How to future-proof your career? (with Dorie Clark)
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You're listening to How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. Navigating a career and figuring out how to make money and pay the bills, all of that would be a lot easier if we could just see the future. But since we can't, or at least I can't, all sorts of unexpected things end up happening in our careers. We can get fired. The path that we thought looked so promising can all of a sudden turn out to be a dead end. Or any number of other career challenges can come up.

One small example is for me, I love performing in front of live audiences. And for years, that was something that I did all the time. It was a big part of my career. But now with COVID, it seems like truly the worst idea possible to go down into a crowded, unventilated basement and hope that a big group of strangers coughs towards me. Right? Like if no one laughs at any of my jokes, that's no longer bombing. That's actually just giving the most COVID safe performance I can possibly give. Absolute silence.

My point being that when the rug gets pulled out from under you and you're dealing with the unexpected, what do you do? It is so easy to focus on the short term.

But it's important to consider the long term. That is something that I learned from today's guest, author Dori Clark. She very convincingly argues that even when things are in constant flux like they are right now, at a moment when it feels impossible to imagine what a few months from now will look like, much less a few years, well, Dori says that is when it's most important to take the long view. She came to that conclusion after going through some seriously dramatic career shifts herself.

Here's a clip from her TEDx talk. I was a newspaper reporter in Boston, and I loved it. You got to talk to the most interesting people, go to the most interesting events, keep learning. One day, I got called into the HR office, and I thought they were going to be changing our dental plan, but it didn't turn out that way. That afternoon, I left the office without a job. It was a Monday afternoon, and I had been laid off.

I went home that night, and I was scared. I didn't know how I was going to support myself. But I thought, "All right, I'm going to wake up the next morning, and I'll figure it out. I'll go look for another job." And the only problem was, it didn't quite turn out that way. The next morning, I woke up, I turned on the television,

It turned out that the day that I had been laid off was Monday, September 10th, 2001. The next morning, the world changed. Planes stopped flying, the stock market stopped trading. The least of anyone's problems that day was an out-of-work newspaper reporter.

But that moment made me vow that I was never going to let myself become that vulnerable in such a precarious position again. And I haven't. These days, I earn money in a variety of different ways. When you take the initiative, when you take your free time, when you are willing to invest in yourself and in your continued learning,

you can push your career into places you never would have even thought possible. That's how we make ourselves future-proof. We live in a world of disruption, and every day it's only becoming more so. Over the past few years, I have consciously and deliberately worked to cultivate multiple income streams in my business. I now have seven. And through that process,

it's done a lot of things. It's brought in more revenue for me. It's mitigated my risk. It's introduced me to new people and new experiences. It's helped me develop new skills. And it's my hope for you, whether you work for yourself or if you have a day job that you love and want to keep, that if you cultivate a portfolio career, that that can do the same for you.

How does Dory use the long view in her own life and career? How does she protect herself against unexpected circumstances arising? And how can you and I do that too? Those are the questions that we are going to dive into right after this short break. ♪

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I'm so excited to share the stage with all the amazing speakers of the TED Next conference, and I hope you'll come and experience it with me. Visit go.ted.com slash TED Next to get your pass today. And we are back. Okay, so on today's episode, we are talking about long-term thinking and how to future-proof your career with Dori Clark.

I'm Dori Clark. I teach for Duke University's Fuqua School of Business. I'm the author of the new book, The Long Game, and I help people and organizations get their ideas heard in a noisy and crowded world.

You've talked and written about how do you make it so that your career can survive when unexpected things happen, which if something unexpected hasn't happened to you in the last couple of years, congratulations, listener, you are doing really something better than I am.

So it seems to me like a lot of the work and the thinking that you now do full time, that all started because you really didn't want to feel as vulnerable as you did when you got laid off that first time. Yeah, I was pretty traumatized. Oh, I can certainly I can relate. Having had similar experiences myself, it's such a.

It can be such a blow to not just your financial future, but also like your sense of self of like, well, what will I do? What am I good at? One thing that's important to note is for almost all of us, we don't necessarily turn on a dime. I mean, now in retrospect, I realize that losing my job was one of the most important things that I've ever done.

one of the foundational elements that made me so keenly aware of the kind of hidden or unexpected risks that many of us are exposed to professionally. But in the short term, like in that moment, all I wanted was to be a reporter. I just wanted to get another reporting job because that was

What I cared about, that was the path that I was on. And so for about six months, I just tried desperately to get a job with another paper and I didn't really make any changes. So I think over time, we perhaps have a more dawning realization of how things are going to shake out.

