Good Life Project - Jessi Hempel | Creating Space to Grow

Episode Date: September 16, 2021

I’ve been a fan of Jessi Hempel’s writing and amazing podcast, Hello Monday, for years now, but it was her deeply insightful six-part series on re-opening the world of work that led us into the virtual studio space to jam. Jessi is a senior editor at large at LinkedIn and host of the award-winning podcast Hello Monday. For the past 18 years, she has been writing and editing features and cover stories about the most important people and companies in technology. Most recently, she was the head of editorial for Backchannel and a senior writer at Wired, where she profiled Dr. Fei-Fei Li and covered Uber’s attempted comeback. Earlier in her career, she was a senior writer for Fortune, where she co-chaired Fortune’s Aspen tech conference. Before that, Jessi wrote for BusinessWeek, and TIME Asia. She has appeared on CNN, PBS, MSNBC, Fox, and CNBC, addressing the culture and business of technology. But, it was her deeper impulse to get to the heart of things and her love of storytelling that really drew me to her work. In today’s conversation, we learn how those threads have woven through her life, landing her most recently in the world of audio with a focus on work and all the emotions and questions it brings.You can find Jessi at: LinkedIn | Hello Monday with Jessi Hempel podcastIf you LOVED this episode:You’ll also love the conversations we had with Dave Evans about designing your life.My new book is available for pre-order:Order Sparked: Discover Your Unique Imprint for Work that Makes You Come Alive and get your book bonuses!-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hey, so I have been a fan of Jesse Hemphill's writing and amazing podcast, Hello Monday, for years now, but it was her deeply insightful six-part series on reopening the world of work that really led us into the virtual studio space to jam. Jesse is a senior editor-at-large at LinkedIn and host of the award-winning podcast Hello Monday. And for nearly two decades, she's been writing and editing features and cover stories about the most important people, the icons and companies and technology, bringing together people and exploring world-shaking ideas and appearing everywhere from CNN, PBS, MSNBC to Fox and CNBC and many others, really addressing the culture and business of technology. But it was her deeper impulse to get to the heart of things and her

love of storytelling and the humanity underneath technology that has really drawn me to her work. In today's conversation, we learn how those threads have woven through her life, landing her most recently in the world of audio. Helming LinkedIn's Hello Monday podcast, Jessie really focuses more broadly now on the world of work and all of the different issues, emotional, psychological, political, technological, and how we navigate them as human beings and how they affect us while also bringing her unique stories and lens into the conversation in a way that didn't often happen as a writer and a journalist. And we dive also into that six-part series I mentioned on reopening, whether the word reopening even describes what's happening now and all the

important questions and touch points that people are navigating during this unusual moment. So excited to share this conversation. And as I shared on our last episode, we're getting really close to wrapping up our own six-part Sparked Stories series, drawing fun and inspiring two to three-minute stories from my new book, Sparked, in the beginning of each episode, leading up to the launch of the book on September 21st, which is just a few days from now. I was so inspired by these amazing people. I wanted to share their sparked stories as these short hits of inspiration and insight as we all make the transition into a season of reimagining and for many, reinvention. So here's today's short and sweet sparked story.

The Maven Impulse sometimes shows up as a generalized, relentless curiosity about everything and everyone. Like you live in a state of childlike wonder about the world around you. My friend, Neil Pestricha, who's a maker maven, personifies this. A maven primary, he's one of the most genuinely and broadly curious people I know. If he asks you how you're doing, he waits for an answer. Then he asks why. What contributed to it? How do you feel about your answer, Ho Wonder? And would it have been different yesterday? Does he want to know because he cares about me? Sure. I mean, we're friends. But there's something else going on.

He's deeply fascinated with people, often total strangers, and what makes them tick on every level. Why we do the things we do. He yearns to know the entirety of the human experience and he will talk to anyone and everyone about it. For Neil, every interaction is a moment of micro-discovery, another drop in his bottomless maven tank. And if you enjoyed that and are curious about your own sparkotype or imprint for work that makes you come alive, grab a copy of Spark using the link in the show notes or just from

your favorite bookseller. Plus, when you order before September 21st, you'll get some pretty cool bonuses as well. Okay, on to our conversation with Jesse Hempel. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required,

charge time and actual results will vary. Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era, or yoga era, dive into Peloton workouts that work with you. From meditating at your kid's game to mastering a strength program, they've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals. No pressure to be who you're not, just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are. So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun.

January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. I'm so excited to dive in with you.

I've been listening to you and I'm reading you for so long. I think there's some interesting parallels in our journeys over the last few years also. I want to dive into your work in journalism, in writing, in podcasting, and some of your bigger, deeper thoughts too. I'm fascinated by some of the decisions that you made over the last two years, but let's take a bigger step back in time because you have this stunning career in journalism bordering on two decades, writing for some of the biggest, most established outlets on the planet. But it seems like language and writing

in particular has been this through line in your life from the earliest days, but not necessarily the writing that you became known for eventually. I love the way that you frame that question because it's the question that I spent the first several decades of my life asking myself. I'm doing the thing I love to do, but not at all in the way that I love to do it. How did I end up here? The one thing I know that I've always known, someone call it purpose, is that I need to be a writer. I don't say want to be a writer because

