BigDeal - #1 Career Coach: You’re Building A Life You Don’t Actually Want! (Do This Instead)

Episode Date: October 14, 2026

Suzy Welch is a bestselling author, NYU professor, and one of the most sought after career coaches in the world. She's taught thousands of students how to build lives that actually work, and in this episode, she breaks down why following your passion is terrible advice, how to figure out who you really are, and the exact frameworks that separate people who build the lives they want from people who stay stuck wishing. In this episode, you'll learn: Why following your passion is terrible advice The Gen Z values crisis that is making finding work so hard The 10-10-10 framework Why only 2% of people are living fully authentic lives Why failure is your entrance fee into the “Society of Interesting People” ___________ (00:00:00) Introduction: Follow Your Passion Is Terrible Advice(00:01:08) The Three-Legged Stool: Passion, Aptitude, and Values(00:07:31) Gen Z's Values Crisis: The 2% Problem(00:10:52) The Values Bridge: 200,000 Data Points on What Drives Success(00:12:53) The 10-10-10 Framework: Decision Making That Actually Works(00:21:06) The Six-Word Memoir Exercise: Writing Your Life Forward(00:23:26) The Four Horsemen of Values Destruction(00:26:29) The Authenticity Gap: Why 98% of People Aren't Living Their Values(00:29:27) Stop Looking Backward: Why Therapy Isn't Enough(00:34:47) The 360 Feedback Reality Check: How the World Actually Experiences You(00:39:10) The Career Traits Compass: What Leaders Actually Need Today(00:49:19) The Society of Interesting People: Vernon Jordan's Gift(00:57:05) We Can Do Hard Things: Everything Good Is Hard(01:00:13) Raising Kids Who Aren't A-Holes: The Character-First Approach ___________ MORE FROM BIGDEAL 🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@podcastbigdeal 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bigdeal.podcast 📽️ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@big.deal.pod MORE FROM CODIE SANCHEZ 🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@codiesanchezct 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/codiesanchez 📽️ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@realcodiesanchez OTHER THINGS WE DO 🌐 Our community: https://contrarianthinking.typeform.com/to/WBztXXID 📰 Free newsletter: https://contrarianthinking.biz/3XWLlZp 📚 Biz buying course: https://contrarianthinking.biz/3NhjGgN 🏠 Resibrands: https://resibrands.com/ 💰 CT Capital: https://contrarianthinking.biz/4eRyGOk 🏦 Main St Hold Co: https://contrarianthinking.biz/3YfGa8u Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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The stupidest thing in the world for your failure, right? I hope you fail because then you'll just keep taking big swings. You should follow your passion, but what if you can suck at it? It's actually easier in life if you're doing what you're good at. My guest, Susie Welch, she's a best-selling author and NYU professor. Today we're diving into life's biggest questions. Who am I? What do I want? And we're going to give you simple, practical frameworks

so you can build a life that works for you instead of the other way around. Gen Zee says we can't understand why we're not getting hired. That's because they're looking for values that you don't have. Do you find the youth is over-optimizing happiness? If you don't walk through the valley of despair, you're never going to be on the mountaintop. What is the number one reason why people won't achieve the life that they want? So, I love some of your spiking points of view. Okay.

I was really just having fun on the internet, watching people, you know, I love when people get all riled up. And you had one I really like that is you have some intense feelings about the words follow your passion. So I want you to tell us. Triggering me as we come out the gate. All right. What do you think? Should people follow their passion? Yeah, if they're good at it.

I mean, because this is the thing. Like, of course you should follow your passion, but what if you suck at it? I mean, like, this is the thing. It's like, I like to sing. I'm really passionate about it. But it is like I've lost friends over it. I don't do it in front of my family. It's just not my Cape Philly.

Like, what you should do with your life, what you should follow, I mean, to be kind of a, you know, prig about it is that, you know, there's sort of three things that have. have to be there. So your passion, which would be your interests, okay? What you're really, really interested in, what, you know, turned your crank. Ooh, that calls me. So that's one leg of the stool. Then there's what you're good at, your aptitudes. Oops, let's not forget those, shall we? Because it's actually easier in life if you're doing what you're good at. Now, you can, if you're so passionate that you don't care if you're good or bad at it, it's fine, but you also have to kind of pay the bills. So like then there's your aptitudes. And then the

third leg is very, very important, which is what your values are. And most people don't know what their values are. So they sort of throw those over it. Oh, everybody is the same values. Honesty, compassion, goodness, and kindness. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We all agree. But actually, what you should be following is not your passion, but it's a synthesis of three data sets. It's very, you know, oh, that's very complicated to figure out. Actually, not so complicated to figure out. It will save you years of boneheaded mistakes. So might as well do the work. I love that. Well, I can also tell, usually, if somebody just wants to make you feel good and not make you money, and then they tell you to follow your passion. You know, like, of course,

Of course, I don't make you really popular. Right. But you'll never actually achieve much of anything. Well, I mean, look, there are some people who followed their passion and they had spectacular lives, but it was because they were also good at it and it aligned with their values. What do you think for somebody who says, I'm not exceptionally good at anything? I have no idea what I'm good at. What do you tell them?

They have not looked hard enough. I mean, everybody is good at something, but you can't just guess. I mean, there's like we have tests that was part of becoming. you last my whole system that we look at. We have tests. You've got to find out what you're good at. You're good at something. Everybody's got to get, like, but people have these very narrowly defined views of what aptitudes are. But like, you can build a whole career in life over the aptitude, the strength, the gift of making strangers feel welcome. Okay. But nobody ever says, well, I make strangers feel welcome. Yeah, but that's like incredibly rare. It's an incredible gift.

And why have you not identified it? Instead they're thinking like, well, I'm not good at math or I'm not good at English. Yeah, guess what? Those are subjects that they teach in elementary school. Abtitudes, there's this huge array of them. But you've got to look and look and figure it out. The information, very unfortunately, doesn't drop on your head. You have to actually go looking for it. And so that's the hard part. I mean, you teach, how many students a year do you think you teach? A thousand. Okay, a thousand for many years now. Yeah. So, and you're dealing with a lot of Gen Z, a lot of youth coming up at NYU. Yeah. What does Gen Z think about finding their purpose or finding their next thing that they need to do in life? Is Gen Z lost? Are they found? What are their biggest questions? Well, they're nervous and scared right now is what they are because the conveyor belts they thought they could get on are generally blown up or completely broken. So there was a time where you thought, okay, if I do, if I put one foot in front of the other, I do well in high school, then I do moderately well. in college, I figure out a major, and then I got on this conveyor belt, and I go to consulting or I go into retail or whatever, there's going to be a path for me. But now there's

been some disintermediation, and that would be AI, and that would be certain geopolitical trends and so forth. And so now they're like, okay, wait, wait, wait, what is my purpose? And what's interesting is for Gen Z, they don't want to postpone it. So for previous generations, everybody's always wanted to know their purpose. Everybody wants to know their purpose. But for older generations, like including my own, it was like, okay, I'm just going to do the hard stuff up front and I'll figure out my purpose and live it later in retirement. But Gen Z, probably because of the pandemic, although there's no data that would confirm that, just as like, yeah, I'm not waiting. I want to live my purpose. I don't want to live my whole life long. I don't

want to pay it forward forever and ever. I want to live my purpose now. So there's a lot of stuff going on with Gen Z. Do you think you should try to live your purpose when you're in your 20s, or should you search for it longer? I think you should live your purpose the minute you can find it because it feels good. And when you feel good and you're filled with joy, here's this tricky little wild thing about joy is contagious. You just give it away. Nobody holds their joy in. Nobody's like, I'm not telling anybody I'm joyful. Everybody's like, I'm joyful. And then it's like when you're in the room with a person who's an energy amplifier, who's a joyful person, it just starts this beautiful, virtuous circle. So like, go find your purpose because it will fill you with joy. It will. And doesn't mean you won't have bad days because bad things happen. You get sick. And when you love gets sick, you know, something happens. You know, something happens. happen. This is no guarantee of an uninterrupted path, right? There's going to be, there's going to be times you fall off the path. But the more joy you have, the more you spread it, and I want that world. I don't want people waiting for that. Yeah, that's a good point. You have that characteristic. You have a lot of energy. And I, because I'm living my purpose. I didn't

always. I mean, like, you don't have four kids. Sorry to break this news to you. Okay. You don't looking at you, you know, you don't have four kids. and get to live your purpose every single day, unless you're kind of, I mean, I suppose you could do it. Yeah. But you're living their purpose for a bunch of years there. This is so random, but I was reading yesterday a list of the most unhinged way Gen Z has quit jobs. And it was a series of, you know, like one was on a piece of toilet paper and it said like I wrote this on purpose, you know, today's my last day. I wish you unwell, you know, Sandy or whatever.