So I wasn't kind of the perfect specimen of immediately realizing that I needed to change my life and change my risk profile when it came to my career. But what I have learned and what I have thought about a lot in the pandemic is this. A few years ago, you know, so I started my own business doing consulting and executive coaching, you know, back in 2006. So for a while, I've been self-employed. And a few years back,

I had what was a good problem to have, but still a problem, which is that I was spending a lot of my time on the road. I was giving a lot of keynote talks. In fact, in 2015, I gave 74 talks that year. I was on planes all the time. And I began to realize, wow, this is maybe not sustainable. You know, I would constantly be getting colds and, you know, sort of run down. And

I was looking at risks, but they were the kind of pedestrian risks, right? I thought, oh,

well, I might get sick or like really sick, or maybe there's a recession. And so everybody just cuts their budget for conferences. And so, you know, my keynote business goes away. Those were kind of predictable risks that I could foresee. I certainly did not see a pandemic coming, but because I took the time to at least think about them and try to prepare, I began to allocate more and more of my time toward online learning and online courses.

And so since 2014, I've been creating a bunch of online courses. And as it happened, the same thing that enabled me to de-risk myself in case of a recession or in case of illness, that actually happened.

worked for a pandemic as well. I wasn't planning for the pandemic, but online learning was kind of the solution for that as well. So this actually comes to one of the most interesting parts I thought of your new book, The Long Game, right? Is that you...

are talking to a friend, you mentioned talking to a friend and saying, I'm writing this book about long-term thinking. And your friend says like, during the pandemic, it seems like that is the opposite of what we need, right? Like no one can predict the long-term. We need to focus on the short-term. And you really make a compelling argument that that's not the case.

Yeah, absolutely. So the pandemic definitely was the classic case of highlighting the need for being nimble in the short term and the ability to be agile in the face of rapid change that shouldn't be underestimated. But that being said, if all we ever do is respond rapidly to external stimuli,

I'm not sure that's going to lead to a good end for anybody. We want to be self-directed. Nobody wants their life to be like a jellyfish on the waves, just sort of, you know, ending up on any beach in sight. Ideally, we want to have the kind of lives where we are self-directed. And it doesn't mean that things are always going to go according to plan. It doesn't mean that the exact route that we've planned out is going to be the one that we end up taking.

But what it does mean is that we are far more likely to end up in a place that either is where we want or is close to where we want because we've

We've put some directionality into it. We've put some effort into it, and we know where we want to go. It helps us be better at scanning the horizon for opportunities, and we're just navigating more. I think short-term thinking is essential, but without long-term thinking, our lives probably are not going to go the way we want.

I think that for a lot of people, when they're kind of stuck on like, what should I actually do? Or, you know, for me, I was like, I'm a comedian. I tore, I'm on the road. And then all of a sudden that didn't exist at all. And I think that something that you have written about of like, where do you go next is this idea of starting where there's already momentum.

which I think is really powerful when you're feeling stuck on like, so what should I do? So where do I go from here? So what does it mean to start where there's already momentum? It really can feel overwhelming for many people when it feels like a blank slate where they just have no idea. And so I think one of the best insights that has come out of Silicon Valley in the past 10 plus years is the idea that's known as the lean startup methodology.

don't go spending a million dollars to make something beautiful if you don't even know that people want it. Like create something rough, test it out. What's the smallest way that you can test it to even see if anybody cares? And then if they do, great, put a little more money in to keep testing.

But when you do that, you never get out, you know, beyond your skis. You never put too much on the table so that everything is at risk. You're taking small incremental risks. And I think we can do the same thing with our careers. If, for instance, you know, my very first book was called Reinventing You. It's about professional reinvention.

if you think you want to change careers, fantastic, but don't just quit your job and sign up for a $100,000 graduate program in some new field. There are a lot smaller and better ways to test it out. That's incredible. And think about all of the time and money and hassle that you saved by doing that. It also does make me think that, especially in creative fields, right? Like

As a writer, a speaker, an artist, a comedian, a musician, anything like that. But I think this is really true for any field. Sometimes there's this stigma against like having a day job. And I'm putting that in quotes, right? That people think like it doesn't mean as much if you're making your money somewhere else.

