Greg Voisen
Well, welcome back to Inside Personal Growth. For another episode of Inside Personal Growth, joining us from New York is Mark Herschberg. And Mark has a new book out, I'm going to hold it up mark, the Career Toolkit: The Essential Skills for Success that No One Taught You. And I was just commenting to Mark, what a well done book, Mark. Good day to you.

Mark Herschberg
Nice to see you too. Thank you for having me on the show.

Greg Voisen
Yeah. And I also want to mention that He's the inventor of something called Brain bump, and we were just talking about that. And you can find out more information at that, as well. And I'm going to mention his website. It's the careertoolkitbook.com. And let me let the listeners know a little bit about you mark, because you've got an interesting background for somebody to write a book on a career toolkit. Mark Hertzberg is the author of the Career Toolkit: Essential Skills for Success that No One Taught You, the creator the Brainbump app, which we just said, from tracking criminals and terrorists on the dark web to creating marketplaces and new authentication Marc systems. Mark has spent his career launching and developing new ventures at startup and fortune five hundreds in academia and over a dozen patents in his name. He's helped start the undergraduate practice opportunities program dub, MIT's career success accelerator, where he teaches annually. At MIT, he received a bachelor's in physics, a bachelor's in electrical engineering and computer science. And a master's in engineering and electrical engineering, computer science focused on cryptology at Harvard Business School Mark helped create a platform used to teach finance at prominent business schools. He also worked for many nonprofits, currently serving on the board of plant a million corals. He is one of the top ranked ballroom dancers in the country, and now lives in New York, also known for his social gatherings. And this is a good one, because it's coming up Halloween party, and is diverse cuffed cuff link collection, we'll have to see that someday. And again, for my listeners, we're going to put a link to Amazon to the career toolkit. We'll also put a link to Mark's website as well. Well, you know, my listeners probably heard that intro and they're going like, why is this guy talking about careers? Because your extensive your background is, is really quite more down the engineering road and physics road and computer science road? What compelled you to write this book on career toolkit? And what do you hope the readers are going to take away from the book.

Mark Herschberg
When I began my own career journey, I found I was very good, the technical skills, but was tripping when it came to those interpersonal skills. No one ever taught me leadership, or networking, or these other topics. And so I had to develop these skills for myself. Now, this is 20 plus years ago, we didn't have podcasts like yours back then that I could turn to is very much on my own. And as I developed these skills, I realized these apply not just to executives, but to everyone on the team. And so I began to upskill, my team, all the people who worked for me, as I was doing this, MIT had gotten feedback from companies saying, we want to see these skills, and we can't find them. Not just in engineers, not just in your students, just universally, we can't find these skills, either. So when MIT wanted to put together a program I heard about, I reached out and said, you know, I have some content? Why don't you take it, maybe it'll be helpful. I thought it would be one and done. But instead, MIT said, please help us develop more content. And please come help us teach this class. So unexpectedly, because of this issue I had found first in my own career, and then the people I hired, I got this parallel career teaching at MIT for over 20 years. And now having done that, I've been saying to MIT for years, we need to get this out. It's not just MIT students who have this challenge. It's a universal challenge. We know. We see this in surveys from companies from HR professionals. We didn't have time we the program at MIT didn't really have time to expand it. And what I thought would be just notes that I would give to our students. I thought, well take these notes, I'll share it online. I thought it'd be maybe 1020 pages of notes. Well, 20 pages became 40 became 80. And once the past 100 I said these are notes. This is a book so I inadvertently fell into doing the career We'll get Book

Greg Voisen
One, thankfully you did, because I think at other universities, and I introduced you to the gentleman at Stanford who did something very similar. And I think, when you're speaking to whether it's an engineering student, or a law student, or somebody in psychology, many of these things aren't taught, and specifically, the tools many of us are missed and what would be traditional education. It's not like the universities are saying, I know when you're in high school, you have a career counselor. Right? So the career counselor is supposed to guide you and direct you to where you might want to go as far as school additional schooling, right? And try and get scholarships and so on. Can you elaborate on what led to this kind of realization, I get that your own story was, hey, I wasn't getting the education. But this seems to be absent all across many universities, not just MIT. I talked about the gentleman at Stanford, it's just not taught.