And it was a series of very cute, probably AI assisted, you know, probably. pumps to leave their job. But I was wondering, like, do you find that sometimes the youth is over-optimizing on happiness early? Okay, so let's talk about it because I actually have incredible data on this from my research. So we have a tool that measures your values. It rank orders them from one to 16. And I don't know if I'm allowed to say this, but I'll say to you, we have a discount code for your listeners. If they want to rank order their values from one to 16, this is a test with 91% accuracy. And it also tells you how much you're living them. So 200,000 people have taken this test in the last year. So we have data that can tell you what the top values are for every single

generation. Okay. So the top values for Gen Z, the number one top value for Gen Z, we use a Greek word because we don't like people's heads to explode when we say it, but it's, we call it eutimonia. That's the Greek word for flourishing. It's work life balance. Okay. It's, it is happiness. Okay. The number one value is they want to feel good. They want well-being. They want well-being. They They want balance. They want harmony. They want to have everything all at once. Okay, that's the number one value for Gen Z. Okay. The number two value is voice. That's authentic self-expression. I am who I am. That's all that I am. Don't make me be somebody I'm not. It's just absolute authenticity. I'm going to let my freak flag fly. That's it. And the number three value for Gen Z is agency,

self-determination. Okay. I am going to live my life exactly as I wanted. This is generationally different than other generations. When I saw these top three values come up in the data very, very clearly to mark this is what Gen Z's top three values are, I thought to myself, hmm, I wonder what hiring managers would like from Gen Z. Why don't I go find out? So I did a study with my lab of 25,000 hiring managers, people who had at least managing at least five people. So they were serious managers managing at least five people. Generally, these people were in their 40s. they were in knowledge industries, the kind of things that, you know, they are in consulting and banking and insurance and so forth. And so not in the trades necessarily, not in the trades, period.

And we asked them, what are the top, we showed them all the values and we said, what are the top three values, you know, that you are hiring for in Gen Z. When you're looking at Gen Z, what are you looking for? Will they say? Achievement. That's the desire to win, win, win, win, win, win, okay? Work centrism, okay? The desire to work, work, work, work. And then the value of scope, which is the desire to learn, have adventure, and travel.

Okay, so then why don't we just cross-reference that data? Okay. And then when you cross-reference that data, you find out that actually only 2% of Gen Z has the values that hiring managers are looking for. And then Gen Z says we can't understand why we're not getting hired. And the reason is, after the interview, they're saying those kids don't have the values that we're looking for. All right. And so this data is, we report on this data in the data. Wall Street Journal and this data made a lot of people's heads explode. On the one hand,

Gen Z said, why are you picking on us? And I'm like, I'm just the messenger. These are your values. I have no judgment on your values. Your values are your values to live. And you live the consequences. So I don't care what your values are. You're not hurting anybody to have these. But when you say you're not getting jobs, that's because the values of the people trying to hire Gen Z is they're looking for values that you don't have. And so I have no skin in this game. I'm grown and I'm employed. And so I'm not. But and then the older generation was like, yeah, well, thanks for putting data on exactly what we're experiencing. We're trying to find people who want to come to our workplaces, work their tails off, you know, win and learn. And we're finding people who would like to have happiness and authenticity and self-determination. And you kind of, you know, older generations kind of feel like you earn those things after you've paid your dues. But dues, that's not part of the current site guys. It makes so much sense. We have a couple hundred employees across companies. And, you know, you feel like the old person. Because I'm like back in my day, you know, and I know it's like every generation sort of feels this way to some degree. I'm wondering, do you have data that shows what traits lead to more monetary or career success? Yes, we do. What are they? So we have done, we've given the values bridge at top performing companies and to the top teams at these top performance.

companies. So let's just say a very big successful bank would be a bank that everybody would recognize a household name that has had the best performance in the stock market over the past 10 years. We had the values bridge given to the top 300 executives. So the people who are the most successful people of that company, their number one value is, oh, shocker, achievement. Okay. And their number two value is, interestingly, very interestingly, their number two value is belonging. That's the desire to collaborate. That's the desire to, and that's a lower value for Gen Z. It's number eight for Gen Z. It's the desire to be in community. It's the desire to do things with and through people. That's the number two value, okay? And then the number three value is work

centrist and the desire to organize your life around work. That's number 15 for Gen Z. So, yes, so we have data. That is, and that data, not just at one bank, that's reinforced in all top performing companies. That is crazy. Yeah. But also really useful, because I think one of the things, I love about your work is you take kind of these fuzzy, complicated ideas, but then you apply rigorous analysis so that you can bucket them and make sense of the world. Yeah, it was important to us that every piece of data and the test be scientifically validated because these are hot button issues and people get back on their heels about it. And we were like, let's make sure the test is very good and the data is as solid as it gets

so that we can have a conversation about it. I don't want people judging each other or feel. acrimony towards each other. I want to have a conversation about how we can build a bridge and work together because there's some differences. Yeah. What about one of the other frameworks that I love that you have? You call it the 10-10-10. What is a 10-10 framework? So this is a decision-making system that I came up with in 1998 or so, and then I wrote a book about it in 2009. Actually, I'm happy you mentioned it because I have another book coming out about it in March next year. So 10-10 is a decision-making system. system because we make our decisions largely how gut. Okay? We make them on gut. And we say, well, I got to decide on gut because what else have we got? Well, there happened to be like 65 scientifically validated decision-making systems.

But when I was at my lowest point in my life, when my life could only be described with two words, both of them starting with SH, okay? It was an absolute S-H-S-H, okay? And this was a night. I had four children in five years. And I was working full-time as an editor at the Harvard Business Review. And from the outside, my life looks so perfect. I lived on a street called Norman Road, and we used to call it normal road because we

look so normal. But like, what was happening at that time? Well, my first marriage was completely falling apart. I was barely holding on by my fingernails as a mother, working mother for kids in the days where, like, maternity leave was two weeks. Okay. Times were different in the olden days. I'm about to tell you a story, which I hope you don't kick me off the podcast when I tell you the story because you're going to say, what's this stupid woman doing in my studio?

But here's the story. Never. I was trying to hold it all together. And in this period, I was getting a new roof put on my house. And I got a call from a speech company that said, would you come and give a speech in Hawaii to a thousand insurance executives? And I said, oh, my God, yes, because I needed money. Okay, they offered me $5,000. This was so much money to me in those days.

And so I said, yes. And then I thought, oops, what about those four little children? What am I going to do about them as I fly to Hawaii and back? I certainly can't dump the babysitter and my husband with these kids. It was too much. It took a village to take care of all those kids. And so I thought, I've got a great idea. The thing that will make this possible is if I bring two of the children.

