Turning a Career Setback to Your Advantage

Anita Brick: Hi, this is Anita Brick, and welcome to CareerCast at Chicago Booth to help you advance in your career. Today we're delighted to be speaking with Rick Smith. Rick is most recently the author of The Leap. You did a really wonderful balance of practical, actionable steps and terrific stories. And I know you have an MBA from the other school, the one that's farther north, correct?

Rick Smith: Yes, I do.

Anita Brick: We're very happy that you're here. I know that early in your career you were in consulting, were at Spencer Stuart when you wrote your first book, which also gave you the launch point for The Leap and World 50. And I know you're going to tell us a little bit about how that was your leap and how you were able to sell it for more money than you thought you would ever have. Does that describe it?

Rick Smith: Yeah, it kind of describes a lot in a nutshell.

Anita Brick: I know we're in a market that's not so great. For some people, leaps may seem completely out of reach. So let's take a step back. Tell us a little bit about how you turned the career setback of—not to give it away, but when you were let go from Spencer Stuart—into the greatest career adventure of your life.

Rick Smith: I'll actually go back a little bit farther than that, because there's a philosophical point that sort of played into all this. It was in my first job. I was actually working at EDS in a management training program. There was a great assignment that was coming up in Germany. I had tried really hard; I'd been doing some good work. I thought for sure I'd get it, and then I was passed over for it.

This is within a year of starting work. It sort of hit me like, wow, you know, this felt like a real setback. Well, it ends up six months later, an even better, actual managerial assignment came up in Germany. I was there for over a year. You know, it turned out to be one of the greatest things. And it never would have happened had I gotten that first assignment. So it sort of hit me, like, wow, you know, something negative turned into something really positive.

Then, you know, I find myself in a consulting career. My office is in Chicago. My home and family was in Orlando. My two-year-old daughter, who was the oldest of three children at the time; my daughter comes running in on Saturday morning, jumps on the bed, wakes me up, and says, daddy, daddy, thanks for coming to visit.

Anita Brick: Oh, my goodness.

Rick Smith: You know, it's kind of like a two-by-four. And so I called my boss that weekend and said, look, I'm having a great time. I'm doing well. I can't do this anymore with that travel schedule. And again, once I had this terrible setback, but then that ended up leading to another great phase in my life. And so I started to get more and more optimistic.

And as you mentioned—this strange scenario, I was an executive recruiter. I was doing fairly well at it, but I wasn't very fired up. I wasn't very passionate about the work, and I sort of missed the consulting work that I did. So on nights and weekends I started doing research reports, started publishing white papers, and eventually ended up writing a book.

You know, I wrote this book on career success. You know, to our surprise, it really started to take off. So the CEO asked me, hey, why don't you spend some time out on the PR trail doing speeches and radio and TV and a lot of this stuff, and I realized through that process that, boy, I don't really want to rush back into my day-to-day job of recruiting.

And the reason I bring all this up is because I think, on the one hand, the week my book hit number one on the career bestseller list, I was actually laid off by the firm that I wrote the book for.

Anita Brick: Right, right.

Rick Smith: It's … on the one hand it’s a really odd situation to be in, but I think because of the other setbacks that had ended up being real advantages in my career, I was much more willing at that point to open myself up to, hey, if this isn't meant to be, it's clearly not perfect, what I'm doing. If it's not meant to be, then why not open yourself up to what this might lead to?

That's sort of how I ended up being more willing to say, hey, let's just let this go and pursue a different direction.

Anita Brick: Is that part of your personality? Because sometimes people have those experiences, they see that it led to something else, and the moment they have the next setback, they think the sky is falling. How would you make yourself available to that next opportunity? I mean, how do you keep that positive but realistic mindset?

Rick Smith: You know, one of the biggest things to shake in your career is this belief that there is one predefined ladder to go up on which all success is based on and measured. So for example, if you come out of undergraduate school, I mean, there's a lot that think, hey, you have to get into a top-tier school or you haven't met that first rung. Then you get into the first rung and you're like, OK, now I'm either going to go into investment banking or I'm going to go into consulting, because that seems to be where the top students end up going that pays the most money, etc.

And all of a sudden two years out, you get laid off because a lot of people do get laid off in those positions, or the positions aren't even available out of school because of the economy. You know, the firms just aren't hiring. And so people are like, oh, wow. Now I'm not a success, because there was really only one path forward on which I would logically measure myself as successful.