And what I've found personally, what I've found from a lot of people that I admire who do creative things is that having that overlap at first where you get to like not worry about paying rent and buying groceries with the money that you make from that thing that is your passion. It lets you actually get better at the passion and figure out like, is this exactly what you want to do? And then you,

if it goes well, you start to make a little money on that and you can kind of transition over. But I think that there's this idea we have to, the only way to get into a pool is to jump into the deep end, that there aren't stairs at the other end and we should never take the stairs. Yeah, I think that's exactly right, Chris. And I mean, especially in the arts, it's so damaging because there's all this kind of baggage about whether you're legit or not or whether you're a sellout or not. But having the creative freedom that is afforded

by not having to panic about where your rent money is coming from is actually just so profound. In the long game, you talk about how everyone kind of has heard the idea that like it takes 10 years to become an overnight success. And yet so few of us really believe that. And so a lot of people end up kind of quitting before they should and how like I think it's the same thing that you were saying there about this idea that you should be able to immediately make the right amount of

money or immediately you should be able to, you know, be writing for the best publication or be hired as the CEO. And yet we all know that's not true for other people, but we sometimes can feel it for ourselves. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

We often somehow in the back of our minds think that there's a shortcut, like there's a secret shortcut that some people know and, you know, damn it, we're going to find it out. But the truth is, I mean, for real, usually there's not. And we just need to be doing the work. And so that's why so much of what I really try to do

is to work to demystify the process because it drives me bonkers when people hoard information. I mean, one of the stories that I tell in The Long Game is about a woman that I knew years ago who was this super successful artist. And frankly, there's not a lot of people that you can say, oh, they're a super successful artist. But this woman truly was. She made a ton of money. She had a lot of public renown. And

I knew as a marketing professional that she was very savvy about her marketing. And so I tried to engage her once and I'm like, wow. So, you know, tell me more about how you broke through, like literally what would, what was that process like in the early days? Cause obviously once someone's famous, you know, it feeds off itself, but the hard part is like getting to famous.

And she gave this incredibly glib answer. She's like, oh, just do good work. And I just thought, what a freaking liar. You know, like, you know better. You know it wasn't just good work. There are so many people, we all know them, who are smart, who do good work. And, you know, their paintings are hanging on coffee shops, not in international airport terminals and in international galleries. Right.

And when people hide behind that, it is so irksome to me because what they are doing is they are pulling the ladder up behind them and saying, I figured it out, but it's a secret. So you're going to have to figure it out too. And I just want to break down all of that. I wanted to really try to break down the process so that people would have a fair shot of understanding what the mechanics actually are to get their ideas heard.

I admire that so much. And I completely agree. I mean, if you ask me the three funniest comedians that I've ever seen, I can name them right off the top of my head. And it's impossible to buy a ticket for any of their shows. And that is not because those tickets are sold out at arenas. It's because they are not performing in places that you could see because they're just hilarious people who have never kind of broken through. So,

If you are one of these people, let's, you know, regardless of whether it's in an artistic field or not, if you're someone that you want to stand out and you're just starting out in a field that seems really popular, it seems really crowded. What can you do?

So, this is often the biggest problem because the people around you know you're amazing, but other people beyond your circle never do unless you start either publishing them or sharing videos, sharing clips, whatever your format is. But you have to get your ideas out there so people can discover them. Number two is social proof.

Which basically is what what are the signals of credibility that you're putting out there? I mean, if you're a comedian, you know, it's all the things that the announcers will say when when you're coming on stage. Oh, you know, as seen on this night show, as seen on Comedy Central, blah, blah, blah. People recognize those names. And so they therefore say, oh, well, I should pay attention to what this guy says. He seems credible.

And we should say, as someone, you know, as someone who's performed multiple times, you're a comedian too. That's of the many things that you've done. You've also performed stand-up comedy many times. Well, thank you very much. I appreciate it. I think my comedy career is not quite as august as yours, but... Well, okay.

You never know. I will take the hat tip. So thank you. But in every field, we have markers of credibility like that. I mean, in business, it might be, oh, well, she writes for Harvard Business Review or something like that. And then finally, it's your network because you need other people to have heard of you and to be willing and able to amplify your message. We're going to have a ton more great advice from Dory right after this. So don't go anywhere.

