Joanne Lipman: The Power of Reinvention in Life and Work

[Music] [Applause] [Music]

Aloha. Al, I'm Michael Bruno Provost, here at uh, Manoa. Mahalo for joining us this evening. Uh, before I start, I want to—where are you, Robert? There you are. Wait a minute. What? You—you didn't know what I was going to say? Thank you, Robert, and and your team. I know they're all around, uh, for your amazing work in arranging not only this event but so many events through the year. Thank you very much.

So our topic this evening is reinvention—an appropriate topic, I think, for uh, Manoa at this particular time. Uh, consider it's only been a little bit more than 4 years since, in March 2020, then Governor Ige ordered a Statewide lockdown, forcing the university to reinvent the ways in which we carried out our instruction, our scholarly work, and our service in the community. Faculty who didn't even realize that that dot on the top of their screen was actually a camera—camera—suddenly found themselves face to face with students to a degree that neither teacher nor student had ever experienced before. It's striking, I think, that much of that reinvention is still with us and will almost certainly carry on as we continue to do our work in new ways, using new tools and new technologies. All of this seems to be a fundamental shift, maybe even a reinvention of the ways in which we do our work, but is it really? I'm not sure. Perhaps time will tell. In many ways, this, too, is the role of a university: to invent, to be early adopters of new technology and new knowledge, to tinker and experiment until we are better at what we do. What I'm more sure about is the role of our University in equipping our students with the knowledge, tools, and confidence that they need to be lifelong learners, with the ability to reinvent themselves. I keep looking at Joanne because I'm trying to get this right. I'm really looking forward to Jo Ann's remarks and to reading her latest book, because this book and tonight's talk come at a time of increasing public debate about the role of higher education in our society and its value to the young people and the communities that we serve. I look forward to the opportunities to make use of her work to make positive changes in the ways in which we serve our students and the people of Hawaii.

Now it's my pleasure to introduce a leader who is a fearless champion of change, our physician governor who has led us through times of great disruption and crisis with empathy and confidence, a great ambassador of Hawaii and always a great friend of this University. Please welcome Governor Josh Green.

[Applause]

Aloha. So reinvention. Well, never has there been a time, I would say, that we would have to reinvent or consider reinventing ourselves, uh, so thoroughly. I was asked to share just a couple comments about my own need for reinvention, and I'm a little self-conscious about that because we're really here, uh, to hear from an extraordinary woman leader, Joan Litman, uh, but as a preface to that, we do have to be prepared to invent and reinvent ourselves. The reinvention scenario for me: I was a regular undergrad at a really wonderful college, uh, studying anthropology and biology. It was at first a straightforward pathway. Uh, I did what most firstborn Jewish, um, sons and boys do, which is I went to medical school. And and uh, that satisfied, needless to say, my mom and my dad to a degree. And uh, the idea was to go and and be of service, to be a doctor, in this case, in a far away place. You know, I was asked to come and be a physician in the big city of Hilo, on the on the big island. Subsequently, of course, I went to the slightly smaller city of Pahala, where uh, there were 8,000 patients waiting for a doctor and perhaps a part-time nurse practitioner or a PA—no care whatsoever. And we went uh, there as friends and family to care for people and to care for 4,000 Hawaiian individuals, 4,000 Filipinos, and, as the joke goes, about 10 witness relocation patients from New York. Our friends, Joanne, back home. And that experience was incredible. It allowed me to learn about Aloha and what no'au actually was. And people took me in, and we, you know, we looked at the community and tried to reinvent that community to get people care, but we couldn't find a way to get people care in that little far away town where there was no drug treatment program really available, there were no trauma services. I saw two beautiful children, both one-year-old, um, suffer terrible traumas. One fell from a a second-story L and died, and the second, six weeks later, run over uh, as a relative who was high on methamphetamine drove over the child's head. And that child, who is with us today and did extraordinarily well and is essentially fine, was saved by the good graces and care of the nurses at KAU hospital. And it was in that moment, in 2003, thank you, that I decided that I wanted to try to do more. I wanted to get services down, so I I did um, take a look at what I might do, and I thought, okay, well, I'll just, for for the moment, make a point that a community like KAU, a rural community, deserves to have an opportunity to transform itself and get care. So I was asked or told I could run for office over in Kona, where I wouldn't disrupt any other incumbents that were friends and and walk door to door just to make the point that we should have services for people, that we could change our community, uh, expecting, of course, to lose and then go be uh, you know, a doctor in a hospital and and do what what we do as physicians. I was ready to go back into that life after making the point, uh, but lo and behold, this young gentleman uh, came into my life, and his name was Josh. Wish Josh, take a stand there for a minute. Yes, Josh, who we know has subsequently run the ACLU and is now a do-gooder at Hua and all those things, but in those days he was a political operative, and he successfully pointed out that my opponent was a convicted cocaine dealer, and I ended up uh, getting elected to office and transformed my life, where I was then able to be a a doctor, state representative, and so on and so forth. And of course, I'm now Governor, um, which is not at all the way that was supposed to play out. But in those moments, uh, we fought for transformation, and we thought that there are any number of paths that one can take, and we experienced it firsthand, Josh and I and friends and family, that if you care about the right things and you work hard, the road may take you to interesting places, and it took us to, among other places, back and forth on call to KAU and Kohala. But then that experience led to some preparation for an outbreak of measles in Samoa, where we had to look at things differently and go as a community, as no'au, and vaccinate 36,000 people in two days to stop a pandemic, beat back RFK, who was telling people that vaccines will kill you, which was a strange uh, way to crisscross with another person who's involved in political life right now. And then six weeks later, this little-known virus called COVID uh, landed on our doorstep, on everyone else's doorstep, and again, that experience and the path that we had to take and be flexible enough to transform when something came our way led us to deal with COVID in the way that we did, and I'm thankful to the university, thankful to thought leaders uh, that you see here amongst us and supporters who helped us to keep the lid on, to keep the mortality rate lower than any other place in the country because, again, we were able—our ability to transform who we were was profound. Hawaii was able to do it. Uh, that, of course, led to uh, other opportunities to serve, and then the wildfire and the crisis we take on. And so the idea that a little kid born in Pittsburgh—well, born in New York, moved to Pittsburgh—would end up in Hawaii doing these things and having the great opportunity to to meet extraordinary leaders—leaders that um, when I was growing up, there were not women editors of the greatest papers, there were not individuals that could transcend the barriers and publish novels that result in great prizes—that is not what the world was like. And so tonight we get to hear from a leader who was able to pivot in life and to show what transformation is possible, to talk about the unknown road maps that are out there for us. Joanne has been a master of reinvention herself. She was an accomplished viola player, a beat reporter at the Wall Street Journal, an editor-in-chief at USA Today. She suffered personal hardships and won extraordinary prizes—the Pulitzer—and to be a best-selling author is not something uh, to ignore. And so once again, our dear friend Robert and the university has done something special for us; it has allowed us to connect, to have our unique roads intersect here with your generosity so that we can recognize her: a prominent advocate for gender equality and diversity, a person that speaks on topics of leadership and transformation, and who has truly uh, walked the walk and lived this life. So if I may, uh, let's invite this incredible person who survived 9/11, who brought her husband to Hawaii uh, for the first time to experience the beauty of this state and to share with us uh, what navigation and transformation really means back on the mainland. So let's give her a round of applause.

