What do you do when you work to get into law school, and then once you get there, realize that is not where you want to be? If you are Laura Gassner Otting, you start dating the “world’s worst boyfriend”, who happens to take you by a campaign office where you meet a presidential candidate who inspires you to drop out of law school, work for his campaign, and eventually join the White House staff! Don’t miss this insightful conversation about how Laura’s path, including twenty years in Executive Search, led her to start her own business, write bestselling books, including Limitless, and give keynote speeches all over the country with inspiring guidance for everyone looking to find consonance in their life and career.
**Must Hear Episode** for everyone, no matter where you are on your education or career path!
You can find Laura on social media channels at @heylgo and at https://www.lauragassnerotting.com/.
What do you do when you work to get into law school, and then once you get there, realize that is not where you want to be? If you are Laura Gassner Otting, you start dating the “world’s worst boyfriend”, who happens to take you by a campaign office where you meet a presidential candidate who inspires you to drop out of law school, work for his campaign, and eventually join the White House staff! Don’t miss this insightful conversation about how Laura’s path, including twenty years in Executive Search, led her to start her own business, write bestselling books, including Limitless, and give keynote speeches all over the country with inspiring guidance for everyone looking to find consonance in their life and career.
**Must Hear Episode** for everyone, no matter where you are on your education or career path!
You can find Laura on social media channels at @heylgo and at https://www.lauragassnerotting.com/.
Thank you for joining us today on Paths in Progress. I'm your host, Carrie Young. On this podcast, people in a variety of career fields, talk about their journey from choosing their college, deciding which majors and minors to pursue, their first jobs out of college, and all of the hurdles, detours and victories along their path through today. Our goal is to help students hear about a variety of exciting opportunities out there and understand what day-to-day life is like in these careers. I hope you enjoy and learn from our story today. Thanks for listening.
Carrie:Hi everyone. Thanks for joining us today. We are here today with Laura Gassner Otting. She is a bestselling author. She's a keynote speaker, an executive coach. Her most recent book is called Wonder Hell. You've probably seen her out of the media recently talking about this book, and we are gonna be talking a lot about her previous book called Limitless. It's a fantastic book for college students and recent graduates, people just starting college, really for anyone. I loved it myself too, but I'm really excited to talk to her about that and about her story. So Laura, thanks so much for joining us today.
LGO:I'm so excited to be here, Carrie.
Carrie:I am so excited to have you here. I heard you speak, it's been what, five months ago now? Yes, at a conference and I just loved everything you had to say. I love your story and I just feel like you're somebody who speaks the same language as we do here on this podcast when we're talking to students about career path and life experience. So I'm really excited for you to share that with our audience today.
LGO:Well, it was great to see you at the conference and thank you for coming up to me afterwards and asking me to talk about my path in progress. Cuz even though I'm 52, I feel like we're always on a path in progress.
Carrie:Absolutely. It never ends. The learning never ends. The journey never ends. I love it.
LGO:So, and thank goodness for that cuz how boring, right? Would it be if the journey ended? Like how boring would it be if you got to a certain point and you were like, okay, I'm done growing now and I'll just be like this forever like that, right. Seems to me to be pretty terrible.
Carrie:Absolutely. Totally. So can you take us back to your high school days and tell us kind of where this path started for you and how you were approaching your college search and what you were kind of envisioning for yourself with your career path?
LGO:Yeah, so I. Grew up like a major civics nerd. Like I thought I was gonna be the first female democratic senator from the great state of Florida love, and I was gonna solve all the problems. And by the way, Florida, you've only
Carrie:We need you now!
LGO:Elected democratic woman. So like get on that. I think there's been one woman who was elected and just a Republican and no shades the Republicans, but you know, like, come on, Florida's not a very good track record of elected Florida.
Carrie:Florida needs some help right now.
LGO:Absolute Florida needs help. Absolute. So I thought my path would be, go to law school because all of the politicians at that point were all lawyers, right? They were implementing the law. They were creating a law. They were lawyers. And I was also, as it previously mentioned, I'm 52, so I'm 107 years old for your listeners. But I was listening to, I was watching Ally McBeal and LA law and I was like, these lady lawyers are glamorous, right? Like I wanna be one of them. So I was like, I'm gonna go to law school, I'm gonna graduate the top of my class. I'm gonna be recruited to go like be a prosecutor. I'm gonna put the bad guys away. I'm gonna make a name for myself and big headline case, and then I'm gonna be recruited to run for office, where of course I'm gonna win and I'm gonna solve all the problems. And that's what I thought I wanted to do. And then I got to law school and I was like, I've made a huge mistake. I don't belong here. I don't wanna be here. I don't like any of my cohort students. I don't like any of the professors. I'm not inspired. What was I thinking? Right? Mm-hmm. So it was like all well and good until I was hit in the face by my bad ideas that were kind of handed to me by society and didn't really come out of this intrinsic place in my heart.
Carrie:Yeah. I know when I heard you speak, you talked about how you'd kind of listen to some people along the way who had made comments to you like, oh, you'd be a great lawyer. A lot of students listen to that, right? A lot of us listen to that. When people give you positive feedback, or you take it as positive feedback, you know, and people say, oh, you'd be good at this, or you should really consider this. We really absorb that a lot of the times and think, oh, okay, maybe I should really look at that. Can you talk a little bit about how you were given that type of feedback and how that did kind of contribute to some of those decisions leading to law school?
LGO:Absolutely. So when I was watching LA Law and Ally McBeal and thinking the lady lawyers looked glamorous, why did I think that? Why was I even open to that? Because I had a fourth grade teacher who was like, Laura, you're a really argumentative young woman. Maybe you should be a lawyer. I. Jokingly, right. And of course the first thing I said to her was, well, you're wrong cuz you know, I was argumentative. Case in point, ipso facto as they would say. But it still nestled in my brain. And it was this subconscious thing until later become a con, became a conscious thing. And I created a path to get me to law school. And you know, along my career I've had lots of people like that. Like I had parents who thought that, you know, that would be a great path for me. And it was secure and it was a career. It would make sense. And I think maybe secretly, my mother had always wanted to be a lawyer, right? So she was pushing me towards that direction. I had bosses in my life who had very specific definitions of success. Like I mentioned Ally McBeal and LA law. Like I had media, you know, the, now they're influencers, but then it was, you know, like people on network, television. And so we all have all these people in our lives, whether they are people we know, whether they're people we aspire to be, whether they're influencers, whether they're celebrities, whether they're parents, caregivers, coaches who all give us ideas of who they think we should be, what they think we should be, what we could embody, what we could become, what we should never, ever attempt to try. Right. And all of those things become guardrails in our lives so that we don't mess up, we don't falter. But that also stop us from exploring. And when it stops us from exploring what happens is their opinions about us, their opinions become our identification. Mm-hmm. And that's a problem because it means that we don't explore all the things that might bring us joy and make us happy.
Carrie:Yeah. So when you got to law school and you said, oh no, I've made a mistake. Like what are the things that really hit you to make you come to that realization?
LGO:Well, I was basically flunking out and why was I flunking out? I was basically flunking out because I didn't care. I didn't care. I didn't wanna read the cases, I didn't wanna study. I was the first student on the first day that got asked question after question after question after question until I eventually like fell down into a puddle of tears. Yeah. Um, and, and why, because I didn't do all the homework. I just, we cannot be insatiably hungry for somebody else's goals. And it mm-hmm. It works well enough when you're in high school, when you're in college, when you're trying to like perform to get the A and then eventually it stops working. And for me, it stopped working on that very first day of law school. And I think you heard me tell the story at that keynote where what I did instead was I decided to date the world's worst boyfriend. Because what else do you do when you're in a position where you're completely miserable? You do self-harming things. And for me, that was the world's worst boyfriend. But the world's worst boyfriend had exquisite taste in precisely two things. Obviously the first being girlfriends, the second was unknown presidential hopefuls from tiny Southern states, and he was giving me a ride home from school one day in his iroc Z I kid you not. Mm-hmm. And he said, I wanna stop at this guy's campaign office. He's running for president. And I was like, governor, who? From where? Arkansas. Not at chance in Hell. Clinton. Clinton. What? Who? And we stopped in this guy's campaign office and there he was talking about this idea of community service and exchange for college tuition. And I was like, oh, that needs to happen. Mm-hmm. And suddenly I was, for the first time in my life, hit with an idea of something that was exciting to me, something that was bigger than me. Something that turned me on in a way that nothing had ever done. And suddenly I had direction, I had purpose, I had passion. I had something that I wanted to do. And once I had something I wanted to do, it became so clear why law school didn't work for me. Because I didn't wanna do it right. I didn't wanna do it. Yeah. And so a lot of times we run away from something because we hate it before we understand what we're running towards. And hearing Bill Clinton talk about this idea, which would eventually become AmeriCorps, that to me became the first time in my life that I was running towards something rather than running away from something.