The reality is, if you talk to so many people—this is from my first book, The Five Patterns of Extraordinary Careers. We looked at the Lou Gerstners, you know—a lot of these super successful people, from fairly early on, they were not the ones that had it all figured out when they were 20. In fact, we make a big point of this whole idea of strategic drift, where they were much more likely to be the ones that said, hey, you know, I'm going to change industries.

I get bumped to the left, I get bumped to the right. I try marketing and finance and sales and all this. And by the time they're, you know, in their mid-30s, even in their 40s, mid-40s, they finally sort of figure out, OK, what is it that I'm really, really good at, uniquely qualified to do? And what is it that really engages me on a day-to-day basis? What am I really passionate about in a work context?

And once you've figured those things out through, potentially, a lot of experimentation, that's when you see their careers really start to accelerate. If you get that philosophy in mind that the bumps in the road are part of the exploration process—not to become a senior partner in a consulting firm, but to find yourself in the job that you were uniquely meant to do and where whatever level of money you're going to be making, you're going to be a lot more fulfilled with that direction.

Anita Brick: I got it, and it seems like we live in really extraordinary times, though. Like one of the alums said, he's been looking for a job for a while now, and he's exhausted and he needs to find a job. What would you recommend that someone like that does to not lose hope and to stay energized and motivated when he may even know what he wants to do, but the jobs aren't there right now.

Rick Smith: First thing is, I don't want to downplay it. I mean, it is a very difficult, frustrating market, you know, particularly for people with higher-end aspirations, higher-end degrees, higher-end comp expectations, etc. A lot of those jobs aren't there. The ones that are there are heavily competitive and are taking a lot more time for people to make decisions.

I mean, one of the frustrations I hear all the time is, I interviewed, and it's been three months, and they keep calling me, but they never make a decision on anything. I acknowledge that it is an unusually difficult period of time. On the other hand, I think one of the difficulties in any career is you get trapped by compensation or by peer expectations in a certain direction.

You graduate top in your class in a liberal arts school, so you go to law school, graduate top in your law school. So it only makes sense to go to one of the top law firms in a big city. And you wake up when you're 35 as a partner and you're like, wait a minute. And I don't remember ever deciding to do this, but it was just the most logical thing.

I think being in a down economy sort of forces you out of the norm and to explore, you know, a much broader base of directions for yourself. So that would be one of the first things I would say is open your net. You don't need to feel like you're settling if you're not going after the number one direction that you think you should go in at that time. Even working in a nonprofit for a couple years … it's all about gaining experience, gaining understanding for yourself.

And then I think the other thing is, on a tactical level, you need to have a support group around you, and you need to be realistic about your expectations. I personally don't think it's possible to spend 40 or 50 hours a week full time. It's like cold calling, you know, at some point it burns you out and you need to do other things to fill that time in.

And then I guess the last thing I would say is, you know, no matter what, you have to maintain confidence. So, you know, I recommend that people work out at lunch because it gives you a break in that cold calling and that somewhat frustrating, tedious process in a lot of cases. And you start to feel better about yourself.

When I was an executive recruiter, I mean, it is amazing. Within 10 seconds, you could tell whether somebody is scared or they’re confident, and the jobs always go to the people that are the most confident. So you have to find some way to maintain that confidence through the process because that's where the jobs are going to go.

Anita Brick: So it sounds like working out would be one. Sometimes people will volunteer because then they feel useful and they're contributing. Are there any other things you'd recommend?

Rick Smith: Don't be afraid to take a job for less compensation than you would like. So one thing to gain that confidence, one of the first things I say is put your feet on stable ground. Fear is basically a lack of facts. Figure out your financials. Go through a couple of worst-case scenarios. Soon you realize it won't be that bad.

Here's where I am financially. I can be stable at this level for this period of time. You gain some of that individual confidence and then open yourself up to different types of jobs. I mean, it sounds unusual having an MBA from Chicago and going to work as an executive assistant for very senior-level people in really respectable companies for less money, for sure, than you think you should be in banking.

If you are good, you will be noticed very quickly, and with those relationships, they will …. I've seen this all the time. They move, they start to move you in different directions where your comp will catch up with the value that you're contributing, versus waiting tables where no matter how good you are, you're only so valuable. If you can put yourself in an environment where the value you are demonstrating on a day-to-day basis is much higher than your comp, your comp will catch up.

Compensation is a trailing indicator of the value that you're delivering. You’ve just got to find a place to deliver that value and the comp will catch up to you.