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I want to tell you about a new podcast from NPR called Wild Card. You know, I am generally not the biggest fan of celebrity interview shows because they kind of feel packaged, like they've already told these stories a bunch of times before. But Wild Card is totally different because the conversation is decided by the celebrity picking a random card from a deck of conversation starters. And since even the host, Rachel Martin, doesn't know what they're going to

pick, the conversations feel alive and exciting and dangerous in a way because they're vulnerable and unpredictable. And it is so much more interesting than these stock answers that the celebrities tend to give on other shows. You get to hear things like Jack Antonov describe why boredom works or Jenny Slate on salad dressing or Issa Rae on the secret to creativity.

It is a beautiful, interesting show, and I love it. Wildcard comes out every Thursday from NPR. You can listen wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, we are back. So Dory, how can someone who is early in their career, someone who's just starting out, how can they build some of what you call social proof? How can they make it so that they get noticed and taken seriously? How do you do that when you are just getting started? How do you build that network?

Yeah. So this is often a place where a lot of people stop. And I'm glad that you're asking this question because all of these things are attainable. Like so often people think, oh, well, I don't have that. So I guess it won't work for me. And I'm like, excuse me, go get it. You can go get it. I think sometimes people can get tripped up when they're, they maybe are like shooting a little too high at the very beginning and they haven't built up a piece. And you talk about this. I know I'm conflating two things that you've discussed, but yeah.

You talk about how with networking, sometimes people feel grimy and the way that we feel the grimiest is when it feels like we're using someone else, right? When it's not like an even exchange. And I think that sometimes with like, how do you get, what are you applying for? Sometimes when people are like shooting for something where it's really like them giving you something rather than you giving them something, we can feel that same griminess a little bit. So,

How can you get to the place where you're like, OK, now Forbes, I know that I can do a job where I'm going to be contributing to Forbes and it's not like Forbes is doing me some sort of favor. Yeah, this is such an important point. So oftentimes you're exactly right. People want to start out, you know, playing in the majors and they're

There's a strategy that I talk about a lot in my books, which is known as the ladder strategy. And it's basically just thinking about, okay, starting out by playing in the majors is for everyone except literally a handful of people in the universe. This is probably not a winning strategy. You need to work your way up. If you're a baseball player, you play in college.

And then you get drafted and you play in single A ball until they send you to double A. And then you play in triple A and then you get your chance at the majors. There's a methodical progression. And we need to think about that too. And this goes to that really important psychological phenomenon, which is that, you know, we judge ourselves based on what we feel capable of.

capable of doing and other people judge us based on what we've done. So here you have actual proof rather than like, I know I could write something good. People see like, oh, I like your actual writing. And that is a much more convincing thing for them. Yes, that's exactly right. And, you know, we just have to be more proactive and more strategic about things. I mean, I think sometimes...

A part of us wants or expects other people to just come to us with offers and opportunities. But unless they know you do that thing, they're probably not going to think of you for that thing. So, you know, now I've spent years teaching for Duke and for Columbia and for other business schools. But in the beginning, it wasn't like anyone was interested.

coming to me and begging me to teach at their business school, like pretty far from it. What I actually did was very similar there. I created a spreadsheet of top business schools and I reached out to everybody I knew who had a connection there. Maybe they were an alum. Maybe they, you know, had taught their,

Once or twice, maybe they had some LinkedIn relationship with somebody and I was asking for intros. And I also did cold pitches, in fact, to department heads of relevant departments offering to guest lecture again for free because guest lecturing is kind of your first foot in the door that enables you to build up enough connections and enough credibility so that eventually you can get a paid teaching engagement.

Thinking about yourself personally, you have had such a varied and interesting career. You know, one of the things you talk about is indexing for interesting, trying to do varied things, and you certainly have achieved that. How do you, in your own career and work, how do you balance growing and learning with earning money? So how do you think about the balance?

relationship between those two things? Well, one of the concepts that I talk about in the long game is called what I call thinking in waves. And I think that one of the places where we go wrong sometimes is, I mean, this is kind of a form of short-term thinking, but it's looking at too narrow of a time span and saying, oh my gosh, well, I haven't fit this and this and this in, in this week or in this month or in this year.

You know, frankly, we need to be thinking in terms of our lifespan, you know, not necessarily some arbitrary time measure about, oh, it's seven days or, oh, it's one year. You know, the bigger issue is as we think about our lives, do things balance out and become the way we want? And so...

