2: So yeah, when I'm in a big city, I like
Speaker 2: to be up and seeing things that you're not seeing
Speaker 2: when you're out in the burbs.
Speaker 1: So really enjoying that.
Speaker 5: You can get so much from doing that. Well, when
Speaker 5: it's time to come with your next child, come back here,
Speaker 5: because I'll take you to the top of the Empire.
Speaker 1: Stap exit you're taking with the Empire State Building.
Speaker 5: We have a record in the Empire State Building, and
Speaker 5: that is really my son's favorite thing about it, which
Speaker 5: is that he can go to the top with his friends.
Speaker 4: Well, that is cool.
Speaker 2: A mommy's workplace is a little bit more cool than
Speaker 2: a lot of workplaces.
Speaker 1: From that perspective. So what's your love of the week?
Speaker 4: Jesse?
Speaker 5: I do have a love of the week, and that
Speaker 5: is that this is the week every year that my
Speaker 5: family road trips down to Tupelo, Mississippi. Tue Below, Mississippi
Speaker 5: is not the love. It's a great place, but the
Speaker 5: love goes to the road trip because when my wife
Speaker 5: introduced this idea, it was during the pandemic. Before the pandemic,
Speaker 5: I only flew to Tupelow because it's an eighteen hour drive,
Speaker 5: But when faced with no choice, we put the baby
Speaker 5: and the dog in the car and I sat in
Speaker 5: the back between them, and she hit the gas and
Speaker 5: we stopped at a Baptist church in Hollywood, Alabama, so
Speaker 5: that I could go to the bathroom. But apart from that,
Speaker 5: we really just did not stop until we got to Tubelow, Mississippi.
Speaker 5: And since then we have road tripped once or twice
Speaker 5: a year with the entire family and as they get
Speaker 5: older and their attention gets harder to hold. I have
Speaker 5: gone from really despising the time to feeling like it
Speaker 5: is our family special time together where we make our
Speaker 5: memories and we have our traditions and our rituals and
Speaker 5: places we stop and I always know my kids better
Speaker 5: on the other side of it. So, if you happen
Speaker 5: to be anywhere between New York City and Tupelo, Mississippi,
Speaker 5: this weekend, maybe I'll see.
Speaker 1: You exactly exactly.
Speaker 2: And then it's summer in Tublo, Mississippi, which sounds a
Speaker 2: little hot to me, but you tell me there's a
Speaker 2: pool involved.
Speaker 5: And a lot of air conditioning, a lot of central air.
Speaker 5: That is good.
Speaker 1: That is critical.
Speaker 2: Well, Jesse, thanks so much for joining us. H Can
Speaker 2: you maybe just tell our listeners where they can find you.
Speaker 5: Sure you could find Hello Monday with Jesse Heemple, which
Speaker 5: is LinkedIn's flagship podcast anywhere you listen to podcasts, or
Speaker 5: you can follow me on LinkedIn. I'm easy to find
Speaker 5: and you can always find me my website, which is
Speaker 5: Jesse j Hemple. Let me take that again. I should
Speaker 5: know my own website. It's Jessejhimple dot com.
Speaker 1: That's good. We'll get that down right, all right, Jesse,
Speaker 1: thanks so much for joining us.
Speaker 5: Thank you, Laura.
Speaker 1: Well we are back.
Speaker 2: I was just interviewing Jesse Hemple, who's the host of
Speaker 2: LinkedIn's Hello Monday podcast. So our question for this week
Speaker 2: is also a career related question. So this list o
Speaker 2: writes in, do you have any ideas for resetting or
Speaker 2: momentum planning after a big goal of accomplishment, Like let's
Speaker 2: say this person is an academic who achieved tenure, or
Speaker 2: it could be someone at a law firm who made
Speaker 2: partner or anything along those lines. So you've gone through
Speaker 2: the major hoop. Now what, Sarah, what would you say?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 3: So fun fact, this came from someone who did achieve tenure,
Speaker 3: and she did so after completing best Lead Plans academy.
Speaker 3: I'm not going to say those two things are related.
Speaker 1: But of course they are.
Speaker 3: But she was super happy to share that with me,
Speaker 3: and I was so excited for her, and I thought
Speaker 3: it was.
Speaker 4: A really interesting question.
Speaker 3: I think the first thing I would say is not
Speaker 3: to jump straight into the next thing, but to make
Speaker 3: sure you've taken time to savor that accomplishment and really celebrate,
Speaker 3: like where you've gotten.
Speaker 4: I would do that in.
Speaker 1: A number of ways.
Speaker 3: Celebrate with yourself, take time to reflect, maybe do some
Speaker 3: sort of treat that's just for you, and then also
Speaker 3: with others, whether that might be throwing a little celebration
Speaker 3: to help people, to thank people who helped you along
Speaker 3: the way perhaps, or like doing a little family celebration,
Speaker 3: like really mark that milestone, because most likely many years
Speaker 3: went into that and it can be tempting to just
Speaker 3: move on, but really valuable to reflect and celebrations help
Speaker 3: us do that. Then I think that think about what
Speaker 3: you want to do and not with a lens of
Speaker 3: like well what would the next logical thing be, because
Speaker 3: if I'm associate professor, then it should be full professor
Speaker 3: or whatever.
Speaker 4: I mean, I just made that up. I'm not an academic.
