Ep513 - Mike Steib | New Year, New You: Finding Your Purpose
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Welcome to the Talks at Google podcast, where great minds meet. I'm Kyle, bringing you this week's episode with XO Group CEO Mike Stibe. Talks at Google brings the world's most influential thinkers, creators, makers, and doers all to one place. Every episode is taken from a video that can be seen at youtube.com slash talks at Google.

Jumpstart your new year with a dynamic, action-oriented, inspirational conversation with Mike Stibe, who is now CEO of Xgroup, now known as The Knot Worldwide. During his time at Google, Mike created the Career Manifesto Google Doc for his team.

This talk quickly went viral, inspiring many Googlers and young professionals beyond Google's walls. In this podcast, Mike brings the career manifesto to life through an engaging, insightful talk geared towards early professionals who want to take control of their career path and make the most meaningful impact in their jobs in order to lead a more fulfilling life. Originally published in April of 2017, here is Mike Stibe, New Year, New You, Finding Your Purpose.

Thank you so much for being here. It's so awesome to have you back at Google And we're psyched to just hear what you have to say. Thank you, Jesse. I'm thrilled to be back. You guys hear me. Okay? For anyone who's watching the video. I'm told this room seats 900. It's almost full. This is really this is great So quickly

I'm not licensed to do this, so first is probably a disclaimer, but Kate and Jesse invited me to come speak at an offsite here four or five or six months ago. And I've heard from a number of folks since who wanted to connect, and so we came back. I'm excited to do it. I'm going to walk you through essentially today

a roadmap for thinking about your life, making a plan for your life, which I can't emphasize enough, I'm completely unqualified to do. At the same time, I have found it useful, people who are important to me have found it useful, and you might as well. We've got 60 minutes. I have more, so as folks, if you have to leave, leave any time, of course, and I'll stay after a little while. I invite questions throughout, and we're going to save time for questions at the end.

Sound good? Good plan for today? All right. First, I need two volunteers to help. Just, it's wonderful. You didn't even know what I was going to ask for. It could be anything. Just tell me why you came, what you were hoping to get out of today. So I know Jesse, and I like to listen to her advice, and I think it's always good to get an outside perspective. All right. Outside perspective advice. Anyone else? Tell me just your goal for today. I want to make sure we achieve it.

Anyone else? What would you like to get out of today? So Mike, you're going to speak again? The actual one is another one. I'm not on the cloud team. So I'm interested in talking to you about the cloud. OK. So talking about the cloud was not in the original scope of the presentation. But I'm here for you guys. So outside advice and perspective and talk about cloud. So all right. That's what we're going to do. All right.

Thank you, Kate. Thank you, Jesse, for the invitation. Thank you, Alan and Matthew, for getting this all set up. What I want to do first is a quick exercise. I'm going to ask you, close your eyes. I'm going to ask you to admit something. So Matthew, I would like you to put your hand in front of the camera. You cover the camera. And I want you to raise your hand if you are living the life and career that you dreamed you would be living. If you are on your dream life's path, raise your hand.

Good. Both of you, put your hands down. I've been there. I know exactly how you feel. All right, one more thing. Raise your hand if you are engaged or married and have childbearing years. Raise your hand. All right. Download the knot and the bump. That's what I do for a living, and I would appreciate that. So here's a...

There's a website that I want to tell you about. And I'll give a footnote to this. A friend of mine calls this discussion my self-important obsession with my own mortality. But I want you to play along. There's a website called deathclock.com. If you put some information into deathclock.com, take care of yourself, do you smoke when you're born, it'll tell you, give or take, when you're going to die. Now, it doesn't know, but it's from an actuarial table. It gives you a bet.

Might be right, it might be wrong. Mine's May 2068. All right, so we've got a deadline. And we've got-- now, I work out. I avoid Third World Airlines. But still, there's a limited amount of time. You have a limited amount of time.

You and I, we sit in this incredibly privileged position in the context of the history of the world. The vast majority of human beings who've ever lived have lived very short British lives and have spent most of their energy trying to have food, shelter, and to defend themselves. That was most people's obsessions. I have a friend who, I mean, even most of us in this room, our grandparents worked to make sure no one starved. That was the purpose of work.

And then I get to be in a room with folks like this who all were the smartest kids in their classes, went to good colleges, work at Google. Someone made a movie about what it takes to try to get a job at Google, and you have one. We're so fortunate. Our lives are such a gift. And yet, many of us, especially those who come to obscure tech talks about planning your life, feel this dissatisfaction. We feel this

thing is something is not quite right. We all have this sense that we have a limited amount of time and we have this sense that we're blessed with something, a really precious amount of time and a really precious opportunity. And we're constantly wondering if we're doing the right thing with it. Also, people like us have so many options, so many options. Headhunters call you guys, they probably call you a lot. And you're being recruited by other companies. You can really do anything. You work here, you could do anything. And there was a study done once

some weird psychologists had people walk into a store and there were four jellies on the shelf and they calculated how many jellies they bought. And then people would walk in the store and they put like 70 jellies on the shelf and they calculated how many jellies people bought. And the more jelly on the shelf, the fewer people bought. We're paralyzed by the array of choices that we have. So I'm going to walk you through a little bit about how I think about how I've thought about those choices. And some other folks have found those choices

And a way that other folks have found is useful, a useful way to think about those choices. So I'm going to skip some slides. I'm going to go back to the beginning. Any presentation that starts with the definition of a word is the worst presentation. But I'm sorry. I did this last night for you. What's important? Now, that word, there are multiple definitions. I picked one. One definition is of high status. I like this one. Of great significance or value, likely to have a profound effect on success, survival, or well-being. Important.

