Molly Turner 
Thanks for tuning in to the very first Longitude Sound Bytes Extra, where we’ll be sharing our observations and highlights of the seventh series of the Longitude Sound Bytes podcast covering pressure with you.

Jaena
Molly, I can’t believe this episode marks Longitude’s 60th episode!

Molly
It’s pretty crazy because one year ago, kind of my like Corona-versary, like March 15, Ipek was wondering if I would just write a couple of tunes for this podcast idea. And I’d already worked with her on interviewing some professionals and kind of got the gist of what she was looking for. And throughout this entire time, I’ve been able to present some really interesting guests and even interview an Olympic coach, and even you were on the podcast just a few weeks ago.

Jaena
Yeah. So Ipek also reached out when I had actually just joined the LinkedIn game, which I highly recommend, for those considering it, especially people with musical backgrounds, because I studied classical flute performance in university with a side of music entrepreneurship. And now I’ll be starting law school in the fall. And I know Molly, you also come from a music background.

Molly
Yes, I studied music composition in Houston at Rice University. And now I’m learning professional stick waving, also known as orchestral conducting at Juilliard. So we have this music background, and we’ve been connected through Longitude. So this is all been a really great thing.

Jaena
And I think something that both of us have experienced quite frequently in our lives, coming from a performance background, is pressure.

Molly
Oh, totally. Yes. Classical music is a big pressure cooker. As much as I love it, it can definitely be coming from all four walls and more.

Jaena
Also, Molly is joking around about waving a stick and making it sound kind of easy. But conducting is really not. And we should give a quick shout out to Molly for our pursuing conducting because we need more women conductors out on the podium, and better women representation at the forefront of classical music. So I am so grateful and happy for Longitude to have brought us together to present the first ever Longitude Sound Bytes Extra.

Jaena
From listening to our guests’ and Longitude fellows’ thoughts on pressure, I observed that no one’s exempt from feeling pressure, both negatively and positively. But also that no one’s exempt from learning great takeaways for dealing with pressure as well.

Molly
Yeah, you make a great point, no matter what career or thing or passion that you pursue, you’re going to be feeling pressure. And that actually reminds me a lot of Episode 51 with Ed Knowles and Rachel Carlton.

Ed Knowles
Now is more than ever, there are pressures on young people. Money and financial things, and just comparing yourself online. So I think one of the things that is the most important thing is to just enjoy it kind of embrace the pressure.

Molly
As Ed and Rachel both felt when meeting great people, such as the president of the International Olympic Committee, although I don’t know how he doesn’t feel pressure hosting and producing each Olympic channel podcast episode, and former Vice President Al Gore in the case of Rachel, though she did sprain her ankle, both of them embraced pressure and tried to recall their hard work and preparation that brought them to these amazing opportunities.

Jaena
Yeah, preparation seems like another common theme when hearing success and pressure and the same sentence.

Molly
Yeah, I mean, we’re always going to face pressure so we might as well start finding ways to prepare and recreate the situations, and on Episode 53, we had an Olympic athlete speak to us about putting ourselves in these situations over and over so that we have a feeling of what it’s like. Ogonna says:

Ogonna Nnamani Silva
Game-like situations and test-like situations are invaluable experiences. And those help you to learn to retain the information; putting yourself in those very similar high pressure situations are actually very important.

Jaena
This really resonates with me, Molly, because I mentioned in my own episode with Quint, Episode 54, that I was told by the former principal flutist of the New York Philharmonic to seek out people who were “better than you,” and then go ask to collaborate with them. I mean, what better way to put yourself in a high-pressure situation than to engage directly, right?

Molly
I think you bring up a super valid point. I am still continuing my musical development, and will for my entire life, but I’ve been told a very similar thing, and that’s to watch really high quality music making, of course, and to talk about their kind of process. But I have even been told to just watch excellent performance. If that is someone running the 100 meters, you know, with hours and hours of practice behind them, or even a politician delivering a speech beautifully or something, just people at the top of their game, and we can really learn from that. And that’s what I love about Longitude, is because it really draws these connections between high performance in different careers and industries. And IBM president, Jim Whitehurst, also talks about this kind of secret formula for creating effective teams and exemplifying great leadership in his episode with Grayson, and that it’s really okay not being the smartest person in the room, which we’re really talking about, in this case:

Jim Whitehurst
Your job is to kind of orchestrate a group of extraordinary people who together can do things you know, that you can’t do.

Jaena
That’s a fantastic point you brought up there, Molly, because not only do I admire that we share a similar perspective on acknowledging that every person has their greatest strengths that might differ from the strength of our own, but we really utilizing each strength to build the most effective team. Like what fantastic memories you’ve built with those teammates!

Molly
And you also shared that, the more good memories you associate with what you do, the more likely it’ll engage you and motivate you to do it.

