In Search Of Excellence - Jessica Berman: A New Playbook for Women in Sports | E99

Starting point is 00:00:00 You can relentlessly pursue the thing that you think you want to do and continuously ask yourself what that opportunity is offering to you and be open to the things that you get to learn along the way because something may take you on a different path and maybe that's the right path also. I had to really confront some of the sort of darkest pieces of what drives us, which is really ego. What mattered most to me when I made that choice is becoming the best business person I could be. And I wanted to learn areas that I would not have the opportunity to learn if I had stayed at the NHL. And I had to understand that that came with some sacrifices, and I was okay with that. Welcome to In Search of Excellence, where we meet entrepreneurs, CEOs, entertainers,

Starting point is 00:00:59 athletes, motivational speakers, and trailblazers of excellence with incredible stories from all walks of life. My name is Randall Kaplan. I'm a serial entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and the host of In Search of Excellence, which I started to motivate and inspire us to achieve excellence in all areas of our life. My guest today is Jessica Berman. Jessica is one of the most influential executives in professional sports. She's the commissioner of the National Women's Soccer League, where she completely reformed the leadership of women's soccer and has presided over its explosive growth during the last 18 months. Prior to this role, she served as the Deputy Commissioner and Executive Vice President of Business Affairs for the National Lacrosse League.

Starting point is 00:01:34 When she took that job, she was the highest ranking woman in the Men's Professional Sports League. And prior to that, she spent 13 years with the NHL, ultimately serving as its vice president and deputy general counsel. Jessica, it's a true pleasure to have you on my show. Welcome to In Search of Excellence. Thank you so much. It's great to be with you. How do we start with our family? You grew up in a racially diverse part of Brooklyn to an Orthodox Jewish family. Your mom, Phyllis, went back to school after taking care of you when you were younger, got her PhD. She was and remains a psychologist. Your dad, Ted, who passed away a few years ago, was an entrepreneur who owned a bunch of golf gas stations in New York. Can you tell us about the influence your parents had on you and your future and what it was like coming from a Jewish

Starting point is 00:02:21 background where you were the minority? Yeah. Well, my parents really stood for and embodied all the values that are focused on work ethic and really focused on people, all of their work centered around building relationships and connectivity in their different spheres of influence. So my dad actually grew up in a family that was an immigrant family and he got his first job working for his dad in his dad's gas station pumping gas. And he did that really more out of necessity than because he was looking to make money. Like, you know, my children want to get a job because they want to have financial independence. He was really forced to work because their family was very poor and they needed money to actually buy food. And that really is what stuck with him his whole life. And he constantly was a reminder of that to our family always, which is that your hard work is ultimately the thing

Starting point is 00:03:36 that you have control over and that it is the thing that people remember most about you and really leaves people with the impression that you deserve to have what you have. And so that's really what stuck with me. And my dad ran a very sophisticated business, but in a not very sophisticated way. He really always kept it to the basics with a Mead composition notebook and a pencil and a ruler. And he did all of his inventory phone calls to his gas station to determine how much gas they had and really put all of his feelers out into his network. And it was a very sort of like grassroots operation. And I always appreciated that about him, even though we all tried to introduce technology to help make his business

Starting point is 00:04:31 more effective and efficient. He genuinely believed that he didn't need that in order to run his business in a sophisticated way. And he actually was able to prove that he was able to do it at least for his lifetime. I don't think it would have passed the test of intergenerational support and being able to have his children or my children be able to work in the business in the way that he ran it. But it kept him very fulfilled throughout his life. And he ultimately became a provider for our entire, both immediate and extended family. And my mom, she actually was a teacher before I was born. And that really drives her actually even still.