And put that in context, I'd ask you a question. How important are you? Now you could say, well, we're all a unique and beautiful snowflake. We're all really important. That's fair. But like Mark Zuckerberg is more important than me. I'm willing to admit that. He's very big on me. How important are you? There's an exercise that I've done and that others have found helpful that I'm going to walk you through now.

answers in a way this question. So I'll start with you. How important are you? This is you. And I'll think about the impact that your life has. Again, honest assessment of the impact that your life has. I first did this, I was like 26 years old and I had this very prestigious job at a big media company where I worked in corporate development and strategy and we met with important people and

I was very big in my britches. And a friend of mine was a kindergarten teacher and she asked me to speak at the kindergarten for employment day or jobs day. And a little girl, she was a kindergartner or a first grader, came up and said to me they had these prepared questions they had to ask you. And the first one she said, do you bring your lunch to work?

And I was like, no, that's a good idea. I spent a lot of money on lunch. I should bring my lunch to work. Thank you. And the second thing she said, she said, do you work in New York City? I said, I do. I work at Rockefeller Plaza. It's really great. Thank you for your questions. Third question, she said, is your job important? I said, well, I have a capital allocation as an important lever of the success of a corporate entity. And

And, you know, I guess the strategy stuff is sometimes it's obvious, but, you know, someone has to do these jobs and I am going to make a lot of charts. And this little girl is looking at me and then she said, I'm supposed to write yes or no. And I said no. And I had an existential crisis from a kindergartner.

And I went home and I did this thing. So I was like, what am I important? What do I do? Well, there's me. And then what things do I touch in the world? It was my family and friends. And those of you who know me know I have like six friends. So there's that. I call my parents. But I mean, this is not, OK, fine. That's nice. When I describe my work, my value over replacement player just wasn't that high. And the impact that I felt that I was having on the world wasn't that inspiring.

I did a little bit of community service stuff, but nothing where, well, if you took me out of the equation, something bad happens in the world. I did the math and I was like, geez, no wonder a little kid made me feel so bad. I'm not having a big enough impact on the world with what I would argue is a pretty precious opportunity. So it's depressing.

And I said, but this is unfair. So that exercise is unfair because I was like, you're 26, you're 36, you've got a lot of years to go. And maybe you're on the right path and you're going to have a huge impact. You just haven't yet. So I did the exercise again and said, oh, and I called it, this is the impact map. I named this for you. So the next thing, it's like, all right, imagine I become much more senior in my role. I get my boss's boss's boss's job. Then how much impact can I have? And I sort of went through it. And

These are personal judgments. There is no right answer here. It's what you think is impactful. I worked at a company whose primary KPI was the number of hours people spent on their butt watching television. So I was like, even if I get to be a lot more important to this company, I don't know that I'm necessarily having the impact that I want to have on the world. So I drew my map. And I thought through things that I could be doing. And if I'm more senior, if I had more money, if I had more time. But I sort of scoped it out. And I started coming to this conclusion. I was like, I don't know that I like

the next 15 years that are laid out for me. All right. That's what this sucks. I did it again. I did a total zero-base my life. I was like, you're a smart young guy. You've got plenty of time ahead of you. If you can do anything, presume for the second you can do anything, how much impact could I have? And then this was a hard exercise. I literally at one point, this is a true story, I literally called NASA and asked what you have to do to be an astronaut.

And at the time, I was thinking space is so important, but there's nobody out in front really pushing new frontiers. You have to be a pilot, FYI, if any of you. This is on your list. And you sort of run the math. You're like, all right, I could do that, but that might not be the shortest distance between two points. This part of the exercise will reveal to you, I think, whether or not you're currently executing a plan that is going to get you to a place where you can have a big impact with your life.

So there was you, what you're achieving, what I was achieving then, what you might consider you're achieving today. There's you a little bit more senior, 10 years from now, running the same playbook. And then there's blank space, whatever you could do, anything. Now here I'll pause to say, on this third exercise, you have to suspend disbelief. There's this thing that nags at all of us. We're like, well, I know I'm smart. I know I did well in school, but

I mean, I don't know that I could fill in the blank. Found a company, run a big company, run for office, write a book, whatever your thing is. I don't know. There are people who do that. I'm not that person. And I've had the pleasure of meeting all those people on the other side of it. They're no smarter than you. They don't know anything that you don't know. There are two categories of people who have a job that you can't have.

Like, super, super star musicians and super, super star athletes. I mean, it's just like, I'm not big enough to be a linebacker for the Giants. So that one's out. But if my life's dream was to work in baseball operations for the Yankees at a very senior level, of course I or you or any of us could have that job. If my life's dream was to run a nonprofit that has an impact on the developing world, of course any of us could have that job. So you have to suspend your disbelief and think about what you could be doing.

And then you should ask yourself which one you like best. This exercise doesn't presuppose that the purpose of your life is to maximize your impact. The purpose of this exercise is to think about what it could be and then ask yourself what you like. Someone who worked for me many years ago said to me in a review, you know, Mike, I don't live to work. I work to live. I was like, that's fair. You're allowed to say that. You're allowed to choose the first chart. There's no judgments here. But you should know which one you want.