Thank you so much, Governor Green, and hello, aloha everyone. Uh, it's so great to be here with you. Um, thank you so much to the governor. I want to thank our hosts, our distinguished guests. This has been such a remarkable um, trip for myself, for my husband, and I am so grateful to Michael Bruno, to Robert Perkinson, and I also want to give a shout out—I want to thank the University of Hawaii at Manoa, Hawaii Community Foundation, the Kamehameha Schools. Thank you. I was practicing that all afternoon. Uh, thank you for inviting me. I I want to give a shout out as well to a couple of people who have really gone above and beyond: Law Professor Mark Levan, who has been showing us around all week—amazing—um, and Re Salvador of the Better Tomorrow Speaker Series and that whole staff. You all have been so welcoming, so warm. Um, by the way, I want to thank Tyler, too. That was phenomenal. I would like to give him another hand. That was wonderful. So it is a great honor for me to be here tonight with you, and especially an honor to be introduced by Governor Green, because as you just heard, he is a true master of reinvention himself. He exemplifies exactly what we are talking about this evening: this idea of navigating change, leading through change, what it takes to see around corners. So thank you, Governor, so much, and thank you for that beautiful introduction about my career, but I actually want to start uh, my remarks this evening telling you about something that is not in my bio, and that is: so when I was a little kid, I was pathologically shy. I was so shy that my first week of kindergarten, my teacher made me sit in the corner because I didn't understand her instructions, and I was too shy to tell her. So. And then while I was sitting in the corner, there was a fire drill, and she forgot to line me up with the other kids, so they all left the school, and I sat there all alone because I was too shy to say anything. So I sat there with the bells clanging and all by myself, waiting for the school to burn down. So not surprisingly, the teacher spent the entire rest of the school year apologizing to my mom. But the reason I'm telling you this is because it's kind of ironic that this pathologically shy child grew up to be a journalist. My job, like literally all day long, is to talk to strangers. So my point is, we all have that capacity to change, and we really do need it now more than ever. I could not agree more uh, with the governor on his remarks, because we really are living in a moment of unprecedented flux. Learning how to manage that, to figure out what's next, is one of the most important skill sets we need. I mean, you just heard about COVID; there's now questions about the future of work; we have political chaos; we have generative AI that is coming for all of our jobs; um, and we have natural disasters like the Maui wildfires. And even without that, every one of us will experience profound, profound upheavals throughout our own lives, for good and for bad. So that's why, for the past three years, I've been researching my book, Next. It's called *Next: The Power of Reinvention in Life and Work*, and what I've done is I've sought out hundreds of people—I did several hundred interviews with people who have mastered change in one way or another. Some reinvented their careers, some rebuilt uh, their lives after failure, or they came back from trauma. And then I spoke to experts in the process of transformation, and it's really interesting because it turns out that there's a whole lot of emerging science right now um, on this front, from things like neuroscientists who now have the equipment to study what happens inside your skull when you have one of those life-changing aha moments, or psychologists who have gained new insights, very recent, into trauma survivors and into how they can rebuild their lives. So this evening, what I'd love to talk with you about is to kind of walk you through some of these findings, which I include um, the reinvention road map—that's what I call the reinvention road map—it's four steps that pretty much all of us will take as we go through any kind of profound change. I also want to talk about—there's a big myth that holds us back from even starting—and then I want to go through just a couple of strategies that can help any of us navigate change more successfully. And we are going to leave some time for Q&A afterward because I would love to hear from you as well. And I know none of this is easy. Change is hard. I can tell you that firsthand. I have lived it. Um, as a reporter, which is how I started my career at the Wall Street Journal. I started as a reporter; I spent 22 years there; I ended as the deputy editor-in-chief there. And so my role was to cover transformations in business and society. As an editor-in-chief, which I went on to do at a magazine, at USA Today, my job was to reimagine news organizations for a digital age. And I have grappled with the brutal financial realities of the business of media right now, and I have the bruises to prove it, um, including including when the beloved business magazine that I actually founded and ran, called *Kess Portfolio*, was shut down after the financial crisis, and my amazingly talented colleagues and I all lost our jobs literally overnight. And I've endured personal upheaval. Um, I was inside the World Trade Center on 9/11 when that first plane struck. I witnessed horrors that no human being should ever see—things you cannot unsee—and I was one of the lucky ones. I'm I'm still here. Um, less than a year later, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. My kids were still in elementary school. My goal then, through two surgeries, six months of chemotherapy, another two months of radiation, was to see my children graduate from high school. I made it—knock on everything—and more recently, I got to walk my daughter down the aisle on her wedding day. So there's a joke among writers that you write the book you need, and I am Exhibit A. Um, so I sought out people who were true masters of reinvention. Uh, one of them was the longtime Federal Reserve Chief, Alan Greenspan. Okay, so he is one of the most renowned economists of all time, right? But he actually started out as a clarinet player. He trained at Juilliard; he played professionally in a jazz band. And he told me that uh, he knew it was time for a change when, during breaks, his bandmates—they'd go back to the green room and get high—and he would hang back and do their taxes. Um, another one: Ina Garten—a lot of you may know of her—the she's the Barefoot Contessa, the cooking diva. She actually started her career as a nuclear budget analyst in the White House, but she had more fun throwing dinner parties on the weekends. And I have to tell you about one of my absolute favorites. So this is a guy I first met when I was a young Wall Street Journal reporter. I covered the advertising business, and one day I was writing about the new Burger King ad campaign, so I had to go interview the guy who wrote slogans for Burger King. So I show up; I go to his office; he has no interest in talking about Burger King; he wants to tell me instead about his dream in life, and his dream is to be a novelist. And I'm thinking to myself, yeah, like, sure, yeah, guy, you and everybody else, right? Who doesn't want to write the Great American novel? And he's like, "But no, no, I really—I got a book published," and he hands me this book. I stuck it in my bag; I finally took it out and read it a few weeks later. Strictly between us, it was awful, and in fact, I recently dug up the Kirkus review of that book, and the first two words were "abysmally dumb." The last two words were "deserves drowning." So good thing this guy has a day job, right? But it turns out the only abysmally dumb one in this scenario was me, because anybody know who that ad guy is today? Anyone? Uh, I don't hear anybody. I will tell you. Very good. James Patterson—only the single most successful author whoever did that. Good for you, America's most successful author ever. The guy holds the Guinness Book of World Records for the most New York Times bestsellers. He's written more than 150 books. For those who haven't read him, you know, it's Alex Cross and *Along Came a Spider* and all kinds of other books. Um, Forbes says he's worth close to a billion dollars. So chalk one up for being abysmally dumb. But I also spoke to people that uh, you probably haven't heard of, people who don't come from any privilege. I spoke to people from their 20s through their 90s who had sort of reinvented their lives in one way or another. Like there was a woman who left the workforce to raise her three kids for 12 years. She said, as a stay-at-home mom, she said, for 12 years she said, "I felt invisible," but she went on, as her kids went off to college, to found a nonprofit, become a CEO, and she gained such prominence in her community, she was elected mayor. Um, or there's a telephone repairman—I love this guy to death—a telephone repairman who, after decades of repairing phones, at age 60, reinvented himself, and today is a couture women's shoe designer. So I asked everybody I met just to walk me through their process, and then what I did was I did the same thing with the scientists and the experts, and I asked them, you know, "Tell me about how this works, like, how do we get from here to there?" And then I sat down, basically with pen and paper, literally, and mapped out sort of the journey that each person was telling me, and I realized—I was absolutely floored—because when I looked at this in black and white, I realized they were all using different words, but they were essentially describing the same four steps. And this is what I came to call the reinvention road map, and the four steps are—there will not be a test, don't worry—search, struggle, stop, solution. So I'll walk you through real quick. So the first step: the search. This is when you're collecting information or experiences. Very often this is unintentional, right? You don't realize that this is something that's going to lead you to a transition ultimately, but that second step comes next: it's the struggle. Okay, this is the one we don't like to talk about; it's the hard part. Um, it's when you're leaving sort of that old ways or the old identity behind; you haven't quite figured out the new one yet, and honestly, it feels kind of miserable, right? It feels like you're stuck; it also is very lonely; it feels like it's only you—only you are struggling; everybody else is on a glide path to success, and it's only you—and it often doesn't end until you reach that third step, which is the stop. Okay, this is something that pulls you out of your routine; could be something you choose, right? It could be, "I'm graduating college," or "I had a baby," or "I got a new job," uh, but it could also be something that happens to you: like, "I lost my job," or "there's a global pandemic," uh, or a natural disaster. But whatever it is, it—