Justin Gross
What I’ve learned is there are many ways to go about a career and many folks rescale, retool, pivot, and take on new and exciting opportunities, and later stages of a career and all throughout, finding things that you like that fit your style and allow for your goals.

Jaena
[In Episode 55] Seems like not only Justin, Debi, and I are the sole people that want to like the things that may pressure us. But that is so much easier said than done, Molly, like, I think we can both relate, you know, even if you don’t end up with the thing that you first set out to do. So, for in my case, I studied music my entire life. And now I’m starting law school in the fall, and even for you, you studied composition and now you’re on the path to becoming a great woman conductor. I think we can both relate to finding that distinction between where to draw the line when you’re an artist and you’re working professionally. And when you need to step away and take time off and take care of yourself and focus on your own life.

Molly
Yeah, I totally agree.  I was actually premed my freshman year as well, which was a crazy thing. And then I was learning how to write music, and then I was realizing music composition might not pay the bills. And my sophomore year was kind of a pivotal year. And I actually spent a lot of time on the Frisbee team, which was kind of that like, time away from like work because like you mentioned, being an artist, you step out of the practice room or you’re done, you know, intensely listening to a piece and it kind of sticks with you. And so it’s kind of hard, just like in any career, to draw that like work-life balance. And actually, Daniel and Sarah’s episode, [59] really speaks to this.

Daniel Cohen
So I do see a pressure there of too much focus on remote work. And that puts a lot of stress on people’s time because it’s much harder to unplug. And I think it looks a lot of dependency on technology.

Molly
But thankfully, Daniel seems to have shared way out by unplugging. What do you think about that, Jaena?

Jaena
I completely agree with you and Daniel there, Molly. I think, oftentimes, we forget to take care of ourselves when times are extremely busy. And we try to fine tune that work-life balance. But I actually once had a great manager remind me that I was saying that wrong. She said, Jaena, it’s not work-life balance. It’s life-work balance.

Molly
Oh my gosh, I love it! And what a coincidence that in Episode 57 with Dr. Jeff Frey and Jesse, he teaches us the importance of emotional intelligence.

Jeff Frey
If you as a leader in your home, school, group or business, feel that you don’t trust yourself in certain situations to make a call that will benefit both your followers and yourself, try boosting your emotional intelligence. I personally think it has become in recent months, the biggest factor differentiating leaders success or failure in these ever changing times.

Jaena
This takes us to the conclusion of the first Longitude Sound Bytes Extra. We hope through these short highlights we’ve not only displayed that pressure doesn’t discriminate, nor is any human immune to feeling pressure but you can actually use pressure to fuel goals and careers as exemplified by both our guest speakers and Longitude fellows.

Molly
Dr. Jeff has also shared with us that for those of us who aren’t as great as dealing with pressure have hope by boosting our emotional intelligence.

Jaena
Thank you for joining us today and we can’t wait for you to tune into the next series of the Longitude Sound Bytes about “presence.”

I think, in this remote era, there’s going to be a lot of conversation about how much can we really work from home after the pandemic, and how much do we need to be in person. So there’s going to be pressure on reducing real estate holdings and new office space and things. I hope we don’t go too far. That’s one risk I foresee because [legal] work in a sense can be done from anywhere. Because what I do is what we’re doing now. I get on a Zoom call, and I talk to you, I write a memo at my desk, on my laptop. But I think something is lost if you completely lose the element of the physical coming together. So I do see a pressure there, of too much focus on remote work, and that puts a lot of stress on people’s time, because it’s much harder to unplug. And I think it puts a lot of dependency on technology. You know, laptops always got to be up, the programs you use always have to be working really well. And as we know, like, Zoom for business, or WebEx, or other things don’t always work great. Whereas if we’re in person, I can always just walk to your office and have a conversation. I think [another] risk is overly siloing people, especially for work from home, it’s just too easy to just work with people you always work with, because you don’t see other people, right? It’s out of sight, out of mind. And you don’t think to yourself, even though we have email, and I could email anyone, there’s just too much going on in your [own] silo [and] [in] your own home. I think gets people thinking let me just rely on the people I already work with. So I figured a way of actually discourages outreach and connectivity and synergy with other employees. Even though, you could theoretically talk to anyone anywhere in the world via zoom and via email, so I think it’s a careful balance of those two.

[For other excerpts from Sarah Sowell’s interview with Daniel Cohen, see her article Understanding the legal field.]

Sarah Sowell, Longitude fellow, Rice University:

In this interview, something I think that really stood out to me is how even in a profession like law, there may be a lot of solitary work. Teamwork, specifically, the organic teamwork that can mostly come by being near people is really powerful and important to a business. Living apart and doing work apart from each other means a lot of changes to what we view as a necessary part of the workplace. And questions like “do we need a physical place to work” and “do we need in person teams” have come up regarding what to do post COVID. This clip makes a really powerful case for reasons to go back to being in person together. The friendships and acquaintances, team power and brain work that are gained by being together are a real asset to a business that can’t be quantified but should be preserved.