Don't say, well, I don't really want all that when you really do because you're afraid to try. That's exercise number one. Completely unhelpful. All this does is force an existential crisis. So hopefully, some people are nodding their heads. Hopefully I've caused a couple few existential crises. Then the second part of the exercise is where you start to define, well, so what should I do about that? Mike, the last thing you said is I could be anything from an astronaut to an entrepreneur to a politician. So which one? And we think about...

designing a product. And the way that you design a product is you have certain things that the product has to do and certain things that you would like it to do and you work really hard to maximize all the things you'd like it to do and not sacrifice any of the things that it has to do. If we were designing an iPod, it's too late, but if you were designing an iPod, you'd say it has to play at least a thousand songs, it has to last at least 12 hours, it has to fit in your pocket, everything else is a bonus. And then you'd start trying to make the best product within those constraints. So now we've sort of opened up the

We've opened up the landscape. We've zero-based how we think about our life. Now we start to say, "Okay, well, what if I can do anything and have a big impact, what do I want to do?" And here I did a very simple exercise. Make a list of things that you love to do, things that you hate to do, and things that you cannot live without. So on the last chart, I very well may have concluded that the most impactful thing I could do, I once studied the impact that you can have through nonprofits, and one of the highest ROI

The highest ROI you can get, nonprofit work, the time I did the research, is distributing mosquito nets in the developing world. The impact that it can have on malaria and human health is significant. That doesn't mean that I necessarily have to make that my job next because when you make this list, I really hate travel and hot places and mosquitoes. So that one just might not be the right one for me. There was other stuff on the list that can be really impactful.

that I can do that I also can really enjoy. So what do you hate doing? These things change at different parts of your life. I have two young kids and there are jobs out there that are just 220 days a year on an airplane or a hotel. I won't do it. That's a design constraint on my life. Travel some during the quarter, but I can't live on the road. I'll miss what's going on

at home. It's a personal choice. You fill this whole thing in. And you have to do it really honestly. You have to be honest with yourself. And I'll use one example where we never are. And again, another really personal question. But it's money. How much money do you need to be happy? Well, we've all been trained to answer that question, right? We've been trained by like Shel Silverstein poems that what you're supposed to say is the money doesn't matter.

You money cannot buy happiness. I don't care about money. All right. You ever live in a sixth floor studio walk-up with two kids? It's hard. There are trade-offs and there are considerations that we have to make in all of these things. So take this one. Let's use this example. How much money does someone need? Because you get tricked on both ends. What happens is

There will be a day, a moment where you have an opportunity to choose among jobs. They may be within your company or they may be outside of your company. And here's how they always look. There's a thing that you know you want to be doing and it's really cool. It doesn't pay as much, but you can live. It's fine. You can live on it. And there's this other thing. And then they keep raising the temperature and offering you more and more and more money not to do the thing you really want to do. It's a real choice. Everyone does the same thing. Everyone takes the money.

But we never ever say, no one ever says, I'm going to sacrifice my dream to take the money. Our brains are too good at self-justification. We never ever do that. What we say is, I'll take the money now and then in two or three years, I can do anything I want. Here's what happens. Whatever money you make, you spend.

Trust me, whatever money you make, you spend. So if someone says to you, "Hey, come take a job that is inconsistent with the impact you want to have, it's inconsistent with the things you enjoy, but we'll pay you a ton of money." What will happen is you will spend it. And then you will not only be unhappy, you'll have even less flexibility in your life because now you have a house in Montauk. Which is great. You used to have a job you liked and you rented a place in Quag.

Now you have a job you hate, and you own a house in Montauk, and you have to keep the job. These personal design constraints and design considerations, you have to really fight with yourself and wrestle with each and every one of them. And then you start to come to a picture. You've started to outline some things that could be impactful, that you'd really love to do. You start to outline things that you would enjoy and things you would not enjoy.

And you start to get a sense for something like what you'd want to do. At this stage of the exercise, I could probably say, I love working with great people and leading great people. I love working in a technology-related sector. And I love to have work that impacts lots and lots and lots of users in a positive way. That's vague. You can't add an objective to your resume based on that, but I get closer. So next exercise. Oh, and the last part of that is I take, just to lay in this point,

look at the credit card statements, look at how much money we spend every month, add up how much private schools cost and the mortgage, and it adds up to this much money. And I'm like, okay, I got to make that much money. And any amount of money over that, forget it. I literally don't care. I am not going to chase more. I just need to hit a certain bid. Because if I don't hit this bid, the next best school in our district after the private school has a metal detector. So I'm going to land it right there. All right. So then

We're narrowing the field. We're designing this product that is your life. So now I'm just going to filter the results. Geography, function, industry, company size. Where do I want to live? There are essentially two choices, New York or someplace else. For me, it depends on what is important for you. But there was a period of my life where I didn't internalize this. And someone would call and say, we've got this awesome job for you running six countries in Europe.

And I am not a Europe guy, you guys. You know me. I'm not supposed to be there. But you go through this crazy, like, oh, maybe I should go to Europe and I can sell widgets to French people and things will be great. And then think of the career I could have because I can put global experience on my resume. When I leave New York to go on vacation, I'm sad. I can't wait to get home. I love New York. That's my design constraint.

I have friends who feel that way about Chicago, who feel that way about California, who will not mess with Texas. That's up to you. Other people do not have this constraint. It means you can do way more. I have friends who will pick up stakes and go anytime. But you have to know the answer for you. And the job shouldn't decide that. You should decide that. And then filter the jobs before they interrupt your day. Next is what function should you do?

And this is, you know, a lot of us, you sort of take a job coming out of business school or something and that's your function. And then you're just in it. It's in the function. You all work at a great company. They just let you switch. A lot of places it's harder.

There are basically three functions in any company. We make it so difficult. We make it so difficult. You can either make the stuff, or you can sell the stuff, or you can support the people who make the stuff or sell the stuff. Those are basically the three jobs. So which one are you going to do? Are you going to make it, are you going to sell it, or are you going to support? And then, is that marketing? Is that finance? Is that legal? You don't have to stay in the function forever. But it's really healthy once you start to know the field and say, I enjoy blank. I enjoy design. I enjoy sales.

And if you have a hard time with it, it's hard to say. It's especially hard to say when you're in the job because whatever job you're in kind of sucks today. That's life. Because the job you're in today comes with email and meetings and a form you have to fill out and an angry customer. It always looks better to be in someone else's job. So you ask yourself, what are the things that stir my animal spirits? When am I most psyched at work?