Mark Herschberg
Right? It unfortunately, isn't. And there are historical reasons for this. At the high school level, high school is a relatively modern invention, it only goes back about 150 years in high school was needed. because prior to that, we really learned back at home, which meant on the farms. And this is sexist, but this is how the world was back then boys learned from their dads how to plant crops and hunt and do basic business that you need down on the farm and the girls learned from their mom how to cook. And so and that's all we needed, you might have sent them to elementary school for a few years for basic reading and writing. But that was it. And once we started to leave the farms and go into an industrialized workforce, we needed a certain level of education, that's where high school came in. And that's all high school needed. And if you were working on an assembly line, you didn't need to be a good networker. There's no leadership to turn Scurry. So high school was sufficient. Now the university system that goes back almost 1000 years, but the university system is run by professors, wonderful people, I work with many of them. But professors are deep experts in a specific category. So when you show up, and you say I want to be a marketer, the marketing professor say, well, we know all about the field. And we the experts have decided you need to take these introductory level classes and some middle classes, and maybe one or two senior level classes. And if you do all this, plus the university wants you to take a language of math, some other stuff, we don't care about that. But if you do all this, we the experts are going to confer upon you this degree saying you have acquired this level of knowledge in marketing. That's all the degree says. He doesn't say you're a good marketer. It certainly doesn't say you're a good employee. That's all it says. And that was sufficient circa 1950 When we were cogs in a machine, and we sat at the desk and said, yes, sir, what should I do now? Okay, boss, put something in my inbox, I'll come up with whatever marketing or accounting, whatever function I do, I put in my outbox, and I sit there and wait for what comes next. And that was fine. You just needed that technical domain knowledge back then. But once we got in the last 3040 years in the 80s, and 90s, as we start to deconstruct the office, and remove middle management, get multifunctional teams, suddenly, we need a different set of skills, and the university system has not caught up with this new demand.

Greg Voisen
Yeah, that's a really good answer for that. And I think when you take the historical perspective, you can actually see where the shortfalls were. And I know people are conferred a degree in something because they took a series of classes that the university deemed necessary, because they were accredited and watched out over by governmental bodies and so on to be able to do that, or at least accreditation authorities. But the real world knowledge today comes from being I'm just going to call it savvy, savvy and so many areas, having hutzpah being able to go out there and market yourself. And you talk about that in the interview, but you state in the book. It's always good to have a career plan. And I was just on doing a podcast about life plans. You know, and you cited Wayne Gretzky race advice about where the puck is going, you know, it's like, hey, follow the puck. In many people's cases. They don't know when it comes to their career. You know, it's like it's a bit it's up into the winds, throw it in the winds and let's see where it goes. And if I have this all land over here at XYZ company, and they kind of leave it up to fate. So Mark, you state in the book that it's always good to have a career plan. And you cited Wayne Gretzky about following the puck. And I think for many people, they've left their careers up to fate. It just kind of ends up being that way. They toss it to the wind, they end up with served XYZ company for a while they move to another company. And you see people bounce around like that, can you speak with the listeners about creating a career plan, the importance of creating the short term plan, as well as this vision for 15 to 20 years that you talked about in the book, which I doubted anyway. But I think that's a good vision to have. And I think it's important to have that focus.

Mark Herschberg
For most people, the plan is, well, I hope to get promoted to the next level. At some point, maybe in the next few years. They don't really think beyond that. Now, as an analogy, imagine the following situation. It's January 1, and the CEO comes up to you. And she says here is a big critical project. Half of the company's revenue depends on this project. I'm putting you in charge. It's due December 31. What would you do? Would you say, okay, boss, I got it. Let's set a meeting for December 31. I'll show up to your office then cross your fingers. Let's hope I get done on time. Because this sounds important. And that's it. And then you go off and see what happens by the end of the year. That would be insanity. There's no way she would accept that plan. Instead, what do we do we come up with a project plan. We say okay, here's what we're going to do if we need to be here on December 31. Where do we need to be in November? Where do we need to be in September in August? What are the checkpoints? Let's set up a monthly process. Maybe we do a check in maybe it's every other week. Whatever process you do, you start with this plan? We know you can't day one, say here's what I'm doing. November 13. No idea what you're doing, then you have a general idea where you need to be. I don't know the specifics. But the first 30 days, you should be pretty clear on what are we doing this month, okay, you're going to work on this. And she's going to check on that. And then we're going to sync up on this day, much more detailed. So we have a detailed early plan, a fuzzier, longer term plan. And very importantly, we do these check ins, because we know things will change, nothing's going to go exactly to plan. In fact, the scope of the project may even change along the way. And that's okay. As long as we can adjust our plan. Well, no, we're not

Greg Voisen
going to do a Gantt chart of that. But, you know, we I guess we I guess we could do a Gantt chart of our life.