I have no choice. I need to be a writer. And it's something that I learned about myself in the third grade when I won the school writing contest. It was like a K through five school and I won it for the whole school in third grade. And I referenced that not to be funny, but because that's actually often where our earliest ideas about what we should be doing or what we're capable of doing or allowed to do and be passionate about come from. And it was that early blessing that told me, well, okay, the rest of the world thinks I'm a good writer. I'm allowed to pursue it. The problem, Jonathan, was that I wanted to be a poet. I wanted to be a fiction writer. I wanted to stitch lyrics together. And then somebody told me that I had to pay my rent and I could not make the two coincide early in my life. So, I mean, where do you go from there? Because I know it's interesting

because I have a number of friends that have had that same orientation and hit that same point where they're sort of like stepping into adulthood and thinking, okay, if this is what I could do for as long as I can think about doing something, I would do it. And yet I also have this value that is important to me of being able to sustain myself financially in the world and be self-reliant to the extent that I can. And then you go into the world and you look up, well, how do you do that as a poet? And the answer is generally, well, you don't. But the flip side of that is there has been a really fascinating reemergence over, I want to

say, the last two decades of poetry in the form of spoken word that actually has created not just sustainable livings for people, but full-blown stars in the field and celebrities. I'm curious whether the spoken part of it, was it all something that was spinning in your head or was it really about pen on paper for you? It was really about, well, it's like this, Jonathan. I just read this book and this book laid out a handful of archetypes that best help you understand yourself. And as I read it, I realized that for me, I'm driven by two things, right? I'm driven by the desire to create new things. This writer, that would be you, Jonathan, spoiler.

This writer called this the maker's archetype and the desire to know deeply and just driven by the desire to know. And just driven by the desire to know. And that would be the maven's archetype. And I've realized, you know, I say it's about writing, but it's actually about stitching those two passions together. And the format, the medium is not nearly as important as I thought at the beginning of my career. Yeah, that's so interesting.

And by the way, that's actually, it's pretty common to makers. I'm a maker. That is my primary sparkotype. And it's almost odd in that very often you see that pattern where people latch into one channel of expression for a window of time and develop a skill. And then the fact that the good on the skill level becomes self-reinforcing. But the truth is you're very often equally happy expressing among a wide variety of channels. So it's really interesting to hear you reflect that.

Well, I think about early on, I started by saying I realized I couldn't pay my rent as a poet. And early on in my life, I considered that a hardship. I was coming out of an elite university where a lot of my peers had parents who were going to continue to help them out for a few years while they nurtured their passions. And I wasn't in that situation. I had school loans. I needed to figure out how to repay immediately. And that's what drove me to journalism. I needed to figure out how to take the thing that I was passionate about, stitching words together, and also make money. And ultimately, that was so helpful to me because

it taught me two things. And one is that we can't and shouldn't be precious about the way in which we channel our passions. There are many, many ways to find satisfaction and excitement doing the things that we love to do beyond writing poetry. And it also taught me the art of the hustle, which if you learn to hustle, you actually end up, I think, creating a lot more opportunities to pursue the things that you most love to do later on. Yeah. You know, when I hear hustle, I have this really interesting knee-jerk reaction. On the one hand, I'm like, yes. To do anything meaningful and to succeed in it takes substantial effort over a long window of time. And I also have this opposite reaction to that word, which is there has become this sort of sea of hustle porn that we see all

over the place where it's sort of like work until your eyes bleed. And that scares me. But I think sometimes we dismiss the notion of hard work over time because of that, you know, sort of like the public impression of what we see. So it's interesting to hear you reflect that, that no, actually, this is really, really, really important, not just because it creates opportunities, but also as a writer, as a storyteller, which fundamentally underlies everything that you do, it takes time to develop the craft. It takes a lot of work to build on the impulse and then say, okay, how do I get good at this? That timing piece is a piece that I've been just thinking a lot about this summer, in

particular, because I came up covering Silicon Valley. And in Silicon Valley, the cycles just kept getting shorter and shorter. You would just latch on to one company. There's a company called Facebook, and then there would be Twitter, and there'd be Pinterest, and another, and another. And the valuations got bigger and bigger until you look up and you think, well, how did they do it? I've been around 10 years of my career and I haven't yet started a billion dollar company. And in truth, while it might feel like the cycles move faster, I don't think that they do. I actually think that most of the things that we create of great value in our lives, we create by working hard over time and that that is never a linear path, right? So you go along in

your career and you have seasons and you might have fallow seasons where it just feels like nothing is happening and you don't understand how that's part of the process and you beat yourself up a ton about why that's happening. But it all lends itself to developing and deepening skills over time and creating whatever it is that you're creating in your life. I love that. I remember I had a conversation with children's book author, Katie Camilla, who writes these wonderful, wonderful books.

And she was saying, you know, she didn't write her first book. And her first book, When Dixie, was this massive, massive success. But she had been working odd jobs, working in a book warehouse, doing all this different stuff for a decade. And, you know, but she reflected back.

She said, you know, that decade was everything. Yeah. Like I couldn't be, I couldn't be the writer that I am now without having done all of those different things over a 10 year window of time, because that became the foundation of everything that allowed me to then step into the world of writing. And I so agree. I think sometimes we dismiss those things as, you know, like that's the wandering in the dark. And the only purpose

of it is to get through it as quickly as humanly possible. Well, sometimes, you know, it really serves a powerful purpose in developing what we step into and, and the urge to get out of that place just because it's uncomfortable may make the unease go away, but it actually may disserve us long term. Do you agree with that? I completely agree with that. And I think there's this great tension in life, Jonathan, between allowing yourself to stay in the uncertainty long enough to let it season you and shape you and show you

new things, but then moving forward with certainty, like making the decision. You also know people in your life who are stuck in a spot that they're made, they're uncomfortable and they're unhappy and you kind of shrug. You're like, you know, they're never, they're never going to move. They're never going to summon the courage to make the decision to walk in any direction. Yeah, no, that's completely true. You know, when I think about the people who are outliers from that point of view or from that orientation, and I often wonder what is it about them that allows them to move, almost flip a switch from living in a place of sustained uncertainty to saying yes to this, and I'm just going

to go all in on this thing for a window of time. And I feel like that person is really the outlier these days. And I often wonder, is there something about the wiring of that person? Is this something where they have something inside of them that allows them to do that? Or is it a skill that anybody can cultivate and learn? I'm curious where you land on that. I don't know, honestly. I think about probably the biggest career decision and ultimately the

biggest life decision I made, Jonathan, I made in the space of 24 hours consulting almost no one. And so I think about a lot, you know, the way that I normally make a decision is I, you know, I think about it myself. I talk to my friends about it. I talk to my wife about it. I'm a person who circles the drain for a long time before the decision gets made. But in 2018, my wife was pregnant. I was a very successful long-form journalist working for my dream magazine, writing long stories. And nobody was unhappy with that situation at work. Things were going great. And I'd been doing the same thing. I wasn't learning a heck of a lot. But goodness, I had a great perch.