Starting point is 00:05:15 But she decided when she got married to my dad, which was later in life, it was the second marriage, that she wanted to become a psychologist. And she approached my dad and said, I could either become a psychologist and get my PhD, or we could have a child. And my dad said, I don't want you to have to choose. You can do both. And she was 30 years old at the time, restarting her career in 1977 at a time when certainly the gender equity movement was far from cool or accepted. And my dad, who was very old school and traditional, didn't think twice about saying, well, I'll just lean in at home so that you can live your dreams. And they really embodied a wonderful relationship

Starting point is 00:06:06 where they shared responsibilities in our home and allowed my mom to go back to school and ultimately have the career that she wanted to have becoming a psychologist. Because you came from a mixed family, right? Your dad had kids from previous marriage and your mom? Yeah, yeah. We were the Brady bunch, except that my parents ended up having me. They called me the love child for better or worse. It has its pros. It has its cons to be the love child in a mixed family like that. But yeah, we all grew up in the same home, actually, the five kids. I grew up, my mom was married a few times, three times. And I had three stepbrothers at one point. So I grew up for 10 years with a family

Starting point is 00:06:53 of five. And I now actually have five kids, three from a previous marriage. They're all in college right now. And then I have a seven-year-old and a three-year-old. And it is a little bit of a balancing act, right? How you fit in with a bunch of other people. So I've lived it and now my kids are living it too. It can be very challenging at times. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. When you were younger, you were focused on dance. You took dance lessons from age six through college. We're going to talk about the hockey experience when you were 16 in a couple minutes. But before we do, will you tell us about Title IX, cheerleading and your high school baseball team

Starting point is 00:07:31 and the search of excellence? What's your advice to those of us on how to deal with our own frustration, at least temporarily, to do something that we're passionate about? Yeah, I mean, I never really saw an opportunity for playing sports to be a participant on the field in any way or on the court or on the ice. It just wasn't really presented as an option to me. And I didn't really see any girls in Brooklyn playing sports. I also think it wasn't really culturally relevant in my communities.

Starting point is 00:08:07 And so the girls that I knew who were interested in being sporty or athletic, they took dance lessons. And that's really the path I took. And it allowed me to be around sports because of cheerleading and allowed me to feel the energy around team sports in particular, which I loved. And I also through that got to know a lot of the coaches and the administrators around athletics. And once I started to sort of unlock my interest in working in sports in the management or administrative side, I volunteered my time to work as a manager, as a student manager for the teams, which of course now is like a path that exists as a formal internship. But when I proposed that to the various coaches and in particular, the high school baseball team, he was like, sure, you can sit on the bench and keep stats instead of my assistant coach. Why not?

Starting point is 00:09:11 And so I just tried to find odds and ends jobs to make the coaches' lives easier so that they would invite me to hang around and learn more about the business of what it meant to play sports in high school. And it gave me a great learning experience. So I just found ways to make myself useful and offer a value proposition when I knew time was limited for these coaches and they were all teachers and needed an extra set of hands. So you wanted to play sports and there were no school basketball team growing up. I know you went to a Jewish day school. And then I think in high school, you went to a public school, but would be the path to me being on a team. It was never something that seemed natural to me or accessible to me. That could be the, you know, Billie Jean King, see it to want to be it. That could be that my parents never really knew about having me play in like a little league or anything like that. It just wasn't really available to me.

Starting point is 00:10:34 So let's talk about you're 16 years old. You're at a hockey game. You had a boyfriend. Tell us about what he told you, what your goal was, why you knew it was your goal, professional goal at that point in time. And tell us about the Nelson Mandela quote that you're so fond of. Yeah, well, so I was at an Islander game when I was 16. And I guess some of the backdrop is that I did attend Jewish day school until I was in eighth grade. And then actually went to my parents and said that I had observed that I was enmeshed in this very diverse community around me, but I felt like I was sort of in a bubble and shielded from all the people from different backgrounds that were around me in Brooklyn. And so I created an opportunity for myself to go to public school, which my parents

Starting point is 00:11:28 were confused about why I would want to leave private school. My stated goal was really to understand the community where I came from. And I just wanted to be around what I described as like different people, real people, people who came from different backgrounds. I didn't want to just drive past them in my car as we went to and from school. I wanted to actually meet people who had different life experiences. And so I went to James Madison High School in 1991 as a freshman, and it was my junior year. So this was after really two years of me having had the history before high school of wanting to learn, being very interested in people who were different from me, but not feeling like they were accessible. And then being in a school where I was very much the minority, it was the opposite of being in