Okay, they were like six and seven at the time. And I get there immediately. One of the kids gets sick. You know it, right? They're out of control. They can't manage the jet lag. And it was just, it was so bad. I was making bad decisions left and right.

So it all culminates with me in front of this audience of a thousand insurance executive. They all wanted to be golfing. This was this massive room. And I'm up there giving a speech in my. bow shirt. I've not left the bow shirts behind. Now that morning to clear the decks, what had I done? I had cleverly warehoused my children in a hula dancing class. I thought this was brilliant. And I still to this day get shivers thinking about my son's look as I left him in his hula skirt. I mean, I just, you know, if I'm found dead, it was because of this. So anyway, I leave them. And I'm up there giving the speech.

And as I'm up there pointing, I was giving a speech about the history of management, I see these two little bodies pressed up against the glass doors at the back of the room. They come. bombing down the center aisle screaming mommy, mommy, mommy. Yes, yes, yes. This is the days before people thought this was cute. Okay, thank God there were no cell phones. I would have been viral for the rest of my life. And people were not amused, okay?

They didn't clap. And I did the right thing. I ran towards my kids. They were hugging my legs. And I thought this is the bottom. It was the bottom. And so that night, because I kept on making wrong decisions, just couldn't stop myself making wrong decisions.

I went to the luau that I was supposed to go to. no one would speak to me. I was like the pariah whose children broke into the speech. And I thought, okay, I've got this idea. I'm going to start to make better decisions. I'm going to take a look at every decision. I'm going to stop time. And I'm going to say, okay, what are my options? And what are the consequences of those options in 10 minutes, the immediate future? Ten months, the foreseeable future. And 10 years, the life I want to create. And I'm just going to use this as a sorting mechanism. And I don't know. It just came to me.

Don't ask how I was desperate. Desperate women do desperate things. I had to get hold of my life again. So I started to use this little device like that next day. Like on the way to the airport, the kids were like, let's go to the toy store, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, hold on a minute. It's a decision. And I like did this 10, 10, 10 thing.

And I was turned around to the kids in the back seat. And I said, we're not going. And they were like, what? I said, I don't care. We're not going. But I had used this. I had a system. So fast forward.

about 10 years later, my life is so much better. One of the reasons it's so much better is because I started to make my decisions rationally and transparently and systematically based on my values. I mean, that 10, the life you want to create is really a proxy for your values, right? The life you want to create. So my life got better. I remarried. Things were very, going very, very well. And at that point, I was writing for, oh, the Oprah magazine, that was my job. I had a column. And one day I was chit-chatting with my boss, Gail King. And I said to her, you know, one day I should write. about this decision-making system I use 10-10-10. And I described it to her. She said, go home and write about it now. And I did. And everything changed because it appeared, I discovered that other people needed this. So it became a book.

And the book did extremely well. And so to this day, look, now it's taught at Harvard. That's the funny thing. It's taught all around the world. It's taught at colleges and universities. I teach it at NYU. I was just giving a speech in your neck of the woods in Dallas. a few days ago when a woman came up to me afterwards and she said, I raised my kids on 10, 10, 10.

And I said, funny things, so did I. And the good thing is you can teach it to your kids. You can teach it to your spouse. Like never 10, 10, 10 alone. Show somebody you're thinking. So it sounds simple, but it forces you to really sort things out and say, what are my actual options? There's usually more than one and you haven't thought of them.

And then like, what's the upside? What's the downside? Immediately? That's usually where we get hung up. oh, so-and-so is going to be mad. Okay? Then in the foreseeable future, when the dust settles, and then in 10 years,

and for that, you really need to know your values. And one of the reasons I like 10-10-10 is now you can know your values, because why? The values bridge can tell you, if you don't know your values, you can find out with the test. So you have to know your values to use this tool. Otherwise, you'll change up every single time. But what do you know your values, North Star?

So interesting. I was talking to a few people who run really large AI companies now. And, you know, and I was thinking about the first thing. future of work and what are going to be important skills to have. And, you know, as you run a podcast like this, often I'm thinking about like, all right, if right now there's a million people listening to this, across platform and across shorts, that's a pretty big weight on our shoulders. So we better hope that we give them something useful for this very limited resources that they have. And both executives, when I said number one skill, like if you could give it to your kids right now today and be sure that

they could take this one skill with them. And they both said decision making, which I thought was interesting. Yeah. Because they were like, it's sure, you could teach them coding, you could teach them how to use AI, but you actually have to decide what you want to use all of these tools on. Right. I would take a little tiny tweak on that far beat for me to disagree with two people who run AI companies, but I would call it even more so discernment. Because discernment is decision making with your values. And so the thing about, the thing that AI cannot do is it cannot make decisions based on your values. It doesn't know them. Only you know your values. Now, you could tell AI your values and then it would maybe make better decisions for you. But discernment, anyone can make a decision.

Discernment, which is elevated decision making, comes when you have a system, when you have a way of thinking about decisions and they're not wrong. You know, AI will make the decisions for you, but not sure they're right, right? Discerning is what they're right. They'll just aggregate based on what the masses do. And that really doesn't lead to very good decision making. Not for you. Right. I mean, it's about you. Yeah. You have another exercise that I don't know. I knew the answer to 10, 10, 10.

This one I only know a little bit about. But you use it in the classroom where students tell the story of their lives going forward instead of backwards. What is that exercise? And what is it supposed to do? So, look, when I start to talk to my students about figuring out their values, the first thing I have to do is sort of tell them what values are. You know, people mix up values with virtues all the time, you know, but they're not. virtues are social and moral, they're social and cultural constructs that everybody agrees are good, okay? What are your values? I'll ask somebody and they'll say, oh, that's so easy. My values are honesty,

kindness, compassion. It's like, those are fabulous. They're virtues. We all agree those are good. You know, get in line behind me. We all have those. If you don't have them, you're like a total jerk. Okay. It's like I was walking down the street the other day. An old man fell down, his wife fell down with him, right? And what do I do? I help them. That's the virtue of altruism. Okay. If I didn't do that, we wouldn't have a society because everybody would do it. I wasn't like, you know, pat me on the back, anybody would help two old people up. All right, those are virtues. They're not optional. Values are choices about how we live our life along a continuum. So when I'm first starting teaching values, choices, I just first start talking to people about

what they are. So we play a game called a six-word memoir. That's what you're referring to. And what I ask people to do is to imagine their life up to the moment that we're in this classroom. Just close your eyes. Imagine your life. Think about it. Now pretend you've written the memoir for it. And you've written, okay, here's the story of my life ending today. And then I ask them to take six words and write the title of the memoir. And after they've done that, they're looking at a lot of times, these are not happy titles because people are not necessarily, like, it's not like, oh, it all worked out. It's sort of like she kept trying to say yes or, you know, never did get a

better job or like not exactly what I expected or whatever. I mean, people have different. Then after that part of the exercise is done, I say, okay, let's now do an interesting exercise. Close your eyes. going to give you a few minutes. Visualize what you'd like your life to be in 25 years. Just imagine what you'd like your life to be as if everything worked out. You got exactly what you wanted. The life that you've always yearned for took place. Write that memoir in your head from today to the life of your dreams and then write that

title. And a lot of times those two titles are really, really different. And the journey between the previous title, okay, the one from their old life and the title of their imagined life is the beginning of your journey of living your values, right? Because a lot of things get in the way of us living our values. So many things, okay? I call them the four horsemen of values destruction. Expectations.

You know, our family needs a doctor or, you know, you've got to become a cop like, you know, your uncle or whatever. There's expectations. Society has expectations. Our spouses. We have expectations of ourselves. that just gets in the way of us living our dream of a life. And then there's expedience because sometimes getting to the life we want is incredibly hard. We have to go back to school.