Carrie:Yeah. So how did that progress from hearing him talk that day in that campaign office? How did you become involved in that?
LGO:So I just started volunteering at that local tiny little campaign office in Gainesville, Florida. Now, as luck would have it, about three weeks after that moment, all four principals, so Bill and Hillary and Al and Tipper Gore were coming to town. I helped those campaign volunteers put on a rally where 36,000 people attended. And that got the attention of the national campaign office. And the national campaign office said, we need to hire those volunteers. Who are they? So they hired all of us for the low, low price of all the ramen soup and idealism we could eat. And my career in politics was born. I got on a campaign bus, I traveled all over the southeast of the country. I did advance, which means you're the person who's putting on events. You fly into a town a couple weeks before the candidates come. You get to know the volunteers. You scope out the site, you get to know the local media. You know, you put on the event, right? You do all the stuff, you go in advance at the event. It's called advance work. When the campaign ended, I had gotten to know a lot of people on the campaign, all of whom were heading to DC to do the transition. The transition is the time between the election and when you walk into the White House, like at 12:01 after inauguration. I got to know a bunch of people. They were all headed to DC and I sort of thought to myself, well, I can either go back to law school and salvage my, like d plus average and hope that I can graduate into this career that I hate and I don't want, or why not keep going? So I had saved up some money in college, literally changing bedpans in hospitals over the summer. It was a shitty job, but I'm bump, right? And literally and and I went to Europe with that money I put a backpack on my back. I went to Europe and for a few weeks I backpacked around Europe and I called my parents, again to show my age from a row of payphones in the basement of a youth hostel in Vienna because I was so afraid that if I said this to them in person, they would find me and murder me. I said, mom, dad, I'm not going back to law school. I've taken a leave of absence and I'm moving to Washington, DC. And my parents who have never in their lives shown me before that date or since an ounce of flexibility, said, we'll give you six months. We'll pay your rent for six months. But by the way, this was 1992, so rent was like$300 a month. Yeah. We'll pay your rent for, basically gave me$2,000, which, you know, huge amount of privilege there. Right. But they said, we'll give you six months of rent. You figure out how you're gonna pay for food and anything else you need. And if you don't have a paying job in six months, you're coming back and you're finishing law school. Mm-hmm. So you might imagine I was incentivized. Right, right. So I moved to DC with, a Rolodex of business cards and phone numbers and a bunch of coins for the payphones in my hands. And I just started smiling and dialing, like, who did I meet on the campaign trail? Where did they end up? What part of the transition team are they working slash volunteering on? And I kept just creating and building those relationships because everybody else that was there, we were all completely out on a limb. Like every person I'd met on the campaign trail was probably under 30 years old. They're single. They're, you are working paycheck to paycheck. They're trying to figure it out. They're inspired by this leader. And you know, none of us were in it because we thought, oh, like amazing career trajectory. We were just like, this is inspiring and we wanna do this right now.
Carrie:Yeah. Two really important points you brought up right there. One is what you just said, we just wanna do this right now because any step you take on your career path or any job that you take, right, you're not committing your life to it. Right. And I think a lot of times college graduates graduate from college or they go into a big transition and think, I have got to make this huge decision, which it is a huge decision, right, about where you're gonna work. But also it's so important to keep in mind if this doesn't work out or if I don't like it, or if something better comes along, you're not committing your life to it. You're just taking that next best step, the thing you're excited about right then, the thing you're good at right then. The great opportunity that's right there. And it's okay if that doesn't end up being your thing, right?
LGO:Not only is it okay, Carrie, I spent 20 years in executive search, as you know. So it was my job to call the most successful people in the country, like the most successful people. And recruit them away on behalf of my clients. And this sounds like a hard job, like calling somebody who's really successful and recruiting them to leave their job. Right. I called them because they were super successful, but they all called me back because despite all this success, they weren't very happy. Mm-hmm. That's interesting, right? Yeah. So people who are on this path that gets them directly bigger, better, faster, more to success, they're not always happy. And I will tell you that in the thousands of people who I interviewed during those 20 years in executive search, the only interesting people who I interviewed, were the ones who took left turns and right turns and U-turns. Because it's in those moments that you realize who you are, what you're made of, what you can learn, how you're different, what you wanna do differently for the next time. We don't go to, you know, parties and tell the stories of our biggest, most amazing unbridled success. We talk about the face plants and the flops and all the things that went wrong, because that's where we learned and we grew and we iterated and we innovated, and we became who we wanna be. Yeah, so I would say not only is it okay to change your mind and do something different, it actually makes you far more interesting, better of a leader, better of a learner, better of a listener, brings you wisdom, brings you perspective. I encourage it.
Carrie:Yeah, absolutely. And the other great topic you brought up was with the networking when you got to DC. How you had to take all those cards, take all those numbers, connect with all those people you had met, and just contact everybody and build those relationships and figure out where you could find a place or somebody could refer you to someone else. Using your network, whether it's a network you earned professionally in a job, whether it's the people you knew in college, professors, your neighbors, your uncle, like whoever. Right? I mean, utilize that network cuz you never know, you know, it just takes one call to click with the right person at the right time to potentially find that next great opportunity.
LGO:Yeah. And can we talk a minute about mentoring because
Carrie:Yeah.
LGO:I think we get mentoring wrong because we put a capital M on it. I need a mentor, I have to find a mentor and. You know what? I don't have time to be a mentor to anybody. I just don't. I'm busy. I've got a new book that's out. I travel all the time. I've got kids that are about to leave for college and I wanna like spend time with them. Yeah. I don't have time to be a mentor, but you know what? I have a ton of time for? Mentoring. So when somebody calls me, if you're listening to this podcast, please call me. Find me. I am@heyLGO on all the socials. Please call me. Ask me to spend 15 minutes with you. I will. Carrie, you know how many people are gonna take me up on that? Zero? Mm-hmm. Maybe one, maybe three. I invite people from stage all the time, but people don't because they think that they're going to be a burden. It's never a burden. People helped me when I was coming up. I wanna pay that back to other people. And by the way, how good do you feel when somebody asks you for help and you help them? Yeah. You feel amazing, right? So listeners, don't steal that from me. Call me. Let me give you some mentoring moments. Everyone has time for mentoring moments. So if you lower the bar and you think, I'm not looking for a mentor, but there's something I can learn from Laura right now on this one subject, there's something I can learn from Carrie right now on this one subject. If you ask a question on that one subject, we spend 15 minutes together and then you know, you follow up with me the next week and you tell me what you did with that information. And then a few months from now you reach out to me again and you're like, Hey, you gave me this great tip on this one specific thing. Cuz by the way, When I was your age, I just smoked a lot of pot, so I don't remember much, but if you send me an email that says, this is what we talked about and it was great, and here's what I did with it, and can you give me 15 more minutes for another question, I'll give it to you because you've just stroked my ego and I feel really good about myself, right? So suddenly every few months you're reaching out to me, and after a few years, guess what? I don't even realize, but I've become your mentor. You snuck it up on me, right? So I think we need to lower the bar on mentoring and just like, we're not looking for mentors at every age and at every stage. And for every problem, you're gonna need somebody who has different amounts of information, different experiences. So just look for mentoring, not a mentor.
Carrie:Yeah, that's fantastic advice. Absolutely. So as you were making those phone calls in DC when you first got there, what happened? Where did that take you?