Is it when you are organizing the stuff? There are people who get endorphins when they are in spreadsheets taking chaos and turning that chaos into order, giving that order back to the team and helping that team to run better. That feels good. Have you ever seen the way the sweaters are lined up in my closet? It is like it's the closet of a psychopath. I love when the comp plan matches the behaviors you want for the team. That is fun for me. That is the thing that I get endorphins from that.

Other people, they just see the like, that a Google spreadsheet has been opened on their computer and like, ah, they don't want to do it. Some people, the thought of going on a sales call and convincing someone to take something that you want to give them makes them want to throw up. Some of us,

walk out of a meeting where we've influenced someone and we're completely energized by it. So what are those things at work? It's not, do I love the job that I currently have in finance? Do I love the job I currently have in sales? No, like every day it sucks in one way or another. But what is the essence of the thing that I love doing? Leading, influencing others, organizing the world, et cetera, et cetera. And then it helps to narrow down the functions.

Then you can ask industry. Some people have a strong opinion of this. You probably should pick. It gets harder and harder to switch over time. You guys all picked a pretty good one. I'm going to skip this. You work in a good industry. You could switch to food services if you have a passion for it, but I think you're on the right path. And then last is sort of company size and company stage. And a mistake that many people who work at big, successful companies make is that your lens for the world starts to become big, successful companies.

When I worked at Google, this was a while ago, there were only three jobs. It was Google, Facebook, and whatever was the other hot company people were talking about that's going to become the next Google or Facebook. That's all we talked about. There is this enormous range of companies of different sizes and different stages at which one could work. Now, the more enlightened among us thought that there was Google, Facebook, the place that could be the next Google or Facebook, and some startup, they called. And so there was a fourth. In between are companies with a market cap between...

$200 million and $20 billion that need really good people. And I've had friends who are like, what I really want to do is just run a big function. I'm like, you work at this one or another one, a really big company where someone might not give you a really big function. But there's another company with 1,000 employees, 5,000 employees, where the sun would rise and set on someone with your talents. This is an important consideration. And it's one that many of us miss because we're

I don't know, did anyone here ever think about working at like OpenTable or Grubhub or TripAdvisor or HomeAway? I mean, these are companies with market caps of like a billion, two billion, three billion dollars. They're so small, like Google belches three billion dollars. So to go work at a company where the whole thing is worth that, it's like, oh God.

These are really cool companies that deliver really cool services that could really use great people. To be clear, I'm not asking anybody here to go take a job like that. But I'm just saying that there's a range of company sizes. And whatever company you work at, you tend not to see the other ones. You ever like startup people or their startup people? Like, oh, my startup's getting too big. I need a new startup. OK, as long as that's not because where you sit is where you stand, you just have started to form this bias. If you really love it, then that's the right thing for you. And then there's stage.

Continuing excellence is the stage of many large companies. That can be fun. Turnaround can be a lot of fun. Take somebody's broken company and fix it. Startup can be a lot of fun. You change the paper and the copier. It's up to you. You got to decide what you like doing. I have friends in the harvest business. Everyone is no fun. They're like, okay, the investors think the business will last five more years. If we can make it last eight, we'll make a lot of money. But that's a job. It's an honorable job. It helps me keep the economy moving. You've got to make your own decisions. So,

Through that exercise, you start to narrow down, right? What are the things that could have impact? How can I be important to the world? How important do I want to be? What are the things that I enjoy or don't enjoy or things that I need to be happy? And then as I'm picking among career choices, which are the ones that feel right to me? And you start to narrow the field. So over time, I was able to narrow the field down to I really like tech.

I want a smaller company, but one that has an opportunity to have real impact. I want something that I think we can really grow. I want to be in a significant leadership position. Then you can wait for your pitch and you know when to swing because you've got a good sense for that thing that you're looking for. If you look at the careers of people who've been successful and people who haven't, generally speaking, the people who've been successful have known what they're looking for and they have a plan.

And the people who haven't, people who've done okay, tend to have a career path that has a lot of variety or no variety. They like stay in one job and one function and just wait to be elevated. Or they keep changing to try new things. But you don't see a plan. And so the next part I would suggest is once you've got a sense for what you want to do, you then come to grips with the brutal facts that you are unqualified for that thing that you want.

completely unqualified to do it today. But you have the ability and the right to expect to be in that position in some period of time. And then from here to there, you have to make a plan. The way you make a plan, here's one way you can do it. Think of the job that you really want. If mine got really specific, I say, I want to be a senior executive, a C-level executive in the tech space with consumer-facing products. Let's say I pick that one.

There are bios of senior executives in the tech space available on every one of those companies' websites. Read them. What experiences did they have? Meet with people who have these jobs. Ask them, what do you have to be good at in your job? You'd be amazed at who's willing to talk to you. Then you say, okay, those are experiences I need. Those are things I need to be good at. How do I get it? Some of them are easy. You need to know how to manage a P&L. You need to know how to read the numbers for the job I just described.

I got this, my wife was a banker. She gave me a book. It was like this thick and it was on accounting and finance. And I read this horrible book. I'd rather eat that book than read it again. But then I knew, you know, what to debit and what to credit and the difference between EBIT and EBITDA and all these things that are so confusing to someone who hasn't read the book. I read the book. You basically get it. There are other things that reading the book helps, but you really have to do it.

Managing a large team. Anyone who has a big job like the one I described manages a large team. At the time that I did this impact map exercise, I managed a team of one intern, his name was Felix. I was not qualified to manage managers on a large team and organization. Tell me about your leadership experience. Well, one time Felix wasn't doing what he should and I said, Felix, I really need you to do something different. But what you can do with any of these

is you can disambiguate, you break it down into its atomic parts, right? And say, okay, what does leading a large team entail? Being able to hire good people. Okay, break that down further, 'cause if you don't have a team, you're not allowed to hire. Knowing how to recruit and identify good talent. Okay, anyone here can participate in that. If you are an individual contributor on a team,

that hires from time to time. Ask your manager if you can help be a part of the interview process. Tell your manager, "I've just read two books on the topic." Read the books. "I think I've developed some expertise on interviewing. Can I please interview a candidate and give you my notes on the person and compare with you?" It'll take you very little bit of time. Now you're becoming someone who's developing expertise in interviewing. Next, you get a Felix and you manage that Felix well.