We have to get out of loan. We have to move. Whatever. Expedience gets in the way. Events get in the way. Having a baby, getting fired, whatever, that gets in the way. And then economic security. But the problem with economic security is everybody needs and wants it.

But we are wired. I mean, behavioral economists will tell you that we are wired to make decisions based on economic security, whether we care about it or not, right? Because we'll go for the hard number with our brains. And so when you, I ask people to imagine their lives. Sometimes I literally will see them physically, like they're like twitching in their seats because it's hard. They edit themselves so much. But what I'm trying to do is force them to let go of those four horsemen they get in the way and so that we could start to get a picture of their values.

That's so fascinating. I remember I did a workshop one time. and the woman teaching it was a little bit more touchy-feely than I am. Yeah. And it was all women, women in finance. But I was in finance at the time. These were pretty successful executives. You know, I was working at a bank.

These people were all pretty high level. And she did, she asked us to close our eyes while we were doing it. So let's say it's like a room of 100 women. Stand up, close our eyes. And make a physical representation with our body of how we feel about money. So just, okay, what are your feelings? on money. I want you to make a physical representation on that. And your eyes are closed, so I don't know what anybody else is doing. You know, I kind of throw my arms up like, I want more of it. Like right here.

I'm hanging out. Ready for you. And then they're like, nobody move and open your eyes. And it was the weirdest moment for me because I looked around the room and I thought, oh my gosh. I mean, there were like women in the fetal position. There were like women with like tiny little hands out. And I would say like probably 70 to 80% of women had sort of a cowering or a closed or a small. And these are finance women. Interesting. And I remember thinking at that point, oh, actually, the way that we perceive ourselves, the manifesto that you're writing or the story that you're writing about yourself, the memoir is actually incredibly important because, you know, you could know all the right answers and have all the tactics. But if you're kind of telling yourself these sort of negative stories, it seems that that

holds you back away. And I think all the other women were sort of surprised, too, to see it. Yeah. So that's fascinating. I think it's always a fascinating and somewhat shocking journey to figure out who you are. I mean, the nickname for my class is the class where everyone cries. And people say, well, why do so many people cry in your class? And I said, because they're finding out who they are for the first time. And I mean, that's what the journey is. And when people get back, their results of the values bridge, they're like, oh, my God, this is so me. I just didn't have words. And then they start crying because it can be, it can be very, it can be very validating. Or can be kind of, it can hurt because you can think I'm not living any of these.

Wow. How many people in your classes would you say feel like they're living their values and are not? All right. So we have a lot of, we have 200,000 data points on this. So not just my students. Okay. So when you take the values, Bridget actually gives you something called the authentic life score, which is the measurement between how much you hold a value and how much you're living it.

Okay. So let's just take this value of scope. Scope is the value of how big and exciting a life you want. That's a choice. Do you want to like, you know, be like Bianca Jagger riding into Studio 54 on the back of a white stallion kind of life? Or do you want to be living in your sort of twee, hipster, you know, a cottage with your, you know, children in pinafores and you don't want to go out. And you like, I mean, look, that's a continuum. How big and I have very, very high scope.

And all, of course, all four of my children have low scope. And when we go on vacations, I always said to my high scope is bumping into yours low scope because they want to go like rent a cottage in the Cotswolds. And I want to like, you know, do like 12 cities and 13 days. So anyway, so if you take this value of scope, almost nobody has, you know, some people have it very high, say they have it as their number five value, but we will measure that gap. We call it your authenticity gap. And you get a score of how authentic a life you're living. So I can tell you exactly how many, what the gaps are for most people. So I would tell you that 2% of the population, 2%, and it's actually closer to one, but we sort of rounded up because it's so painful, are actually fully living. their values. We call them the transcendence. Then there's about 14% who are thresholders, which are sort of getting close. Okay. And they're sort of like, they're 12% to 20%. They're getting there. They're not quite there. There's like maybe a 20% gap or so of them actually living their values as much as they want to. It's a bell curve because down at the bottom, there's the

incongruent. These are people who have got like, I mean, I've met people who have a 99% authenticity gap, that they're only living a 1% authentic life score. And when they see the results, they say things typically like, oh, no wonder I'm in so much pain or like, what do I do about this, which we then try to help them figure out. But it's not a lot of people. But you know what? When you see them, you know them. And you think to yourself, I want what she's eating. You know what I mean? When you see somebody who's filled with joy, who's living their values, typically you just read it right off of them. You can feel it. Yeah, that's very true. Wow. I cannot believe how low that number is, actually. It's so sad because if you're looking at so much of the, you know, statistical data. It's like, you know, we're living longer. I know. You know, we're not getting violent attacks every seven seconds. Um, but yet our brains maybe, you know, cannot recognize that. I guess it kind of goes back to like all the greats always say, you know, the Oracle of Delphi know themselves, you know thyself, um, you know, Sun Tzu, same thing. Lao Zoo, same thing. But like, I guess you've said that it's quite hard to figure out who you are and that,

you know, people have a difficult time somehow without exploration. Instead of, you know, short of going off to a monastery in an orange outfit, what are like... I don't like any of those ways. And I don't like... I mean, look, therapy has its role, but therapy looks backwards. And, you know, and maybe it's because I'm a mom. It's like at a certain point, like amnesty for your mom, okay? Like, she tried as hard as she could, all right?

And that, look, sometimes it's very important to understand where your childhood wounds come from and where your traumas comes from. But becoming you, our whole methodology is about figuring out your future. So the way we look at you figuring out who you are is a means to an end. Like you've got to figure out what your values are so you can play in your future life. You've got to figure out where you are in the continuum from individual contributor to leader so you can figure out your future life. You've got to know whether or not where your strengths are in terms of people, ideas or execution so you can go forward. And so, yeah, it's hard. But I don't think I 100% don't think you figure out who you want.

are going to a monastery and just some pondering. You've got to do some work. Yeah, I totally couldn't agree with some work. What do you think about therapy these days? It's a very, very important thing for people. Many people struggle with anxiety and other challenges with their mental health, and it plays an incredibly important role. But it's, look, it's not what I do. Like, sometimes in class, a student will say, Professor Welch, do you think that my family centristism, family centrism is the value about how much you want to organize your life around your family. Do you think my family centricism is so low because my parents got divorced when I was three and I say, take that up with your therapist. I am your professor at NYU as Stern School of Business and I am talking to you about how you build a career

and a life that you want with lower family centristism. You know, I love you, but I don't care where it came from. That's not my job. So I think therapy is incredibly important for figuring out why you are the way you are, but at a certain point, look, my proclivity, my interest, my area that my PhD is in values expression. What I'm interested in is how you live going forward. And, you know, no shade at all in figuring out why you are the way you are. But at a certain point, I don't know, maybe I just don't have the attention span. It is, what is my, you know, when somebody says to me, I had a hard childhood. I was like, getting in the line behind me. You know, it's like, but I understand. I mean, trauma is real and I don't want to make light of it.