Starting point is 00:12:29 private school. And I was always interested in understanding ways to combat social challenges and racism in particular. I was always very interested in trying to understand the experience of the Black community. My neighborhood was very much in bed within the Black community. And a lot of my friends in high school were part of the Black community. And I spent a lot of time in their homes and trying to understand what their life experience was like and really trying to understand, be sitting next to these two people and was just engrossed with this vision of the way that sport had the power to unite everybody in this arena. 20,000 people were cheering and screaming for the same thing. Everyone wearing their blue and orange jerseys, but also coming from very different backgrounds. But in that moment when the Islanders scored and I

Starting point is 00:13:46 saw these two people embrace, I had an epiphany moment that really changed the course of my life and decided that I wanted to work in this industry that I felt really truly had the power to change the world. And my accuracy check, my fact check is that, yeah, I did have a boyfriend in high school. And he has since validated that my memory serves me right, that I told him when I was in high school that I wanted to one day. I had the aspiration of being a commissioner of professional sports league, which, of course, seemed like a crazy goal and fortunate that made a lot of the right choices, but also got very lucky along the way to end up in, in the situation that actually manifested my,

Starting point is 00:14:33 my life dream. And can you share with us that? Can you share with us the Nelson Mandela quote? Sport has the power to change the world. It actually goes on to say it has the power to unite communities. There's a whole series, a whole sort of phrase and mantra that follows that really speaks to this idea that, in particular for children, that sport is the ultimate equalizer and meritocracy. And when they have the opportunity to either experience it or observe it, it can change their hopes and dreams in ways that few other things in our social fabric can.

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Starting point is 00:15:37 and a five-star rating. Get your next amazing gift and order a copy of Bliss Beaches by clicking the link in our show notes. I think it's amazing that you were born, it sounds like, with the desire to participate in a diverse community and you're interested in social change in high school. I don't know many people who are. I went to a private school and it was very racially and religiously diverse. My younger kids go to public school. My kids in college went to private school. I can tell you the demographic makeup is completely different. And I love the fact they go to public school. But what's your advice to people who are parents listening, because there aren't a lot of 16 year olds listening to my podcast, to get their kids more aware and more involved with this social change? Because I think right now we're

Starting point is 00:16:26 seeing an all time divergence or a hardening of social views and canceling culture. And I don't think it's good for anybody. Yeah, you know, I've thought a lot about it. And actually recently have have thought a lot about it. I think a lot of what opened my eyes to this, yes, it was definitely that I grew up in bed within this very diverse community, but it was also my Jewish education, which might seem counterintuitive because it was a private school,

Starting point is 00:17:00 but in my Jewish day school, we were taught that every human has basic human rights and deserves an opportunity to be successful in life, should be treated with respect and dignity, that no matter the person's background, no matter the color of their skin, no matter the socioeconomic status, no matter their religion, no matter their sexual orientation, no matter their gender, that it's our responsibility. And this was actually, this was taught to me as someone who, as part of our Jewish identity, that it was my responsibility to look out for other marginalized communities. This is part of what is in bed within our traditions and culture. And as a result, yeah, I've just been on this life pursuit. And it was reinforced in my home with my parents, where it's part of our culture to retell stories of the past and understand historical oppression and recognize that history repeats itself and that it's our responsibility to change the future if we don't like the result.

Starting point is 00:18:14 And to make sure people understand what has happened in the past and why so that we don't make the same mistakes again. One of the main goals of my podcast is to inspire, motivate people to achieve their dreams, no matter how small the odds of success are. You're 16 years old. You want to be a commissioner for sports league. I mean, it's hard to make a professional sports team, but I don't know how many commissioners there are, but if I do the math in my head, I think it's less than 10. So what's your advice to everybody out there? I know so many people want to be a head coach of a professional football team, soccer team, hockey team.

Starting point is 00:18:55 They're dying to get a job and internship at these professional teams. What's your advice to all the people out there who say, gosh, am I ever going to be able to get one of 10 jobs or even 100 jobs or a job at Goldman Sachs or Citadel, for example, where they had, if you can get this, 29,000 applications for summer internships? Wow. Yeah, I think it's twofold. I think it's to be focused on the things that you really care about and want to do and be unrelenting in your pursuit of those things, but also be open along the way to other things that might interest you and recognize that there's probably a lot of ways to quench your thirst for whatever you thought you would achieve. And yeah, like this was like square peg, square hole. I identified this as my goal and I achieved this goal. But I think I could also say with certainty that I would have been happy in my life and felt fulfilled