You may break down other elements of a leader's position. Being a good communicator. There are books on this and there are opportunities for you to demonstrate this at work. You practice these things. The worst thing that could ever happen is you get the job of your dreams and you just never put in the effort to become good at those things. You swing and miss when you finally get the chance. So this career roadmap, you break the job that you'd like to have ultimately in your life down into the things that you have to be good at and the experiences you need.

And you go and you get them. You go develop those experiences. Sometimes through books, through mentoring, through practice, through side hustle. It's up to you. Aren't we on time? Do we have any time left? I think we do. But what I want to do is the next part is a little different. So I want to pause there and take questions. Who has a question? Is this helpful? Useful? Who has a question?

How often do you find that people are just... Can you please use the microphone? It's okay. I'll just repeat the question if you say. How often do you find that people are just always striving for the grass, always being greener, seeing something better than what they currently have, when it turns out they're just looking for something else different as opposed to this specific thing? How often do you find that someone is just looking for the next thing in the grass as always greener rather than looking for the right thing? Always? All the time?

All the time. It's a great question. And it's why having a purpose and a plan is so important to your success. And I want to sort of break that question down into two parts, because one is just vague dissatisfaction as a driver of a career is not necessarily going to get you to the right place. You don't know where you're, this is obvious, right? But if you don't know where you're going, the faster you run in that direction, the more likely you are to miss it.

The second component of that question-- so have a plan. So part of the answer is if you have a plan and you're jamming to achieve that plan, you're on the right path. Second part of the question is you might have asked it to her. I might ask it to her. Hey, I'm really ambitious, so I'm always miserable because other people are more senior than me or more successful. Have you ever feel that? Somebody ever leave your team or leave the company and go somewhere else and get a better job and a better title, and you're like, oh, that person? Please.

That guy's terrible. Like there's someplace you want to be and then other people seem to be someplace else and you're not. And it makes you like crazy. So that's not healthy either. Not being ambitious is not healthy. Not having a plan is not healthy. But then always being miserable because you want to be somewhere else is not healthy too. So as you think about it, here's a good exercise to do.

Imagine the sum of all of your dreams, astronaut, Mike, whatever it is. You want to be CEO of pick a company. You want to run such and such. Just pick it. And if you wanted a ton of money, give yourself $100 million. Put it all in a pile. Put it all in a pile, on a plate. And I will give it to you. It's a trade that you have to make. I will trade you something. I will give you all the things you want. And all you have to give me back is the health of someone important to you.

or your sight, or your limbs, your relationship with your parents. Very few people would make that trade, which means you currently have, this is mathematically true, you currently have more value than all the things to which you aspire. What you have right now is worth more than all the things that you want. So it would be criminal, it would be horrible to have all of that and be miserable all the time because somebody else got a raise you didn't or a promotion you didn't.

It'd be awful to set yourself off on this journey to have impact, but all along the way to be miserable because you haven't had the impact yet. So I don't know, the balance, the trick, and it's hard to do, is to enjoy today and be driving for greater impact that you want to have in the future. A great way to do that, one man's opinion, take it for what it's worth, is just don't multitask.

If you're with your friends, turn off your phone. Yes, there's interesting stuff going on in your phone, but there's more interesting stuff going on with your friends too, and if you're half on the phone, you missed the whole thing. Yes, someone else got promoted or something's going on at work, it's stressing you out, but be in the moment that you're in now. Don't be stressing out about some stuff going on over there. That's a balance, and it's a balance. It's a great question, though. Thank you. Other questions? In the back. So as you're going through these exercises and

Identifying what you need in order to set up the filters to build a plan. What, how do you or what recommendations do you have for someone that says, I don't know. I don't know what I would want. The question is, if you're going through all this and you don't know, what should you do? This is the tyranny of choice, right? This is what's so hard. There was some experiment where they, psychologists gave, they brought a group of people and said they have a free pair of jeans. And they said to the one group, they're like,

You pick a pair of jeans. They had three jeans. It was like tighty jeans and regular jeans and baggy jeans. And everyone under 30, I guess, took the tighty jeans. They had another group come in, and they were like, we have 60 different kinds of jeans. They had every different kind that you want. And later, they asked people how happy they were with them. And the people who had fewer choices were happier. People who had more choices had all this regret over whether or not they took the right ones. So if your question is, you go through this whole exercise, and you're just paralyzed by the choice, paralyzed, give yourself a deadline.

And give yourself a method. I did a thing where I woke up every morning at 5:00 AM and I would write. I would write and write and write. I wrote a bucket list. I wrote a eulogy. I wrote the book report that I would want my granddaughter to write about me some 50 years from now. Write, write, write. All these things that I want to be true. Mike Stibb, what do you want it to say in your eulogy? Mike Stibb leaves us at 125 years old. He still has all of his hair and he's--

90 wonderful great-great-grandchildren. Whatever your thing is, what are those things that are important? The more you go through that exercise, the more clarity it gives you. And I can't emphasize this enough. Writing is really powerful. Not typing, writing. It just seems to touch a different part of your brain. And that exercise starts to bring you clarity. And then wander the earth. Tell yourself, I'm going to go talk to these 10 people who have careers, different kinds of careers that they seem to enjoy, and I'm just going to ask them, how'd you do it? What was interesting?

What did you like? Do that exercise. If you still don't know what to do, that means you're indifferent. Pick one. Pick one and stick with it and just go for it. Pick one that's like... And honestly, there is no perfect answer for you. Unless you are Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, you are supposed to play piano. Like 99.9999% of us are not supposed to do anything. So pick one.