LGO:So, the very first call that I got, you know, there was a guy named Patrick. I wish I remember what Patrick's last name was cuz I would love to call him and thank him, but I just don't remember his last name. And I've asked a number of my friends from that period, and none of us can remember his last name, but there was a guy named Patrick. And Patrick ended up running the volunteer office at the White House. 12:01. Day one calls me up and he is like, Laura, we need somebody to answer the phones in political affairs. So political affairs was run by Rahm Emanuel. He ended up becoming the mayor of Chicago, by the way, which is kind of awesome. Rahm Emanuel was one of two kids. If you ever watched the show Entourage, it was a show about a super agent in Yeah, in LA. So that was Rahm's brother. There's Ari and there's Rahm, right? So Rahm is the other brother, you know, big slouch, right? He ended up being like the head of political affairs for Bill Clinton's administration and Chief of staff and eventually, mayor of Chicago. So Patrick calls me up and says, we need somebody to answer phones. And I was like, great. I'm in at like 1203. I'm there, right? Like, I'm like running to the White House. I'm there. Yeah. And I walk in and I sit at rom's desk and there is this giant phone that, I mean, it's like the size of two pizza boxes covered with buttons. It's called a switchboard, right? So the phone rings, the everything, every button on the switchboard lights up, yellow, red, white, everything's all blinking. So I answer the phone and I'm like, hello Ram Emanuel's office. May, may I help you? And the woman over there said, said, is he in? This is his mother? And I was like, oh no. So I'm looking at the switchboard I've gotten, mind you, zero training. And I kind of peek into the office and I see him back there and he's like, you know, a power broker. Now this woman has raised like the super agent and Rahm right? I'm like, okay. I put the phone down, like the cradle down next to the giant switchboard. Cause I'm afraid if I push a button, I'll just disconnect the whole thing. Oh my gosh. And I tiptoe into his office and I'm like, Mr. Emanuel, sir, Mr. Emanuel, your mother's on line one. And Rahm is sitting at his office at the time, his feet are up in the desk and he is reading what's called the clippings, which are like, people come in at four in the morning, they take photocopies of every major news story from every major newspaper, and they like put together a packet of photocopied pages. And he is reading the clippings and his feet are on the desk. And he goes, tell her I'm busy, I'll call her back later. And I was like, oh, okay sir. And I like back out of the room, you know, like backwards, like I'm like talking to the Queen of England. And I go back to the phone and I'm like, he says, he'll call you back later, Mrs. Emmanuel. And I like hang up the phone. And meanwhile I'm thinking to myself, like, if my mom called and I was in the White House, I'd be like, Mom! I'm in the White House!. I don't wanna work for this man. I don't wanna work for him. There was something about the way that he treated that interaction that told me that his vibe and my vibe were not going to jive. Right? Like we were not, it was not going to work. So the next day, and when I'd gone to know Patrick over the course of the campaign, I was like, I wanna work in political affairs, the First Lady's office or national services I did of community service. And so the next day he calls me up and he is like, okay, national service needs a volunteer. And I like walk into national service the next day. Tiptoeing the same way. I think I was wearing the same suit, which by the way, I think was my mother's hand-me-down suit. And I walk in, I got these giant 1980s shoulder pads on. And I walk in, I sit down and I start doing data entry. And I'm doing data entry for six weeks, like me sitting at the computer doing data entry while all the, like young and hungry, the bright young things are all walking by, buzzing by like doing deals, making things happen, creating policy. And I'm doing data entry. And Eli Siegel, who ran the office, who actually ran the 92 campaign, comes walking up to me and he says, hi, my name is Eli Siegel. It's nice to meet you. You look like you've been working very hard here. Now mind you, there're like 15 of us in the office. Clearly I know who Eli Siegel is. Yeah. Like he was kind of a big deal. But the fact that he came over and introduced himself to me as opposed to like, I'm not gonna make to say hi to my mom, right? That told me everything I knew about him as a human, as a leader. And then he says to me, so, I've got a question and I'm wondering if you could do a research project and answer it, it occurs to me, That the Peace Corps was a success from the minute John F. Kennedy announced it in the Rose Garden of the White House. Whereas the War on poverty was a failure from before it even came out of Johnson's mouth. Can you find out why? Oh. Oh, okay. Okay. You know, only the future of whether national service will be successful in this country. Fine. You okay? Wow. So I pack up my stuff and I'm like heading down to the Library of Congress, cuz again, this is like before the internet, you know? So I start walking outta the office and the chief of staff at the office comes up to me at the time, and he kind of leans on me. He was like kind of tall, little muscular leans on me. And he is like, Laura, listen, Eli's a very busy man. He's not gonna have time to read your whole report, so why don't you go do it. Give it to me and I'll put a summary paper on it. So, so he can, he can read. I'll put a summary memo on it so we can just get the highlights. And I was like, oh, okay, sir. Hmm. Sure. Hmm. So I started walking outta the office and this woman comes up to me, Janet V. Green, and she says, you know what just happened there, right? And I was like, yes, maybe no. And she's like, Laura, he's gonna screw you. He's gonna take your work, like you're gonna do the work. He's gonna put a summary memo with his name on it, he's gonna screw you. And I was like, what am I supposed to do? I'm like, I'm basically an intern. Like he's got me dead to, right? Yeah. Like, I'm, I'm a volunteer trying to get a job. And she's like, here's what you're gonna do. You're gonna go do the report. Eli wants it by the end of the week. You're gonna give it to him tomorrow. Okay. It's Monday, right to him tomorrow. So you're gonna give it to tomorrow. And, and, and you're gonna say this, you Chief of staff is going to give you a summary of this, but I thought maybe you'd like the raw data in advance. Mm. Okay. So I did it, and then I went home that night and I cried into my ramen soup about the job that I was never gonna get, that I didn't even have yet. Right. Like I was like, this is, I'm done. Like I'm going back to law school, I'm screwed. I come in the next morning, chief of staff pulls me aside and he's like, Eli told me to put you on payroll. Wow. So I researched the lowest possible salary I could give you and still get away with it. So I'm offering you$22,717 a year, and if you ever do that again, I'll fire you. And that's how I got my first paid job in the White House.
Carrie:But oh my gosh, what a difficult position to be in.
LGO:What a difficult position. And here's the thing, wow. There are certain moments in your life where you have to understand that everybody is maneuvering. Everybody is playing a game. There is power all around you. And we have to surround ourselves with people who we trust, who have our best interest at heart and who we know have the kinds of ethics that agree with ours. So, you know, where I decided to work, how I decided to stay at National service, even though I still wasn't getting paid six weeks into it. Right. All the things, all the lessons from that story. I didn't know any of them at the time. I was just like a passenger on that ship. But I didn't know why things weren't right in political affairs, but I knew that things were right in national service. Right? There were a lot of things that now 30 years on, I can look back and be like, yep, that all makes sense, right? Like, but I did not know and enough at the time to do it and. Here's, here's the other thing I'll tell you from that. There was a guy by the name of Jack Lu. Jack Lu he was a lawyer in New York City. He was on Partner Track. He was incredibly successful and he got asked to come down and write the legislation for National Service and he left his big law firm to come do it. And everybody said, what? Are you crazy? You're going, you're leaving New York. You're going to DC to go work for this tiny little program that's gonna be like an asterisk on this administration and we don't even know if it's gonna pass. Congress? Are you crazy? And what he said to me when I interviewed him for Limitless was I just knew that if I did interesting things for interesting people, Interesting opportunities would come along. And I sat down with Eli. I met him. I got to know him and I knew that he was a good human. He was an interesting person, that he would have my best interest at heart, and Jack wrote the legislation that would become national service. In the process of doing that, he got to know the Clintons. Eventually he became chief of staff for Hillary when she was Secretary of State. Eventually became chief of staff for Barack Obama when he became president of the United States and then became the Secretary of the Treasury under Barack Obama. Now, did he leave that law firm to go to DC to write that legislation for that tiny little program that was maybe not even gonna pass congress cause he wanted to become the Secretary of the Treasury? No. We don't know where our decisions are going to get us. You just have to do interesting things with interesting people and interesting opportunities arise.
Carrie:Yeah, absolutely. So can you talk a little bit about what your time was like working in the White House, like moving forward, like picking up your story and then also for students who are out there who were interested in that life opportunity, cuz sometimes it's just like a window for people, right? Sometimes people can develop a long-term career if that ends up being their interest in DC but for a lot of people it's like a step into something else. Mm-hmm. So can you talk a little bit about what that was like for you and what that experience was like encapsulated, but then also how it launched you into what you did next?