Hey everybody, I want to spend the next few minutes talking about the importance as a leader of not being the smartest person in the room.

And I thought of this because I was recently guest lecturing at my alma mater, Rice University, to an engineering class. And it was around engineers thinking about going into kind of management or more business oriented jobs. And one of the things I always say to engineers, but it really spans beyond engineers, it can be kind of the bright kind of type A people, but I specifically say this to engineers, “Be really careful, if you want to be effective, about not focusing on the right answer and being the smartest person in the room.” Because that doesn’t mean that your idea is going to be listened to. It’s, you know, the old saying that, “People don’t care what you know until they know that you care.” And so it’s about how you fit in with the team and how effectiveness is getting a team to walk out and do what you want them to do ultimately, or, be engaged in kind of creating the best idea. I think that’s an important concept for individual contributors. But  as you reflect on that, in terms of being a leader or a manager, you can kind of take that to another level, in the sense of, you have the opportunity to pick who is in the room with you. And if you create a team where you’re the smartest person in the room, I think you have to really, really think hard about, “Are you doing your best to create the most effective team?” I’ve always thought a lot about who’s on the team and not just kind of raw IQ. I know we’re kind of using that as a bit of a shorthand, but really think about the people in the room and what do they bring? And how does that augment the team? And you know, I think, as a leader of a team, that’s the most important thing you need to do. Your job is to kind of orchestrate a group of extraordinary people who together can do things, you know, that you can’t do. And so again, going back to this notion, I think a lot of leaders want to walk in and say, “I’m in charge, I’m driving this and I’m kind of coordinating out things that I could do myself.” You know, if you’re doing that, you probably aren’t creating the best possible team that you can. So again, think really, really, really hard about how you are hiring people that can do specific tasks better than you and constructing those into a group of people that can do things that you can’t couldn’t imagine doing on your own. Hope that helps. Talk to you soon.

[To hear more of Jim’s views on culture and open leadership follow him on LinkedIn to see his video series, “An Open Conversation with Jim.“]

Grayson Best, Longitude fellow, University of Texas:

Thank you Jim.

Jim brings up a great observation in leadership, but one that I think can be good life advice in general. In almost all aspects of life, there is some form of hierarchy, whether it be in the workplace or social. Even in academia, it can be common for a perceived hierarchy of knowledge to be established. While these hierarchies can be normal, they can expose certain flaws in collaboration. In a debate, taking counterpoints personally or becoming defensive can drastically change ones response to criticism and disapproval of ones ideas. It is only too common to see debates become ineffective at communicating ideas when notions like status or emotions come in to play on such topics. This societal pressure holds no place in true progress of a groups’ goals for betterment.

When sharing and executing ideas, the more everyone knows or is aware of, the better. Most things that progress society forward come from a collaboration of complex ideas that require different fields of study or bits of information to effectively move forward. In order to do that, a group of people must be gathered, as it is nearly impossible for one person to know all the things necessary when making a large innovative decision. 

Collaboration is just that, collaboration; no one individual has absolute power, and I think it is this running theme that will become more common in a more constructive society.

I am Longitude fellow Jesse Annan van der Meulen from Rice University, and today I’ll be presenting a sound byte by Dr. Jeff Frey, vice president of innovation at Talent Path, an enterprise working to further educate emerging tech talents. He’ll be speaking to us about emotional intelligence, and how this is crucial to leadership success.

I’m Dr. Jeff Frey from Houston, Texas, vice president of innovation at Talent Path, a venture that is upskilling emerging tech talent, and I’m on faculty at the business school of Rice University and the Citadel, where I teach innovation courses with a lean toward my research subject: emotional intelligence.

We’ve had quite a lot of change recently in our world, and in our lives personally. While these changes are on an impact scale like no other. leaders in business groups and nonprofits have always had to deal with uncertain environments.

I’ve become a devourer of whatever wisdom I can find or even create for myself around how leaders handle their leadership, the change that impacts them, their professional effectiveness, and personal wellbeing. These things flow and lead one to the other, but maybe not in the way you might think.

Take the CEO of a large nationwide nonprofit who was on a wedding anniversary trip with his wife when an event prompted his team to reach out and call him home to personally take charge of the situation. He did, it was a huge success, and he received an award for the diligence with which he handled it. From all outward appearances, he did the right thing.

Maybe as a one-time event in isolation, this noble act makes sense, but our CEO has made a habit of missing family outings, staying at work too long, and letting his physical and emotional health go by the wayside… all for the mission of the organization.