Some people absolutely must have therapy to live. I totally understand that. But I, my focus of, the focus of my work is like, let's just move on, shall we? I love that. are my favorite kind of therapist, actually. I'm like, do we have next steps? Or are we just going to go back to what I'm three again? So what are the most, you know, what are some simple practical ways to figure out who you are? Like if you were telling somebody who was Gen Z and Super Lawson going back historically, what would you tell them to do? Look, I think there's three data sets you have to excavate, okay? And the first is your, are your values. First of all, you have to figure out and you have to know what values are. Again, they're not virtues. They're choice. about how you live. And I believe if you want to come to an academic conference with me,

sometime I'll take you where this is where academics fight about whether there's 13, 19, or 16 values. I'm in the 16 category. I actually invented a values inventory called the Welch Bristol values inventory. That's my claim to fame in academia. And so I think there's 16 values. You've got to know what yours are and what rank order they're in and which ones you're living and which ones you're not. Don't worry about the ones that are low, care a lot about the ones that are high, worry about the gaps. So I think that's the first thing to know yourself, know what your value is, like put words to them. Because, oh, this explains my weird feeling about wanting more excitement than my partner. Like, there's a value called belovedness, which is about how much

you want to organize your life around your partner, around your spouse, or your boo, whatever. Oops, I said the word boo. Everybody's cringing. Sorry. So, so, but belovedness, like, it's, no shade. You can have high belovedness or lower belovedness. The problem happens when it's a high value for you, but it's a lower value for your partner. It's good to have words around that because it depersonalizes it. So I think the first step is find out what your values are in their gritty specific. Don't guess. And then the second thing is figure out what your aptitudes are. You asked earlier, you know, what if you're not good at anything? Well, you haven't looked hard enough, my friend. You know, you've got to keep finding out. You've got to get very, very specific. I'm good at this

and I'm not good at know what you're not good at. I mean, I often say to my students, now that you know your aptitudes, what jobs should you absolutely not take? Because, you know, and, I'm Look, when I'm talking about aptitudes, I'm going to be very blunt here. There's two different types of aptitudes. Number one is your cognitive aptitudes. That's how your brain's wired. It's set by age 15. This is how you process information.

This is how you make decisions. This is how you speak. Those cognitive aptitudes, you're born with them. They're going to make something's easier and something's harder. But there's a second part of your aptitudes, and it's your personality. It's how the world experiences you. And most people would like to tell you that their personalities, this list of adjectives, about themselves. What's your personality? Oh, I'm kind. I'm a good listener. I'm so compassionate.

And when they say that, I say, maybe you are, maybe you're not. Let's find out how the world experiences you. Because the world may experience you as blunt, rude, and whatever, let's find out. So, like, everybody who goes through my methodology has to have a 360 feedback. It gloves off, maybe. Let's find out how the world experiences you. So you've got to know those two things. How's your brain wired? And for that, there's tests, okay? and very, very easy, some free tests and so forth. But then for your personality, you must actually confront. Because look, the truth is that everyone writes the script of their life with themselves

at the center as the hero. So when we tell the story of our life, we write that script and we describe ourselves as the hero. But the world may not be experiencing us as the hero, okay? And this is ouchy for most people. And so like self-awareness, first of all, self-awareness is very, very, very hard to test. But everyone, like 90% of people say they have high self-awareness. Well, that's technically not possible. Okay. And so we have less self-awareness than we know. And so it's

very important for us to get that. And so the third thing I would say after values and after aptitudes is what you're interested in. And that for some people, they're interested in everything. And some people kind of don't know what they're interested in. But I think it's very important to identify what you're interested in. So good. Now, what about, I want to get back to the working conversation a little bit. You know, we're seeing this, I see it across our companies. We have thousands of people that apply to very few jobs often. You know, we're seeing the jobless numbers among the segment of the population continue to have issues. And I think a lot of people feel a little lost. Yeah. What, now, obviously, we know maybe don't say your core Gen Z values in an

interview if you want to get one from a manager now because we've taken your test. But like, what would you actually tell people to do in a job interview to absolutely crush it? Okay, this is a great question. And I would say this. I don't think you should ever try to change or hide your values because that's like holding your breath. And so if you have high eutamonia and you have high voice and high agency, try to go find a company that will accommodate it. Because to go into a company, if you have those high values, you go work at Goldman Sachs or J.P. Morgan, you're going to feel like you're suffocating every minute and eventually you're going to blow up. And so I don't know, a lot of times this is not what people want to hear because they want the money that those companies give you. But if you've got the values,

so you can artificially elevate your values. You can, you know, I know, though somebody with rather low achievement who needed some money because of something happened in his life, and he decided, he said to me, I'm going to go in and I'm going to artificially elevate this. And I said, well, we'll see how long it lasts. It's very hard to fake your values. You feel, again, like you feel like you're in a suit that doesn't fit. You feel like you're holding your breath. So I can't say, go in and say, oh, I believe in achievement. I believe in winning. I think the better bet, the more sustainable bet, although you may not like it because of its financial consequences, is find a company that is not competitive and find a place where you're going to have a more

sustainable future. Yeah. You know what? I remember early on in my career, I worked at a company called Vanguard and then I worked at Goldman Sachs. Right. And Vanguard was not a fit for me because it was actually a place where not a lot of competition, slow progression in your career. Your traditional company. Very traditional. High degree of collaboration, but not a lot of degree of rewards of exceptionalism. I hated it. Yeah. I hated that company. Yeah. You need to be in a, you need to be in a classic high achievement company. Exactly. And yet, I have some dear, dear friends who have been at Vanguard for 15 years. That's right. And it's the best thing ever. Yeah. And so I do, it's a really good point because increasingly there's so much optionality. If you can find, you know,

your group of people that are into just about everything on the internet these days, there is probably a company for you. Yes. I think that sometimes though those companies, they do have a financial consequence. So I mean, a lot of times people say to me, or a student will say to me, Professor Welch, I have eudamonia as my number one value and affluence as my second value. Is that a problem? And I'm like, do you promise not to kill me? You know, it's like, yeah, it's a problem. I mean, if you want work life balance and harmony, no shade, it's fine. It's good for something. It's not my value, but it's like for some people, it's a top value, whatever, it's fine. But if you also want a lot of money, those, I don't know, those two things don't usually go together. And maybe in a

perfect world, they will. I mean, my students all say, like, why does it have to be that way? And I said to them, I don't know why it has to be that way, but I played by those rules. So it's very hard for me to say, look, I hate the rules. It worked for me. But I get that they would like to be able to make a ton of money with a lot of work-life balance. I didn't write those rules, but those tend to be how it goes. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's them chips. What about, let's talk about leadership a little bit because you interestingly teach people how to become themselves and also teach people how to manage or lead. And so I think a lot of people think their leaders, want to be leaders, but really maybe aren't even managers. So like what do you think real

leadership looks like? What does a good leader look like versus a bad leader? So I have many thoughts on this because I teach this. But I would say that actually the data, there's a very fascinating study that came out from Deloitte just last week that said that only 6% of Gen Z would like to be a leader. No. What was it before? I don't know. That's a fantastic question. It had to be higher. I had to be higher. I mean, I think about, look, when I was at Harvard Business School, it wasn't 6%. Okay. I mean, of course, that's a self-selecting crowd. Even when I was at Vanguard, they had individual contributors and they had

I don't think they called it leader, but something damn near close to that. And you kind of felt shame if you wanted to be an individual contributor. The cultural narrative is leadership is good, individual contributor, even manager bad. I actually blend the words and call them managers because if you're a leader who doesn't manage, sometimes everyone hates you. And if you're a manager who never leads, everyone hates you. So I like to put it together. And the word meter was too ugly.

So I just use Lanager and my students get used to it because they're blended. And trying to, oh, leaders do this, managers do that. only in academic articles. In real life, they do a lot of everything. I mean, if a leader who's never thinking about how stuff actually gets done is absolute, you know, pompous, you know, blowhard. And a manager who's a grunty little bureaucrat never leads and never inspires is a grumpy little bureaucrat who never leads and inspires. So you've got to be both, I think. And so, but I actually have done some research around in today's environment with AI, with the pace of change with what's going on, what actually the traits that you actually need.

need to be a leader. And we actually have a construct. It's called Career Traits Compass. And it goes, it's a compass. So it goes north, east, southwest, right? It goes around the compass. So the first, up at the top, north stands for nerve. I think nerve is absolutely essential for leaders today. And what is nerve? Nerve is composed of your stamina, mental and physical stamina, which not everybody has. Edge, the ability to make decisions with no, with incomplete information. Who can make, first of all, You have to know how to make decisions and then you have to make them with no information whatsoever. And then candor, radical candor. So that's nerve.