And a tech company came and asked if I wanted to quit writing and make a podcast. And I said yes before I had really thought about it. And I think about the mechanics of that decision a lot. The biggest decisions that I have made in my life, I think, are like that. There's like an inner knowing, something that feels right. I don't even know if I could articulate the language around it. A willingness to take a chance paired with an understanding that it's the right chance to take. I don't know, what do you think about that decision versus the sort of incremental smaller decisions we make in our lives and careers? Yeah, you know, I think it's interesting because I think we both thought about this a lot. And I know you've

spent so much time sitting down with people who have founded these massive companies in the tech space where that's sort of like the way that they live. And I often wonder if those people are wired differently. But I think my lens on it is that there is probably a very thin slice of human beings who are just wired in a way where they're just all in, they'll go for it. The risk is high, the stakes are high, and somehow they're comfortable making a decision in a moment and just living with it. And then there's sort of like this group of people who will make that same decision fairly readily, but it will destroy them inside. They're not wired to be able to handle it, but the rational brain says, this is still the thing that I need to do, but I'm not equipped to be okay now stepping into this space of high stakes uncertainty.

And they get wrecked by it. And then there's another group of people where they do that same thing and they either intentionally or unwittingly develop a set of practices that allow them to be okay in that space and somehow navigate their way through it. But I still think that entire group, all three of those categories is the much smaller group of people. And most folks just don't ever go there. We're so completely controlled by a fear of the unknown that we just say like better the devil than we know. Particularly when I think like one very confusing experience I see a lot

among Hello Monday guests who are, you know, in the middle of their career is when you accomplish something that the external world celebrates, but it isn't in line with what you feel driven to do. So we had this great guest. Her name was Jessica Powell a couple of seasons ago. She had arrived at Google early, kind of by accident. She'd been right place, right time, right age, gotten in early enough to really benefit from the early rise of that company. She was on the communications staff. She rose to be head of communications at Google. I don't think she was even 40 years old and she had one of the most prestigious jobs in

all of Silicon Valley, controlling information for the monolith that was Google. And then she quit and walked away. And everybody looked up and they're like, what are you doing? But in the run up to that quit, I mean, you know this, this is the experience that you hear from people over and over again in the work that you do. Like a piece of her head atrophied under everybody's noses, but she'd continued to figure out how to do the thing, stay on the treadmill. And it wasn't until she could not do it one single moment later that she walked off the treadmill. Yeah.

That is such an interesting and common story among the person who makes that decision, but uncommon story among the vast majority of people who never made that decision. I think sometimes also my sense is that when we just kind of keep on keeping on and, you know, Adam Grant languishing or flatlined or whatever language you want to wrap around that we feel like, you know, we're not making a decision to, it's just like, we're just kind of living our lives. When in fact, every day that we wake up and we step back into that place in that state where it's more empty and then filling, we actually are making a decision. We're just making it by default. But we feel like we're off the hook because we haven't made a call. And I feel like sometimes that psychology leads to just

a season of endured life rather than flourishing life. I think that's so right. And when I ask people, which I often do in my role, what did you learn by leaving that job? Invariably what they say is, I learned I should have left it earlier. Across the board, nobody ever says, oh, I wish I stayed just a couple more years. I had something more to learn. That's not what they say, right?

Yeah, so common. So for you, when you get to this moment in your life where you've got this incredible career in journalism, this opportunity comes to you to actually, to not just step away from journalism, but to step into an entirely different, now you're actually being, you're stepping into one of the companies that you've been covering for years. Yes. You know, so you've been covering for years. Yes. You know, so you know this space really well. You know this space is also kind of fraught and you know that it changes on a dime, that you never know what you're going to wake up to in any given moment in time, even in a really big established company with thousands of employees and a fairly baked culture.

So when you decide one day, okay, like the end of 2018, you hit a point where you're thinking, okay, what got me here ain't going to get me there. And LinkedIn comes to you and says, come over here and also stop doing the thing that you've been doing and do something entirely different after two decades of doing that thing. How do you wrap your head around saying, yeah, I'm totally good with that? Oh, it was easy. No. So first of all, something big was going on in my personal life. And I say that because I think often when we make these big decisions, they don't happen in isolation. It's a sort of a rebirth generally of who we are, right? And so I was becoming a mother. My wife was getting ready to give birth. And so it was bringing up for me the larger questions, like, what am I doing here? Is it going to pay by kids college?

But even more important than that, maybe it should have been more important to me, but that wasn't the driving force for me at all. At the time that I was going to become a parent, my wife had had a very hard pregnancy. I knew that we were expecting twins. We learned that only one of the children was going to survive. And I just remember thinking about that. It was the biggest thing that's ever happened to me in my life. I hope it is the hardest thing that ever happens to me in my life. And it recent-centered everything. And I woke up with this certainty that what I did had to matter. And I felt that what I was doing, which is writing long form stories about technology for a magazine, for people who loved technology, it was interesting to me. That's the maven in me. I'm curious as heck. But it wasn't going to change the experience of people. And I felt like I had

learned all of the stuff about technology over two decades. I'd learned sort of intuitively what other people were just coming to as outsiders and trying to become proficient with. And I looked out in the world and I saw my peers who worked in other industries becoming less able to compete because they didn't necessarily understand intuitively the way these tools were changing things. So then when LinkedIn said, hey, come make a podcast for people interested in their careers, then I was like, that to me feels like a platform I want to create. Here's a place where I can take all the stuff I just spent all of this time learning and share it with a broader group of people. Because those people you referenced earlier that I've covered, they are a particular strain of humans who start companies, who just

take every risk in the world and trust that they're just going to figure it out. That's not how most people work, right? And I was done talking just to them. I wanted to talk to a broader group of people. And it really does connect back to that bigger life change because I just thought, okay, my son Jude, he's two and a half now. Two and a half is not the funnest age. But when he is 20, what do I want to tell him about what I spent this time away from him doing? Then it was really an easy decision to make. That actually lands in a really powerful way because our daughter is 20. And she has seen me through so many different careers.