What he doesn’t realize is that he is headed for some unfortunate life events which will be termed “burn out.” His personal health will fade, and professional effectiveness will be lost. The very organization that he was working so hard for will be deemed ineffective and the mission unfulfilled for a time.

Sad story I know, and I usually tell ones from a positive angle, but, what’s the lesson here?

If our leader was equipped with the knowledge and skills to recognize that his actions, which looked to him and everyone else around him as being positive, sold out to the organization, setting the example… if he recognized that his actions were driving himself and eventually his organization down a dark path, he most certainly would have turned them around.

It’s the difference between an unsustainable leader and a sustainable one, and a factor in that is emotional intelligence.

A leader with high emotional intelligence first has self-awareness. They understand themselves and are aware of their emotions, actions, and how those impact themselves and others. This can come through personality assessments, and situational analyses. Coworkers, and friends can also give us this perspective.

Once that’s known, self-regulation kicks in. Do what is right, not what is wrong. Do what is beneficial, not what is destructive. Easier said than done, but peers, accountability partners, and mentors can assist with this step. 

My hope for leaders, and anyone who is facing an uncertain environment with constant change, is to become professionally and personally impervious to the shifts around them by having a solid foundation self-awareness and self-regulation. These pillars of emotional intelligence can save individuals and organizations from destruction. If you are a leader in your home, school, group, or business, and you feel that you don’t trust yourself in uncertain situations to make a call that will benefit both your followers and yourself, try boosting your emotional intelligence. I personally think it has become in recent months the biggest factor differentiating leader success or failure in these changing times.

Jesse Annan van der Meulen, Longitude fellow, Rice University:

Thank you Dr. Frey, for sharing your insights with us.

In times of a worldwide pandemic that is draining our mental health batteries, emotional intelligence is more important than ever before. Yet, it seems like not a lot of people are aware of its meaning or application in the real world, myself included. The best definition I encountered online goes as follows: emotional intelligence is the quality that enables us to confront with patience, insight, and imagination the many problems that we face in our affective relationship with ourselves and other people.

The overcommitted CEO that Dr. Frey mentions is a textbook example of how Western society likes to view the work-life balance. That is, when push comes to shove, a work-life balance can be forgotten and one is often expected to commit to work fully. Pulling all nighters, working during the weekends, and expectations of immediate responses to an email, are just a few examples of things that have become commonplace. Adding on to that list, we can take the CEO who comes back from a vacation to solve an emergency situation at work.

But what about emotional intelligence? Why do we not give the same amount of credit to people that prioritize their own wellbeing over work? Why do I feel looked down upon when I want to tell my college professor that I prefer not to have tests on Saturdays? I don’t know if anyone can give a definitive answer to these questions. But luckily, new initiatives that stress the importance of emotional intelligence are emerging more and more. Dr. Frey is not alone in recognizing that cultivating emotional intelligence should become a priority. And I can only hope that more people will start to realize the same.

When you get to the Olympic stage you are in a position to win a medal. The key thing is to focus on the job at hand.You’ve got 70-80,000 people in the stands, and sometimes they even know your name, you are representing the country. So you’re right there in the runway, and they’re calling your name, “Richard, hey!” You’ve got to tune that out. When you get caught up in the press clippings, if you are the leading guy or leading girl in the event, and you get caught up in that. That’s, your downfall right there. You need to clear all that stuff out, stay focused with your coach and your immediate people who are supporting you, physios, whatever have you, stay in that moment. Because once you start getting distracted, that’s when you start losing focus and that’s when the other guy is going to get you. And you’ll see a lot of times where, that star comes in. They’re expected to win. Might as well give them the gold medal. Then somebody comes in from right field, bam, they take it, or they trip over a hurdle or, or the baton doesn’t get around to that team that was destined to be the world record holders, right? It happens because there’s a, there’s that small margin. That’s small margin of error, that if you lose your focus, it’s going to catch up and come up and bite you. So, you’re in awe, but at the same time, once you start the competition, you’ve got to go back to the A, B’s and C’s. You got to sort of take a moment, right, take it down. And you know, I mean, I could look up and I could see the jumbotron and I’m on it. I’m like, Okay, let me not do that again. Right. And there’s a, there’s a clock in front of you that’s counting down. You have a minute 45 seconds to complete your jump. A lot of people realize that on the runway, there’s a clock there. You just can’t be there for 5-10 minutes.