Nerve is stamina, candor and edge. And, you know, it's in short supply. I mean, stamina, that's a rare trait. It's pretty physiological also. I mean, like I have a great deal of stamina, but sometimes I think, oh, good for me. I've got stamina. And then I call my 98-year-old mother. I'll say, Mom, what are you doing?

And she'll say, I'm mopping. I noticed some dust. And I was like, I inherited that. I mean, that kind of like always go, go, go. Is that true? Stamina is often inherited. I think it's physiological. Now, you can lose your stamina if you hate your job and then suddenly get your stamina back. But you know, there's high energy people and there's lower energy people. You're absolutely right. And there's jobs. My grandmas are 90, well, one's 103 and one's 97 and they're animals. So some good genes for you, baby. Yeah. That's why I didn't know that. That's fascinating. So then the next trait is elasticity. This is your ability to absorb change, embrace change,

anticipate change. Plus, the other part of elasticity is your ability to have relationships, true relationships with people who are different than you. Okay? We call those irregular relationships. Down at the bottom and the S for, you know, going around the compass, is soundness, emotional soundness. And it matters more today than ever before because for all sorts of very important reasons. and I would applaud them all. Managers and leaders are more responsible for their employees' well-being than ever before. Like when I was coming up and along, you didn't go talk to your manager about your anxiety. Okay.

But now people do, and managers have to be able to deal with it. And so if you're going to help people with their well-being, you have to have some emotional well-being. Okay. You have to be the same person every day. You have to have some kind of emotional regulation. So sadness is really self-awareness. It's positive energy. It's resilience.

It's accountability. all of those things go into soundness, and they matter more today than ever before because of the importance of managers being able to care for their people's well-being. These are scary times with young people and harming themselves. So the final one is wonderment. The W is wonderment. And that's not just curiosity. Curiosity is a gene. So you inherit it or you don't. You can have hacks for how you can act more curious. But Wonderment more is about curiosity, about technology that's coming. Because if you're not curious about new technologies, you're too late. You've got to be seeing around the corners or you've got to be curious to see around them.

So I think those are the traits going around the compass there. There's a lot of them. And I think a lot of them you can get better at. I think you can get better at edge. You can learn how to make decisions. I think you can get better at building relationships with people who are different than you or you've got to practice. So I think there's good news on that front if you want to be a leader. Fascinating. I've never heard it describes so succinctly. What about, this is kind of out there. What do you think about leaders who cry at work? Well, I mean, it depends on the context. I mean, I think you don't want to be crying all the time. I mean, people need to have somebody who's emotionally sound. But look, there's a time and place.

I mean, for showing your humanity. Again, I don't think that this is something you do on a regular basis, but if the context is appropriate, I don't think we should hide our humanity. I mean, I think your humanity is what makes people want to follow you. Yeah. I'm so back and forth on this one. I have a good friend Jefferson Fisher, and he says, you know, if you want to cry at work, you should let it out. And this is, you know, this is your feelings. And he's very eloquent. So he's a beautiful way to say it. And I was like, Jefferson, this is terrible fucking advice. Stop telling people that. I mean, if somebody dies or if there's something gut-wrenching or really hard, yes, of course, cry, do whatever you need to. But do we really want to give people advice that a leader is one who can't emotionally regulate enough? I'm with you on this one. I do remember I had an employee once and his wife was pregnant with twins and she lost one of the twins in childbirth. And I put my head on my desk and cried in front of everybody. I was heartbroken for them. And I didn't, we all were heartbroken. And then I sent everyone home. I think that's okay. I look back at it. I have no regrets about it. I still feel sad about it to this day. But I would say that letting it all hang out, this is not, I'm with you on it.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes I think, I mean, that's why I like your work. You have to, of course, there's always the exception, but sometimes you have to say the hard thing if you actually want people to get ahead. So I love that. What about the, like the flip side of it? Like, what do you think people get wrong about Gen Z since you're in front of them all day? Yeah. Because it's also very popular to sort of give them a hard time. I don't hate on them. And I, how could I be with them every day and hate on them? I mean, I think that I have a warmth for them. I'm with them. I think that. You use the word shade. So that's a genesis. Yes, I'm because I'm around them, but I do make them cringe all the time. I warn them right at the beginning of the semester. My job is to make you cringe constantly and I do not, I do not fail them on that front. I practice on my own children. But I'd say that what do people get wrong about them that I don't think they understand their lack of ambition. Okay. So they do have lower achievement than previous generations. And I think that they think, well, they don't want to work and they don't want to, you know, they don't want to put in the effort. But what I think that there's another. side to understanding, and that is that they looked at their parents put in the work, and they looked at their parents kill themselves for their whole careers, and then get laid off at 52 and have nothing to show for it. And they're like, yeah, I could put in all that work, but the whole contract is broken. Why are you telling me do something that's going to, you know, that won't work for

me? So, look, I can't make, you know, it's hard to speak about them as a unilaterally because there's so much variation in them. But I think that we have to have a heart for what their experience has been, which is that they saw their parents take this traditional route with sort of high achievement, high work centristism, and for some of them, it did not work out. Yeah. So can you change your values? If you're like, listen, I know my number one value is happiness, but your fancy term. Eudomonia.

Eudemonia. But I really want my number one value to be achievement because I want affluence. Can you change your value? If that was the case and somebody was to take the test, right, what we would probably see would be utomonia achievement affluence, they'd be right next to each other. I think it's typically, look, how are our values formed? Let's just talk about that for a second. Our values are formed in this gigantic cauldron.

And the cauldron starts bubbling when you're born. And what goes into it is like your parents, your culture, your demographic, your class, your, you know, my father saw the Hindenburg explode. That was one of the things, you know, life experiences, childhood trauma, everything goes in. And then by age 25, your values are pretty set. And they get changed by a seismic experience. And so it's very hard to manually change your values. values because you came by your values honestly. You came by them by life experience, genetics,

and so forth. And so you can artificially amplify a value. And you can say, okay, fine, fine. I've got eutemone at number one. But look, I have got affluence and achievements at two and three. And I'm going to lean into those. You can do that for sure. But let me add, if you've got eutemone at number one and you've got affluence and achievement down at 15 and 16, no can do. Yeah. No, can do. That's just too much vegan. Yeah. And what about, I guess if there's somebody listening right now that doesn't have the life that they want. Yeah. And they're going through a few of your exercises, which is, you know, maybe doing this memoir, thought, understanding their values. What is the number one reason why people won't achieve the life that they want, even if they know themselves or theoretically know themselves? Fear. Fear, fear, fear, fear, fear, fear. Fear. Fear. Fear. Fear. Fear. Fear.

of the stupidest thing in the world fear of failure. How dumb it is to scare. I feared failure. And then I failed. I had the most massive failure in the world. I got fired. I was Susie Little Goody Two Shoes. I was just like everything. Oh, I got to get into Harvard. Then I got to Harvard Business School. And I was like, you know, and everybody clapped. Okay. So then I got my divorce. And then right on the heels of my divorce, I met my husband, Jack Welch. And I got fired. Okay. I got fired on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. That was the story. Okay. And it was just a explosive and I thought, oh my God, I'm an utter failure. And I remember saying to Jack, I was sobbing. I'll never work again. He was like, get over yourself. You're going to work again.