When she was born, I owned a yoga studio and was teaching yoga in Hell's Kitchen, New York. But I think I do think that a lot of times we reach that season in life and maybe it's triggered by being a parent or just something happens where you start to really, you're dropped back into the big existential questions and meaning becomes centered in a really powerful way. And the existential crisis, it's not a crisis of power. It's not a crisis of money, of relationships, of status. It's a crisis of meaning. And I think eventually we all get brought back there. But it's interesting to me that for you, the answer was, wasn't just, well, let me start

writing about something different. It was because there was a bigger change that happens here. You say, I'm going to completely change the expressive channel, the medium that I'm doing this in, which on the one hand, well, okay, it's not a big deal. You're kind of doing a level of competence in one particular way to bring this thing inside of you out to the world. And stepping into this new medium is also effectively you saying, I'm stepping back into day zero of skill and trusting that I'm going to do that in a public way and figure it out quickly enough that I'll feel okay with myself doing it. Yeah.

But you know, I mean, the other piece of this, and I don't think this is specific to print journalism for sure. The other piece of this is that I understood, I didn't know when, but I understood the ride would stop for me eventually. And so I had no choice. And I had been very lucky in my career. I had watched many of my peers for no reason that I can think of. They weren't less talented. They weren't less interesting or interested. Get pushed out of these media companies. And so I knew that my time would

come and it would have nothing to do with my talent or lack thereof. And if I blew everything up first, I would have an easier time dealing with it, but I was going to have to deal with it. And so that piece factored in as well, right? Yeah, that makes sense. And especially in the world of journalism, I mean, there's been such a sea change in terms of over the last, well, certainly two decades, but even over the last five to 10 years, it's almost like in a completely different industry. The Apple Watch Series X is here. It has the biggest display ever.

It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone X So you knew the rules of journalism and you lived by a certain code as most journalists do, which is not the code that exists in social media. It's not the code that exists in, quote,

new media or podcasting. And part of that code is it's not about you. It's always about the person you're writing about. And you're trying to get as close to, quote, unbiased as possible, even though we all know that's a fiction. And when you step into this new domain of podcasting, for you, your voice becomes really centered in what you do. It's not the dominant voice. You're still sitting there and bringing other people in. And you're focusing a lot of the spotlight on them.

But your voice is absolutely a part of the story. It's a part of the narrative. And I wonder how much the impulse to allow that to happen more was a part of the decision. So I think magazine journalism always has been a little bit different than more traditional newspaper journalism in that good pieces have a bias and own the bias. They have a point of view and own the point of view. And particularly if you, I mean, for me, I came up as a writer and reporter in Silicon Valley 15 years in. If I didn't own my relationships and own my role in the Valley, I was doing a disservice to my reader. So I'd already entered this bizarre territory.

I mean, I, you know, I knew the folks at LinkedIn well enough, we had a cordial enough relationship that they reached out to me for this particular role. So that didn't feel confusing to me intellectually moving into the role. But what I didn't expect, Jonathan, is the degree to which podcasting is a much more intimate endeavor than writing, that the human voice itself is, it's a gift. It has a connecting power that I didn't expect. And I find that listeners connect much more with me in the show. I got a lot of letters for my work at Wired in particular, but they were always about the ideas. Like, oh, I love that piece about so-and-so. I can't believe they're building a such-and-such.

And now I get baby presents. And Jonathan, it makes me uncomfortable. I don't understand it. Maybe you have some advice as someone who has been at it a little bit longer. Yeah. I mean, it is really interesting. And I didn't understand that at all about this medium either until I had a conversation. You know, a friend of friend of Seth Godin,

who, you know, I go back with a long time ago. I reached out to him one day and I said, Hey, like, I'm actually curious about public radio because years ago when I was bringing a new book out to the world, I did a whole bunch of radio and I loved it. There was something about it. I just loved being in the studio with, you know, like headphones on and a microphone and just foam padding on the walls and silence. And maybe it's the introvert in on and a microphone and just foam padding on the walls and silence. And maybe it's the introvert in me and the introvert meets the maker. And he hooked me up with Julie Burstein, who was then one of the founders of the Studio 360 public radio franchise. And I said to her, I'm really interested in this space. And she asked me why.

And I said, well, tremendous reach. And then she kind of like, like Katra had a little raised an eyebrow. Like I clearly wasn't getting it. And I said, what am I missing? She said, the thing about radio is it's the most intimate medium on the planet. It's your voice in somebody else's ears, but you really have to understand that and produce to it. And I didn't understand that in the beginning, but over time, like you said, I really, really got it. And it is very different. There's something about it that is, especially these days when most people listen to them with some form of earbuds or headphones where you're literally inside somebody's head. So it's really powerful. Well, and then there's this year that we've had, right? And to me,

Hello Monday was a fine show before the pandemic. But the pandemic introduced a need that we've had, right? And to me, Hello Monday was a fine show before the pandemic. But the pandemic introduced a need that we all had for a colleague and a friend and somebody who was willing to endure the career journey and the emotional journey in the same breath. And my relationship with my listeners deepened. And I'd like to think they need the show. And I also understand that I desperately needed them. And it felt like we were much more of a community. And we have this thing for Hello Monday on Wednesday afternoons. We have a coffee hour. I go live on LinkedIn Live.