I have a friend who's an author. And I said to him, this was a couple of years ago, I was like, this is so great. You wrote a book? You're a writer. How did you know you were a writer? And he was like, this is the stupidest question I've ever heard. You're a writer after you write a book. So you don't know you're a writer until you write a book. Then you're a writer. I'm like, no, but like a real writer. He's like, they don't do that. They don't split them into categories. There's just a writer. So if you can't pick--

I don't know, I put my email up before, just email me, I'll give you some. So, a big piece of feedback that I've heard from a lot of people is to never try to over-engineer your career. That things change, the opportunities come up, and that if you are too busy planning, you'll miss opportunities. What's your perspective on that? The question, if you didn't hear it, was I think the opposite of everything you just said. What was your name?

Matt, so Matt said, I've gotten advice that you shouldn't try to over-engineer your career because you could miss something. It's very good advice, but I might express it differently. You should be iterating this plan regularly. You should regularly be asking yourself, what kind of impact do I want to have? What kind of a career road, what career roadmap do I want to execute? As you're in the field, as you're doing in learning, you should be iterating that plan. There was some moment when a bunch of people who really wanted to work in media said,

defined it as television and missed internet, did not reboot their career plan for maybe I'll do something in the internet, much to later their dismay. So I would say you should have a plan and you should engineer it, but you should, in the same way that we develop products and put them in front of our users, you should launch early and often, you should learn from the experience, we should iterate to the next level of the product. And I think that gives you the best of both. It gives you a plan. You're not just wandering in the wilderness.

and it allows you to take new data points and incorporate them into that plan. That'd be my advice, but everybody's got to do their own thing. The chairman of LinkedIn wrote a book

which is very good and is very popular. And it basically just says, hang out with really smart, interesting people, and some good shit will happen. And he has a lot more money than me. So you pick. There are different ways to execute it. My humble advice would be have a plan and consistently edit that plan and iterate that plan as you learn more.

Elliot. Thanks. So, some of this comes down to, and I think you were alluding to it in the beginning, big fish, small pond, small fish, big pond. And so, what do you treat your general happiness to? Is there a preference to you as far as either, and then do you think there's a correlation to small pond environment allowing people to have you?

Elliot asks, "What's better, to be a big fish in a small pond or a small fish in a big pond?" And it is completely dependent upon what you enjoy. Big fish, small pond is my job now. My company has 800 employees. I make a decision and we do it. I actually remember when I first took the job, I said to my CFO, there was a company we wanted to buy. And I was like, "Okay."

I was wondering, who do we have to talk to now? And she was like, "Nobody, you're the CEO, you just buy it." I was like, "Whoa, I guess this is what I signed up for." At the same time in the job I had previously, the only way to get anything done was to build coalitions and get everybody on the same page and manage stakeholders. Some people are really good at one of those, some people are good at the other. Some enjoy one, some enjoy the other.

For me, that's essentially what determines a bigger company versus a smaller company.

I'd also comment that it's a false choice because there are people – I mean, this is a big company, right? But there's a small group working on the Google Space Elevator or whatever you guys are up to that I'm sure it doesn't feel like a big company over there, right? It's probably like 10 engineers and a product guy and a marketer just trying to launch it into space. So it's not only a company. It's sort of its team and its –

remit and it's how much that thing is the same as everything else going on at the company or how much it's unique. The more it's the same, the more your skill set has to be bureaucratic in nature and the more it's different, the more your skill set has to be getting things done in nature. Thank you, Elliot.

Can you talk more about living below your means and how this plays into the decisions you're talking about? You mentioned renting in Quag and now you own in Montauk. Can you explain a little bit more, if you live frugally, how that impacts the stock? The question was, can you talk about-- it's a good question-- living below your means and how that can create optionality. I think that creates optionality. It gives you flexibility in your career.

I have never successfully done it. And there are people who go on CNBC and they'll tell you like, the way to become a millionaire is you just stop having a latte every day at Starbucks and then over time the interest compounds and you'll be a millionaire. I've met millionaires. No one has ever said to me, I just stopped drinking lattes. And now I'm loaded. It's...

It's good to be a saver. It's good to live below your means. People who do that are better people than I am. What I have found instead is that whatever you make, you spend. And therefore, to the earlier point, I figure out what we really need at this moment in time in our family to be happy and then how much we need to sort of save for retirement and the kids' school and all that stuff. You add it up, and that's the amount of money I need to make.

And I'm painfully aware that if we make any more, you're just going to get an extra bedroom on the apartment or something. In my life, it's just going to get spent. And I also know that that extra bedroom in the apartment is not happiness. Living the career and the life with a purpose that is meaningful to me is happiness. And I also, I have friends who have successfully gone this way too. They have just said, look, we spend too much money. It's not worth it. Let's just like, let's get down to the

basics of what we need so that we can be happier. And that's fair too. I don't know that I could successfully pull that off either. It just feels to me like the spending becomes somewhat permanent. And so in a weird way, my advice is know what that number is, make it, disregard any more that you make, and understand that if you do make it and you save it, you're a really good person. But if you spend it, I feel you. I've been there. Thank you.

I'll come right back to you. Can you talk a little bit more about your roadmap as it related to the decisions you made after leaving Google? So my roadmap and the decisions I made after leaving Google.

I had a terrific job and worked with great people at Google. My job over time became more bureaucratic, which wasn't for me. And also there's a point at which you might feel in your career this sort of flattening of either what you're learning or just this sort of the trajectory of your career and the current path that you're on. And someone called me with an opportunity to be the CEO of basically something that was being built from scratch. And it checked a bunch of boxes for me.

And it was the absolute wrong one. It was a catastrophe. Catastrophe. But in doing it, I got to really for the first time in the wild be a CEO. And I absolutely loved it. And I learned a ton. And it went well. Operationally, it was working. Our issue was sort of investor relations related. But operationally, it was working. And I was like, I think I can do this job. And the next thing that presented itself was even better.