And he said, Susie, you know, life is long. Prince to Pig, Prince to Pig. And I was like, no, no one will ever hire me again. And I was scared. And I thought, how could I fail? I'm such a good little girl. I'm such an achiever. Why does nobody understand this is true love? And it was just terrible. I mean, there were terrible stories written about me. Thank God, there was no social media in those days, but it was bad even without social media. And then I was at a party with Jack. I was at Vernon Jordan's house. And he was a huge civil rights activist and also an investment banker, only person in the world who was both of those things at the same time. But he was. And we were at this party and I was cowering in the corner next to Jack. And I couldn't lift my eyes

because I thought everyone looks at me and they think there's the failure in the room. We're all winners and she's a loser. So I was cowering in the corner. Jack kept on trying to shove me into conversations like pushing me towards like Madeline Albright. And I was like, no, she doesn't want to speak to the loser. And right at that moment, Vernon Jordan came over to us. And he was six foot five and he was towering over us. And he said, Jack, I understand that your new wife likes art. I want to show her a beautiful painting in the next room. And so he led me to the next room and we're standing in front of this absolutely disgusting painting. And I think, okay, now great. Now I have to now I have to lie on top of me being a loser. I'm now going to be a lying loser because I'm going to

tell Jordan that this is a really good painting. And then we're looking. We're looking at. And then we're looking at the painting and I'm like, ah, and he says, this is a terrible painting, isn't it? And I was like, oh my God, he said, yes, this is just a ploy. This is my wife's cousin painted it. And we had to hang it up. This is just a ploy to get you into this room. And I said, okay, and he stood over me. And he said, I'm so sad looking at you. You're completely pathetic. You're scared of your own shadow. You're just, you've fallen down, Susie. You've fallen down just like everyone in that room. But you have to get back up. And then if you get back up, You get something.

And I was like, what? And he said, you get to be a member of the society of interesting people. And I thought the society of interesting people, I want to be. That's the club I want to be a member of. I don't care about anything, but I would like to be interesting. He nailed it, right? And I thought, he totally reframed failure to me as this entrance into this paradise where you get to be interesting.

and I really wanted to be interesting. In fact, I had thought being a success was going to make me interesting. That's what I thought I was going to do. But actually, failing makes you interesting, getting up and saying, guess what world? You're not done with me yet. And so I walked out of the room and back into the main room and I was like, you know, I'm back. I'm back. I'm back.

And Jack was like, what happened in there? And I looked at a painting. And later in the car, I said to him like, I want to be in the society of interesting people. And he said, baby, you're already in it. And I said, well, I'm going to get back up and prove to the world I belong in it. And it was like, after that, my whole life changed because I thought I could fail again and again and again. And indeed, it just makes you more interesting. People don't live the lives they want to answer your question.

They don't live the lives because they're scared of that thing. They're scared of falling down because they think it takes them out of the club, but it puts them into a much, much better club. I mean, when I'm with fancy successful people as you are with day in and day out, they don't talk to you about their successes. They talk to you about their failures. That's what they compare. I mean, I've been with the greatest CEOs in the world. They sit around the table just comparing notes on A, how poor they used to be, and B, how much they've screwed up. They're fighting for the bottom.

Like, no, no, no. I mean, I was in debt for $300 million. But because they talk about the comeback. The comeback is what makes us interesting. You know, it's so funny, I never used to understand the man in the arena quote. Yeah. Fully until I think I understood that line where they say, you know, the way. one who has experienced neither failure nor defeat. No, victory nor defeat. And I remember at first

listening to that line and thinking, well, I don't need to, I'm cool. Right. You could just skip the defeat part. That's right. Go straight to the victory. And you're like, no, no, actually, if you haven't felt that, it really does make you less of a human. And does it? Like, I, after I failed, I just became such a nicer person. More heart, more compassion. I mean, I kind of came to hate my former self. I was like, ugh, that striving little goody two shoes, she was missing the love she should have been giving people. And so I, like, I'm all about it. But I see people every day saying, well, if I did that, I might fail. And I'm like, I hope you fail.

I hope you fail early and often, get it over with because then you'll just keep, like, you know, you just keep taking big swings. We only have one wild and precious life. Yeah, it's such a good point. Yeah, we also, you know, I was thinking about this the other day. We help people try to grow businesses and buy businesses. And, you know, one of the scary things for me, I think when we teach somebody to buy a business, I'm always like, congratulations, and I'm sorry. Because it's going to suck at some point. You're going to curse my name. You know, and you're going to wish you had never gotten into the game. But you sort of have to get into the game at some point. And you've got to go through when everybody tells you it's over. I mean, that's the thing that makes successful from, you know, people who just stay through. I mean, it's when you fold. And if you don't fold, you know, you will eventually play your cards. But that's, I mean, you're right. But if you don't walk through the valley of despair, you're never going to be on the mountaintop.

It's interesting, too, because you're a little bit older than I am. Just a little bit. You look amazing. But, you know, I was thinking lately, I'm on X, you know, Twitter. Yeah. And I was thinking, you know, sometimes I have those moments where everybody's piling on about something that I did. Sometimes it's warranted. Sometimes I don't think it is.

And I thought, well, gosh, there haven't actually been that many generations of women that that have been, you know, this might be the first one in which being a CEO as a woman is relatively normalized, even though it's only, what, 14, 15% of the Fortune 500 are women. But, you know, your generation, let's say right before ours, women's CEOs weren't really normal at all. And then the generation before yours, women working wasn't normal. And the generation before that, we couldn't even get credit, you know, or get a job. Couldn't buy a house without a husband. Yeah. Right. And so it's kind of fascinating because at least for women, it's like, we're, three generations into this experiment, actually. And we've never really competed with men for the

same economic resources, at least in like modern history. And so I could only imagine what it must have been like to have that over the Wall Street Journal everywhere, even though it's not like social, but it does feel like this echo chamber. I thought there was no coming back from it. I mean, I was very, very lucky because like, you know, a couple of weeks later, Oprah's organization called and said, how'd you like to come right for us? And Jack was sitting there in the corner kind of saying, told you so. I told you so. And I was like, okay, okay. And then it was, and then it was, and then it was off to the races. And I thought, oh, and then I actually learned to take risks and I learned to say things like, I might fail when I do this,

but I'm going to try because I will learn and I'll grow and so what, I'll dust myself off. And it changes, it changes you. It changes you. You just live so much more life. Do you have something that you say in your head when you're scared about something you think you might fail, but you need to do it anyways? Yes, I say, we can do hard. things. We could, like I tell myself all the time, we can do, like saying we, like you and me, Susie, we can do hard things. And I also say, and I've said it to my kids all the time, is everything good is hard. I mean, if it's easy, I mean, it's, you know, everything, starting a company is hard, but it's so good. You start creating people's lives for them. I mean, everything, everything good

is hard and then, and then the rejoinder being like, we can do hard things. And I have another one, suggest. I mean, it's like, you can do, you can get anywhere in first gear. So sometimes things are really hard, and you have to take your bike down to first gear, you'll get back up again. I mean, you know, it's all part of a piece, really, when I think about those three things. It's like, yeah, it's hard. Just persevere. Yeah. What about you've been, how long have you been married now to Jack? Well, Jack passed away in 2020. So he passed away. So we were married from the early 2000s to 2020 when he died. Oh, I'm so sorry. I'm sorry, too. But it's been beautiful 20 years. Yeah, about. Yeah, about. Yes, about.

So it was a wonderful, beautiful marriage, but he got sick and he fought so hard and we fought together. And we tried everything, but at a certain point, you just can't defeat illness and sickness. We tried. And he was able to die at home, which was great with the kids and me there. And so it was what you would, you know, you don't want it, but we were. able to do it in a way that was tender. Oh, my gosh. And your kids are how old, though?