Starting point is 00:20:03 with the variety of other things that I've accomplished and experienced and would have been happy in my life and felt fulfilled with the variety of other things that I've accomplished and experienced and would have experienced had this opportunity not happened. So I think both can be true. You can relentlessly pursue the thing that you think you want to do and continuously ask yourself what that opportunity is offering to you and be open to the things that you get to learn along the way and the people you meet because something may take you on a different path and maybe that's the right path also. Let's talk about college. We'll switch gears. After high school, you went to Brandeis for a year. Then you transferred to the greatest school on earth, University of Michigan, where you majored in sports. Go Blue. Pardon me? Go Blue. I said Go Blue. Go Blue. National

Starting point is 00:20:48 champions this year. Greatest. So great. I was on campus 1997 when I won the national championship that year. But this is just an amazing, amazing year. Sorry we lost the coach, but we'll go out on a high note. This is going to live for quite a long time. So go blue. So you transferred to Michigan, majored in sports management. I believe most of the reason was because your cousin Eve Rotsky was there and shout out to Eve for introducing us and making this happen. So I appreciate you so much. Can you tell us what you did with our hockey, football, and baseball teams? And what's your advice to us where there isn't a clear path to get the kind of experiences we want and need to pursue that we're passionate about in our future? Yeah. So with each of those teams, it was not all that different from what I

Starting point is 00:21:37 did when I was in high school in that I found a way to make myself useful to the sports department and the coaches and the administrative staff, knowing that they had lots of responsibilities. And in particular at Michigan, I was actually there in the late 90s as well. And it was really on the precipice of becoming a real business. And they actually didn't have formal internships. There was no stated path to go and be the manager of the Michigan hockey team or the manager of the baseball team or the football team. And I found jobs to do that would help the coach and the administrative staff. So I wrote press releases and I prepared athletes for interviews and I kept stats during the game and prepared the media notes

Starting point is 00:22:34 that would be distributed after the game so that the press would write articles about the players. I worked in, it was a form of PR for the, and used it as a way to really learn more about the business and to get work experience in the industry. So you walked into the athletic department office, which today there's a statute of, I think Bo Schembechler right outside. You just walk in and you say, hey, I'm Jessica. I want to intern for one of the teams. I think today they'd probably laugh at you. It sort of doesn't work that way. So how important is it to basically be able to cold call, walk into a could be a major university sports team and just say, hey, can I have a job? And just showing up at someone's door. And then how do you add value once you do that right out of the gate to get that opportunity when there's 500 or 10,000 people who want that job? Yeah, well, I often think about

Starting point is 00:23:40 whether my life would be different if I was growing up in today's environment, because part of how I distinguish myself is actually by showing up and by making my interest be known and going the extra mile in terms of my work ethic so that people wanted to have me around. I worry actually in today's world about the screening mechanism that wouldn't let someone like me probably even get through initial screening. I did well enough in school, but I certainly wasn't A plus student and the person who would stand out on paper necessarily. I was the person who was always willing to outwork everyone and was super diligent and left my colleagues knowing that they could count on me to get the job done, which is hard to communicate on paper.

Starting point is 00:24:39 So I've actually said to, for example, my former law firm, when I've screened candidates who are all from Harvard Law School or Yale Law School or Penn, which are great schools and I'm sure very deserving. like a really good school, but not the best, best school and did well enough in school, but maybe wasn't a straight A plus student because I don't know that whether those people are able to break through today. It's so much more competitive and everything is so much more formalized. I think it's really hard to be a teenager or in your twenties these days. I'm lucky that I grew up in a time where the things that I'm good at allowed me to stand out. And I often wonder if life would be different if I were growing up today. But that's sort of a side note, more of a just referendum on the state of the world being so, so difficult and so challenging for kids. The pressure is just so high. I think that's a great place.