LGO:Yeah. Well I thought. I was gonna go work in the White House and I would, you know, be in politics for the rest of my life. First I thought I was gonna run for office, and then I saw how the sausage was made and I was like, Nope, don't wanna do that. And then I thought, well, I make a hell of a chief of staff. Like I wanna be the guy behind the guy. Like, that's where I wanna be. That's the place. And then I, you know, had dumped the world's worst boyfriend and I started dating the world's best boyfriend, who, by the way, we just celebrated 25 years of marriage, so, you know.
Carrie:Oh wow. Congratulations.
LGO:Thank you. Thank you. So good on me, right? I'd be like Mrs. X, the world's worst boyfriend if I had kept dating him at this point. But, that world's best boyfriend, had absolutely no interest in politics, was not involved in politics, didn't work in politics, but was working in a research position, at the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, DC. We met in a bar. And about three months into it, he was getting ready to move to Boston to get a PhD in economics. And I went to go talk to Eli again. I was like, interesting things with interesting people. I'm gonna get good advice from Eli. And I said, all right, I'm ready to go back out on the campaign trail. And uh, he said, well, you're kind of too old to get back on campaign buses and you know, eat frozen pizza and sleep on high school gymnasium floors. Cuz you know, at 25 you're like a hundred and billion years. I was gonna say Wow. Okay. Yeah, it's like dog years. And so he's like, and you're kind of too young to be the domestic policy advisor. So here's what you should do. You should go talk to my best friend, Arne Miller. Arne runs the biggest search firm in the country that does specifically nonprofit, universities, foundations, advocacy search. Right? Finds CEOs and C-suite positions for organizations that we have our civic infrastructure. Go talk to him. He'll find you a job. You'll hide out somewhere awesome for four years, and then you'll come back and you'll do something big and meaty on the Gore campaign. And I was like, great, I'll go do it. So a couple days later I sat down in the lobby of the Mayflower Hotel right across the street from the White House with Arne Miller. And within about five minutes of talking to Arne, I was like, huh, you work in Boston? Well, the world's best boyfriend's about to move to Boston. Arnie, I should come work for you. And he goes, you should come work for me. And I was like, great, what do you do? And ladies and gentlemen, that's how I became a headhunter. And 20 years later in executive search, right? So, this idea that we think that every decision we make is going to be permanent and we're gonna be that for the rest of our lives is hogwash. And I think limiting. So, you know, I think politics is a great place to work. I mean, this was obviously 30 years ago. It was vitriolic, but it was nothing like the vitriol of today. So, I don't know, it's a little different now, but when you were working in a political campaign, The vast majority of the people on that campaign are young, and they're single, and they're idealistic and they're solutions oriented. And you may not agree with any of their solutions if they're on the other side of the aisle, but they're still made of the same stuff as you. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Like we all think the world can be a better place if only insert policy solution here. And they are smart and they are well read, and they wanna make the world a better place. To be surrounded by that energy, that sort of can-do attitude that like, there's always a way. That's a really fun place to be and to live in Washington, DC in your twenties when, or whatever, state capital, wherever you are, like in your twenties, when everyone is young and single and everyone is from somewhere else. That is just, it is so much fun. I say to my husband all the time that we should move back to DC at some point. And he's like, I think you're confusing the romance of the time with like, you know, really enjoying it. But you know, I mean, I'm sitting here in my office right now and I'm staring at a photo of me and my compatriots like in the Oval Office, and I'm looking at every single one of those people and every single one of those people ended up somewhere. Interesting. Yeah. Not necessarily in politics. Like one ended up, you know, as a very senior person at Delta Airlines, one makes Documentary films for a Living. One is a journalist that focus on climate issues. One became the ambassador of the United Nations. One is a startup unicorn in the healthcare space. Like they all went somewhere interesting cuz here's what they got out of it. They got precision, discipline and a network, right? They understood that every word matters, every action matters. They're disciplined that like, you have to, like, you have to be all in on what you're doing. But they got a network that could choke a horse. Like when I went into executive search, my team would say things to me like, yeah, you keep telling me that I should call so-and-so because they'll have all the great ideas, but I can't get them to call me back. And so I'll like pick up my phone. I'll send a text and the text will be like, Hey, hey jerk. Like, call my staffer back. Would you? Five seconds later, the my staffer's phone rings and they're like, how did you do that? How do you know all these people? That's magical. And I'm like, no, I'm just old. Like, you just put enough time in. And so, you know, as we're collecting people around us, there are people who were in that photo who were really big deals at the time, and there are people in the photos who they used to hold my head out of the toilet after nickel beer night. And you know, all you can eat wings. Like we were young and. Stupid and poor and we had nothing to our names. And yet some of those people ended up in places where if I gave you a list of their names, you would've seen their names on the cover of the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post within the last week. Like yeah, it's, I didn't collect them because I knew they were big deals. I just collected them cuz they were cool people. Again, interesting people doing interesting things. You never know where people are going to end up. And so I think it's really important as we go through life that it's, it's. It's not like I've never gone into a job thinking, oh, this is gonna get me somewhere good as the only reason I did it. Right. There may have been moments where I'm like, if this works out, it might get me somewhere good. But it was never the only and the primary reason, I think it's important that it's there. It just shouldn't be the only in primary reason. Cuz then all happens is that you get there and you're like, okay, I got there. So now what? So, I think that as we go through our lives, I think politics is a great place to like drop in, grab a huge and great network very quickly. And what's nice about it is that if you're in it, like you can either strap your wagon to a great candidate who you love and respect and think they're gonna change the world. Or you can strap your wagon to a nonprofit, to a lobbying arm, to a cause that you care about. So it can really be a lot of different things. I personally don't know that I have the stomach for a life in politics, but you know, now I'm still involved. I raise a lot of money for candidates who I think are pretty awesome. But I do it on the side as a hobby. It's not a vocation, it's an avocation.
Carrie:So after you had that conversation about going into executive search and going to Boston, what was that chapter of your career like? First of all, can you explain to students what that industry is and like what you were doing, and then also just how that shaped you during that chapter of your life?
LGO:Yeah, so executive search is basically searching for executives, right? It's sort of what it, what it sounds like. The recruiting world is made up of a couple of different types of firms. There's either sort of staffing firms where you are their clients. They try to place you in a position somewhere, and what that usually looks like is they're representing you. They're calling lots of different clients and they're trying to throw numbers at a wall to see what sticks. They'll get a commission based on whether or not they place you. Then there's executive search and retained executive search is the organization. The company calls me. They call me and they hire me, and I spend three to four months helping them do a deep dive, a strategic plan, figuring out where they've been, where they're going, what kind of person's going to get them there. And I do a huge search, combing the world for exactly that right person. For which I get one third of their first year's cash compensation, right? I get one third of the first year's salary. Now I did retained executive search, and I did it for, as I mentioned, Marques search firm, right? One of the best in the world of what they do. Until about five years into it, when I had a little bit of a moment of rage. Because for me, the idea that we should get paid one third of the first year's cash compensation for every search we do felt not. Good. There were searches that we did that were super complex. That took a whole lot more time. There were searches we did that were very easy. That took a whole lot less time. Ironically, the searches that we did for the bigger, fancier, prettier organizations who were paying their people more, took less time. And the ones that we did for the smaller, tougher, grittier organizations took more time. So the chief strategy officer position at the Kellogg Foundation was an easier search than an executive director or a fund fundraiser for a local domestic violence shelter. Right? Yeah. Like, that's just a harder job. It's a harder job. They have less money. It's got a higher turnover rate. It felt yucky that I was charging a lot of money for somebody where it wasn't hard. But it also didn't feel good that I'd charge more for the people for whom it was harder. Right. So I had to figure out a way to do this work better. And I walked into my boss's office one day and I had sort of come up with this idea that we could like pull apart how the search work was done and for our clients who could afford it, we could charge them, you know, a bespoke model, sort of customizing the work that they did and the clients who couldn't, we could teach them the parts of the work that they couldn't afford to do with us so that the capacity stayed in house with them long term. Yeah. And even better because the capacity stayed in house with them long term, maybe we could get those foundations to actually pay for the searches because they were actually building the nonprofits that they were investing in. And I walked into my boss's office and I was like, there's a better way. And he was like, there's the door. Oh. He basically said, look, you're great. I love you. You do good work. We want you to stay. But you gotta do it our way if you stay. And in that moment, I had kind of realized that I wasn't part of my client's solution, which left me in only one place, which is that I was part of their problem. And that to me, felt untenable. I couldn't stay if that was the case. And so I left and I started my own firm. And I started my own firm. Not with a business plan, but a business. Like I had business. I had a couple of clients who I knew would come with me if I left and I was like, okay, I'll figure the rest out as I go. And then I became an entrepreneur. So even though I spent 20 years in executive search, 15 of them were running and building my own company. So I sort of think about my career as having four distinctive phases. I sort of had my phase in politics. I had my phase as a recruiter, and then I had my phase as an entrepreneur in the recruiting space. And now I have my phase as sort of an author and a speaker.