It could be any platform. That's the one we use because we're employed by LinkedIn. But it's a moment when we can just talk real time, not asynchronously, to each other. And the most gratifying moments to me for this whole show's life are the moments when I see my listeners talking to each other, catching up, being like, what'd you do this week? And I've got one listener who is in Modesto, California, sitting at her dining room table trying to keep her kids away from her computer. And she talks all the time to this guy in New Hampshire, whose one child is a teenager. He's got a lot more space. He's been virtual for years. Hello Monday created that relationship. And that is the thing that I'm excited about.

Yeah. I love that. Similarly, the community that we've created around the podcast, it is amazing how it really can expand into not just an audience, but a community, which is really different. Because it's not then just about you and people listening, it's about the people listening and each other. There's a sense of belonging that happens there that is incredibly powerful. And the ripple that goes out through that community is really beautiful to experience and to be a part of. I want to talk about some of the stuff that you've been exploring over the last 18 months, but there's something that popped out at me when I was just sort of refreshing. I did a quick scan of your entire catalog on the show and I was kind of zipping through it quickly, you know, and, um, started back in, I guess,

early 2019. And then you hit May 24th, 2020, and there was a change that happened, which was in the visual iconography of the show. Before that, it was always just sort of like a, it was an icon. It was an illustration. And then you hit this one day and the episode that you aired it with was Roxane Gay, which is a fantastic conversation, by the way. But also you changed the tile and all of a sudden an image of you is front and center. So the branding of the show changed in a really major way. And that to me, from the outside looking in, especially from somebody who's brand centric and who's an introvert, it felt like something bigger. And I'm curious what went on there and what was going on

behind that. Do you see me blushing? I'm so viscerally uncomfortable as you say this, that the only thing I can do is turn bright red. There were two things behind that. So one is, and by the way, I'm just going to own the fact that I chose that. I think I even requested it directly. And it was responding to feedback from two places. The lesser place was the world of podcasting. And it is so competitive in podcasting. And we were trying to figure out how we could stand out in the app store when people are

browsing. How do they find you, right? And we had this light orange, like kind of would disappear kind of icon and nobody was finding us. And we started looking at what everyone else was doing and everyone else was doing pictures. And we had our conversation with our representative at this particular platform that I will not name on your show. And they said, well, you know, you could look at that. You know, you could do a lot more with that tile. So then it kind of went back to, you know, our producer and our team. It was like, what do we do? But then the other piece

is that the listeners were asking for it. You know, I'd bring them Roxane Gay or I'd bring them, you know, Matthew McConaughey or like, you know, big famous guests, which by the by the way, that's never the thing that our listeners care about ever. They want really good advice. But even more than that, they want more me. And I don't even know exactly what that means. When they give their feedback, they're like, more of Jessie. What are they looking for? And so that feels to me like it's this uncomfortable lurch forward the show is

doing as it finds itself and by the way i don't think we've landed there yet as a show because the thing that they're asking for i don't actually think is me jesse hempel right they're asking for i think like closer alignment with my curiosities and more of a sense of how they shape like what I want to learn in the world. I think, I don't know. What do you think? You know, I don't know. My sense is probably, and I was really curious because, you know, you could just scan through

and say, oh, isn't that cool? They just decided to change the icon. But the fact that it went from something that was reasonably generic to you, your image front and center, it was telling a different story to me. And I was really wondering what was happening there. Because we have in the history of the show, I'm not on the tile. It's our brand. But part of that is me. I'm introverted, sort of like fairly protected in a lot of my, my personal life. And I'll share certain things, but also I really want to sort of like, I want to leave with the idea. I want to leave with something else, but we've had a lot of the same questions.

And fundamentally, as much as I think any podcaster tries to, maybe not all of them, but like dissociate, you know, the brand or the show with the individual. That's why we're all in this. Like we were talking about earlier, this is the most intimate medium on the planet. And intimacy happens between human beings, not between a brand and a being. Yes. And my sense is like, that is why folks want to see as much of that humanity show through. And as literally as I'm saying this, I'm rethinking what we're doing. But it is interesting because that moment said something to me when I saw that happen. Well, thank you. I mean, thank you for giving me a new lens on it.

And when I think about your show, it's the branding piece that I think about. And you have been such a strong brander from the beginning. And from my perspective, the reason why that's worked is the authenticness of the community. It just, it really comes through and being around over time. And, you know, we, we didn't start with either of those things. So I think part of it was trying to find a way to create our own sub-brand for the sake of the show within a big brand, LinkedIn. Yeah, that makes sense. And also you have that very different context than us. You have that alliance with that larger brand. When I think about the last 18 months in this

space, it's been interesting. You and I were both longtime New Yorkers. I've been on a journey since September of last year, as have you. I'm curious how this last season has been for you personally and also professionally. Well, so last season, so are we talking summer 2021? The last 18 months. Are we, the whole quarantine? Yeah. I mean, I guess you can kind of almost like, I was going to say like break them into a

three act play, but we have no idea how many acts are actually in this play right now. Yeah. There's no breaking it. But you know, if we look at the last 18 months in three acts, there was that first period of time where we were trying to figure out what we were doing. And I was a complete prima donna about the whole thing. You know, before the pandemic, we'd only recorded in the studio, and we'd only record with guests who would come and see us. And that was it. And I didn't know how to work any of the equipment by myself. So I learned a thing about learning during that first chapter,

right? And that is, I hate change, good change, bad change, any change, it's uncomfortable. If I didn't ask for it, it's worse. But if you give me three weeks, I'm fine. The first week, I have to complain a lot about it. The second week, I have to actually physically learn the things to manage the change. And then by the third week, I'm like, I guess this is the way life is now and I can go on. That was an important thing to learn that first little bit. And then that second window was really all about burnout in every way that you can imagine. We were holding on, hoping for a vaccine.