Once you step on a runway, they hit the clock. You’ve got to complete that jump in that time. So you got to settle yourself and then you go through your checks and balances and down, you go and you’ve got the 100 meters, whatever events, you’re really going back to muscle memory, you’re really going back to, you’ve been doing this so often that it shouldn’t be like, oh, I’ve got to change something now. This is not. This moment, on the playing field, there’s no changing anything. You’re following that pattern, you’re following the training, you prepped before that maybe you’ve had a, you know, some athletes eat before some don’t, whatever your prep is to get you to what’s called ideal performance level, you’ve been doing this a number of times, hopefully through NCAA’s or your conference meets or whatever have you, that sort of prepare you for how you’re going to be when you get to the main stage. And but again, you’ve got it, you’ve got a really blank out to crowd and other things, you really have to really drill down and focus. And you’ll find that you’ll perform to the best of your ability on that day.

Sharon Zou, Longitude fellow, Boston University:

Thank you, Richard, for sharing such an incredible and inspiring perspective. As a hip-hop dancer that has participated in a number of dance competitions, the notion that “on the playing field, there’s no changing anything” especially resonated with me. Your description about the moment you step onto the Olympic stage and the clock begins counting down reminded me of the moments I got into position behind the stage curtains. Just like how you empty your mind and follow the natural pattern that your body has become accustomed to after months of training, I forget everything else and let my body take over once the music begins.

This importance of preparation can also be applied to other parts of our lives too. For students, practice is the most important thing to do when it comes to presentations, interviews, tests, and more. Only by devoting hours of practice prior to the actual events, will we be sure to really execute to the best of our ability. Practice undoubtedly leads to confidence. As someone who gets especially anxious without previous preparation, the practice goes a long way to help me feel calm and in control of the situation. Additionally, I really liked the part where you mentioned the importance of avoiding being distracted by the people around you, whether they’re your opponents or fans. The expectations of the people around us, even if they’re positive, can exaggerate the pressure we feel. It’s important to focus our attention inward during these times and trust ourselves and the process.

Hello, my name is Justin Gross. I currently live in Washington DC. I’m at Capital One working on our fraud disputes and reissuance experiences in the capital on mobile app. I’m a huge fan of the product management profession, this profession I started after being in several roles in my early years out of college.

I would say I got there in a round-about fashion. Product management sits at the intersection of human, business, and technology. How do you understand a customer problem and what drives someone to use your products? What are the emotions? What are the outcomes you were driving toward? For business what benefit does this product provide?

Releasing products that customers love isn’t inexpensive. It requires a lot of work. How can you justify the work required to release and at least make your money back if not generate lasting long-term value? Technology is about building innovative products that are easy and seamless and practical.

You get to wear many hats as a product manager, which is part of what makes it so exciting. The idea of wearing many hats and playing multiple positions comes from ideals instilled in me from our parents. I grew up running track and was pushed to try almost every event, eventually becoming a decathlete, competing through college. For 15 years, I tried to excel at so many different events and take on the unique challenges that each event presented. I played the saxophone in concert in jazz bands, and can also hold my own as a Spanish speaker. I didn’t know at the time, but that attitude of mindset would go on to play a very central role in my early career.

I was an economics and policy studies double major and undergrad at Rice University. I really had no clue what I wanted to be when I when I left school, and I’m still not really sure that idea has fully developed five years out of college, even after spending my first four years out of college at an investment management firm and Edtech company in roles ranging from investment analysis, corporate finance, customer insights and strategy, business intelligence, to data science.

I moved to Capital One in February of 2019. When I graduated, I didn’t expect that within five years I would have worked at three companies and held five different roles. But embracing new challenges and gaining new skills when possible has been something I’ve prioritized in my early career. 

In one of my first interviews, I was asked if I thought I was someone whose learning style was more in line with “a mile wide and a foot high” or “a foot wide and a mile high.” In other words, do you like to know a lot about a little or a little about a lot? Careers are long – intimidatingly so – you have a long time to start building up a mile high if your career is 30 to 40 years long. Why rush? I’ve seen folks who get started down the path and keep building up in a role that doesn’t align with their personal or career interests, but the title and money make it hard to pivot and explore other opportunities after time.

It all comes down to what you optimized for. For me, I’ve been interested in seeing a business for many different angles. There are definitely folks my age who are subject matter experts at this point and have really leaned into a specific function while I’ve been in a exploratory phase of my career.

What I’ve learned is there are many ways to go about a career and many folks reskill, retool, pivot, and take on new and exciting opportunities in later stages of a career and all throughout. I love learning and I love picking up new skills. My parents always told me, “The more things you can do, the more opportunities you may have available to you.”

I really look forward to continuing to take on new challenges and really piece together the things that make a business home, but also my career home. Ultimately, it comes down to knowing your end user well. Your career is no different. Finding things that you like, that fit your style, and allow for your goals. Over time your career can be looked at as a product that you gather requirements for, refine, iterate, and enhance, as you go along.

[To see more of Justin’s views, explore our Career Conversations feature Work happiness by choosing a career that aligns with personal interests.]