It's where and it's where I am now. So in a way, I mean this is a personal anecdote and I don't know what it's worth but I made a mistake when I made a change. But the bigger mistake would have been not making a change. Optimally I would have left for something that was a success and not a catastrophe right out of the gate and saved two years of my life. That would have been optimal. But the next best option was just forward progress. I can't emphasize how important

doing is to success. And it sounds so obvious. But I have a story about a friend of some of ours. At one point, remember when Yahoo bought Tumblr? I don't know why, he was possessed with the idea, like he started blogging about that this was a bad deal.

I was like, "Who cares?" But our friend really cared. He was blogging and blogging about how this was a bad deal for Yahoo. Then he pinged some people on Twitter. He was like, "What do you think about all the things I've been writing about? What a bad deal this is." People tweeted about it and so on. Then Bloomberg Television called him and asked if he'd come on as an expert to talk about this deal. Everyone is looking for someone who knows what they're talking about and knows what they're doing and no one does. If you just act like you do, you eventually get the shit you're after.

Forward motion is just really, it's really important. And I don't know, for whatever that's worth, that's my life. I wouldn't do it if I were someone else. Go ahead. Okay, so my question was about like sometimes you need something very specific. So I think that's...

The question was how do you think about temporary sacrifices in your design principles to move your career ahead more quickly? It's really important to know which of your design principles are constraints versus desires.

And if, so for me, a constraint is the time I need to spend with my children. So I won't, there are jobs that for two years I just won't see them, but it's only two years, but they'll never be this age again. So for me, I just, that one I won't budge on. I won't budge on it at all. There's other stuff that, you know, most people are not as psycho as I am about wanting to live in New York. Like they'll take it, but they'd also move to California for the right deal. So you just have to know which ones for you are fixed constraints and which ones are

negotiable and the fixed constraints don't even think about it like you you made a principled decision with clear eyes and then something came along and tried to get you to think differently at one point in my career I just said you know what I

I'm not going to play golf. Like I'm just not. Everyone keeps trying to pressure me to play golf. Oh, business gets done on the golf course. You have to play golf. We're going on a golf trip. No, I hate golf. I'm not doing it. It's so liberating. It's liberating. Now every time someone's like, oh, hey, we're putting this thing together. There's golf. I'm like, nope, not doing it. You've got to decide what those fixed constraints are for you. Great questions.

I love that this approach is really inward looking, but what are some good questions to ask mentors and advisors to get the best advice from them? What are the best questions to ask of mentors and advisors to get the best advice for them?

There's a book called The Finer Points of Leadership that's a good read. And there's a concept in there called the career covenant. And the career covenant is you agree with your manager that I'm going to do really good work for you and help make you as my manager successful. What I'd like from you is advice and championing my career. Would you be willing to do that with me? Any manager worth her salt will say yes.

Then, with a manager like that, you've negotiated that we're going to be talking about my career from time to time. And then you just ask anything. I ask for feedback. A great way to ask for feedback, everybody in this room, you go to the tech talks for, you're probably winning, you're probably getting good scores. Your feedback is usually you're doing a great job. Say, if I was a managing director, what would I have done differently with this project? Well, I mean...

You're not a managing director. I'm not asking you to make me a managing director. What's the difference between me and a managing director? Well, you wouldn't have asked so many annoying questions. That's fair. That's helpful. Tell me what I could have done to not ask so many annoying questions and on and on and on. So I think forcing feedback on yourself that is not just did I do a good job, help make me feel good about the job I just did, but okay, people are much better than me. What would they have done different gets you the kind of feedback that can really fuel your career.

And then I think with people who you don't know as well, people who are in other jobs, other professions, when you meet people,

Just be so vulnerable and willing for them to know that you don't know what they're talking about and keep keep keep asking them questions So you're at some like, you know, my wife makes you go to these fancy dinners and you have to meet random people This is terrible is my life. And so you're like, hey, what do you do Tom? And Tom's like, oh I work in dead capital markets for Goldman Sachs and I'm like, oh

What everyone says is like, "Oh cool, debt capital markets." "How's debt capital markets going this year?" I say, "What's debt capital markets?" Which is, it's embarrassing, right? I live in, how long have I lived in New York? How could I not know what debt capital markets is? Tell me, what is, I don't work in finance. What's debt capital markets? We create liquidities for investment grade companies. What's liquidity?

For some reason, people describe their jobs in a way that makes it sound so complicated. And when you keep asking, they finally give up and they say, we loan money to GE. And then I say, oh, that's brilliant. I said, gee, it makes a lot of money. Why would they need to borrow money? He says, honestly, these days, it's just to buy back their stock. It's financial engineering. And then I go, how does that work?

And then they explain it to you. And I'm like, what do you have to do to be good at that job? GE can borrow money from anyone. They have great credit. Why would they borrow it from you? He says, oh, it's all sales. Tell me how you went in sales. For me, it's a relationship game. I take the guys out, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I know more about the market. How do you know more about the market? It is like, anybody else have a five-year-old? I have a five-year-old. I am the five-year-old of asking you about your career. Why? Why? Why did you do that? What does that mean? What's the opposite of Apple? Da, da, da, da. Like on and on and on.

I just keep going until I really know what this person does and I can really engage them in a discussion. I've taken something from it. Or until they just like, they surrender. And one way they surrender is they go, what do you do to try to make you stop? The other is they drink their drink really fast and they're like, oh, my drink's empty. I have to go to the bar. That's all right. The people who stay with you, these are people that you're now familiar with.