We kind of learned what we needed to do to withstand quarantine, but nobody had any energy or momentum to think or dream about a future. And then this last little bit, Jonathan, it's been confusing, right? I mean, we did this big reopening series over the course of the summer. And when we planned it, okay, we planned it in May and June, we anticipated that it would be the time when our listeners would be starting to feel really energetic about what was to come and we wanted to help them to focus that energy but even the time

by the time it began it began in July we realized that we have a new challenge before us and this is a challenge that I think about constantly right now which is okay it's all uncertainty from here it's all there's there's no end to the uncertainty so now the challenge is against the backdrop of that uncertainty which is endless how do we find momentum and excitement and passion and that that to me is like those are the only questions that i'm interested in exploring personally i don't have answers in my own life i'm home right now with a two and a half year old and a newborn baby wondering how our house could be any smaller than it is. And I'm so anxious to be back in the office and to talk to people every day who are not my wife in person, although I love her. And it's also the big question that we keep exploring in various ways on the show. Yeah. I mean, it's,

and I love the way that you actually teed it up because you created this six part series on reopening, which I thought was so fascinating in the way you sort of, you delineated it as each one focused on a question. And it is interesting in that, like you choose the word reopening and then in the process of you producing and then rolling out this series, you're starting, he's like, huh, is that actually what's happening here? Like, is that where we're headed? And like, or are we just going to expand, you know starting to be like, huh, is that actually what's happening here? Is that where we're headed?

And are we just going to expand the conversation? What actually do we mean when we use the phrase reopening? But I think it'd be a little fun if you're down for it to walk through those six different prompts. I mean, I would love to. Yeah. And by the way, about reopening, I came to believe that what I'm talking about is the way that we all get to reopen right now. And I say get to, not have to, because we've all been so shut down.

Yeah. I love that context, actually. Immediately what pops into my head was that the image of a flower blossoming, you know, and it's sort of like whatever's happening in the soil or, you know, beneath it or the wind around it or the sun and the rain, like how do we still go through that process of blossoming? Yeah. I love that. But yeah, so we started by doing something as a community that I would love my larger community to do, which is just acknowledging the loss, you know, and from my perspective, that loss, it's so amorphous that it can be hard to name.

And it's so individual in particular. Some people actually lost loved ones. Some people lost their entire sense of identity. Some people lost their job. And we, I think, are lesser selves, sometimes a little and put each other down around the size of that loss as if there's a grief Olympics and everyone else is losing. But instead, what I really wanted to do is create space to just take a moment collectively to acknowledge all of it so that

we could just say, okay, there, like, let's move on, you know? Yeah. I mean, I think that's so important because like you said, we, the way that that loss has shown up in any individual's life we thought it was. And if we hung our hat, if we tried to find ease and equanimity and peace and calm based on that model, and that model has now had the legs torn out from underneath it, and it just doesn't exist anymore. And the likelihood that it will ever exist in something resembling that is pretty slim, then we're all grieving not just the loss of people that we might have loved and been close to us, but the loss of the entire way that we saw the world. Right. And then imagine then, and you don't have to imagine because it's happening, that our offices open up and we go back to work with people that we're

expected to have work relationships with, whatever that means. And we have to hold the size of that grief privately or with each other. We don't know. We don't have a model for that. And I think that is a piece that I really wanted to explore as well. How do we, we kind of have a model for how we deal with this with our closest people, but how, how do we go back into the world again and hold space and respect this grief? Yeah. And I would argue that even the model that we have in dealing with that for our closest

people is really fraught. I mean, it's sort of like the classic old stages of grief model has, is, is, I think is pretty questionable these days. We had Megan Devine, who's a friend and a therapist and somebody who's deep into the world of grief on the show to sort of like do this processing around this very question. And I think even that model of grief that we've all been taught, you go through the stages, can actually do a disservice and lead to shame for a lot of people. But even bigger than that, even in a more micro context, nobody knows how to relate to the person who is grieving. So most people just ignore that person because they don't want to have the uncomfortable conversation. And now when we're

all in that space, and then we have to go back into potentially an environment of work where it's got a whole separate set of rules about what is and is not appropriate. And then, you know, like there was, you know, and you talk about this in the conversation that you had around this topic, you know, how do you actually, if you're a leader in a space, what are you supposed to do? How do you actually do it? Where are the lines? How do you support people emotionally and empathetically, but at the same time, do all

the things that you're supposed to do and have the boundaries? It's really fraught. It really is. But Jonathan, I think one of the things that I'm most excited about is that for so long, we haven't asked our managers to be as empathetic as they need to be to master the workforce and really keep people motivated and happy. We've praised it. We've written books about it. I think Empathy was the book that I got pitched the most in all of 2019. But truly, it wasn't a make it or break it situation. And going forward, it becomes make it or break it. It becomes the most important attribute a leader will have because it will, the way

that the organization can keep its talent is the strength of its leaders in navigating the really challenging emotional lives of the people that work for them and keeping them motivated. And as you know, and you have talked a lot about it on your own show, people are leaving, they're resigning, they're moving on, they're deciding they're unhappy. And the only way for them to be happy is to move on. And the point at which we can help them to find happiness in a way other than leaving or purpose in a way other than leaving is that relationship they have with their manager. Yeah, so important. And I think the rules are going to have to be rewritten to a certain extent. And also, but it's not just the rules, right? It's the skills. Yeah.

Yeah. I think in the world of industry and enterprise and business, the focus has been largely on hard skills because they're the things that quote matter. They're the things that move the difference. They're the things that increase, you know, that measurably increase the KPIs, the things we measure. And soft skills are kind of like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Those matter. Of course. Of course those matter.

And whatever budget we have or time we have on the side, we'll allocate to that baby. And now I think we're stepping into this world where we're like, oh, no, that's everything. Right. Right. And maybe we're experiencing that now, but in six months, we'll be able to look back and see whose track record has left them in a position where they're unable to compete. Yeah, absolutely. Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era, or yoga era, dive into Peloton workouts that work with you. From meditating at your kid's game to mastering a strength program, they've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals.