Pulls you out of your daily routine, and it gives you the perspective that you need to kind of get to that final step, to understand where you're going. And that's what helps you get to that final step, the solution; that's where you're transitioning to.

And I really feel like the reason that so often the world feels a little off-kilter right now is because collectively we're all kind of in that struggle stage. The world is in flux—not not our imaginations. Right since the pandemic, the world has been in in flux, and we're at an inflection point where we've left that pre-pandemic world behind us, but we're not exactly sure where it is that we're going from here.

And I think the problem is when we tell stories about people who have had great reinventions—they've reinvented their career, they've had, you know, some kind of wonderful transformation—when we tell these stories, we totally skip over that struggle step. Right, we skip the messy middle; we go right from the search at the beginning to the solution at the end. I mean, think about it, right? It's like Mark Zuckerberg; he went from college kid to Tech billionaire, boom. Right? Um, and I call this the Cinderella myth, uh, cuz it really it really holds us back. It's this idea that these Transformations are supposed to be easy; they're supposed to be abrupt. And it is—think about it, right? You, when you're a little kid, it's Cinderella; you get a little older, it's Spider-Man, it's Superman. By the time you're a grown-up, you're looking at American Idol, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. Right, it's all these things that happen sort of like overnight.

But the fact is everybody goes through the struggle; it's actually the most important part of the process, and a lot of important work is being done; it just doesn't feel that way. And by the way, the people I spoke to, they all went through this. So James Patterson, right, who we're just talking about, he held on to his day job at that Ad Agency even after his books became best sellers because he told me he was afraid he wasn't good enough to make it as an author. He did not quit the Ad Agency till he had written almost a dozen books, and he was 50 years old. So as much as it may hurt, I just want to urge you guys all to lean in when you have that feeling; lean into it. Um, research shows this actually works. Um, Chicago's Second City, there was research done on them, so they're the Improv guys, right? So they have improv students, and when they told them lean into discomfort, the students actually they took more risks and they performed way better. But what's interesting is in a completely different setting, same experiment, UBS, big bank, so they asked managers to watch video that showed that stress was essentially good for you, that it would strengthen your brains and your bodies, and weeks later, months later, these managers still viewed stress as a positive, and also they were happier at work and reported fewer health problems.

