Business
Today I'm interviewing Laura Gassner Otting and she is a confidence catalyst who works with leaders, entrepreneurs and change makers to help them get unstuck and accomplish extraordinary results. Her new book "Limitless - How to Ignore Everybody, Carve Your own Path and Live Your Best Life." Limitless deputed at number two on the Washington Post's bestseller list, right under Michelle Nathaniel Schooler This is a really interesting episode, and we're really talking about growth thinking here. And I think you're going to love it. It's lovely to speak with you, Laura. WARNING — AI Transcriptions Below May Cause Grammatically Correct People Serious Stress and Lack of Sleep! Laura Gassner Otting 0:58 So it's great to be on Nat. Nathaniel Schooler 1:01 So I know you gave me this amazing title that you thought would be really, really helpful for this. Laura Gassner Otting 1:07 I think it might have been ignore everybody carve your own path and live your best life. Nathaniel Schooler 1:13 Yes, that's, that's what it is. But like, a lot of the people listening to this are going to be, you know, in organizations, they get to have to deal with people. So how do you kind of ignore everybody and do that was holding down a job. Laura Gassner Otting 1:30 So it's funny that you say that because this this, the book was originally titled:- "Purpose, How to do Work that Matters." And, you know, that's kind of a boring title. He really wants to buy a book called purpose, how to do work that matters. But we all want to feel limitless. And the way to feel limitless is to not be limited by everyone else's expectations of what success should be. So the idea behind the title of the book:- "Limitless: Ignore Everybody Carve Your Own Path, and Live Your Best Life, is that has to start by throwing out everybody else's definitions of what success should be. Now, obviously, there are people in our lives that we have to listen to. But we also get a choice about who those people might be. If if we're working in a corporation, and we don't think our boss is right about something, we might have an option to talk to somebody else, we might have an option to look for another job, you might have an option to go within the organization and find a different type of job inside of the same employment. But we have choices in our life. But even more so than that where we are today. I think it starts by asking, Who gave us these definitions of success way back, when that told us to go to the right school, pick the right trade, pick the right college, go to the right University, get the right job, you know, go to the right, you know, have the right house, have the right spouse, etc. And then we look around and we say, Well, if I checked off everyone else's boxes of success, and I have a job that, you know, on paper looks right and resume that on paper looks right? Why do I still feel like something's missing? Why am I part of the two thirds of the workforce that are disengaged in my work? And that starts by figuring out what success actually means for us? And then going towards that instead? Nathaniel Schooler 3:17 Yeah, yeah. So So really, all of that stuff is just come in, when I was growing up, my dad was like, you got to go to university, you need to get good grades, you know, and, and the pressure that you feel from that sort of idea of someone else, there is their idea, isn't it? It's not? It's not necessarily what you have to do these days to be successful, certainly, in your own eyes, right? Laura Gassner Otting 3:41 Absolutely, you know, we could be really good at being successful, as defined by other people and not feel like successes, I spent 20 years interviewing people, as in the world of executive search. So I was interviewing people for C suite positions, these are the top of their games they had on paper success, but they weren't happy. And I was, you know, as evidenced by the fact that they were sitting in m...