Mark Herschberg
But here's the important thing, if you would not tackle that one year project, that's half the company's revenue without doing a project plan. Why do you think you can handle a 20 year project? That's 100% of your revenue without such a plan? Insanity. So we want this plan and the key what trips people up is they say, how do I know what I'm doing in seven years? Well, you know about as well as what you're doing in November on this project. It's a placeholder, don't worry about getting the details, right? The important thing is that you want to set a plan more specific, upfront, fuzzier, further out, you have that goal, what's the point of this project? What's that long term vision, your career, you want that set, and then you were fine if you go, so here's a simple thing you can do right now. I'm going to have you pause the podcast for a moment, but you have to come back and pause the podcast, pull out your cell phone and create a calendar event that says think about my career, and set that as a recurring meeting every six months. So now that you've done that, you're back with us listening to the rest of the podcast, you now have a recurring calendar event every six months, which means you have that check in just like on our projects. We have the monthly status meeting, you know, every six months, you're gonna sit down say, Where am I on my career plan, and what adjustments do I need to make?

Greg Voisen
You put a prompt You know, it's interesting for all the Freelancers out there, right. So when you talk about career plan, because in these last 30 years with the advent of the internet, the ability have to be able to take little snippets of projects and many projects, which a lot of programmers do a lot of people, do. We all experience this. What advice do you have for them, as far as this career toolkit because, you know, it can be feast or famine. And they're really their biggest challenges marketing themselves.

Mark Herschberg
I hear often from freelancers, as well as entrepreneurs, well, I don't need a career plan. This is my career, there's no promotions, there's no ladder, what do I need to plan for. But the career plan is not just about getting bigger titles, it is about growth. And at certain companies, that growth is recognized through promotions and titles. But even those of us who say I will have this title for the next 20 years for the rest of my career, because you're a freelancer, or a founder or an entrepreneur, you still want to develop these other skills. In the book, we talked about 10 skills, skills, like networking, all of us, no matter where we are in our career, can get better at networking. And so in your career plan, you might say, over the next six months or two years, I'm going to focus on being better at networking. You might say, I want to get better at marketing, not because you're a marketer. No, maybe if you're a freelancer, you want to market yourself. It may be you're even an employee, but you want to market yourself as a brand. Get your name out there get better recognition of your personal brand, bear unknown. So you may put in skills into your career plan. Where do I want to be skill wise? How do I want to develop and grow and that is part of your career plan.

Greg Voisen
That's a, that's great advice. Because there are a lot of freelancers that listen to the show, I can be assured you. And most of them probably feel all over the place, right? In other words, it's I'm vying for this and vying for that I'm trying to do this, I'm trying to do that. And that is kind of the life as you said, defined as an entrepreneur. Now in the chapter working in effectively discuss the issues of corporate politics for those that end up in corporate America, and survival of the savvy and you had this chart in there, which really intrigued me there was a kind of a compare and contrast, a bit about corporate politics a difference between what you call survival of the savvy between the power of ideas, style versus the power of personal style. Can you speak with the listeners a little bit about that chart, the differences and how that can benefit them? On, you know, overall, because it's your chapters on working effectively, it's like playing the politics.