So what's interesting is these steps that we're talking about here—that search, struggle, stop, solution—so they are common, um, regardless of these kinds of transitions we're talking about. But it does turn out that there are some groups and certain demographics that actually are more likely to pivot than others, um, and frankly a lot of them are better at it, um, and at the top of the list, interestingly enough, is women, and particularly women of color. And you know, there's good and bad here. I mean, the the fact is the reason that they are better and more inclined to pivot is because they don't always have a choice. Uh, women are often called what we call necessity entrepreneurs, and that refers to actually any marginalized group; it's women, it's people of color, it's the LGBTQ community, increasingly, interestingly, it's also baby boomers. These are all groups that are being squeezed out very often of either, you know, rising up the ladder or just being squeezed out of the workforce, of the traditional workforce altogether, that mainstream career ladder, and they don't really have a choice but to reinvent themselves.

So if you look at the at the stats on women, so I I wrote a book on closing the gender gap, and so I've sort of deeply taken a deep dive into that, and we know from the research there is a documented respect gap between men and women. So, for example, researchers have found if you put a man and a woman in the same job, same title, same responsibility, the man commands more respect; his job title is given more respect than if a woman holds that title. Um, women are seen—it's there's a psychological term—it's called that women are seen as illegitimate authorities, and that phenomenon, by the way, is far more pronounced for women of color because they're facing what's called a double bind; right, there's bias against them for both gender and race or ethnicity. And meanwhile, women's voices are often discounted. Um, turns out women—this has been re—there's been research on this—women are interrupted three times more frequently than men are. Uh, there was research done on the Supreme Court of the United States, and female Supreme Court Justices are interrupted three times more frequently than male justices; it's quite remarkable. Anyway, there's a—I could go on, but you know, let me just basically say that all of this translates into lower pay, fewer promotions. Um, think about, you know, women have earned more than half of all college degrees, and this has been true for like 40 years. So you would think theoretically they should be half of CEOs. Um, does anybody know the actual figure percentage-wise? It's it's 10%; historic high. We got we have a [Laughter] winner. Um, the Rockefeller Foundation actually did a survey and found one in four people believe we will literally invent time travel before women run half of Fortune 500 companies, and I every time I look at that I'm like, why did they ask that question? Right? In any case, but that is also why women have learned how to pivot, and you actually see it; the very latest figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that women are leading the way in terms of starting new businesses, and among women, um, black women are the most entrepreneurial of all.

Um, they're women like this amazing woman I met named Katherine Finney. So she started out as an epidemiologist, but then she morphed into this media personality; you may have seen her; she was known as the Budget Fashionista. Uh, she would go and like tell you about her Fabulous Finds at Target. You know, oh, look at these great shoes for 40 bucks. Um, and she was a regular on The Today Show, but I tracked her down more recently, and it turns out she's pivoted again; she is now one of the largest Venture Capital investors in black-owned businesses in the country. So what's amazing is when I talked to Katherine, she did not see this as a pivot; she's like, no, totally organic, like at one step led to the next to the next; it was kind of mind-blowing, right? But it was true for everyone I interviewed; it didn't matter how extreme. I mean, I met a guy who was a Harvard-trained Economist and spent 30 years at JP Morgan and today is a cattle farmer. And and yet they all said the same thing; they all said, oh, it was very organic, and and I realized what they were trying to say is they weren't intending to invent a new identity; they were instead seeking a fuller expression of who they already are.

And the other thing they all said, which I found really fascinating, was that nothing in their previous life, no matter how different it seemed, nothing was wasted; nobody felt like they had wasted that first career or that early time when they were struggling. They all said, I used everything in my life to help me where I am today. And actually Governor Green is such a great example of that, right? I mean, he just talked about his own background as an emergency room physician here in Hawaii, working with the underserved communities, which inspires him to run for office in the first place, and it's informed so many of his decisions and his policies since then. Um, and that's actually quite common among the people I interviewed. This wasn't all that they had in common, by the way; they also shared with me some of the strategies that help them to really make those kinds of pivots. And what was fascinating was the strategies they talked about were things that were basically the opposite; they just defy what conventional wisdom would tell you, and I want to share just three of them. Um, these these three were really really fascinating. First is they didn't plan where they were going; they were open to the unexpected. Now, if you know if you've ever read a business book, they're all the same; they all say they all say if you want to make a change, you know, have your goal and then plan every step of the way to get there. And which, by the way, is true for certain professions; if you want to be a surgeon, if you want to be a concert pianist, right, you really have to plan to get there. Um, but most of the people I spoke to started on their paths completely unintentionally; this is what I was talking about with the search, that that first step, even if they had a goal, they were open to pivoting. There's this really interesting study, a business school Professor, uh, at Washington University, a guy named Eric Dean, so he studied people who changed their lives after they had an epiphany, right, that sudden realization that seems to come out of nowhere. Some of them were motivated to break off toxic relationships or change a bad habit; quite a few were motivated to switch their careers. But what everyone had in common when he interviewed all of these people was they said they were open to these new ideas; they didn't reflexively shut them down. So often you have that sort of gut feeling, aha moment, and you you want to discount it, like because it seems to come out of nowhere. Um, but they were they were like, I listened; I listened to that feeling. And what's interesting is this openness to the unexpected, to the pivoting, works on a broader societal level as well; it actually works for companies, it works for brands.