I remember something that was very influential to me was, you know, just this sort of like kind of random saying that people use sometimes, which maybe you've heard too, which is you learn in your 20s and you earn in your 30s. And I thought, oh, you know, that makes a lot of sense, actually. And so I tried to think of it that way, that especially in my 20s, I would take plenty of low paying jobs if I thought that they would help me learn new things, establish credentials,

you know, build, build a resume because, you know, for a lot of us in our twenties, we don't necessarily have a family to support or a mortgage or things like that. So you have a little bit more flexibility to be able to do that. And it enables you if you're thinking long-term to then over index later on saying, all right, well, once I do have these credentials and I know these people, I can get a job that, you know, or, or build a career or something that actually pays more money.

And so that was kind of big picture how I thought about it. But also, I really did make conscious choices around 2012.

I made a very specific decision that one of the things that I knew was going to be really important for me in terms of building my business was creating more content, you know, going back to the piece about how you become a recognized expert. I had built up a nice business, you know, it's kind of a nice six figure business for myself doing local consulting in the Boston market. And I wanted to kick my career into a different place. I wanted to level up.

And so I thought, I've got to get a lot more people knowing who I am. And the only way to do that is to create content at scale. So I started writing a lot for Forbes, for Harvard Business Review, for Entrepreneur, for all these different publications that meant that I had a lot less time for taking in paid clients. So in some ways, it was a good forcing function.

But I thought of it as an investment in order to be able to spend the time building my brand that would enable me to come back later at an even higher position. Unfortunately, it really did work. But in that moment, you know, when you're making the choice and saying, gosh, I hope this works out, it's very discomforting. I feel like that is such an important point because so many people can be really scared about saying no to a sure thing.

to make time for the future, right? For things that could pay off bigger. It's still scary because you're like, well, this is like, I could just have this job right now, even though, you know, it's kind of not perfect. I think we've talked a lot about the benefits of thinking ahead and of diversifying the way that you work and having multiple kind of streams of income and all of that. I

I wonder if we can, for just a moment, look at some of the downsides or kind of the darker sides of that. So how do we diversify our professional portfolios? How do we make sure that we have side hustles or that we're not just relying on one main job, which, like we all know now, could possibly disappear?

How do we do that without normalizing overwork and burnout? And that culture that I think we all know is pretty toxic right now. Yeah, absolutely. And certainly during COVID, it became very easy since there was not a separation of workspace and home for people to just keep going. So I think it's a worthy point. So my last book actually was all about this question. It was called Entrepreneurial You.

And it was about how do you create multiple revenue streams in your business or in your life? And the way that I think about it, sometimes people would say to me, oh, but doesn't that sound complicated? I'm already busy. How can I create multiple revenue streams? And what I always wanted to emphasize was as you're thinking about this, this is not about...

revenue streams that are so wildly different that you have to cultivate a different audience, that you have to learn different things. I mean, it's not like you can simultaneously be a lawyer and a dog breeder and a professional windsurfer. Those are completely different things that take a long time to cultivate. What I am talking about instead is

is thinking about your core IP, your core ways of doing business and what you're good at, what you like doing, and just thinking, are there different audiences I could reach with this? Or are there different ways that I could potentially deliver this? Just hearing what you're saying, for me, one of the things that I think I take away from that is that you...

are broadening the frame just a little bit. So it's instead of you do this one thing and this is the only thing you do to think about, well, what are the other things that touch on that? And how are, how do you have skills that are obvious to you that maybe aren't obvious to other people? Yeah, that's exactly right. And the more you do that, frankly, the more you are de-risking your profession because, you know, God forbid, if you're not doing this podcast,

Well, you don't have that problem because you've already built up these other side income streams. I mean, in Entrepreneurial You, I tell the story about a guy who, in fact, is a podcaster named Pat Flynn. He runs a popular show called Smart Passive Income. And he actually got his start because in 2008, he was an employee at an architecture firm. And he ended up getting laid off, as was not uncommon during 2008 if you were in architecture. Right.

And he had started a blog when he was trying to pass his lead certification exam. It's this green building exam. He started a blog that was like a study guide. It became kind of popular. So he decided, you know what? I wonder if I package all my blog posts into an e-book. I could sell that e-book.

And, you know, he thought, ah, maybe he'll make a little bit of money. But it turns out it was so popular, this e-book, that within a couple of months, he was actually earning more from the e-book sales than he was from his day job. It would have been devastating otherwise. You know, he had just gotten engaged. You know, he was going to buy a house. And instead...