Anita Brick: So it's a good point. There was a woman, this was in 2003, who had graduated and was looking for a job in investment management. And, you know, the market was not very good. And she had to find something. So she went in and actually temped in an investment management firm, and she was actually doing—it was not what she wanted to do—was filing.

But what she did is as she was filing, she was very quick at doing that. So she had time to read some of the files and to learn. And she started asking people questions. And what ended up happening is, although they didn't have a position for her in that firm, they helped her find another job at an investment management firm. So sometimes you do have to be open and sometimes a little bit humble.

Rick Smith: A quick example: there's somebody that I had known that was graduating, you know, from business school, not a great market, not as bad as it is now. They had an offer from a reputable company. And then they had an offer from eBay at like $35,000 less than they were making when they went in to get their MBA.

And I told them, I said, well, you know, if your passion is there, go in at 35,000 in an eBay because the company's growing, you're going to learn a lot. And if you add value, it will pay off. Your starting salary will be insignificant in five years. And sure enough, I'm not sure if she's a senior vice president, but she's a very highly respected and now highly compensated person in that sector of the world because she sort of placed the bet on herself.

I'm just going to get out there and get exposure; let people see how valuable I am. And as long as it's a growing, decent organization, with the opportunity, they will find a way to leverage good people.

Anita Brick: So that's often more true in companies that are in earlier stages, because they actually like to have people who could do two jobs, who have the capacity and the skills to do that. Two questions came. One came from an Exec MBA student, the other one came from an alum. They're very similar. One said, I took three years off to raise my children and can't seem to break back in. How do you suggest I reposition myself to be taken seriously?

And the other one, which is very analogous, is how do I tell a compelling story that demonstrates that I'm an ambitious and uniquely talented worker, while justifying, and that's in quotes, that I haven't worked for a year because I've been raising my young child.

Rick Smith: One thing I would say before you get in that situation, you know, there was a McKinsey entry-level partner person that I knew pretty well who took four years off but actually stayed active on some nonprofit boards. It didn't take much of her time. She was able to make a contribution. She was able to maintain some fairly high-level relationships with the other board members who could vouch for her contribution on the board.

And so when she wanted to go back to work four years later, it was like, look, authentically, I wanted to stay with my children. That's why I made the decision I did. I did keep one foot in the workforce. I was able to make a contribution, and this is part of my plan now to get back in. You know, that's something that can actually help.

Now, if you haven't done that, it's not a huge thing one way or another. You just have to be honest with the employers. You know, if you've been out of work, a lot of people are like, oh, I've been doing consulting and people will find out, are you really doing consulting or are you just looking for work? And you've been out of work for a long period of time. You just have to be honest with your real situation.

And again, I think in some circumstances it gets back to what we were talking about before. You may have to get in and prove it before you fully are taken seriously. So you may have to take a job that you think is below you. You may have to take compensation that is lower than you know you should be making on a market value, with the understanding that, hey, if I just get in there and prove it, then I will be taken seriously and they will start to pay me market value for what my value is.

Anita Brick: And sometimes people will also make that bridge with projects or even part-time jobs so that they're offsetting maybe some of the loss of income. But by not having huge childcare costs, it's a way to ease back into it. We've been seeing that more and more with the market, the way it's been over the last year.

Rick Smith: And again, I think all of that is fine, if you're just open and honest about here's my situation and, you know, I'm not just trying to survive. If you get in these interviews, the less you can make it about, “employer, you need to solve my problem,” and make it more about “I am here only to solve your problem, and I'm just questioning you to make sure that this is the right problem that I know for sure that I can solve.”

You know, if you take that approach, you're much more likely to have success in those situations. The other thing I would say is that if you can explain to people, here's why I did it, you know, it's obvious why people want to stay home with their children for a period of time, even if that's not the scenario. You know, I've gotten a lot of questions of, oh, I'm frustrated with my boss, or is this going to look like a setback if this doesn't end up working out?

I mean, people understand, you know, that not every situation works out. And if you can articulate, here are the reasons, you know, I perform better in an environment where I can have some flexibility in what I deliver. And by the way, I learned all these things about myself through what turned out to even be a negative process. Employers value that.

It's like, look, this person's really finding out what they've discovered. They're not just selling themselves. They're telling us, you know, look, I know a lot more about myself than I did three years ago, and that's why I'm now more equipped to not only solve your problem, but to get a lot of fulfillment out of working in this environment.