Debi Saha, Longitude fellow, Rice University:

Thank you Justin! You perfectly encapsulated how I view my education and career. Going into Rice in the midst of a pandemic, I wanted to reinvent myself as this “Renaissance woman.” That meant learning a new language, pushing my activism, and getting involved in student government, something I hadn’t done before. Right now, that looks like taking Arabic, posting action items for various social and political movements, and being part of the academics committee in Rice’s student association. I am someone to jump at every opportunity for skill building, and though it may not directly lead me to a specific career, I enjoy facing these challenges, like Justin. As someone who is also majoring in Social Policy Analysis and Economics (alongside managerial studies), it is encouraging to hear about the plethora of options available to me after I graduate. I want the opportunity to explore multiple roles and careers, guided by my love of learning. As Justin mentioned, “Find things that you like, that fit your style, and allow for your goals” and while that may be especially hard during a pandemic, you’ll come out on the other side of this in a better place.

My name is Jaena Kim, currently 23 years old and I am currently home at Winnipeg, Manitoba, that’s where I grew up. I just came back from Banff, Alberta, which is also in Canada, working at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. Due to COVID right now, though, the center is closed, but it was an arts and leadership development institution. And so I worked at arts administration, which was a fitting fit after I graduated from the University of Montreal and McGill University in flute performance. And I also minored in music entrepreneurship.

I was lucky enough early on to meet a very renowned flutist. Her name is Jeanne Baxtresser. She’s kind of the goddess of orchestral flute excerpts that you play for auditions. She gave me this piece of advice, where she said, “Always find someone better than you, and then go up to them and ask to play with them.” And I think, especially as musicians who are nurtured from a young age to be the very best, it can also kind of interfere with building good relationships with your peers, or with musicians who are better than you because there will always be someone better than you. I can tell you that right now. I guess hearing that from a young age actually kind of like broke that barrier for me a little bit. I guess no longer did I see them as competition, but I saw them as opportunities to learn. And so where else are you going to find the most talented musicians? Well, you’re gonna find them at competitions because those are the ones that know that competitions, especially in 2020, you need to win major competitions to have a solo career. Like that is a very harsh, but real, reality. And so I think my parents and my teachers recognized that and put me through a lot of competitions. And so why I think they are so essential to you as a musician is, not only do you need them to build a successful career, but now it’s like, I want everybody to see them as learning opportunities. You see people perform, like you see people better than you, and you have opportunities to connect with them actually, like through competition, so it’s not like you’re segregated by a wall the entire time. You can interact, you’re often in the same waiting room together. They’re often small cocktail parties for the competitors to meet beforehand. And I really use those moments to network, like network, network, network. And some of them I call my closest genuine friends, and some of them have taught me maybe techniques that I was struggling with, and some have even encouraged me to do better things with my career. And so to me, competitions was not so much the competing aspect, or enrolling in the competition, but it was more that I was going to meet people who are better than me and I was going to take advantage of that and get to know them.

I think the more good events you have surrounding something that you do, the more it encourages you and the more it encourages you to do it, because now not only are you extrinsically motivated, you’re intrinsically motivated.

[To see more of Jaena’s views, explore our Career Conversations feature Power of arts in connecting people.]

Quint Smits, Longitude fellow, Tilburg University:

Many of us try to learn from others who are ahead of us and have developed expertise in their fields. Perhaps by taking a class they are teaching, reading a book about their journey, or by watching a mindset building tutorial. The main takeaway I have from this excerpt is to do this more proactively and to actually reach out to the people who have already taken some of the steps I am about to.

A massive thank you to Jaena Kim for the interview and to you for listening. We hope you enjoy today’s segments please feel free to share your thoughts on social media and in the comments. Or write an email to podcast at Longitude.site. We would love to hear from you. Join us next time for more unique insights on one digit sound bytes.

I love volleyball because it’s a true team sport. I was hooked. I said, this is what I’m gonna try and do. I was fortunate to go out to Stanford and compete for four years. And that’s how I started really getting into volleyball and Stanford’s a great place for academics too. And I was very determined to try and take full advantage of the resources available at a university like Stanford and it’s hard at times to balance being a student athlete. I told myself, hey, my body can’t go forever. And so I’m going to really try and give myself the best shot I possibly can at making the 2004 Olympic team. So I was fortunate to make that team. It was a tough decision to make because I had to take a leave of absence from school, which is something that is very scary to do. But I’m glad I did, because I learned so many lessons in that training camp. And I was fortunate to make the team and then I was lucky to play in another Olympics in 2008. I loved it and was trying for 2012. But I kind of had a reality check. I’m like, I’m gonna be 30 soon. And I really want to be a doctor. That’s my ultimate life goal. I really had to sit myself down and ask myself, what did I want to do with my life. And it was a tough call, I was traveling with the national team, I love it. I loved my teammates. I loved the coaches. I loved being there. So it’s really hard to be on the train and on a track that’s moving with no real issues, and get yourself off of the track and feel like you’re going on the wrong track in the wrong direction, and a completely new world. But I said, you know, I’m gonna try it.