Starting point is 00:25:53 And I want to ask a couple of other questions about that. It is definitely a different time when you and I grew up, there was no Google, no email. You couldn't just jot off a note to someone. You couldn't mail it or like you did, you could walk in and you could drop it off, but it is different. So what's your advice to people today, how to break through and how would someone go about working with you as an intern? Are they just going to show up in your lobby? And I hate to use that word because it's stalking, but I've

Starting point is 00:26:21 had people just show up at my door. We get a lot of emails. I probably get 50 on LinkedIn every week, which is, hey, Randy, I'd love to meet with you. I'd love to have a cup of coffee with you. I do give meetings to people who earn the meetings. That would be a single space letter, talked about my background and career, the details to show me they've done a ton of work to want to get 15 minutes of my time. And that 15 minutes usually turns into one hour. And in some cases, it turns into a job with me or one of our portfolio companies. But what's your advice? What would work with you? And what's your advice to those who need to break through today? Yeah, you know, this is the other sort of epiphany that I've had in recent years as I've gotten more

Starting point is 00:27:06 seasoned or more of a veteran in my industry is that I actually don't think it's that hard to stand out once you're given an opportunity. Um, I don't know if that's your experience, but I, I am similarly, because I was given so many opportunities by people in the industry to have informational interviews it mostly on my personal time because I want to give back. I want to give young people an opportunity to learn and grow. And I'm always amazed at how few of them actually follow up and stay connected. I'm so amazed. I tell my kids this all the time. What was the point of them taking that 15, 30, 45, 60 minutes with me? Maybe it interested in that you wouldn't then take the next step to at least stay in touch. And I would say, if I had to do the ballpark, less than 10% of the people that I do informational interviews or conversations with actually turn it into something that is not transactional, less than 10%. And to me, that's a travesty.

Starting point is 00:28:49 So I actually don't think it's that hard to stand out because if you do the sort of basic things that we were taught when we were growing up, which is to make a lasting impression, to be authentic and genuine, to stay connected, to reach out when you don't have something to ask for, to build trust in your relationship. It could go a long way. And the people who actually do that end up, it pays back in spades for them in terms of the value for their career, I would think. Certainly has for me. This episode of In Search of Excellence is brought to you by Sandy.com. S-A-N-D-E-E.com.

Starting point is 00:29:34 We're a Yelp for beaches and have created the world's most comprehensive beach resource by cataloging more than 100 categories of information for every beach in the world. More than 100,000 beaches in 212 countries. Sandy.com provides beach goers around the world with detailed, comprehensive, and easy to use information to help them plan their perfect beach getaway at home and abroad and to make sure you're never disappointed by a beach visit again. Plan the perfect beach trip today by visiting sandy.com. That's www.sandee.com. The link is in our show notes. Stay sandy, my friends. We have a summer internship program here. It's a 12-week program, eight to six. Do not show up one minute later. We're going to have a gnarly meeting. Don't pack up at 5.59. We got 1,750 job applications this summer, and we hire 36 every

Starting point is 00:30:29 summer. And it's amazing. Some of the kids at the lesser-ranked schools run laps around the kids from Harvard, and I hate to even say it, Michigan, because I do favor Michigan students. So if you're going to Michigan, contact us. But this year we hired a guy named Matt Hickerson who went to Biola. And I'm going to guess you've never heard of Biola. I have not either. It's a small religious school about 90 minutes from Los Angeles. And he shows up to tie in a suit and tie his first day. We send a very detailed memo about what to do when you show up your first day. We give them reading. And by the way, I call on people. I tell them 10 hours of work before you show up. And

Starting point is 00:31:11 there's a memo. I'm going to call on you. And first impression, you better know the answer to some of these simple questions. 90% don't. They're embarrassed. And I say, why not? And the room goes silent, like, where am I? What did I do this summer? But Matt continued to distinguish himself, showed up at 6.30 in the morning, left at nine o'clock. And he was gunning, I think, as most people were, for my mentorship for life. And we have so many interns. It's sort of like a bell curve, Jessica. We've got a third who are there, who just go through the motion. We've got another third and they want to put my firm on the resume. We've got another third who they do okay. And then we've got

Starting point is 00:31:50 a top third who just kill it. And of the top third, this is where the margin gets so thin, right? And this is what you're saying. It's the 2% or 1% that just go off on a different path. And they set themselves up for tremendous success in their future. I'm writing a book on this right now. Extreme Preparation, it's called. And we'll talk about this a little later in the show. But people say it's hard to do that. No, it's simple to do that. It takes a few hours. And it just, like you, it just boggles my mind why people don't follow up, don't do things differently, listen to people say, nobody does that. I mean, I get that all the time from my own kids, you know, follow up. How about FedExing a thank you note to someone after a Zoom call? You'll be the only one who's ever done that in your entire career. That person will remember you forever. And if there's a thousand people