Mark Herschberg
And that section, specifically my book, of course, I've been studying this learning this talking with experts for years, that particular section, corporate politics was heavily influenced by the book, survival, the savvy, and I reached out to the authors and said, I'm gonna cite you heavily and got their permission. And they have the best model I have seen for corporate politics. We often think of politics as just bad corporate politics is bad. You don't want to play politics. But here's the thing. corporate politics is like regular politics. Now, regular politics, if we didn't have it, we'd be in trouble. We do need to elect officials. And it's not inherently bad. It just seems to attract bad people who do politics badly and abuse things. Yeah. But here's the other key point, you can say, well, I don't like the politics of my country, I'm not going to participate, I'm not going to vote, I'm not going to do anything. And that's your choice. But that doesn't mean you're not impacted by it. You can choose not to vote, but votes will happen, decisions will be made, your life will be affected. And the same thing is true in corporate America. Now, politics doesn't have to be bad. And we'll talk about that in a moment. But if you say, Well, I don't want to participate. That's your choice. But other people will, decisions will be made and your career will be affected. Now, here's the thing. And this comes from the authors of survival of the savvy, which is a fantastic book. They talk about this political spectrum. And you have people on one side versus the other. On one side, you have more power of ideas. That's where I come from. I'm an engineer. And people on this side say, well, good work speaks for itself, just do the job. And that's it. And if we all do a good job, we'll see who does the better job and those people get promoted. On the other side of the spectrum. It's the power of people, and it's more relationship oriented. Now, we tend to think of that as being out, if you go to the extreme on either side, it's problematic. And the extreme people on the relationship side, those are the ones we hate in corporate politics. But here's a simple example of how it's not so bad. I have large teams, I have a lot of projects, I'm juggling, I don't have time to always get in all the details, all the decisions. So imagine two people come to me, Sheila, and Bob, and they come to me and they say, Mark, we each have an idea for how we should tackle this project. That's just one of many I'm responsible for. And I know their backgrounds. I know that Sheila is just good and reliable, solid, not super exciting her solutions. But if she says it's two months, it will be two months. And then there's Bob and Bob is a genius. He has these amazing solutions that can wow the customer. But we can also guess swinging a miss Bob can be off by 100% on a timeline Bhargava thing that's just way too complicated. So I'm thinking they're both giving me these plans, I don't have time to get into the details, based on my relationships with them how well I know them, I might pick Sheila's options and say, I know this needs to be done on time. Or I picked Bob's because I know we can take that chance. And now making the judgment less on I've read every detail and analyzed it. And more on I don't have time. So I'm trusting what I know about you the person. And that comes in maybe not so extreme that comes into a lot of the decisions we make. Now, it's bad when I say well, I just like Bob better than Sheila. So I'm always picking his solution. That's where we see it done badly. But politics and relationships do have a place in the office when used appropriately.

Greg Voisen
Well, that's a good example. And I think, as the CEO, they're coming to you or whatever position you're holding, you know, you're using a large degree of intuition. And I'm going to say that because most people Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, they'll all tell you that intuition is a huge factor in who you chose. Also, as you said, their personal style and the way in which they work. And as you said, you know, Bob could have been way off. But you were willing to take that risk, because you needed to hit one out of the park, maybe you would maybe you wouldn't. You know, you have a chapter devoted to interviewing now for all those people that are following a traditional career path. Interviewing is a big thing. And it's even a big thing, I think, for people who are entrepreneurs, because in many cases, they're interviewing clients. Okay, people prospective clients, they're prospecting. And all the listeners have heard that the job is secured. And you win over your competition when you do a good interview, and I think this applies as much because we're humans, Daniel Pink said, all humans are always selling. Okay. And we are, can you give our listeners some sound practical advice on interviewing in particular, because it is a big area.

Mark Herschberg
And I'll note, my book is a little different than others. There's lots of books that say interviewing. And here's how to answer the question, you know, what's your favorite fruit? What are your three weaknesses, things like that. But I look at not just from the candidate side, but also the interview errs side. Because so many of us in our jobs have to interview other people, whether we're hiring them for teams, or as you point out, you're interviewing a potential client, and you need to know how to assess them. And that's an important skill we never talk about. So it's one we want to learn and learning that makes you more effective on the other side of the table. So now here's how we need to recognize it is sales. As you point out, as Daniel Pink points out, we are selling ourselves. And by the way, as a candidate, I am selling myself as a solution to your problem. As a company, you are selling this opportunity. To me as someone who can buy different options, I can buy a job over here, I can buy a job with your competitor, which job don't want to purchase so everyone is selling. And I recommend there's a little side on what we're talking about. If you are on an HR team, or if you are someone who puts out job postings. Sit down with your marketing team. And ask them to use marketing techniques to make your job posting better because you are selling and you've probably have no training in how to do that. Now as a candidate, what you want to do is really understand the parts of the job that are not listed. Unfortunately, everyone suffers from the streetlamp effect we focus on what is obvious. We focus on X years of experience with this and knowledge of why that's very easy to measure. Do you have five years experience doing this? Yes or no? I can see Do it on your resume. But there's all sorts of other traits. And if you're a hiring manager, you should think explicitly about these. And if you're a candidate, try to find out what these are, and sell into that. So let's take the example of Sheila and Bob. Sheila is that stable, reliable person who hits her numbers? Not very exciting. Bob's that genius guy. And I might want both types of people on my team. And maybe I've got five Sheila's, and I need a bob. So for the same title, I've got six people same title five of them are Sheila's, but I need that person who's a little more genius and chaotic, and out there. That might not be clear in the job description. So you want to be what do I want? What type of person style characteristics be explicit when you're defining the job, and as a candidate, understand what that is, and sell yourself into what they're not telling you?