Um, one of my favorite examples, um, was actually about Pfizer, the big pharmaceutical company. So I heard this actually from a Pfizer scientist; he's based in England, and he told me the story about how the company was testing a heart drug to teach uh to treat angina. So they went through trials; he and his team oversaw these trials, and the drug was a total bust. Right? Now, generally when that happens, you dump the medication, you move on. But the scientist and his team who were overseeing the trials, they—there's a guy who reports back like what the trials, you know, what happened in the trials, and they go through this meeting, and the me—the guy's like, yeah, this didn't work; this didn't work; this didn't work; this didn't work. The meeting's almost over, and the guy very hesitantly says to them, but there was this one really weird side effect; the men in the trial were all getting erections. So the scientists began wondering, um, they're kind of like, wait a second, maybe there's a different use for this drug; maybe maybe it could treat impotence. But their colleagues were mortified; they're like, Pfizer is not in the sex drugs business; we don't do that here. Um, but the scientists, they were open to the unexpected, and they were also really really in luck because they happened to be in the furthest satellite lab of Pfizer in the town of Sandwich, England, which is like the White Cliffs of Dover. And yes, the sandwich—the Earl of Sandwich—um, invented our favorite food, yes. Um, but in any case, the the uh scientists, they ignored the naysayers; they pivoted; they ordered up a test of this drug for impotence; it was so successful that after it ended, the men in the trial, who were anonymous, keep in mind, they began writing to the scientists, outing themselves, begging for more. And that is why a failed heart drug that could have ended up in the trash bin of History instead became that little blue pill that we all know of as Viagra and created an entirely new drug category.

Oh, I'll tell you one other quick one because I love this one so much; this one is very G-rated, don't worry. Um, so this was about a cleaning products company; it was—they made something called Kutol wallpaper dough. Now, this was back in the 1950s and earlier; it cleaned coal soot off your walls, back when everybody had coal stoves. But in the 1950s, coal stoves went out of style; everybody got electric and gas; nobody needed this Kutol wallpaper dough anymore. The company is on the verge of bankruptcy; it's a family-run company; the owner, he's about to to mortgage his house; he's like, oh my God, I have to fire all my relatives who work for the company. And then he gets a call from his sister-in-law, and his sister-in-law, she's a nursery school teacher, and she gets on the phone with him; she was a very brassy lady; she gets on the call, and she's like, I can save your company. And he's like, what? And she says, I just used Kutol wallpaper dough as modeling clay for my preschoolers, and she said, um, it's great for modeling clay. So the guy's like, wow. So he actually listened to her; he removed the cleaning agent; he added a lovely pleasant scent; he used the same factory, the same extruders, the same cans; he just swapped out the label. Every one of you knows it, and I would bet that every one of you has had it in your house; you may never have heard of Kutol; you know it by its new name, Play-Doh.

So I want to tell you about a second strategy, so that was about, you know, be open to the unexpected; when you pivot, it can really really be transformative. The second strategy I want to talk to you about is it's it's what's called an expert companion; everybody I spoke to had an expert companion. Now, I'm borrowing this phrase from trauma psychologists, but honestly, we all need one; it is a person who knows you well, who can reflect back to you your strengths, your talents, your progress. And the reason is that we are terrible judges of ourselves, and um, you really need someone because we have everybody here; we all have talents that are innate to us, but they're so—they come so easily or naturally—either we don't recognize them, or if we do recognize them, because it seems easy, we completely discount them. Um, in my case, my husband, who's actually here, um, he was my expert companion. Um, I had spent more than two decades at the Wall Street Journal; I became the highest-ranking woman in its history until that point; I loved my job; I loved going to work every day; I had no intention of leaving. But then I was offered this sort of dream opportunity to create a business magazine for Condé Nast; that's the magazine company that owns the New Yorker and Vogue and Vanity Fair, and it was an amazing opportunity, but I have to tell you I was paralyzed; I was torn because I didn't want to leave my job, but this unbelievable opportunity was out there, and it was several months where I just was like literally paralyzed. And then one day my husband said to me, you know, when you talk about this mythical non-existent magazine, your entire physical effect changes; you light up in a way that I have not seen in years, that you don't light up when you're talking about your current job. Interestingly, he did not tell me what to do; he did not give me advice, as much as I asked him to. Um, I begged him, uh, but he simply reflected back to me what he saw, and at that moment I made my decision; I I knew that I was ready to jump.

Now I want to tell you a little bit about the Genesis of this expert companion; it actually comes from two psychologists who pioneered a relatively new field that's called post-traumatic growth. I don't know if any of you have heard of that, but I'll tell you a little bit about it. The so these psychologists—it's really fascinating—they started out by researching wisdom; they wanted to understand where does wisdom come from. So the first thing they did was interview a whole bunch of elderly people; they learned pretty much nothing about wisdom. However, they realized, um, that most of these people they spoke to had survived, over the course of many years, they'd survived traumas in their lives, and yet they were all thriving. So that got them interested in why is that so; they started researching other people who had survived tragedies from, you know, natural disasters, war, illness, um, you know, deaths of loved ones. So most of these people had PTSD, which you would expect, right, post-traumatic stress; it's very common after a trauma. But the psychologists noticed that many of the survivors also experienced positive growth, and they would tell the psychologists things like, I established a new path in my life, or I see new opportunities that are available to me, or I develop new interests. So in the mid-1990s, these psychologists, they coined this phrase post-traumatic growth, and the idea behind post-traumatic growth is trauma survivors really can't bounce back, like when we try—when we say you should be resilient and bounce back—it's really—they really—it's after profound trauma; they really can't bounce back to where they were, but they can bounce forward to someplace new. But the psychologist also found that to achieve that post-traumatic growth, these survivors needed to have that expert companion; it was that person who could reflect back to them, you know, how they're doing and their progress, and to give them perspective that was so hard for them to have themselves. So the expert companion, by the way, so it could be a therapist or coach, but it could just as easily be a family member, a friend, a colleague. And that's why I think all of us should have an expert companion who can help us keep grounded in reality, um, and I hope that you all do have one, and I hope, by the way, also that you are one or that you will be one to someone else as well.