He had a fallback income that he did indeed fall back into. And he later launched a podcast and got into that world. But it all started because he had almost inadvertently created a side hustle for himself that ended up saving him. I think there's also something really interesting and important about the idea that

these processes that you describe are cyclical, right? So like they work. And then once you're in a place, maybe you then start thinking about like, how can I do something different? And then as you figure out how to do something different, well, actually you could then help other people do something different. So it kind of grows, right? Where like first you're helping someone pass their LED exam, and then you're helping them start a passive income business. And then you're helping them podcast and you can kind of keep spiraling in upwards rather than

I think sometimes when you say the word spiral, people only imagine it goes downwards. That's right. But that feels really relevant to your career where you've had all these really fascinating things that you probably couldn't have predicted initially.

but you can look back and see how the thread ties through all of them of your interest and what it is that brought you to them. Yeah, that's, that's exactly right. You just have to keep scanning for opportunity. And oftentimes if you, if you keep your eyes up and scan properly, opportunity will come to you in the form of people actually saying, you know, Hey Chris, it's so amazing what you do. I'd love to learn that. You know, and normally

what we do is we have our blinders on and we just say, oh yeah, well, you know, yeah, podcasting's great. Good luck. But if you hear enough people coming to you, you could actually say, oh wow, well maybe I should start a training program or wow, maybe I could create an online course about that. And you realize that there's a lot of opportunity that we're not harnessing.

As I was thinking about all of the different work and the kind of how do you build something that's stable and secure by thinking a little more holistically and by broadening the frame, I thought about my dad who worked for 30 years for the same government agency, has a pension, he's retired, and he doesn't have to worry about that stuff anymore. And I don't really know anyone my age who's able to count on something like that. I know it does exist for some people, but it really seems like more and more people

insecurity is kind of inherent in work. Yeah, that's exactly right.

It's true that, yeah, if you're a teacher or if you are some kind of government employee, there still are pensions, but it is getting increasingly rarer. This goes back 30 plus years. There was legislation that actually changed it. It's what created the 401k. And the whole premise of the 401k is that it essentially shifts the risks of retirement funding from the employer to the employee. And

I mean, we can debate government policy all we want, but for 30 years, that's been what it is. And we have to deal with it and reckon with it. All of us are going to be better off looking reality in the face and saying, man, okay, I'm kind of on my own here. I have to make this work. And so the more we can actually...

Take control and just say, look, if I want career insurance, I make it for myself. It's so powerful because I think a lot of folks and I include myself in this category before I got laid off.

If you have a day job, it seems 100% secure until the minute it is not. And then, you know, they can rip it away with no notice. And, you know, in my case, it was Monday afternoon. They paid me through the end of the week and then they wiped their hands. So we have to understand that.

The more we take responsibility and put in place multiple revenue streams and just a constant attitude of skill acquisition and growing our network, that's how we protect ourselves and create proactively a lot of opportunity and possibility that actually can be really exciting and meaningful.

Well, Dory Clark, it has been such a pleasure talking to you. I am a huge fan of your work and I'm so excited for people to read your new book, The Long Game. Thank you for being on the show. Thank you so much, Chris. That is it for today's episode. I am your host, Chris Duffy, and this has been How to Be a Better Human. Thank you so much to our guest, Dory Clark. Her new book is called The Long Game, How to Be a Long-Term Thinker in a Short-Term World.

On the TED side, this show is brought to you by Abhimanyu Das, who thinks so far ahead of time that he forgets what millennium we're in. Daniela Balarezo, who is as nimble and agile as a fox. Frederica Elizabeth Yosefov, who would be an impressive addition to any social network. Anne Powers, who has amassed a mountain of social proof. And Cara Newman, who never hoards information.

From PRX Productions, How to Be a Better Human is brought to you across the boundaries of time and space by Jocelyn Gonzalez from the past, Pedro Rafael Rosado from the present, and Sandra Lopez-Monsalve from the future. Thanks to you for listening. Share this episode with someone who you would like to continue knowing for the long term. Thanks again, and we will be back next week.

Support for the show comes from Brooks Running. I'm so excited because I have been a runner, gosh, my entire adult life. And for as long as I can remember, I have run with Brooks Running shoes. Now I'm running with a pair of Ghost 16s from Brooks.

incredibly lightweight shoes that have really soft cushioning. It feels just right when I'm hitting my running trail that's just out behind my house. You now can take your daily run in the Better Than Ever Go 16. You can visit brookscrunning.com to learn more. PR.