Carrie:Yeah. So for students who just heard that and think that that executive search sounds really interesting, like trying to find the right person Yeah. For these different types of positions and making that contribution to those organizations. What are the kind of characteristics or what are kind of some key things that students should think about that are important maybe, naturally within people who do this work? Or just some things that people should kind of consider if they're interested in this or thinking about pursuing that path?
LGO:Yeah, so I think listening is a highly underrated skill and a super important one. When I first started doing executive search, I remember one of the vice presidents came in at the end of the day, and Carrie, she looked like garbage. I was just like, are you okay? Did your dog get run over by a truck? Like, what's going on? Yeah. She was like, no, I'm fine. I've just been listening all day and I remember thinking, like, listening, whatever, like get older lady, right? Mm-hmm. And then I learned how to listen. Like really, really listen, watch what people are saying. Hear the way their inflection to changes. Hear the speed of their voice. Watch their body language as they shift in their chair or cross their, their arms or, you know, circle one, one foot around the other ankle or look to the left as they're answering, right? What are they saying? What are they not saying? Listening is an incredible skill. And so if you were somebody who's interested in doing that, doing some work in psychology or journalism, just taking classes in that area to help you think about how you. Really build your listening muscles is a great thing to do. I really didn't understand how to listen until I was in that job and I sat really at the foot of the master and watched him listen to people and watched him ask. Questions, really good questions. So listening is one, learning how to ask questions is another, I remember there was one interview that I did where I had brought somebody in for an interview for an executive director position, like a CEO position. And this guy was probably one career move away from that. He wasn't quite there yet. He still had like another position in between. And I remember my boss having the guy saying, okay, so like, let me understand your organization. So you are here. Who are your colleagues? And he was like basically drawing for this guy who was, we were interviewing, he was drawing the organizational chart. And he's like, okay. And he goes, and who do you report to? And then he wrote those people and he was like, okay, who did they report to? And he basically drew this entire organizational chart while he was interviewing this guy. The guy's name was James. I still remember it to this day. And as soon as James walked out, My boss, Arnie turned to me, he circled the, per the position above this guy's position on the organizational chart. And he goes, get me that guy. And I was like, oh, isn't that interesting? Yeah. He was so good at understanding and, and interestingly enough, we placed James in a different position years later because, you know, we got to know him in the organization. So, Learning how to ask better questions, is a huge skill as well. I think curiosity, uh, openness, and this is gonna sound sort of funny, but a little bit of a cynicism about people like you, you, if you are somebody who loves everybody and only sees the best in people, you're not gonna be a very good head hunter because our clients don't pay us to understand what makes people great. They pay us to understand where their challenges are because they wanna know how to manage them to be successful. Right. So, let me say this. I think managing rejection is a skill that everybody and every career needs to understand. And in search, there's a lot of rejection cuz you spend the entire day smiling and dialing like, hello, are you interested in this job? Hello, can I ask you about this organization? Hello? Who do you think might be right for this? And you get a lot of, like, nobody calls you back. They don't have any other ideas, right? You gotta like, you gotta be tenacious. And we often have to call or email people and call. Like not just email, not just text. Pick up the phone and call. We gotta call people multiple times before they're willing to actually have the conversation. There's a great Ted Talk, I think he just had 10 million views by a guy by the name of a Jia Jiang, which is j i a, Jia. And then the last name is Jiang, j i a. N g and it's all about rejection. And, I would encourage anybody who's thinking about any career to watch this. And what Gia did is he set himself up very intentionally for 100 days in a row of rejection. So he would do things that he knew people would say no to. Like, he'd walk up to random strangers on the street and just ask if he could have$20, or they'd go up to the counter at Burger King and he'd ask for a hamburger refill, right? Maybe like, we don't do that, right? Like, you're gonna have a shorter refill without a hamburger refill. And he, so he did it over and over and over again until he became so inured to rejection that it didn't scare him anymore. So I think that's a great skill no matter what you're going to do, is to, is to understand that rejection is a thing that happens and it often has nothing to do with you.
Carrie:Yeah, absolutely. So I wanna move to the next chapter of your career. And particularly reading Limitless, you talk a lot about consonance. So I wanna talk about what that means. And I also wanna ask if consonance is kind of what led you to this chapter of your career, cuz hearing you talk and listening to your story and then reading this book, I just kind of wondered is that what led you to this place?
LGO:It absolutely is. I wrote consonance because I needed it. I wrote Limitless cuz I needed it. I wrote Wonder Hell cuz I needed it. I'm sure I'll write my next book cuz I'll need it. And I think that's what a lot of people do who write books in the sort of career development, personal development space. Yeah. So when I was in that career of executive search, calling those thousands of people. What I found is that they were all calling me back because despite that success, they weren't very happy. But there were a handful of people who didn't, and I wondered why. There were also moments in my career where I made massive changes. Because things just didn't feel right. And when I retired, I sold my firm to the women who helped me build it. And I retired from that. I spent some time thinking about what I wanted to do next. And what I realized was that all the things that I thought I was supposed to do, they just didn't feel like things I wanted to do. They weren't consonant with who I was. So we all know the word dissonance, right? Dissonance is noise. It's cacophony. It's that like organ rejection, that organ failure, rejection that you feel when things just aren't right. But it's opposite is a word that isn't used as much consonance, and that's alignment. It's flow. It's when everything you do matches everything you are. And I started to think about the people who I couldn't recruit away in this, you know, two decade career. And what I realized was that they really embodied their work. They were always in that flow state. They were always in this place of this sort of fundamental state of leadership. And what I came to understand is that consonance really has four elements. It has calling, connection, contribution, and control. So calling is this motivational force, this gravitational force that gets you up in the morning. It's the business you wanna build, it's the family you wanna nurture. It's the leader who inspires you. Right? It's the societal ill that you wish to solve. Like that is your calling. At this time, right? Right. We can have multiple callings over the course of our career, but we're always told like, there's only one calling. Like, that's bullshit. There's lots of calling. Sorry for my French.
Carrie:It's true.