So you cannot be your own expert companion; doesn't work that way. But I found a really cool hack; um, this was—I learned this from a biologist, okay? This is—bear with me—create your own CV of failure. Now, CV of failure. Now, I know no doubt everyone here has fabulous resumés, but a CV of failure can actually be more instructive. So what it is, it's a CV, um, for your own purposes that lists every job you never got, every project that went south, every exam that you screwed up, every boss who said you'll never make it, whatever, every driver's test you didn't pass, whatever. Um, and this biologist—the reason—when she's very very accomplished, but at a time when she was really struggling, she created her own CV of failure, and she said it made her feel much better; it showed her everything that she had tried, which she felt good about, but just as important, it gives you really really useful data about where your strengths are, not just your weaknesses. And by the way, she published—after she did her—she published hers in Nature magazine; it went viral among scientists; there—there was like you could hear this collective sigh of relief because everybody fails; everybody fails at some point. But what she found—she told me—was that her CV of failure showed her that her failures were actually all in a laboratory setting where she had to manipulate things with her hands, whereas what it told her was her strengths were actually computational, not physical, and it made her switch her specialty, and she is now a computational biologist, and she is tops in her field, and she told me it's all because the CV of failure—kind of like an expert companion—the CV of failure showed her her strengths that she didn't even realize that she had.

So third, I want to mention this third and final strategy; pretty much everyone I spoke to understood the importance of taking a break. Now, I am sure a lot of you are rolling your eyes here, and I am one to talk; when my kids were little, we ate dinner at 11:00 every night because my husband and I worked these insane hours, and we tried to convince the kids like this is totally normal. But all the research shows that taking breaks is the single most important thing you can do for creative thinking, for breakthrough ideas. There was a a study that was done—science—where um researchers asked physicists and writers, so we're talking left brain and right brain thinkers, to keep a diary throughout the day of their ideas, and they found that for both groups, many of their best ideas and all of their sort of aha moment breakthroughs, all of them came when they were doing anything but work; they were generally daydreaming; they were doing anything; they were doing, you know, paying bills or vacuuming or

Commuting, uh, and and it turns out pretty much any kind of break will do. There has been a lot of research on this. There's been research that shows benefits for walking, for spending time in nature, for exercising, sleeping, meditating, showering. Um, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen actually once told me that playing rock music on his guitar at night is what allowed him to be a better programmer during the day. And an actual rock and roller and Hall of Fame Rock and roller and Hawaii resident, by the way, Todd Rundgren told me he came up with his biggest hit while he was asleep. And it wasn't, for those of you who are old enough to remember the 80s, it was not "Hello, it's me." It was it was this one. I think we have it [Music] here. So very apropos, by the way, I don't want to work; I just want to play on my drums all day. Very apropos given our topic. Um, but the fact is we can all benefit from a break. It turns out people who use their vacation days are promoted at almost twice the rate of those who leave days on the table. And in a study of Business Leaders, nonprofit CEOs who took sabbaticals were able to develop out-of-the-box thinking that allowed them to transform their organizations. And neuroscientists have actually found the reason for this.

So it turns out that you need to step away; you need to distract yourself; you need to basically turn off the executive function of your brain. That is the function that corrals all of your thoughts, right, and keeps you, you know, your rational brain there, keeps all your thoughts in in order. You have to turn that off so that there's all these disparate ideas that are floating around inside your head, and they can mix and match and merge subconsciously, almost like behind your back, right, until they sort of coalesce into something that is totally unique and novel and new. And now scientists call this period when you're distracted and and all of this is happening subconsciously, they call it the incubation period, and it is actually essential to creativity. It it's also, by the way, why you cannot get an "aha" moment when you are staring at your computer screen. You actually have to step away; you have to do, you know, exercise, take a shower, whatever. Actually, uh, Aaron Sorkin, if you know this, the screenwriter, very famous screenwriter, he has said that while he's writing, he takes eight showers a day for that very reason.

But even small breaks throughout your day can have a transformative effect. So years ago, when I was writing my first book, I had this ferocious case of writer's block. So I spent four full days of a holiday weekend literally staring, staring at that blinking cursor on the blank screen. It was awful. And then I ran into a friend, and he told me about the 90-minute rule. It is genius. I will share it with you; this is like I tell this to everybody; it's an amazing thing. So here's how it goes: You focus on whatever it is you're working on for 90 minutes with zero distractions. That means no email, no cell phone; turn off all your alerts, right. But at the end of 90 minutes, you must stop. It's like a hard stop; you must stop; you must take a break. It doesn't matter what you do, by the way; you know, you can eat or sleep or run, whatever; it doesn't matter. You then you come back, and you do it again. You'll find you actually cannot do this more than three times a day, but in those four and a half hours, you would get more done than if you sat there staring at that computer screen for, you know, 12 or 14 hours. It's really it's remarkable; it really works. If you're having a block about anything, it's like it it fixes it; it's just incredible; it's like magic. But it actually was validated by a psychologist guy, uh, named K. Anders Ericsson, with he had the study of violin virtuosos. It's a really famous study; you actually all know it, even if you're not familiar with K. Anders Ericsson because Malcolm Gladwell made this study famous. It's the one that says you need 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert, right? So that everybody knows this 10,000 hours, but that was actually only one piece of the study. There was another key element: The virtuoso violinists compared virtuoso and amateur violinists, and it turned out that the virtuoso violinists had what was called deliberate focused practice for 90 minutes at a time; then they took a break; then they came back, and they did it three times a day with breaks in between. And, by the way, they also took more naps and slept an hour longer than the amateurs.