Starting point is 00:32:49 applying for that job, you're now top five, if not number one, because nobody does it. But this stuff is so easy to do. It's very true. It's really not that hard to distinguish yourself. So yeah, I agree. After college, you went to Fordham Law School where you interned for National Football League. When you graduated, you got a job at Proskauer Rose, one of the best firms in New York City, specializing in labor and employment law where you worked with the National Hockey League,

Starting point is 00:33:20 which is one of its clients. Why did you go to law school? Was a law degree or graduate degree necessary to where you get to where you wanted to go? And what does labor relations have to do with marriage and divorce? Well, first of all, we now know that I wanted to be a commissioner and most of the commissioners are lawyers. And so that part exists as a sort of foundational reference. I also learned throughout college as I was reading the sports business trades that the underpinning of the professional sports industry, at least in America, North America, is labor relations

Starting point is 00:34:06 and the relationship that exists between the professional sports leagues and the unions that represent the players. And I realized early in my college days that understanding that foundational relationship and respecting and recognizing that being able to impact the stability of that relationship could unlock the growth of our industry of professional sports. And that was the real reason that I wanted to go to law school and become a labor lawyer. I knew I wanted to work in collective bargaining and wanted to really understand that relationship and be able to negotiate the terms and conditions that really drive the player's experience. And the other piece about labor relations that I was very interested in is really this idea that it's a relationship that you have to learn how to work together. You have to learn how to compromise. You have to learn how to listen. You have to learn how to communicate. You have to learn how

Starting point is 00:35:17 to prioritize. And that is the reference that you're making, which I've said sometimes when I've talked about labor relations, where it's a marriage where you can't get a divorce because you have to learn how to be together. And you can take different positions. You can fight for the things that you care about, but you do it in a way that allows the other to know that you respect them and that you need to work together. And it is different in that way than doing mergers and acquisitions, transactions, or other sort of deals, more business deals like venture capital deals, where you might initiate or engage in a transaction, and then you may or may not have to actually

Starting point is 00:36:06 work together in the future. The way the collective bargaining works is that you negotiate agreement and the real work actually begins when you're administering that agreement. And there's numerous opportunities to have to solve problems together. And that's really what I enjoy most about my time at Proskauer and my years at the NHL. And even still today, working with our union, it continues to be the underpinning of the professional sports industry. Do you need a graduate degree to succeed in life or get a commissioner job somewhere? Is it even necessary today to be successful? I hear so much talk these days. Some people say you don't even need to go to college. So it's what level of education is necessary, do you believe,

Starting point is 00:36:56 to achieve certain milestones in your life, especially in fields like sports or something related to sports? You know, I'd like to believe there are many paths to get to whatever the intended result is. It's hard for me to imagine being in my role without having my training, but that's because we all look at things through our own lens. I think being a labor lawyer helps me tremendously, not just in working with our union, but in the way I process information, the way I communicate, the way I think all of that is in large part driven by my legal background, but there are plenty of people who are leaders who do an incredible job who are not lawyers and not all of the commissioners are lawyers and most of them are, but not all of them. And so I'm sure there's lots of different paths that could make someone successful. I think you just have to lean into the things that

Starting point is 00:38:14 make you uniquely you, make you uniquely successful, that give you confidence that you can perform the tasks asked of you in a particular role. And for me, having a legal background really built my experience, my skills, my confidence. I went to law school at Northwestern. I hated every minute of it, although I love the school. I'm on the board of the school. I'm happy I went there, but I hated what I was learning. I didn't want to go to law school. It was tough for me to read it, but it was a means to a future for me, and it also paid at the time $70,000 a year. I was rich. When I graduated, I bounced around. I had three jobs the first eight months out of school. It's kind of a long story, but I was fired from my job five and a half weeks