Greg Voisen
Yeah, looking for the hidden factors. And I think it's important because there's so much as the iceberg is above water, there's so much more below the water. And I think it's really important that people bring that up and make it visual, make it out there, right, because it's invisible. And we talk about that invisible side, many cases. And, you know, in your book, you were talking about the differences between leadership and management. And you also talk about the management process. You know, one of the big things that everybody runs into, besides you talking about the four roles of management, I'd like you to address meetings, because you talk about making effective meetings, and every one of my listeners out there today runs into this. We see, I don't know if there's a statistic out there somewhere, but the millions of hours that are spent in meetings, and how many of us have walked away from some kind of meeting and God, God, why did I even go to that? And I just, I don't even know what I got from it. You didn't take any notes. You heard somebody talk, you were there for an hour. And I can tell you in my career, I've been into so many non productive meetings that I can't see straight. What would you what advice, would you because I think this is a big topic.

Mark Herschberg
There are three basic types of meetings. That's it, just three, I think of them this is my physics background is unit vectors, you can combine them, you can do more than one of these in a meeting. But there's three basic things that you would do in a meeting. The first is broadcasting information, I need to tell all of you this information, think of the company town halls, or an annual shareholders meeting where you just provide an update one, or a few people are providing an update to men. That's the first type. The second is, and that's one to n is how I defined it. The second is an end to end meeting. And this we see commonly with for example, a weekly status report. Okay, the five of us were on a project team, we're all gonna get together go around the table, each of us give an update. And we're all going to take roughly 1/5 of the meeting, to say, here's what's going on, here's what I'm working on. Here's my blockers, right, and we just go around the table. Now we've all informed each other. And then the last type of meeting is a decision meaning we need to decide on the budget, approve it or not, we need to make plans for the company holiday party, we need to come up with a hiring strategy, whatever it is, it's a decision where decision gets made and how people can move forward. Those are the only three things you do and immediate. Now certainly we can combine them. We might have our weekly status meeting, everyone come in, give you a report. And then we know we have some open issues and let's decide. But we want to be very clear each of the meetings on our calendars. What is it for? Is it an update of one person sharing with a lot? Is it a peer to peer update? Or is your decision and it's fine if it's multiple things, but you're clear. First, we're going to share updates, then we'll make a decision. And fortunately, what happens is we all show up for one purpose. But then someone starts talking about something else and our drinks and purpose and are we making a decision or you're trying to keep us updated or just talking because you'd like to talk and that's where we get lost. So by being very clear, each meeting or part of the meeting, which of those three are we trying to do? And if it's sharing information, who is sharing what information with whom for what purpose? And if it's a decision, what is the decision that needs to be made and are the people in the room the right people make that decision? have a meeting, we're not missing someone who should be part of it. And likewise, we're not having people in the meeting, wasting their time because they don't need to be part of it. And once we think of the world this way, our meetings can get much more explicit.

Greg Voisen
Well, it's it that is really good to have defined it that way. Because I don't think that many people really are looking at meetings, how you just explained it. And they don't often know why they're coming or what they're coming for. Or if they do, it's not clear what it is. And I think if they were a lot clearer and more concise and had an action plan, or an end goal for the meeting, it would be much more effective. And I see so many ineffective meetings. And now, not only that, we have the advent of you know, just what we're using right here. I mean, looking at or using Zoom, and, and meats, and teams. And these meetings are just crazy prolific, it's all over because people can now say, oh, yeah, we're gonna do a zoom meeting at three o'clock. And, you know, here's what we're we're going to meet about. So take Mark's advice, that's a good bit of advice for career because if you are in a position, you want to be really good about holding meetings. Now, you often say is often said that poor, it's often said that poor communications are the crux of most problems within organizations. And I can adhere to that, because that's when problems occur. It's the first time they heard it was a miscommunication, somebody didn't hear somebody, or they didn't repeat themselves, or they didn't effectively communicate. How do we hone the skills of being a more understanding listener and more compassionate communicator about what it is that we're trying to get across, so that we can be more effective in our communications?