LGO:We can have multiple and we get it wrong because we think that calling has to be purpose and purpose can only be purpose if it's got, you know, a higher or a lofty in front of it. Like, unless you're literally giving the shirt off your back to poor kids in needs, you're clearly just a paper pusher and you don't matter. That's wrong. Like everybody's calling can be different. Like your calling could be that you wanna cure cancer and I love that for you. And your calling might also be that you wanna buy a Maserati and a beach house and I love that for you too. Right. But for most of us, our calling is something a little simpler. Like, I wanna pay off my debt so that my kids can make different choices than I had to. Right. Our, our calling can be very different. So that's calling. The second piece is connection. And connection really answers the question, does your work matter? If you called in sick tomorrow, would anybody care? Would anybody even notice? Does the stuff like what's in your inbox, your calendar, or your to-do list, does that get you closer to that calling that you just highlighted? And for a lot of people, it's not that their work doesn't connect to what they care about, they might just not have sight lines for it. And so I say to a lot of young people now, if you don't understand why your work matters, ask somebody. Don't say like, why should I do this? But like, walk your boss to the elevator. Take the elevator downstairs. Walk them to your car. Right. Steal a few moments, a few mentoring moments from them. Yeah. And ask them questions like, I really wanna do the best at this project. Can you give me a little more daylight into how the goals that we've set will be affected by this work so I can make sure that I'm prioritizing the right pieces of it. Yeah. Then suddenly you understand why the work matters, and not only that, your boss is like, cool, I have somebody on my team who actually cares about their work, who's engaged in their work? Amazing. I'm gonna pour into them and invest in them too. They may not be thinking that consciously, but I can guarantee they're thinking it subconsciously. Yeah. So that's connection. The third piece is contribution. So connection's about the work. Contribution's really about you. How does this work contribute to the life you wanna live, the lifestyle you'd like to have, the values you wanna manifest on a daily basis, the career trajectory you'd like to have. So how does this work contribute to that kind of life? And this is where I give my passion plea about the word ambition because we're always told like, don't be so ambitious. Oh, she's so ambitious. Like, it's like a bad word. But if having more time, more money, more resources, more leverage, more connections, it allows you to show up better for the people you love and the causes you wanna serve. Then I say, it's not your ambition, it's your responsibility. And you should fully embrace that. Yeah. So, I'm all about contribution. And then the last piece is control. Now studies have shown that people are more interested in taking jobs that give them more control than got jobs that give them more power because the amount of personal agency we have about our work directly contributes to how well we perform in our work. So the more we feel like we actually have some control about who gets assigned to teams that we're on, what kinds of projects do we get put on? How much is our hustle going to impact our earnings? Like the more we feel like we have control, the more that we're invested in and care about our work. So every one of us at different ages and different stages will have a different definition of consonance. Your definition is gonna be different than mine, but your definition today is also different than your definition was 10 years ago or 10 years from now. So, when I was dropping outta law school, I didn't have any control at all. I didn't know if I was going to, you know, Poughkeepsie or San Diego the next day. I also. Had very little contribution. Like I was getting paid all the idealism and ramen soup as I could eat, as I mentioned. But boy was I manifesting my values, right? And if this guy won, maybe I would've an interesting job. Connection. I was getting the coffee for the guy who got the coffee for the guy who got the coffee, but calling, oh, did I have calling? Right? So I had a ton of calling, serving this leader who inspired me. I had some contribution possibly in the future. I had zero connection and zero control. Now I'm 52. As I mentioned earlier. I've got a kid who's about to leave for college. I'm gonna be an empty nester. I wanna be home every single moment of every single day. And if I'm not getting paid my full fee to get on a plane and be gone for three days, I'm not gonna do it this summer. I might do it in the fall after he is gone, but I'm not gonna do it now, right? So my rubric of what matters to me and how I make decisions for my life and in my work has changed. The calling that I have has shifted from this leader externally who inspires me to this family I wanna nurture right now, inside. That shifts the way that I make decisions. And so when we're given this like bigger, better, faster, more fancy job, fastest, and its most expedient path to the corner office, fancy title, it's all about the promotion. That doesn't contemplate your calling, your connection, your contribution, and your control. And so I think we have to es issue everyone else's definition. We've gotta throw at everyone else's definition of success and figure out what defines it for us right now in this moment.
Carrie:You wrote, regarding consonance, that realizing it is missing is often easier than figuring out how to get it.
LGO:Yes.
Carrie:So over the years, as I'm sure you've witnessed this thousands of times, especially with executive search and having your own firm and even with yourself, do you have some particular advice for people, whether they're in college and trying to figure out what they wanna do with their life, or people who perhaps have already entered the workforce or really at any stage in it? Right. Do you have some particular advice that you've seen as consistent to help people find it?
LGO:Well, I would say, I mean, I have a couple of tools online. If I could give those.
Carrie:Oh, absolutely.
LGO:So, there are four questions you can ask yourself. One on each of the four areas of consonants and those are at myfourquestions.com. That'll tell you a little bit about what you're looking for in terms of each of these areas of consonance: calling and connection, contribution and control. If you wanna go deeper, I have a 67 question quiz. It'll take you about 20 minutes. The first will take you about 20 seconds. The second one will take you about 20 minutes, and that's at limitless assessment.com. Each of those will give you a fairly meaty response with a lot of details about what you're missing and what you actually might wanna do today, right now, in order to go and get more confidence in your life. So here's, but to answer your question in specific, I think if you're feeling like something's missing, you can't fight quite figure out what it is. I'd go right to the root of the problem. If what you were saying is the definition of success that I've been following thus far doesn't feel right for me. I would ask myself, who gave me that definition of success? Hmm, who gave me that definition of, and can I talk to them about the fact that this definition doesn't work for me? Will they be open to having a conversation about other definitions of success? If the answer is yes, awesome, go talk to them. If the answer is no, or if you find out halfway through the conversation, the answer is no, which often happens. Again, I still ask my parents for advice on things and half through I'm like, oh, what was I thinking? You know, that meme of the baby who like runs to the room and then like turns around and runs back? Like, that's usually me in my brain about 30 seconds into the conversation. If you were at that point and you don't have somebody to ask, what I would do is I would look around and I would say, Who's interesting? Who seems like they're living a great life. They're doing things that I keep finding myself pulled back to. I'm compelled by the work they do, their outlook on life, who they are, and then I would reach out to them, DM them. I mean, I get dms from complete and total strangers who are like, hi, I read your book. I like what you have to say. I'd love some advice, and my response to them is always great. At 6:00 AM every day, I am on my treadmill. I'm on a bike, I am on a walk. I am moving my body. I do a meet and move almost every day at 6:00 AM. Oh, wow. Here's my assistant's email. She'll slot you in. And what that does is, first of all, it gets rid of the people who actually aren't that serious. Right? Right. Who's gonna get up at 6:00 AM? Right. And by the way, I travel for work a ton. So sometimes at 6:00 AM is on East coast time. Sometimes it's on Pacific time, sometimes it's somewhere else. Yeah. So, you know, there's lots of different options. But what it does is it allows me to get my workout in. It keeps me accountable because if I know that you know, I'm gonna be maybe breathing a little heavier in our conversation, I better get my butt on the treadmill and actually do it. Number three, it allows me to give back in a way where a lot of people gave to me. So look for other people who are interesting to you. Schedule a 15 minute conversation. Have a conversation. Create your own board of advisors, your own counsel, and none of it's permanent. If you have a conversation with me for 15 minutes and you decide that my advice is amazing, you'll reach back out to me. If you decide that my advice is terrible for you, I'll never hear from you again, and you'll go on your merry way and it'll all be just fine. I think, we've raised the bar so high because we think every conversation is permanent. We think every decision is forever, and it's really not. My favorite quote from Eleanor Roosevelt is we would worry much less about what other people thought about us if we realized how seldom they did.
Carrie:Yes.
LGO:No one's paying that much attention. So you have all the opportunity in the world to mess up and recalibrate. And regroup. So the first thing I would do is I would figure out where your definition came from and whether or not that definition still feels right for you or not. And if it doesn't, maybe look around for some people who feel like it feels a little more consonant to who you are.
Carrie:I did wanna ask about coming into this space as an author and a keynote speaker. Yes. What is it that kind of instigated that with you? Did you hear someone else speak? Did you read someone else's book and think, you know, I have something different to say about this, or, I have something better to say about this, or I feel like I can contribute. What was the thing that kind of led you down that path to think, I wanna put what I have to say into a book, or I wanna put it out there and be on the speaker circuit. How were you led to that space?
LGO:Well, like pretty much every other career decision that most people in the world make, it was completely and totally accidental. Like I could tell you the history of my career in a way that sounds like every decision I made was strategic and planned and well researched and I'd be lying through my teeth. I dropped outta law school to join a presidential campaign. I ended up in the White House. I left the White House to go follow a boy to Boston, right? Like I became a headhunter because of the world's best boyfriend. Like, I could write this in a much different way, but I feel like that would be doing a disservice to everyone who's ever stared in the mirror and said, what the hell do I do now? Which has been me multiple times in my career. What happened was I sold my executive search firm and then I had this crisis of identity. Like, who am I when I'm no longer L G O ceo? Here's my business card. Yeah. And so, I started blogging. I just like opened up a website because I'm super clever. It's laura gasner otting.com. I know. I know. Exciting. Hard to imagine how I came up with that. Lauragassnerotting.com and so I just started writing about stuff that was bothering me in the world. I had no idea what I was gonna do with it, but I needed like a professional home. And now, you know, your professional home is your website, right? So like, I had a storefront. I wasn't selling anything, but at least I had like a place. And then the executive producer of TEDx Cambridge saw one of my blog posts and called me up and said, and she's a friend of mine. She called me up. And again, this is somebody who like, I. I got to know because I was running a marathon at a charity training group and she was in it. It's not cuz I like looked for her. I sought her out. I tried to social climb to get her like we were just running together for months. Yeah. And she called me up and she said, again, do interesting things with interesting people. Right? Interesting opportunities happen. She called me up and she's like, Laura, I saw your blog post. It would make a great TEDx talk. Do you wanna do one? And I said, hell no. I think my exact words were no effing way. Um, I've never spoken in public. I don't wanna speak in public. Speaking in public is terrifying. No, thank you. Goodbye. Now my kids who I think were, 14 and 16 at the time, 13 and 15 were in the backseat and they said, mom, don't you always tell us we have to do scary things?