Starting point is 00:39:02 after moving to Los Angeles. There were layoffs. I had $3,000 in the bank. I thought this isn't going well. But ultimately, I ended up working for a firm, McDermott, which you probably know, a large Chicago firm. Then I went to work at Sun America. I got an amazing job. Eli Broad was my boss. He was one of only three people at the time to start two Fortune 500 companies. And I would have never gotten that job without a graduate degree. And in my situation, even though I learned really almost nothing practicing law, I felt like and still feel like today, the intellectual training and the way I look at things has been immensely helpful to me. So when people say to me, oh, should I go to law school? I say, well, number one, do you like it? Do you want to be a lawyer? Even if you don't, you should really map out pen and paper if it really makes sense. I know so many

Starting point is 00:39:56 people who don't go to good law schools. They spend $150,000 to $200,000 to graduate, and they don't get a big firm job, which today pays $215,000 to start, which is just asinine to me. Is that where the starting salary is? $215,000. And get this, they bill out at $495,000 an hour, some $595,000 per hour, these New York firms. And this is the only profession, by the way, where the clients pay for the professionals to learn on their dime. I've never heard of another profession like that. But for me, I think it has been very valuable. But for most people who go to law school, they're not working at

Starting point is 00:40:37 Proskauer or Skadden or White & Case. They're making $40,000 or $50,000 a year to start. And I don't know whether the benefit really pays for itself in the long run. What do you think about that? Yeah. The idea of living with the debt that me, law school itself was very humbling. It was good for me in that way. It was really one of the first times in my academic life where I was really challenged and I had to actually really study. And I couldn't do all my extracurricular activities and the million things that I normally do. And I had to really focus on studying and getting good grades, knowing that my 1L year in law school was going to dictate where I was able to ultimately work after law

Starting point is 00:41:43 school. And I really wanted to work at Proscower, so I had to get good grades. And so it was very humbling for me. It forced me to focus and become a good reader, which I really wasn't a particularly good reader before law school, which I think has helped me a lot in my career. But what was the thought process there? Were you nervous and anxious and saying to yourself, what if it doesn't work out? And do I have the courage to actually do this? Yeah, of course. And I had to really confront some of the sort of darkest pieces of what drives us, which is really ego.

Starting point is 00:42:24 And why does it feel good for me to work at the NHL? It's a cocktail conversation. It very much gives you that external validation that what you're doing matters and what you're doing is cool. And you like to see it on SportsCenter and you like that it's on the front page of the New York Times and it makes you feel important. And I had to, first of all, acknowledge that. And I think that's a very important thing to acknowledge when you work for a high profile company, a high profile brand. It's okay to say that you enjoy that. It has an outsized influence on society, separate and apart from the substance of what you're doing or the size of the business. It

Starting point is 00:43:12 matters to people. It matters in people's lives. And I had to really ask myself, is that enough for me? Is that going to be the driving force? Will I be satisfied with my career staying at the place that opens doors and provides fodder in a cocktail conversation? If the sacrifice is that I don't actually get to achieve the ambitions that I have in my future, in my career. And I made the choice, understanding the risk that I may be going to a place that no one will ever care what I do or where I am, that it was more important for me to learn and develop as a leader. And even if it meant I made a right turn and that it was going to be hard for me to come back into the sort of sexy pyramid of professional sports, that that was okay. And, and, and, you

Starting point is 00:44:15 know, it's, it sort of goes back to what I said earlier about being relentless in your pursuit of what matters most to you. And sometimes what matters most changes, right? Like I, what mattered most to me when I made that choice is becoming the best business person I could be. And I wanted to learn areas that I would not have the opportunity to learn if I had stayed at the NHL. And I had to understand that that came with some sacrifices and I was okay with that. I also think I had to sort of dispel this notion that because I left the NHL, it meant that I no longer had it as part of who I was. I really embraced this idea that no one can take away from me what I learned and experienced during my 13 years there. And if that's something that feels like it has value to

Starting point is 00:45:15 me, it's still part of who I am even today. And that leaving doesn't mean you've left it behind. You can take it with you and you can take the things with you that continue to provide value and maintain those relationships, which I've done. And realize that that will keep opening doors for you throughout your career in ways that you can't even imagine.

Starting point is 00:45:41 Thanks for listening to part one of my amazing conversation with Jessica Berman, the Commissioner of Women's Major League Soccer. Be sure to turn our next week to part two of my awesome conversation with Jessica.

In Search Of Excellence - Jessica Berman: A New Playbook for Women in Sports | E99

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