There are so many times in my career where I never thought that medicine would be possible, so many roadblocks, like not being able to transfer my credits, not being able to get to the program right away. I always thought that my dream would continue. I was really bold, and I was determined.

Funny, I laugh and I always want to share this with people because everybody looks on LinkedIn. And people see resumes and people don’t understand that there are so many squiggly lines in between those points. It seems like it was a cookie cutter path for many but a lot of the times, things don’t go the way you had hoped that they would. But as long as you have a North-star and a mission, and an ultimate goal, you’ll eventually get there. You might not get there the way you had planned or hoped. But eventually you will make it.

I was fortunate to have played for Karch Kiraly, who’s currently the head coach of the women’s national volleyball team. He’s phenomenal. So he was one of the first people I reached out to when I made it to medical school. And I was like, Oh my gosh, I’m gonna start. And he shared a really important book with me, it’s called Make It Stick. And it’s such a good book. And I think, especially for someone like me, because a lot of times as athletes, you want to prepare and you want to practice before you start, do game like things before you compete, you always feel like you’re not ready, but always testing yourself. So game like situations, test like situations are invaluable experiences. And those help you to learn, to retain the information, putting yourself in those very similar high-pressure situations are actually very important. So I had my highlighter set picked out. I had my notebooks picked out and he reminded me the importance of you know, the essential principles of that book is a test yourself often. And then the first day of medical school class, I’m not joking, I was terrified. And the first slide of medical school is the slide of book, Make It Stick that was a really big symbol for me that I’m going to be okay.

Shvetali Thatte, Longitude fellow, Case Western Reserve University:

Thank you so much for such a lovely reflection, Ogonna. As someone who plans to go into the medical field, I felt inspired by your story. And I have so much respect for your commitment to both the sport you love and the field of medicine. I’ve always considered myself a competitive person. And I spent the greater part of my childhood competing in chess and karate tournaments on the weekend, so I became well accustomed to making decisions under pressure. However, I often forget the same principles of practice, practice and more practice, that apply for sports also play a role in school and in our careers. It really resonated with me when you talked about the idea of testing ourselves often, even with schoolwork, so that we can prepare ourselves for the performance we will have to give on our exams. In medicine, I can see this lesson being all the more important. As the more practice we do, the more confidently we can treat our patients. Like you said, there’s not one path to reach a final destination. And as long as you keep your North Star in sight at all times, you will find a way to get to your final destination, no matter how long it takes.

On that note, we’re out of time. But we hope you enjoyed today’s segment and felt inspired to continue your journey towards your own North Star. 

I played sports in high school and for a couple years in college. I played football at Cornell. I’ll place the word “played” in air quotes, because I wasn’t very good. But I had a lot of heart and stuck with it even after I suffered a shoulder injury my freshman and sophomore years. After the second injury, my position coach sat me down and pulled off the band aid with a blunt and painfully true statement. “You’re never going to start at the varsity level so you really should stop playing, so it’s not to hurt yourself any further.”

There would be no Rudy moment for me. So I stopped playing. And I thought that was the end of any involvement in sports. At the time, in the early 90’s, most pro executives had generally been former pro players or pro coaches. So as a government major, I anticipated a career in government politics, for which I had equal passion, and I’d completed two internships on Capitol Hill.

So government was the career I anticipated, when I was admitted to a joint degree program between Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and Columbia Law School. In my first year at Harvard, I was working on a year-end project for my antitrust class. I liked antitrust because it was a nice mix between government and the law. When I was stumped on a subject for the project, my advisor asked, “What industries are you passionate about?” I replied sports. And he said, “Well, why don’t you write about an antitrust issue involving the sports industry?” And I did. I wrote about the NCAA’s application of Proposition 48, a rule designed to raise graduation rates by having athletes at NCAA Division One schools meet certain minimum academic standards. My analysis examined whether the administration of the rule could be considered anti-competitive. This project was important to me because it ignited my thinking that there were other businesses, government and legal interest, related to the sports industry that may serve as the platform for a career.

My second year at Harvard, I completed my final initiative, known as a Policy Analysis Exercise or PAE. I decided that I wanted to do my PAE on Midnight Basketball. In the early 90’s, Midnight Basketball was touted as a transformative social program that served as a safe haven for teens. Young people could play in these basketball leagues, and the leagues also had an educational component. It was a great example of how sports can transform communities. The sponsor for my PAE was the NBA. And at that point, I began to switch my career focus from government to sports. When I began my second year at Columbia Law, I was able to be paired with a Columbia alumni mentor who was a New York sports lawyer. And at that point, I started focusing on what I wanted to do next. I was fortunate enough to get a clerkship and then ultimately a full time job at Proskauer, a law firm that has a significant history in sports. And that’s how I started my career, working as a sports lawyer and sports executive.