Next time you see them, I'm not like, hey, Tom from debt markets, how are you? I'm like, Tom, I just heard interest rates moved. And I remember what you told me about what that means for liquidity. Are people still buying back stock? And he's like, you're not going to believe it. Nobody's buying back stock. We're at 10% of gold this year. We're getting killed. I'm having a conversation with Tom. So if you're talking to a mentor or someone in an industry that you like, just ask questions like a five-year-old. There's got to be a better way to say that. But ask questions like a five-year-old.

We've got a couple minutes left. Anyone else? The next question was time management, but people have a meeting next. So I'll pause for a second. Anybody needs to go, go. And I'll stay and answer the time management question, even if you don't stay. So we'll give it a minute. Thank you guys for coming. It was great to see you. Next page is time management. How much time you got?

I'll give you like the three minute version and then if you want to ask more, but you guys are welcome to leave as you want to leave. So you're working hard and you have obligations, you have family, some of you are in an adult kickball league, like there's just no time left. Right? So how do you also work a career plan and meet with mentors and read books on accounting and all that stuff? If you, so you have to be hyperproductive.

And if you calculate the number of hours that are already spoken for in your life, you have sleep, eight hours. You have to sleep eight hours. Don't believe anyone who tells you otherwise. You must sleep eight hours. You have to exercise an hour a day. You have to. You really should. You have to bathe. You have to eat. And if you're ambitious, you work 60 hours a week, which over seven days averages out to, you know, call it eight hours, eight and a half hours a day. You add that all up.

On an average day, blending weekends and weekdays, you have five hours of discretionary time every day. You have five hours to live. That's your time to proactively decide how you are going to spend it and what you're going to achieve with your life. The average American spends five hours a day on social media and television. And then they all say, I have no time. If...

And the bell tolls for you. For five hours, you could be doing anything you want. Anything you want. You could put more hours into your work. So you don't work 60 hours, you work 70. There have been points in my career where it's been 80. You decide when that's appropriate. If you have kids, you owe time to your kids. I love my children. Five hours every night is a lot. A lot. Two gets you there.

You have time with friends. You spend it proactively. You decide how you're going to invest those five hours. A portion of those five hours I invest in personal development almost every day, right? Reading. There's a list of things that I know I want to read and I know I want to learn.

spending time with people in the space who can give you perspective, et cetera. A proactive investment of that time. If you believe the 10,000 hour rule with five hours every day in just a few years, you could also be a concert pianist. This is up to you. Five hours is a ton of time. But most of us don't invest it proactively.

It gets invested for us. We work, get up, you're like, shit, what am I doing today? All right, you scramble. You're like, I'm not going to go to the gym now. I'll go after work. You work, somebody bothers you. And then it's six and you got to get home. And then you didn't go to the gym and you're home and you scramble with the kids and you just beat. And you're like, all right, I know I have some work to do, but I'll just like, I'll just veg out for a minute. And next thing you know, Netflix is saying to you, are you still there? Has that ever happened to you? Get a life. Of course I'm still here.

I have found that when I proactively say how I want to spend my time and then put it in my calendar, that it works. And your calendar is this really powerful operating system. You never miss a one-on-one with your manager because it's in your calendar and you go. And yet somehow we keep not going to the gym. It's in my calendar. When I read, it's in my calendar. When I get in bed, it's in my calendar. It's really weird. But it is really effective. There's this block of time on Saturday

That is my personal time, not with my family. And it's not work-related. It's investment in things I want to learn, explore, or contribute. Like, it's my time. It's 5 a.m. to about 10 a.m. That's mine. There's this block of time where it's going to be me with the kids, and I will not check an email. I cannot be bothered. I'm going to be with my kids. It's dedicated time. And it's so much more powerful when you wake up on Saturday, and you're like, all right, what are we going to do? So the most...

Passion advice I could give you on this topic is to proactively Schedule your five hours. I can also tell you And I said this in passing but like when you sleep you really are much more productive They did a an experiment people were asked to sleep six hours a night for two weeks and they performed Cognitively and physically at the same level of people who had pulled back to back all-nighters when you don't sleep you suck at everything and

And we're all ambitious and so we're looking for an extra hour and an extra hour and you take it out of sleep and it's massively destructive to your ability to be productive. So the way to do it, I said before, I literally have an alarm that goes off that tells me it's time to get in bed. And I have to plug my phone in not by my bed because if I bring my phone to the bed then I will lay in the bed with the phone for another hour.

The phone is actually over by the door next to my gym clothes. And when the alarm goes off, I get up, I get out of bed, I go, I grab the phone, and I'm right there with my gym clothes. So I know I have to go to the gym now. Like you can create these barriers or these guardrails in your life that force you to proactively and intelligently invest your time in the things that maximize your productivity. Other questions? Oh, so this was if we had enough time. Essentially...

quickly, the way to manage your to-dos is to figure out what's the goal you're trying to achieve? How much impact can this action item have? How fast can you do it? And by when is it due? And we tend to, we have a tendency to go to a meeting and some to-dos come up and they go to the top of the list. And my advice is you will never do everything on your list. So always

assess every to-do and only do the high leverage ones that you can, first the ones that you can do quickly that are due soon, and then the high leverage ones that take a long time, and match them to the amount of time that you have.

So you know like you have 15 minutes between meetings, so you come back to your desk and you open an email and it's like a 20 page PowerPoint you're supposed to read and then you read like four pages of it but then the 15 minutes are up. So then you run to the meeting and then you come back and you're like, okay, let me go to my email and you're like, oh, this PowerPoint, where was I? And you basically start over. Not matching the important task to the amount of time with which you can use to get it done is the way that most people make themselves unproductive.

It was really nice to see you guys. This was a lot of fun. So I'll put my, this is how to get in touch with me if you want. I'm more than happy to help. It was great to see you. You're all friends or friends of friends and I'm at your disposal if I can ever be useful to you. Thanks you guys. Thanks for listening. To discover more amazing content, you can always find us online at youtube.com slash talks at Google. Talk soon.