Mark Herschberg
Communication is a very broad area in ways we can get into it and be more effective. What I get into in the book is really fundamental and foundational to any type of communicating, whether you and I are meeting one on one or larger meeting, or public speaking, or an email you're sending, or even a book you're writing. This applies to all types of communication. And it comes down to understanding the different mental models that we all carry with us. And putting things in a language and a framework that your audience can understand. It's obviously easy when there's one person and I know your style, and I know how you think, and I can orient my communication to match your style. When I have a larger audience, or when I'm speaking here, I've got an unknown audience. I don't know everyone, and there's just gonna be a large diversity of thinking modes, I need to use different types of models. I need to speak in different ways. And actually, you see good politicians do this, where they'll talk about a problem or solution in different ways. They'll do personal connections. They'll do a process. They'll give data and facts, and they're just trying to resonate with different people in different ways.

Greg Voisen
Yeah, it's a really good point. And I think, when you're communicating, especially if you're communicating, to inspire and inform, it's important to use stories. And I think stories become a much which is left out of the picture. And it's so important that it's not left out of it. Because we all learn by story, great storytellers. And I think great storytellers are great effective communicators.

Mark Herschberg
Yeah. Well, I'll give you an example. I am not a story person. When someone wants to pitch me and they start out with, here's a story. You've lost me, I want to just get into problem definition solution, go for it. That's my style. And so someone pitching me who can figure that out, can now if they don't know what they start with the story and I've tuned you out, or they can go right into my style. And I'm gonna be more engaged in the conversation. But certainly, stories do apply to many people. And that's why we use it because when you go into a broad audience, you know, that's going to engage many people. But I always look mark

Greg Voisen
at the, at the hero's journey story, which is Joseph Campbell, and I look at how many movies we watch as individuals, whether they're a Disney movie, or it's something on Netflix, or whatever it might be. In most cases, stories, communicate, and even documentaries. I see how documentaries are actually put together and pieced. I just watched the one about the Sacklers right, it was called painkillers. And it was a story which was telling the bad Back end of how oxy cotton where it got where it was. But in the end, I remembered almost everything that went on. In, I'm not going to say an extreme detail, but in the main key points of how that company went from where it was to where it got to, and the techniques that it used in the process. And I think if you if you use media like that, to tell a story, it can be quite effective. Now, you

Mark Herschberg
note, by the way, for anyone who wants to get better at storytelling, my friend Charles Vogel has a fantastic book called The art of storytelling. I love

Greg Voisen
to have him on the show, you can recommend.

Mark Herschberg
And he breaks down how to do it, and how you can create such stories, in your conversations in your meetings, your professional and personal work. Well, I

Greg Voisen
do know, I do know CEOs of companies not to get off on this story. They actually most of them are not very good at telling stories. So I'll actually go get counseling, advice, coaching on how to tell stories. And I think too many people they relate to it, because they're bombarded by it in the media, meaning the way that we see things positioned. But you know, you have an appendix in your book, and you call it career questions. And I think this might be some of the most valuable content in the book. And not that all the stuff that was preceded it wasn't? What are some of the questions that you'd want our listeners as it that they asked themselves, about their career goals that you put in that appendix? Because I think this sets the stage for them, defining their career plan, right, and looking at their life and what they want to become. I mean, I remember, in grade school, they always used to ask us, you know, what do you want to be, and people would say, I want to be a fireman, I want to be a doctor, I want to be a teacher, I want to be a whatever. And in reality, we know in many cases that didn't happen. And we know in a lot of cases, maybe it did happen. But I think if you're at this stage in your life, Mark, these career questions in your appendix are so so valuable. Can you comment on them?

Mark Herschberg
Sure. And I'll first note, you can find these questions for free on the website at the Career toolkit. book.com. resources. Yes, they. The questions, were there, I hope you buy the book, I think there's value there. But if you don't want to buy the book, take those questions for free. They're also all in the brain bump app, again, completely free. So the questions, these are questions to help you plan because you're right, so many people do the binary. Do you want to be a firefighter? Yes or no. That's not how we should think we should think about the components of our job. And in fact, you've mentioned earlier in the show life plans, we want to think about our lives. Because as you think about your career, you need to think about your life. So your job fits into the life that you want. Instead of trying to fit a career or create a life around the career you have to really start with our life plan. And these are questions like, Where do you want to live? Do you want to be an oceanographer, North Dakota is not a great place for you to finance and you want to be top of the hill finance, you probably need to be in New York, London, or certain other major cities. So we have family, how much time do you want to spend with your family? We know there are jobs that are 60 7080 hours a week. Some people love them. But if you also want to be there for every little league game, that's probably not going to be a match. Do you want to have a well defined nine to five job? Do you want a job with flexible hours? Do you want to be working with computers working with other people, part of a team, a person on your own? These are the questions we want to ask. So you notice I haven't said do you want to be a doctor? Yes, no. It's different parts. And then you say, Well, I want a job that works with computers. I set my own hours. And I'm not in an office I'm actually in the field and traveling a lot. Okay, given this now we want to go out and talk to people in here. What type of job might let me do this and make some type of technical sales consultant meets those needs to determine that the elements that you want, and then seek the job that fits those elements.