Anita Brick: Well, that's a good point. And actually, it ties in with a question that an alum had submitted and he said, I'm director of finance and accounting at a startup. When I joined, I expected the role to call for initiative, quick decision-making and an ability to work on a variety of company-wide topics. Unfortunately, because of an over-controlling CFO, the role is the opposite.

I do not manage my time. I do what I'm expected to do and only do what I'm told. I'm looking for a job, but how do I explain going from a more strategic role to this very tactical role, and not have it look like a setback?

Rick Smith: First thing I would say is, OK, all is not lost at your current job. You know, I think so many people end up just throwing in the towel before they have those difficult conversations with their boss or even someone else within the company saying—not, look, you need to put me in a different role or you know, you're an ass and therefore I'm leaving.

It's, hey, you know, my strengths and passions are more in this direction. Can we start to work at least some percentage of my activities in that area? And what I've seen happen is, you know, in some cases, even reluctantly, the managers will say, OK, we'll let you do that. And all of a sudden you start delivering high performance in those areas.

Everybody becomes a little more willing to let you grow into those areas. You know, my first thing is don't give up on where you are. You know, in a lot of cases, you have a lot more ability to stretch, to move in new directions with your current employer, where you've built up trust and experience. Then with a new employer that just wants you to do what you've already done over and over again, you know, for a little bit more money on the positioning side.

And as a recruiter, you hear this all the time. I got into this role. You know, they sold it as this. And it turned out to be that every single recruiter knows that because, you know, every placement they make, they hear six months later—oh, by the way, here's how it was a lot different than what they led you to believe, and therefore you led me to believe. That happens all the time. You need to be open and honest about, you know, what really happened.

The last point I would make is don't quit, particularly in this environment. If you're interviewing for a job and you're out of work and you're like, well, here, you know, I got so frustrated, I just left, every single recruiter will hear that and say, there's another side to the story because you're not working there anymore. There's no way that I know what the total picture was of your departure.

If you go to a recruiter or you're talking to other companies and you're like, yeah, here are the reasons I'm frustrated, here's why I'm open to new opportunities—but I am still working and they are still giving me raises and they still want to keep me—all that credibility falls into place and you're in a much, much better position to sell yourself to a new employer.

Anita Brick: Very, very good point. One of the things that I think was very exciting about the book that you wrote is that the next job or even this job, even though this alum sounds very frustrated at the moment, could actually be the source of his leap. Right?

Rick Smith: Absolutely. So first thing, what have you won, right? You've won an understanding of a type of environment where you may not be passionate about, and, you know, and parts of it you probably do pretty well. Parts of it you don't do well; parts of it, you just never want to do again. I mean, all of that, you put in your piggy bank—it’s like, OK, I really learned something about myself in this—how did I get led into this position in the first place?

And, you know, how do I codify that and make sure that if I made any mistakes, that I don't go in that direction again. At a high level, if all of this is one great experimentation, you know, it's a very Darwinian process. The success of, you know, Darwinism is the species that evolve the most, not the ones that evolve the best, are the ones that succeed.

And so the more you go through the process of having some successes, having some setbacks, and learning all along the way, the more likely you are to end up in the role where you say, you know, look, I don't care what everybody else is doing, I'm in the perfect job for me.

Anita Brick: Well, and it sounds like what you're describing is what scientists do.

Rick Smith: Yeah, absolutely. Experiment.

Anita Brick: Some of the experiments blow up and then they have to try other things. And then sometimes the discovery comes as a next step and sometimes it comes out of the blue.

Rick Smith: It's so interesting that we lose this willingness to experiment. The older that we get, you know, we start to settle for different things. We start to become very comfortable. In fact, one of my favorite chapters in the book is called “The Now Trap,” which basically talks about all the tricks that your brain plays on you, based on evolution, that tend to keep you stuck in your current role thinking that anything you do in the future is going to be probably similar to what I'm doing right now.

And the risk to get there is way overinflated. Your brain creates sort of an illusion that ends up with you saying, hey, I might as well just stay where I am. That's the only option I have. Where the reality in so many cases is there are five paths forward for you. You're only thinking about one, and you're getting frustrated with it.

Anita Brick: I mean, I think one of the things that is really obvious—it's not that you're saying, OK, experiment, and if you lose, you could lose your house and you could lose your family and all this. You're saying pay attention to the things that have worked where opportunities may lie, and decide what your risk profile is, but without eliminating everything, allow yourself to take some risks. That's not going to put your whole life in jeopardy, but may open something amazing.