So if you take those steps that we're talking about and you put that all together, it turns out that these people who are really great at figuring out what's next, people who can grab hold of the future and make it a reality, they're just like everybody else in some ways, right? They're fearful of change; it isn't easy; they really, really struggle with it. But they also show what we might do differently, right? Get comfortable with that discomfort; listen to your gut; be into the unexpected; consult your expert companion; and, of course, be really smart about taking breaks. And on that last point, Hawaii is actually ahead of the game. I did a little research on my way here, and Hawaii is actually ranked the number one healthiest state in the nation. Go, you guys! I mean, honestly, and you're also second among all 50 states in terms of last year increasing your participation in nature and outdoor sports, things like hiking and camping and fishing, um, which the researchers think is largely because of remote and hybrid work. Um, by the way, number two, um, it was a little surprising to me about who beat you; number one was South Dakota. Go figure, right? And Hawaii, but is also in the top 10 states with the most physically active people in the country. So, in short, I actually think the rest of us have a lot to learn from you. And I know we're all dealing with complicated issues, both personally and professionally. I know every state has its own share of challenges. I'm only just beginning to learn about the nuances here in Hawaii, but I have to tell you I have already learned so much more about this topic and so much else from you this week, and I am so grateful to you for that and also for your hospitality and Aloha. The pathologically shy kindergartner in me could never, never have imagined a welcome as warm as I've gotten here with you. So thank you so much for having me. Mahalo. Mahalo once again, Joanne, for this empowering discussion. I truly loved hearing about the different steps that we could take towards all of our, our collective reinvention.

As we end this discussion, we would actually like to take this time to recognize the graduating seniors for our team here at the Better Tomorrow Speaker Series. Please come up to the front: our very own photographer, Kenzie; assistant and resident furniture builder, Levi; and community engagement assistant, Hannah. Take pictures. Oh, no, is Levi in the crowd, our resident furniture [Music] builder? If not, it's going to be... Oh, oh, perfect. Thank you. Now we would like to announce the winners for the online book raffle hosted for Joanne's most recent book, *Next: The Power of Reinvention in Life and Work*. The two winners of the raffle on Instagram are Chelsea Kagan and Caitlyn Kagan. Kindly meet me outside by the book signing table to claim your free book, or over here at the stage; you'll be given first priority during this book signing. If all of you guys are interested in joining raffles like these, be sure to check out our Instagram and Facebook page at, uh, BTS_UC. And congratulations again to the winners, and Mahalo once again, Joanne, for being with us here tonight. Feel free to take some cookies and tea right outside the venue after this Q&A. Thank you, everybody. If you have any questions for this event and for Joanne, please be sure to pass your cards down over to the side; there will be people collecting them at the front as well, and Joanne will be shortly answering your questions. Thank you. Okay, so this is our first question. I guess this is the most appropriate for me to ask as a graduating senior: Um, how do students find their best path after graduation?

Oh, that's a great question. So one interesting thing to know about this generation of Gen Z, so if you look at how long people tend to stay in jobs, um, starting with Baby Boomers, the oldest people in the workforce, they're like, longer—um, I'm the talent to the Baby Boom; I spent 22 years at my first job. You compare that with the youngest people who are graduating now; you guys are Gen Z; they spend an average of two years and three months in a job. So your first job is most likely not going to be lasting for 22 years. Um, but the one piece of advice I would give you is whatever you do, and you can try different things, um, you can, don't be afraid—you know, fear is the biggest um thing that prevents us from trying something new—don't be afraid to go and try something. But the one thing I would say is you don't want to look like you're job-hopping, right? You don't have to stay in one point, but think about—um, you remember I was talking earlier about how everybody talked about how their pivots were organic, right? You want to think about how, even if you're switching to different kinds of jobs, how they all connect, how that all connects to you, right? So that you don't want to feel like you're a dilettante, but that you have—um, these are all part of sort of a holistic plan of your life. So I would say, you know, don't stress too much about what that first job is, but do think about what you're learning and how it might take you to where you're ultimately going to go. Thank you. I appreciate that. Um, yeah, basically, can I just say, if you're graduating, just exhale? Okay, it's all going to work, work out. Okay, so our next question is: You mentioned that women of color are most successful at pivoting; how was that measured? Oh, so there's actually the Bureau of Labor Statistics measures entrepreneurship, and then it measures it by gender, race, and age, and so that is actually how we know. Okay. And then our next question is: What did you learn from writing your most recent book?

I learned so much. I actually, the the number one thing I took away, honestly, I felt so much better after doing the research because, like everybody else, I have been through that struggle phase myself, trying to think, like, where am I going from here? And also thinking it's only me, like, why do all my friends seem to have it together, and only I don't, right? And um, it made me realize, first of all, we all go through it, but it also made me realize—this is like the number one thing I think I got out of it—was it made me realize those moments in time when you feel like you're sort of in between and flux, you're not sure where you're going, are actually the most productive, and and it made me understand that that you really are doing an awful lot of important work; it's just that it's kind of just below your consciousness, so it doesn't feel that way. Um, but, you know, it was very similar; you know, I mentioned those couple of studies where they told people, you know, if you lean into the discomfort, you're going to end up doing better, and that is so, so true. I found that for myself, and um, I wish I had known that when I was going through it, but I'm happy to know it now and happy to share that with all of you. That's great advice, um, and I'm glad that you could share it with all of us. Um, our next question is: How did you move away from your shyness? Oh, that's a really good question. So, um, I I think the way that I moved away from the shyness is, honestly, when I was seven—seven years old—I read a book called *Harriet the Spy*. Has anybody read that book? *Harriet the Spy*? Is anybody familiar with it? For those of you who don't know it, it's about an 11-year-old girl who spies on her friends and neighbors and writes it all down in a book. And I was fascinated by *Harriet the Spy*, and I asked my mom, I wanted a notebook like she had, and I just started listening, like, to my big sisters with their boyfriends and stuff like that and, like, spying on them and writing it all down. And um, and but that really helped me, kind of, it really actually helped me a lot because I I it really honed my listening skills, and it actually helped me, I think, to start kind of interacting with people a little bit more, and and it turns out those are both of those things—listening, but also that in learning how to interact with people—um, both of those skills are really important for journalists. But I will also tell you, you know, my whole professional career, I'm surrounded by journalists, and you would be amazed how many of them are truly introverted, um, but they also have curiosity. And so being a journalist allows you to exercise your curiosity and talk to people, except it's your job, so it makes it okay, right? Things that you wouldn't do in a social setting, you have no problem doing as a journalist. I think that's part of it, too. Perfect. Um, our next question is: How would you suggest someone approach reinvention when they are passionate about three to five different things? Is it possible to do all of them, or should you just focus on one? So you can have your passions for three to five different things. Uh, I would not try to have three to five different jobs at the same time; probably not a good idea. So you kind of got to hone in on one of those, but, you know, when I was talking about like this search thing where people are in the search phase at the beginning, very often what ends up happening, it's a hobby or a side interest that leads them to this new career. So when I tell, tell you about like the telephone repairman who became a shoe designer, he in high school had started like sketching women's shoes. It's just, you know, he went to Catholic school, and he came from like a very working-class family where you get a job; you don't have a passion; you have a job. And um, and uh, so he never told anybody that he was sketching these shoes and that he had this passion for it, but he did it all along. And uh, by the time, you know, he got the confidence to uh to go off and actually, he actually scrimped and saved for many years so he could send himself to design school, um, and uh and then became, became the the shoe designer. So, but but my point is that a lot of people, you'll have a passion or a hobby, and you can keep it as a passion or hobby, but you may find that it actually leads you to a pivot. Okay, this kind of is different from our previous questions; the next one is: What sorts of public policies can make it easier for people to change careers? Oh my gosh, yes. Okay, first, foremost, and always is we need paid parental leave in this country. The United States is the only OECD country that does not have a paid parental leave policy, and that is so harmful to people. Um, so we need that. We need it; it would also be very helpful—Robert and I were talking about this—if you if you had an insurance policy that wasn't attached to your job; it was attached to you; would also be another great policy change; it would—and both of those things, what they do is provide a level of independence that we don't have now, and you kind of need that independence, right? Now, you know, pivoting does take a degree of privilege, right? Because if you're pivoting, particularly when you're talking about careers, it takes a certain degree of privilege in order to have the money to be able to do so. You know, you know, the telephone repairman I was just talking about, I mean, it took him 40 years because he had to save up his money, and he was not in the kind of job where he was was earning a lot. Um, and so those two policies alone, but you know, I'm sure there are others that anything that would allow us to have greater independence. Okay, so our next question is: I think you touched a little bit on this when you were talking about breaks—how do you know when to stop?