Greg Voisen
Why do you think that? For most people, the discipline required to go through the questions and develop the plan is most like for a lot of people I think pulling teeth, meaning it's painful. And is it because you think they don't want to look at things? They don't want to create the discipline? Because I can tell you in the over 1100 interviews that I've done, there's many people that lay out foundations to do a plan. The question is, it's a small minority, usually, that usually spend the time to do the plan itself. Would you have any insights as an engineer, physicist, computer scientists on why that is, and psychologically what could be bumped? To actually make the change?

Mark Herschberg
I think there are two reasons as to why you say brain bump for both reasons. First, we haven't been trained to do it. And whenever we're starting something new, it seems hard and complex. I think about a podcast, you do this all the time, you know how to do a podcast, but the first time before you do an episode, thinking, oh, there's all these things I have to do, I can feel a little more intimidating, a little overwhelming, right? So there's a lack of experience and training doing it. But then there's also that uncertainty. The again, where am I going to be in five years? I don't even know what I'm having for lunch tomorrow. How do I know if I want to live in New York or San Francisco or when I want kids? Now, some of those questions when you're getting married, you should probably ask some of those questions. remarkably few people do even at that point. And so we we have this uncertainty and uncertainty is okay. It's okay to say maybe this or maybe that. Remember, the plan you create is not set in stone. But because we're not used to as humans, we don't like uncertainty. It's hard to deal with this. And in fact, this is why these questions are not only available for free on the website, they're in the brain bump app. And so what you can do is you have the app, one of the modes that the app offers, and the app is completely free. It has the equivalent of a daily affirmation at a time you set. So you get the knowledge or the question what's relevant to you. So for example, you can say I want the career planning questions. And I might get them, let's say, eight o'clock at night, after I've come home from work. I've had my dinner, I'm now at a place I can relax. Each day, I want to get one of those questions to pop up. And I'll think about for five or 10 minutes, I might not have the complete answer. But I'll just start to think about a different question. And each time you start to think about, and now you've done this, for weeks on end, you start to form where you might want to go and ruling things out. So

Greg Voisen
I think the brain bump is your prompt, and you know it, we need to be reminded, I'm not saying people are lazy, what I'm saying we're inherently postpone many things that we need to do. It's not a matter of being lazy. It's a matter of not wanting to address it. In lieu of choosing something else that we think is more valuable in our life, like maybe reading that book, or playing a video game or watching a television show or whatever. But the reality is, here's Mark's book, what should be important to most people, and they get it straight in the career toolkit is really, if you want to manifest the life that you like to live, you need to be thinking about the career questions, no matter how you do it, if you do it through the brain bump, or you do it by reading the questions in the appendix, or you go to his resources out there, they're okay, I'd highly recommend getting the book, we're going to put a link to Amazon on that. Mark, you've been extremely insightful for our listeners about you know how to develop a plan the steps to take the interviewing process. Even the other book survival of the savvy which we mentioned in there, the process we might want to do. I think this has been a really, really valuable podcast and one where people have some takeaways from this, especially all the things that you've mentioned so far. And I want to thank you for being on inside personal growth, and spending some time with the listeners. And again, for all of my listeners, just go to and I'm going to cite the website. Again, it is the career Toolkit book.com. There, as Mark said, is a resource section. There's also the media section, a blog section, you can contact mark, and if you want we're also going to put a link to the brain bump app in our blog entry as well. So you can get those questions through there. Mark, thanks for being on the show. Thanks for your wisdom and advice as somebody who's taught This two people at MIT for years and now turned it into a course I think it's wonderful. Thank you.

Mark Herschberg
Thanks for having me on the show.