No pressure to be who you're not. Just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are. So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th.

Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here.

It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum.

Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. You know, one of the other prompts that you had in this series was around location. Yeah. And that has been this huge issue now because it used to be, you know, you had a job. You showed up at the office, like you showed up your five days a week or whatever. You had seven days a week, depending on who you were and worked a lot of hours in this place. And that's just completely blown up now.

Yeah, completely. And we're in a really fuzzy place with that. It's not at all clear. It's not at all clear to me the direction in which it will go, whether two years from now we'll look back at this moment and we'll all be back in our offices and laughing, or whether the system will have been entirely rethought. And so much is tied to location, like for example, compensation. How do we rethink that in light of change in location? But I think that then in light of the the lack of clarity it puts the responsibility on individuals to figure that out for themselves and that's a lot to have to handle as well and I'll just speak for myself like I worked at home and I complained about that and then we were lucky enough to be able to have a place to get to out of the city. I lived with my in-laws for months. I know you're listening. Thank you guys. But I also complained about that a little bit too,

because when you're working from your wife's childhood bedroom, it gets old after a few months. And then we were allowed to go back to the office and I didn't quite know what to do because once I actually had to get on the train, well, then I complained about that. And then I thought, gosh, I don't know if I can figure out for myself what the right answer is here. I liked it better. It was less taxing on my brain when somebody else told me what to do. Yeah, I can see that. Because I think for both of us, you mentioned that until now, before now, you basically

had a studio space. Everyone came to you. We had the same thing for the first six years of this show. We had a studio in New York. Anyone who ended up on the level that I would feel proud of and preserve the intimacy and the safety and the production values any other way. And then I didn't have a choice, you know, and neither did you. It's sort of like either this is over or you have to move into this different mode of operation. And we had to completely reimagine how we did everything. But the flip side of that, and I think this is what so many folks are finding now, is once you go through that pain of reimagining what your workplace looks like, where you're showing up to, and you realize that you actually can do a lot of it. And in a way it gives you more freedom when you actually can do most of it and at a very high level without being tethered to a physical location. And then the question becomes,

where is the possibility that is bundled with this disruption? And I think that's happening for individuals like us and it's happening for organizations who are like, okay, there's a really interesting argument to bring people back. And there's a really interesting argument to bring people back. And there's a really interesting argument to not bring people back. And then there's the middle ground. And like you said, I don't think anyone knows where this is going to land right now. No, but I will say, you know, one thing that happened is when I didn't have the commute, even with the little kids, and when I didn't have the social life, I actually had a lot of time. And being that I'm a maker, my agent got in touch with me and

said, hey, book publishers are a little nervous about the future right now. If you have any good ideas, give me your craziest, your wackiest, your once in a lifetime idea. So I pitched her a memoir about my family and it sold. And so I have somehow been able to carve out the time to do the thing that I had thought that I'd left behind to write over the last little bit. And I sure am grateful for that. Yeah. And had this window not happened, I'm guessing maybe that book happens, but maybe it happens five years down the road, 10 years down the road, or maybe it just never happens.

Yeah. I don't actually think it would have happened. I think it was the combination of, hey, pitch a passion project. And also the world is uncertain. So I need a plan B. If the job goes away tomorrow, this will be a plan B. Right. And Jonathan, I think everybody's kind of searching for a plan B right now. Like everybody I talk to has some sort of a side project going on. Yeah. I wonder what that's about. I'm curious. Is it just a plan B?

I'm curious on your take, right? Because you spend so much time talking to folks in the domain of work. Do you think it's just a plan B? Because like, well, what if this main thing doesn't work out? Or do you think it's, well, people are starting to realize that the thing that they've been doing, it satisfies certain needs and it's aligned with certain values, but there's something, there's an itch that has not been getting scratched

often for a long time. And even if they can't do it, there's a full-time thing. It's awakened, like the itch is like, it's gotten to a point where it has to be scratched now. I think that is exactly right, Jonathan. And what I most like about the Sparketype way of thinking about the world is you divorce the conversation of purpose from how we make money right from the

start, right? And you go on to broaden the possibilities for what we're doing without necessarily asking us to switch it all up. In fact, right at the start of what you're doing, you tell us not to switch it all up. Don't go quitting your job overnight. Because I think that so often when we are unhappy with what we're doing, it's not that we know what we want to replace it with, right? It's not like, oh, you know what? I always wanted to be a painter and here I am with an administrative assistant job. I'm going to quit it and be a painter. That is not how life works. What is more true for people is that there are aspects of their day-to-day job that really aren't allowing them to fulfill every passion that they have. And they can lean into some of those passions before they leave behind the thing that's working

for them. Yeah. I think that is definitely much more the real world story, you know, especially for grownups. It's much easier to make that what I call the nuclear career option decision when you're in your early 20s. But, you know, you get a little bit further into life and that just it becomes a much harder thing to explore. You know, beyond certainly how we're going to spend our time and where we're going to spend it and how we're going to assemble the things that we're doing, one of the other things that was part of this reopening series was a conversation around habits and rituals with somebody who we both know, Nir Eyal, whose brain works in ways that still mesmerizes me. Completely. My brain just does not go there. I'm completely in awe of it. But it is really fascinating because I think sometimes, you know, we were forced to develop a whole new set of habits and rituals to accommodate a new way of living. And then the question that you start to bring up is, well, what survives and why and how? Right.

And maybe we do that unconsciously. And so one day we look up and we think, well, oh, I had no idea that I no longer walk at all during the day, or I had no idea, really, I didn't even notice that I'm having two drinks every night. Now is our opportunity to bring some consciousness back to those decisions before they're so hardwired that we can't remove them and figure out what's serving us and what's not. Yeah, I think it's a great time for re-examining

all of those different things. I know there are definitely things that I will bring forward and there are things that I will leave behind. Jonathan, I have to ask you, what is something that you will leave behind from this period? Because we've talked a lot about what you'll bring forward. I mean, you're in a beautiful part of the country right now, having learned that you don't have to spend every moment in Manhattan.