[To see more of Brian’s views, explore our Career Conversations feature Sports and law: An intersection for a fulfilling career.]

Karen Martinez Perez, Longitude fellow, Rice University:

I find Brian’s words to be inspiring and motivating. I’m a first-generation college student trying to figure out what I want to do post-grad. What I have come to realize, and what Brian also discovered, is that there isn’t only one way to do something. While he may not have gone the “traditional” route to end up doing something in sports, he found something that worked for him. The ideal job involves something that you’re passionate about. This way, perhaps it can be easier to find motivation in day-to-day life. One of the main takeaways from Brian’s story for me is that in a career, you don’t have to sacrifice your personal interests. I think it’s great that even though there was a period of time where Brian wasn’t as directly involved with sports as before, he didn’t just throw away his interest. Rather, he set it to the side temporarily, and eventually, discovered a way to incorporate it into his life again. I also admire Brian’s willingness to take on projects that further explored his interests, despite leading away from the career in government politics he anticipated. In doing so, he found a way to make the pressure from the demands of a career be a bit more manageable and enjoyable.

Hello, my name’s Ed Knowles, and I’m the producer and the host of the Olympic Channel podcast, the only official podcast about the Olympics. And so I’ve been working as a journalist for, well, the best part of a decade. I started out working for a TV channel called Setanta Sports News in about 2008. So yeah, it’s been a really interesting time to be alive. And I think lots of things have changed since that period. One of the things that has been consistent, though, is there’s been a lot of pressure. I thought that is true now more than ever; there are lots of pressures on young people. Money and financial things, and just comparing yourself online. So I think one of the things that is the most important thing is to just enjoy it, kind of embrace the pressure. It will always be there, especially if you’re in a kind of a mindset of wanting to improve yourself. And I think that’s it’s good to feel pressure. So rather than kind of letting it be a negative, try and see the positive sides to it.

I’ll always remember – and I’m going to name drop horrendously here now – there was a time when I was doing a speaking engagement for the Olympics, and Thomas Park, the president of the IOC, the International Olympic Committee, was coming along. And he comes with all his people. And there was like a set of all the guests as well. And everybody started stressing out to me about the fact that the president is here, the president is here. And I remember, I just took a step back, I breathed. I was actually DJ-ing at the time, so I mixed the next record into the into of the other record because I knew that record would then take us into the bit that we needed to get to in the kind of event. And then I smiled, and went and met the president of the IOC. I have this mantra for myself in those moments, it’s like, “You have done so much work to get to this point, you know, enjoy it. It’s now time to enjoy the fruit of all those things that you’ve been doing every day, whether that’s getting up early, reading, whatever it is, whoever you’ve met. You’ve got to that moment, so enjoy it.”

And I think another thing that I wanted to say is that I have struggled in the past with being in pressurized moments and not being courteous or smiling to people. And it really makes a huge difference, and it’s something that I’ve learned the hard way. And that if you’re in a pressure moment, showing that you can handle the pressure by being funny, by being just smiley, and just being polite, it makes such a huge difference. And if you can just take that deep breath and take it with a pinch of salt. You know, it’s very rarely that important.

And I think the final thing I wanted to say was just, it will go wrong. One day, you will be pushing yourself and it will be too much, and you will break, and you will do something that you regret. And that’s okay. Just learn from it. Move on. And breaking is part of the process. I mean, look at all these athletes who are at the Tony Robbins podcast, there’s just loads of them. They pushed themselves to the limit, and they broke, and that’s okay. So yeah, embrace those things rather than let them kind of get on top of you. It’s okay to use that as a platform to go and achieve elsewhere.

So I hope that helped out. Listen to the Olympic Channel podcast and, keep going.

Rachel Carlton, Longitude fellow, Rice University:

A big thank you to Ed Knowles for his take on coping with pressure. I imagine that pressure is a recurring theme in his life, whether among the Olympic athletes themselves or his coverage of the Olympics.

Ed’s advice to embrace the pressure, as well as his personal anecdote on his encounter with the President of the International Olympic Committee, really resonated with me as an aspiring journalist. I remember feeling similarly starstruck when I had the opportunity to interview former Vice President Al Gore, and I too relied on my experience and the background research I had done to get to that point to keep cool under pressure. And as Ed acknowledged, things will go wrong – in fact, as I was walking to the interview location that morning to meet Gore, I rolled my ankle and sprained it pretty badly, undoubtedly anxious for the upcoming event. Who knows- maybe I was distracted enough by the sharp pain running up my leg to forget how nervous I was!