Carrie:Oh man.
LGO:And don't tell your kids will get you every time the leg starts on the other side of the fear. And don't you always tell us that a challenger doesn't change you? And I was like, you don't listen to me telling you to pick up your socks, but that's that you heard. So six weeks later, I'm on the stage and I'm on the stage at like one of the big deal TEDxes, like 2,600 people, Boston Opera House, gold, gild walls, crystal chandeliers, five camera shoot, professional hair and makeup. And that talk went online. That got a little attention and I got a call from the Nonprofit Association of Idaho and they said, we would like to pay you$1,500 and fly you out to Boise, Idaho and have you give a 45 minute keynote for our annual conference. And I went, Really? People do that now. I'd never been to Boise, Idaho, so I was like, cool. I just sold my business. I literally have nothing to do. I thought I was going to be, you know, head of president's personnel and Hillary's White House, and she didn't make it back to the White House. So neither did I. So I suddenly had nothing to do. And I was like, cool. Okay. So I got in a plane, I go to Boise, I give a 45 minute talk holding onto the podium. Like as if I let go of it, I would fly off into outer space. I was terrified. And, At the end of it, they handed me a check and little did I know I was gonna get a hat with a potato on it cuz you know Idaho. So there's a bonus, right? Bonus. Little did I know. And now remember I spent the last 20 years in consulting, essentially like four to six months projects, giving them, you know, giant three ring binders of 300 page reports. Like, I was like, I just come out here and I talk for 45 minutes and you give me money, tell me more about this job. This sounds fascinating. So then I was like, well if I'm gonna get paid to do this, I should know what the hell I'm doing. So then I started doing like speaking training and all the sorts of like, how do you learn how to like get on stage and not just speak, but perform, like to perform a keynote and the business of speaking, how do you find bureaus? How do you create a website? How do you build a keynote? What are your top, top, top topics? What should marketing look like? And like every other industry, there are people who specialize in helping people become speakers. So the speaker lab for people that are very, that, that are junior heroic, public speaking. As you're becoming more senior, I now in another group called Impact 11. Right. So as my career in speaking over the last six years have grown the way that I've continued to search for professional development which ps, we should always be doing it. Every agent at every stage. Yeah. The people who I have sought out have been at different levels based on what I needed at the time. And so I never knew that speaking was a thing. It was a career. And then I was on these stages and I was starting to get paid more and more money, which was cool, but I was like, the people who are making real money have a book. I should get me one of them. So I wrote Limitless mostly like I needed it at the time. I was trying to figure out who I was gonna be when I grew up. I was like 46 years old, 47 years old, and I was suddenly like reinventing myself. And so I wrote Limitless and I thought, you know, it would had three people would buy my mother, my father, and my husband maybe, and my mom would use it, buy it used from my dad. And then I ended up getting asked to do media. So suddenly I'm on the Today Show and Good Morning America and all this local stuff. And so all of these things grew out of saying yes. One of the things that I write about in my new book, Wonder Hell, is the Art of Making Yourself Lucky. And I used to think that people are either born lucky or they're not. But it turns out. That people can actually make themselves lucky. And, Dr. Richard Weissman wrote about this in the Luck Factor. And basically what he said is, people who are lucky create and notice chance opportunities. They listen to their intuition. They have positive expectations, and they're good at adopting a resilient mindset that turns bad outcomes into good outcomes. And so, all the things that I did when I decided to start speaking. In hindsight, I now know that I've just wrote in my last book about made me lucky, right? Like I just, I put myself out there, I assumed good things might happen. I, I said yes to opportunity. I, I turned bad outcomes into good outcomes by using it as a learning opportunity. And so I think that in everything we do, we can create chance opportunities by going to the event, by networking, by picking up the phone, we can be more resilient by not just saying this was a mistake, but what can I learn from this thing that happened there? There are so many ways throughout our career, whether you're early, you know, like a lot of your listeners or your me, right? Like in probably what's in the last stage of my career. I think we can keep continuing to learn and we can keep continuing to grow.
Carrie:Absolutely. And kind of on that note, another thing that you wrote about in Limitless was that space between what you are qualified to do and what you want to do and how you have to kind of take inventory of that. Can you talk a little bit about that in a context for college students and recent graduates and like early career individuals and taking inventory of that as they're looking forward to what they think they wanna do or what they think they want their next step to be, and kind of looking at what they're qualified to do and how they do navigate that space.
LGO:Yeah. That's my favorite space to be in, and it is the most terrifying space Yeah. To be in for sure. Now, from my vantage point, what I can say is that every exciting and interesting thing that ever happened to me at my career came out of that space 100%. Like without a doubt. And yet it's the space that we avoid the most because at some point we get hired because we showed some competency in something, whether we studied it or we did it an internship. And then we do that thing and we're afraid to step to the right and we're afraid to step to the left because if we do, we might fail. That holds us back. That limits us from everything that we're capable of doing. The only jobs I've ever been interested in doing are jobs for which I have no qualifications. That's why they're fascinating cuz I've got no experience. I don't wanna do the thing I've done 15 times already. Like that's kind of boring. But we avoid it because we think that everybody who is ahead of us on the ladder knows what they're doing all the time. And what I know now from my end of the tunnel is that none of us know what we're doing ever. And we're all just making it up as we go along. So you know, that to me would've been really liberating to know when I was, when I was younger. So, One of the things that I learned from my son actually, is this thing called the Side Quest, which I wrote about in Limitless. I am not a video game player, but my son is a video game player. So anybody, any of your listeners who are video game players will recognize the term side quest. The idea is, if you are playing a game and the goal of the game is to go to the castle, slay the dragon, and save the princess, then you need a horse. You need potions. You need a sword, right? You need all the things that you need to be able to get to the castle, slay the dragon, and save the princess. But if you're playing the game with a friend and your friend is still doing the dishes, and he hasn't met you online yet to play the game, what are you gonna do? You're sitting there waiting. So there are things that you can do. You're a farmer. You can grow your wheat. You can till your wheat. You can cut your wheat, you can take it to the market. You could sell it for the wheat. You can get some money from the money. You can buy the potions, and the sword, and the horse, right? So that by the time your friend gets online, you can go to the castle, slay the dragon and save the princess. So there are all sorts of things that we can be doing right now in that space in between what we're qualified to do and what we really wanna do before we make the move to do the thing. So if you're somebody who's like, God, you know, I'm in this one area, but I wanna be in a different area, there is time in your day. Don't tell me there's not. There's time in your day where you can listen to podcasts like this. You can watch Ted Talks, you can read books, you can have mentoring conversations, right? There are things that you can do so that you can amass knowledge and network and understanding and nuance so that, and make yourself lucky, right? By putting yourself in the deal flow, creating chance opportunities, so that when opportunities arise in the area for which you really seemingly have no qualifications, there are people who have watched you do the work, who have met with you, who see what you care about, who see what you're capable of, who don't just know what your past is, but see your potential that will put you forward for those opportunities and vouch for you in a way that will allow you to walk in the door, maybe not with as full of a backpack as you need, but with enough momentum that you can get to where you're going to.
Carrie:Yeah. So I definitely wanna touch on your most recent book, cuz you're still not quite done with press and everything for that, right? That is called Wonder Hell.
LGO:Yeah. I've got a couple more weeks of book launch on that and then I'm going to slither onto an airplane and pass out for a family vacation.