That in itself is like a wonderful bring forward thing. What stays? Yeah. I think what stays for me is, oddly enough, my commitment to movement has been renewed, even though I've been semi-nomadic for the last year. And it hasn't been the easiest thing. And it's for a variety of different reasons. But I think also being constrained and having a lot of disruption, it kind of reminds you of what leaving behind the routines around movement can do to you, which is not good.

So I'm, you know, like fairly recently have started to try and figure out like, how do I get back into like the things that make me feel better? And writing, like you, you know, I was stunningly fortunate to have sold my next book literally the week that New York City shut down and spent so much time over the last year writing. And it had been five years before that since I was working on a book. And it reminded me that I like the practice of writing. I care about language. I love what we're doing here. And I really care about written words and the craft of, you know, putting them in a sentence and staying committed to that. Um, and just starting to take notes and like, I'm, I'm trying to figure out like, what is the, without me saying I'm, I'm a journal,

you know, I'm journaling or I'm a journaler, but just, you know, committing to like, can I write a sentence a day in my notes app to start to take that practice and continue it on? Because it just matters to me to be able to have that output and that throughput over time. What about you? I'm curious. Oh, in terms of the things that I plan to leave, I've given up movement. It's the one thing that between the newborn baby and the book writing, and it's the one thing that has stayed behind. And I'm not as kind to the people around me on the days that I don't move. So that's, I'd like to pick that up again, because before the pandemic, that was very important to me every day. And when I say movement, I wouldn't be really,

really loose about that. I sometimes would run. I sometimes would walk. Like it doesn't, just to move. I'm cluttered. I'm cluttered in my thinking. I'm cluttered in my organization. I never quite know where stuff is in a way that wasn't true before the pandemic. And so that's a piece that I'd like to just hit a hard reset on it. And I figured that I would time that reset with when I go back to the office and I have a desk where I can visually see what, you know, very few physical artifacts in my life right now, but I can visually see them.

That would be the time that I would get organized in my life. But now it's time for me to just fess up to the fact that like that's not coming and I'm gonna have to figure out how to do this one on my own. But as for what stays, like the best thing about the pandemic is that I have found a way to be virtually present with my guests for the shows. And I just find it so energizing. I'm unlike you, Jonathan. I'm a huge extrovert. I get my energy from spending time

with people. I know that when we're done here this afternoon, I will go home excited and exuberant. And I'm so glad I figured out how to do that virtually. Yeah. And even as an introvert, I'm actually super glad for that exact same thing. And I'm glad for the awakening to the fact that it's possible because I didn't think it was beforehand. Yeah. Right?

Yeah. But it's been really powerful. You know, you mentioned rather than finish off the other things, I'm just going to send people over to your podcast because I think we've gone through like three of the six. Oh yeah. Thank you. Go listen to the whole series. It's there. It's fantastic. There's a ton of incredible information on it. There's something that you have done and it's, you know, when you have your, at the end of, of, of when you're having these amazing conversations, you'll sometimes invite people to journal around them. But you tee it up in a really interesting way. You know, you say, okay, so here's a 15 minute writing prompt to go deep into this question or this idea.

Keep writing. And then you say, if you reach the end of your writing and you've still got time on the 15 minute clock, keep the pen on the pad, keep going deeper. And I'm curious about that, that prompt, why it's there. I kind of think I know, but I want to actually just ask you the question. My brain runs away from the questions that I don't want to sit deeply with. So it will trick me into telling me that I'm done thinking about something before I have even begun. And I learned that for myself when I started the practice of morning pages several years ago. I don't know if you've ever done morning pages at some point in your creative life.

Yeah, we've had Julia Cameron on the show a couple years back. Oh my gosh, I have not heard that episode yet. I have to go back for that one. But the great gift there is to keep going, to keep reminding your brain gently by keeping your pen on the paper. Hey, we're still thinking about this hard thing. We're still thinking about it until without even realizing it, your brain has spat out the thing that you actually need to be telling yourself. Yeah, keep going. I think those are sage words. And it feels like a good place for us to come full circle today also. So hanging out in this now 2,000 mile big safe container of Good

Life Project conversation, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? Compassion. That's it. I mean, I had Elizabeth Gilbert on the show early on and you know I asked her like what what are you a writer and she's like yeah I'm a writer and I don't even think this made it into the episode honestly Jonathan but she's like I used to think that I was a writer but now I think my purpose is just to be love. And I have to tell you that, I mean, I was very early on in my days moving from being a tech correspondent to being a career show host. And it was quite literal in how I was thinking about my role as a career show host. And I thought, how am I going to possibly with a straight face feature Elizabeth Gilbert saying, I think my

purpose is just to be love in the world. But three years later, I will tell you, that's what it means. That is what it means to live a good life. I love that. Thank you. Thank you. That was so delightful. Thank you for paying such close attention to our work. That's my pleasure. Hey, before you leave, if you loved this episode, safe bet you will also love the conversation we had with Dave Evans about designing your life. You'll find a link to Dave's episode in the show notes. And even if you don't listen now, be sure to click and download it so it's ready to play when you're on the go. And of course, if you haven't already done so, go ahead and follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app.

And if you appreciate the work we're doing here on Good Life Project, then go check out my new book, Sparked. It'll reveal some incredibly eye-opening things to you about one of your very favorite subjects, you, and then show you how to tap these insights to reimagine and reinvent work as a source of meaning, purpose, and joy. You'll find a link in the show notes, or you can also find it at your favorite bookseller now. See you next time. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping.

And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman.

I knew you were gonna be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. On January 24th Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg You know what the difference between me and you is? You're gonna die. Don't shoot him, we need him! Y'all need a pilot?