Oh, yeah. Okay, so the the um, when to stop, if you're trying to reinvent, is that is that the qu—I'm not sure if that's the question, but the that CV of failure that I was talking about is probably like the greatest tool I have. A whole chapter in *Next* is on failure because this is another emerging field of research. There is a data researcher at Northwestern University, and all he does is he studies the data on failure; it's fascinating. Um, and what he told me, and there's another woman in Columbia who does the same thing, and what both of them told me is the ma—the main, first of all, the main reason we don't pivot is fear. So you need to take that first step, but they also said that the main reason that we think we fail is because we quit too soon. And um, he uses the the analogy of an ice cube, right? So let's say your job is to melt an ice cube; you walk into the room, and it's 29 degrees in the room, and you say, "I'm going to raise it to 30," and nothing happens, and you say, "I'm going to raise it to 31," and nothing happens, and you say, "I quit," right? And all you knew is like another degree or two, and you're going to melt your ice cube. And he says a lot of us are like that, but this is one of the reasons I love the CV of failure because it is one of the things that helps you understand, like, when is it actually time to quit and and pivot, and what are your actual strengths? By the way, I should mention one other thing that these researchers—because they studied Olympic athletes—um, the one in Colombia, and uh, her research is not published yet, but I will tell you she found that for a number of Olympic athletes, she went and looked at their junior level performance, and she said very frequently they at the junior level are number four. So, in other words, they just missed the podium—the gold, silver, bronze podium—and that gives them the impetus to really move ahead. Okay, so these are all really great questions and, of course, really great answers. Um, before we move into our last question of the—just a reminder that we're going to be doing a book signing after um this event; it's going to be right outside; you you'll get a chance, you know, to talk a little bit to Joanne, um, and then we're also doing uh green tea and cookies uh right by the book signing. Okay, so our last question is: What's one piece of practical advice that you can leave us with?

Oh, I love that question, too. So the one thing that I would tell, particularly anyone who is thinking about making any kind of pivot, there's um advice that I've heard from so many, which is reach out to what are called weak and dormant ties. Okay, so weak ties—people who you don't necessarily know that well; dormant ties—people who maybe you've lost touch with—that's like somebody you went to school with or somebody you used to work with who you've lost touch with. And the reason is that you will find that those people surface way more fresh information and fresh leads for you than your immediate circle. LinkedIn actually did the um research on this; they they researched their own members on LinkedIn, and they found that when people get new jobs, it is almost always from that larger network because people in their immediate network, um, you know, are they they all have the same information. Um, and also there was research um done on this, so because it sounds really scary, right, to like reach out to somebody who you either don't know very well or haven't talked to in a million years. Um, and so there was this research that was done on executives where they were required to ask for business advice from a dormant tie—somebody they hadn't talked to in ages—and all of them reported being anxious beforehand—like I said, fear is the number one thing that holds us back—and but they were forced to do it. When they were interviewed afterward, they all said, "Oh my God, it was not only did I get great information, but it was enjoyable, and it was fun."

Also, it will make you feel amazing, and make that person feel amazing. And I will just tell you a super quick anecdote to end on, which is: um, I got a note like that, um, not long ago. I got an email from a former colleague who wrote me this note out of the blue to say, "You probably don't even remember this, but 10 years ago I was really struggling with a particular problem, and you really helped me, and I just want to let you know." And I will tell you, I wept. Like, I was so moved by that note. It was amazing. And, and first of all, we rekindled, and we were able to get back in touch again. But also, it inspired me, and it inspired me to do the same. And I then wrote and reached out to someone who had helped me in the past. I wrote an email to my breast cancer surgeon to say, just to say thank you. You know, thank you for all the years I have had since then. So I recommend that you do it. It's great for reinvention, but it also is just a wonderful thing to do, uh, to rekindle those relationships. And with that, I think we're we're good. We're gonna do a book signing. Thank you. Thank you. [Applause] [Laughter] [Music]