Carrie:Yeah. Well deserved. Well, if people Google WonderHell, it is not gonna be hard to find. It's not hard to find. It's everywhere. Which is incredible. Congratulations.
LGO:Thank you.
Carrie:Can you just tell us a little bit about what Wonder Hell is and how you got to form this term and talk about it and what this has meant for you in this part of your career and perhaps a message that you have for people who are earlier in their career as they will potentially approach this space later on?
LGO:You know, it's funny, I, I think that most people who are firmly grounded in Wonder Hell probably have a few more years of experience in them. But I think that as I've been out on the circuit, a lot of younger people come up to me and they're like, yes, I'm in wonder Hell too. So what is Wonder hell? Which, which just surprised me. Right? It surprised me cause it wasn't Yeah. What I was expecting. So, when you've accomplished something you didn't quite think you can accomplish, like, you know, maybe you did a presentation or you did a big report or for me, like I sold a company, right? It is amazing. But also maybe you ran your first mile or your first 5k. Maybe you got an a on a test in a class that you didn't think was your strong suit. Maybe you presented in front of a class that you were afraid to do it and suddenly you were like, that felt pretty good. I wanna do more of that. Like, that's amazing. It's exciting, it's humbling. It's wonderful. But also now that I see myself doing more of it, maybe I wanna run a 10 K, maybe I wanna present in front of the whole school, right? Like, yeah. In these moments when you see this bigger version of yourself, it's also anxiety provoking and stressful and uncertain, and you're full of doubt and, and, and fear and imposter syndrome and envy and exhaustion and burnout. It's wonderful, but it's also hell and wonder. Hell is the space in your psyche where the burden of your potential walks in and goes, Hey, there, what you got for me? Are you going to live into this newfound you this bigger version of you that you didn't even know existed last week, last month, last year? Are you gonna let it pass you by? And when I found myself in that space, I was like, well, I don't wanna let it pass me by. What am I gonna do with it? I also don't wanna be consumed by it. Right? Like, I don't want to, to to serve fall prey to the hustle porn of like, you, you gotta do it all. So this, this, this experience of wonder hell was where I found myself. And because of the weird nature of my job, I often found myself in the green room with Olympic medalists and startup unicorns and glass ceiling shatters first of type people. So I called a lot of them and I'm like, what do I do now? Like, how did you find your way out of it? And what I learned was that there's no way out of it. Like everyone at every age and at every stage of their career struggles with the same uncertainty and doubt and fear and anxiety and imposter syndrome, whether they're creating their second billion dollar company. Right. How's that first sentence? Their second billion dollar company? Yeah. Or they're, you know, going down an Olympic ski slope with literally like a gold medal in their pocket from yesterday's race already. They're still feeling the same way that you and I and all of your listeners feel. So what I learned in this book was that they, instead of deciding they just had to get through these moments and survive in them. They changed the way they thought about them, which I write about over the course of 15 chapters in this book. So that they could thrive in them instead.
Carrie:Mindset can make all the difference. Right.
LGO:Mindset can make all the difference. And you know, I gave this as a talk, TEDx Reno earlier last year. And that talk went live in the fall and it's got something like 1.5 million views already, which is just mind boggling because I really, I was like, this is gonna be this book for this tiny little niche of people. And it turns out everyone I talk to is like, I'm in wonder hell too. And I think that's the trick is that every one of us, every single day are in between who we were yesterday and who we just realized we can become tomorrow.
Carrie:Mm. Yeah. Wow. Well, looking back on your journey, you've given so much great advice and such interesting perspective throughout our conversation, but is there any other advice that you have for students particularly on this podcast, we really like to encourage those who just don't know what they wanna do with their life. Maybe they're holding off on college or they're attending something locally to help kind of experiment and figure out what they wanna do. Or maybe they're in the middle of something and now they suddenly realize it's not what they wanna do. Like when you got to law school. Mm-hmm. So do you have some advice for students of potentially, maybe it is mindset, in addition to some of these tools you've mentioned, but some kind of big picture life advice for moving forward from that space?
LGO:Yeah, I mean, I would go back to that quote from Eleanor Roosevelt, right? We'd worry much less about what other people thought about us if we realized how seldom they did. For me, that quote was very liberating cuz it meant that I could. Make a lot of mistakes in private before anyone really actually noticed or cared what I did. I think that life is very, very long. We have the opportunity to make a lot of different choices in our lives. As I mentioned, I'm on my fourth career now, and nobody from the outside would look at and be like, she's a failure, right? But there were definitely moments in between some of those careers where I was like, I am a failure. Like this is not working. But we get to tell our own stories. We get to show what we wanna show on social media, right? We get to write our own resumes, we get to write our own bio. What I would say is that everything that you have done up till now will be useful to you. You just don't quite know how it will be useful. So, I never thought I was gonna spend my days as a corporate and university keynote speaker. I never thought I'd spend my days writing books about success and happiness and all that. But what did I do for 20 years? I learned all the things that went into those books, right? So it was all useful information. The stories that I tell, like the world's worst boyfriend, I mean, I. That was definitely a mistake, right? But let me tell you, that is one of the biggest laugh lines I get in any keynote I give. Like, it makes me compelling, it makes me funny, it makes me relatable as a speaker. Like I should forget Patrick, I should reach back out to that boyfriend to be like, thank you very much. I've made a lot of money off of you. Right? So you, like every mistake I've ever made in my life, I've been able to use for material later on. So I don't believe that they're mistakes. I mean, unless you're like an astronaut on a space walk, like failure is not finale. It's not the end. Right. Like, yeah. For the rest of us, like it is the place from which we learn and we grow and we iterate, and we innovate, and we change. And so all of these stories, all of the mistakes, all of the left turns and right turns and U-turns, that's what makes us interesting. That's what makes us relatable to other people. That's the foundation from which we build the relationships that will carry us to whatever we're going to do next. Which, by the way, we don't know. One of the worst questions that I get asked on these podcasts that I do is like, what advice would you give your 22 year old self? And I appreciate the way you asked the question because you're basically asking what advice I give to 22 year olds now, right? But like, mm-hmm. What advice would I give my 22 year old self who's listening to a podcast on her cell phone that was recorded over the internet? None of those things existed when I was 22. So even if I knew myself and knew what I wanted, the world around me changed so much since then that I would've been wrong. So the advice that I would tell, but if you're asking me if I would give any bit of advice to any people at all young people right now, I'd say you're wrong. The advice is that you're wrong. Whatever you think you're wrong. So don't worry about it because all of the things that you're wrong about will make you so much better later.
Carrie:That's so true. Well, Laura, I could talk to you about this all day and I'm so thankful for your generosity of giving your time to talk to us today. And I also just wanna thank you for everything that you're saying that you're putting out into the world and that you've written in your books, because people need to hear it. You know, we all wanna make the contribution that we're meant to give, right? Yes. Yes. In our life. And we really want to find that consonance. So I think the more that people find resources and people that can help them do that and confirm that they're not alone. I mean, just everything that you put out there, I'm so grateful for, for myself and for students and for everybody who hears it. So, I wanna encourage everybody to, if you know anybody in any of these spaces that we've been talking about over the course of the last hour, please share Limitless with them. Please share Wonder hell with them. They're fantastic books, and thank you so much for writing them.
LGO:Well, I appreciate being on, and you know, the last thing I'll say is if people are listening and that is if you don't know, if you have a gift, that's okay. Yeah. If you think you have a gift, you may be wrong. Like, I did not know that I was gonna spend my time performing from stage in front of thousands of people, even up until seven years ago when I was like, hell no. I don't wanna do it. Right. Yeah. Like, we have no idea what life is gonna hold and you have multiple gifts inside of you.
Carrie:Absolutely. Laura, thank you so much.
LGO:Thank you, Carrie.
Do you know someone I should interview? Please DM me on Instagram@pathsinprogresspodcast and let me know who I should talk to. I would love to hear about how these stories are impacting your journey. Please follow Paths in Progress wherever you download your podcasts and leave a review to let me know what you think. You can also follow us on Facebook and LinkedIn at Paths in Progress Podcast. Our music is by John Grimmett and the artwork is by Edgar Alanis. Thanks again for joining me today.