30. My kids are from my first marriage. My kids are 30. I have a 38-year-old, 36-year-old, 35-year-old, and 32-year-old. Do you ever want to get married again? No, that is not in the car. I mean, I had a great marriage. I had a wonderful.

My first marriage, I'm actually really close friends with my first husband. He's a wonderful guy, terrific guy. And then with Jack, my second husband. That is not in the plans. Yeah. I was married once before, too, and now remarried. But I think I'd be the same with you after I have kiddos. Yeah.

Like, I love him and we work together and it's amazing. But I couldn't really imagine doing it again. Yeah. It's been six years, almost seven years now. And so it's like, I don't, it's not a burden. Like, I used to have a high value of belovedness. That value I mentioned to you of, like, romantic love. It was a high value.

Jack was living. And I recently took the value. Bridge again and it's number 16 for me. So when I say it's not in the plans, I know it's not a value for me. And look, it's not like I don't like or love men. I do. I do. And my kids have happy marriages and I have great friends with close marriages. I have no problem with it as a construct. But I've got a great life. What do you, like, I imagine your students also want to hear about that aspect. Yeah. You know, raising a family, being married. So I'm curious from your perspective, like what were your lessons, the things that you two did together? Because he's a legend, too. And did you guys apply systems and frameworks to your marriage? We did. I mean, we were great co-parents together, I must say. And I think the kids would all agree. I one time did a podcast, my own podcast about the way as I raised my kids. And I, at the beginning of the podcast, you know, what worked for me, I called all four of my children. I, like, bombed them, like, total surprise on the phone. And I said, was I a good mother or not? And they were all very, very agreeable that I was.

So the jury is in and the jury agrees. Look, it was hard. Okay. I care. So Jack and I really only cared about one thing with the kids. Okay. The majority of the kids' upbringing was with me and Jack. We married when they were very, very young.

And we cared. I know this is going to sound like virtue signaling. So bear with me. Okay, it's going to sound really like, oh, what a virtue signaler. But we really just cared about the kid's character. All right. So we like, we didn't obsess on where they got into schools. We didn't obsess.

I remember like praying to God in the closet that my son would not make varsity because I didn't want to travel around with his team. Like we didn't like obsess on that kind of thing. They was like, please God, but unfortunately he did. And so, but we really wanted them to be not Aho's. Okay. And so they had some, you know, these kids were coming from a privileged background with a famous stepfather. And they could have become really jerks. They could have been really yucky people because they had so much privilege.

We were in New York City. People knew who they were. And we were just like, they've got to be really good. So we're like one summer. I mean, here's an example. One summer our son came home from high school. They were in boarding school because we traveled so much. And he said, hey, my friends are going to Europe this summer after like after school ends. And like, I'd like to go to Europe with them. And we were like, oh, really? You think you're going to go to Europe on what money? And he's like, we have the money. I said, you're going to regret for all the rest of your days that you said that you said that, Marcus, you just. You're going to regret for all the rest of your days that you said, Marcus, you just. said the wrongest thing you could possibly say, we have the money yet. You make it? Did you make it? So he did not go to Europe with his friends and he stayed home and he had the worst job in the world. He worked as a camp counselor that summer, getting up every single morning at 7 a.m. and being a camp counselor to a bunch of little brats. And he worked and worked. He'd come home covered with sweat and dirt. And it was a really, really tough job. It was a bicycling camp. But we, I think that he now, 20 years later, forgives me. But he had to learn that, you know, I think I call them Little Lord Fauntleroy. You do not go to Europe with your pals when you're 16 years old.

That's something you have to earn in your life. So we focused on that kind of stuff. And we didn't make us the most popular parents in the world. I'll tell you that. I mean, they were not like, I love my mom and dad. We had the reputation as being incredibly strict. And we were. But now, my kids are my best friends. And now I have grandchildren. And I get to say yes, constantly. Yes, yes, yes, yes. I show up with like sparkly go-go boots. And she says, can I wear them to bed? And I say, yes. Yes. And then I said, do you want them in other colors? And she says yes. And I say, yes. And I say, do they still fit? Yes, I'll send them. I'm like absolutely yes. And and Roscoe says to me, you know, you're going to spoil her. And I'll say, that's right. I did not get to do that before, but now I get to do it with you. Oh, I love it. You know, it's funny. My mom, we're incredibly close to. But same. I mean, we used to call her the NARC because she would just, she was on me like white on right. She knew what I was thinking about doing wrong before I knew that I was going to do it. Famously used like a water glass to listen to my door to see. I mean,

She had every trick in the train. What Christmas, my kids gave me a baseball cap and it said FBI on it. I mean, I knew everything about everything. I mean, they were like, what is my mother doing here? And I'd be like, hello. I was just everywhere they wanted to be. I aspire to that. I hope I could be the exact same way. But I, you know, I think I have to owe a lot of, you know, whatever I'm good at today to her and my dad because they were tough, you know. Yeah. Well, and I think it's cool to share because these days there's so much about gentle parenting and all these other stuff and seems overwhelmed. you know while you're trying to figure out what to do with this little mini human. I know, but you've got to meet that many person. So that person is going to come out with his or her. Do you know what it is? No, we're going to surprised. I was surprised each time. That person is going to come out with his or her own personality and they're going to tell you some stuff about them and you're going to have to understand. You know, the biggest change for me, the most important thing I learned as a mom, if I could just share this with you, was that the day I kind of got better as a mom was when I realized that my kid, each one of them, each of the four of them was not an imperfect version of me, but a perfect version of themselves. And I had to stop imposing me on them saying, you should like this,

you should do that. I mean, look, there are rules and they all have to be polite and so forth, but like their interests were their interests, their values were their values. And I had to just learn who they were and love that person and not just keep on just grimacing that they were not the, they were not me. Your kid is not going to be you. And that is like, that's a gigantic, that was a revelation for me. Maybe other parents knew it, but I was like, wait, why aren't they more like me? I think I would have been like that too. This poor little thing. He's got a he, she, we don't know. But my husband is a former Navy SEAL and then I am whatever I am. So we joke about it'll be like a benevolent dictatorship, but it'll still be a dictatorship. So we're going to have to learn to chill out on this poor thing. We'll see. Yeah, I know. I think there's so many interesting things we talked about. One of the things that I want to send people to is Value Bridge. The valuesbridge.com.

Incredible thing. I'm actually going to make my husband take it, I think, with me when I go back. And if you click a little, if you both click a button that says it's okay, it will compare your values with your partner and you will get a report saying, here's where your values are the same and here's where they're different. I know what we're doing at dinner tonight. He's going to have a glass of wine, but I'm going to make you take this. So valuesbridge.com. And then where else do you like? I mean, you've written a few books by now.

Do you like to talk about becoming you? Yeah, I love talking about becoming you. You know, 10, 10, 10 is coming. They can go to Susie Welch.com and find out about all my books. Yeah. And you're on all the socials as Susie Welch. I am, Susie Welch on Instagram mainly, yeah. Yeah.

But I like becoming you. Yeah. And I really like, like you talked about, I think it sounds touchy feeling until you actually do it. Yeah. It runs your life. I am the least woo-woo person you've ever met. I'm not. Oh, my God.

I can't stand the woo-woo stuff. When I hear woo-woo platitudesitudes and bromides, I just lose my mind. Look, I like data. I mean, I would love to spend all my time with data because we can learn from the data. And I think that, look, people are always telling you to go live your purpose, but they don't tell you how. And that drives me out of what? Is it going to just drop on your head? It doesn't work that way.

You've got to go do the work to figure it out. And then when you do and you're living your purpose, it gets better. It gets better for you and it gets better for everybody you touch. So I think it starts off this very virtuous circle. I want to be in that business. Susie Welch, this was amazing. Thank you for being here. Thank you.

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