Speaker 3: But instead of thinking like what would the guidebooks say
Speaker 3: to do, think about like, well, what do I want
Speaker 3: to do with this role? Like what do I want
Speaker 3: my day to look like? What do I want my
Speaker 3: life to look like in ten years? Call Newport calls
Speaker 3: it lifestyle centric career planning, And I do kind of
Speaker 3: like that concept of like maybe thinking about outside the
Speaker 3: box of what you're going to do with this new
Speaker 3: milestone based on what you want your day to day
Speaker 3: existence to feel like. And then I would also just
Speaker 3: be really really patient because anytime you have a transition
Speaker 3: like this, things can just feel messy when you start
Speaker 3: with and I personally get into the trap of feeling like, Okay,
Speaker 3: I'm at this new thing and I did some planning,
Speaker 3: so it's going to be like super smooth and awesome
Speaker 3: from the very beginning, and a lot of times, like
Speaker 3: I have learned the hard way that no, it like
Speaker 3: takes adjustment you're figuring things out. I remember when I
Speaker 3: kind of even went to sixty percent with my job,
Speaker 3: which sounds like it would be a really easy transition,
Speaker 3: I was like, oh my god, like what do I do?
Speaker 3: How do I structure my days? Like what do I
Speaker 3: you know, going from a day packed with meetings to
Speaker 3: a day where I had to decide when to do
Speaker 3: things was really different. So give yourself time to analyze,
Speaker 3: think about it, settle in, and maybe figure stuff out
Speaker 3: through trial and error. And my final idea I had
Speaker 3: a lot of ideas, I guess, is to think about
Speaker 3: perhaps if there are ways you could give back by
Speaker 3: helping those under you, like especially if you receive the
Speaker 3: benefit of being mentored by someone, then being in the
Speaker 3: next level might mean that you're ready to do some
Speaker 3: mentoring of your own. I think as women were always like, oh,
Speaker 3: I'm not at that point of being a mentor, because
Speaker 3: you know, I'm just still new with this. But really,
Speaker 3: if you've reached that tenure position, then you're really awesome
Speaker 3: and impressive to anyone who hasn't. So you probably have
Speaker 3: a lot that you could impart on the next generation.
Speaker 3: So those are a few of my thoughts.
Speaker 2: Excellent, Yeah, I was thinking back to this. I have
Speaker 2: a section in one hundred and sixty eight Hours, which
Speaker 2: is a book I wrote many many years ago, but
Speaker 2: the chapter was about achieving the career breakthrough. In the
Speaker 2: last section it was called be ready to ride the wave.
Speaker 2: And that's because I think a lot of people you
Speaker 2: get so focused on like, this is the thing I
Speaker 2: have to achieve, and it is a big thing. But
Speaker 2: life keeps going after that. I mean, you wake up
Speaker 2: the next morning, you sweep up the confetti and the balloons.
Speaker 1: And then you keep going forward.
Speaker 2: And so being ready to ride that wave means having
Speaker 2: some back burner projects that you know, maybe may weren't
Speaker 2: your main thing that you used in your you know,
Speaker 2: tenure committee, media or whatever. But you have these things
Speaker 2: that you still want to keep moving forward on. You
Speaker 2: can reach out to everyone as you're sharing the good news,
Speaker 2: and as part of that, have these conversations about what
Speaker 2: your colleagues are working on and what areas they feel
Speaker 2: are right for discovery that might form the basis of
Speaker 2: your next project. Whatever good habits you have, it's probably
Speaker 2: not the time to get rid of them. So if
Speaker 2: you have good creative habits, like devoting time every week
Speaker 2: to reading new research, or coming up with lists of
Speaker 2: ideas to pursue, or writing five hundred words a day,
Speaker 2: just to keep yourself in that mindset, keep going with
Speaker 2: those right like, because they're going to lead to new
Speaker 2: things in the future, and you know you're going to
Speaker 2: need some other big idea, and so you want to
Speaker 2: keep laying the groundwork for that big idea to happen.
Speaker 2: And then of course be open to opportunity as well.
Speaker 2: I mean, especially as you get more seen, you're probably
Speaker 2: people want you to do lots of things, so you're
Speaker 2: not going to take on everything that people are suggesting.
Speaker 2: But on the other hand, you want to know what
Speaker 2: looks like good to you, and so you are ready
Speaker 2: to seize opportunities that look fairly close to what good
Speaker 2: looks like for you.
Speaker 1: And then you can ride that wave.
Speaker 2: I'm always fascinated by the people who are sort of
Speaker 2: the difference between the one hit wonders of the world
Speaker 2: and then the people who keep coming up with good stuff.
Speaker 2: And I think it really is that being open to
Speaker 2: new opportunities, to seeking them out, and to maintaining those
Speaker 2: good habits even if you don't technically like have to awesome.
Speaker 4: I love that.
Speaker 2: All right, Well, I've been talking with Jesse Hemple, host
Speaker 2: of LinkedIn's podcast Hello Monday. We will be back next
Speaker 2: week with more on making work and life fit together.
Speaker 4: Thanks for listening.
Speaker 3: You can find me Sarah at the shoebox dot com
Speaker 3: or at the Underscore Shoebox on Instagram.
Speaker 2: And you can find me Laura at Laura vandercam dot com.
Speaker 2: This has been the best of both worlds podcasts. Please
Speaker 2: join us next time for more on making work in life.
Speaker 1: I've worked together