Rick Smith: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think you hit on one of the key points, and this is another one of these myths that hold people back, is that in order to make something extraordinary happen, to make a leap in a new direction in my life, that I have to take an extraordinary risk, and therefore I'm not in a position to do that. I've got a family, I've got bills. Sorry. I'll just leave that up for other people.

You know, I’ve studied dozens and dozens of people that made this successful transition from ordinary to something extraordinary in their life, and every one of them was as risk averse as me, as any of us are. You know, it wasn't the fact that they were more willing to take risks or that they were bold risk takers. They were effective risk mitigators. You know, in almost every case, they kept one foot on the ground where they were, you know, in a safe environment, while with the other foot, they started exploring different directions.

And we give in the book a lot of the specific techniques and, you know, approaches that you can do, but there's so many things you can do in simple, safe, exploratory steps to start to eliminate risk of moving in many different directions while your one foot is still firmly planted on the ground.

Anita Brick: You gave a lot of examples, and one of the examples was Sara Blakely from Spanx, which, she continued doing her job selling fax machines as she was developing these, for women, life-changing pantyhose. What's one of the strategies in the book that you think she applied effectively to allow her to do something extraordinary while mitigating her risks?

Rick Smith: A great example, because, you know, if you know her, she's on TV a lot, I mean, her company now, you know, Spanx does over $250 million in sales. She's close to, if not the most successful female entrepreneurs of all time. She's beautiful and photogenic, and if you look at all that, you're like, OK, she's not like me, right?

You know, I could never do that. And yet she was at a state school. She transferred to another state school to follow her boyfriend. You know, she worked at Disney and then she ...

Anita Brick: She didn't get into law school, which was her dream!

Rick Smith: Yeah, exactly. She couldn't even couldn't get in; that was a big setback. She wanted to be Goofy at Disney, and she was too short. So she had to be a chipmunk. And, you know, she gets into this job selling fax machines. You know, she's OK at it. You know, she's making OK money, but well into four to five years of doing this, she knows that she hates it.

She tells the story. You know, she'd go knock on doors all day and then drive around the corner and cry in her car for an hour. And so she knew she wanted out of that. And yet the first thing she did is said, OK, I know this is not what I'm going to be doing long term, so I'm going to open myself up now to multiple alternatives.

You know, she sort of settled on two. One is I'm going to start a business and two is I'm going to be a stand-up comic. While she was working, she started performing at, you know, opt-in nightclubs all around the country and explored that path. And then she started exploring her business idea, eventually coming up with this idea, going through the whole patent process on her own on nights and weekends; she took a week of vacation to go finally convince somebody in manufacturing to make a prototype of her product.

So this had been two years from the time she absolutely had decided I'm out. She stayed in her job through that whole point until she had a prototype. She had a customer, she had a design, she had branding. She had all of those entry-level, in this case, entrepreneurial risks already mitigated before she ever quit her job.

And I think that's the bigger point is people are like, hey, I you know, I could never be an entrepreneur because I'm not in a position to just quit my job and go do something. Most of the successful ones that I've seen, there's a lot of risk mitigation over a longer period of time than you think before people jump into that new direction.

Anita Brick: It's very interesting, and I know—just so that people understand. I know some people obviously have already read your book because of the questions they asked. A leap: it has three simple characteristics. It's big, it's selfless, and it's simple. Now I understand with Spanx and with Sara, it was big. I mean, it was something that could be beneficial to women everywhere. It was simple. But how is it selfless?

Rick Smith: You know, I talk in the book about the Geldof Live Aid example, which, you know, here he is out of work and within seven months they have the biggest media event, you know, in the history of the planet because, you know, there was this 100-year famine in Africa, you know, that's an easy thing to say, OK, that's a selfless thing that he's trying to do, save the world in some respects.

But you evoke that same emotion and ultimately that same engagement with those that you are trying to bring with you in the process if it's clearly seen that you were trying to solve someone else's problem, not just make yourself successful. So, in Sara Blakely's case, she cuts the legs off her pantyhose to create this initial idea for the product.

And one of her very first thoughts standing right there was, wow, why is it that women suffer from the tyranny of a male-dominated fashion industry? I can save us.

Anita Brick: Right, right, right.

Rick Smith: And that attitude, if you talk to her employees, I mean that attitude. Their customers felt that. When she talked on TV, she wasn't just selling products. She was like, look, we can feel better about ourselves. There's no reason we have to suffer the way we've done. The same thing when I started my company, you know, it went on to become one of the most influential networking companies in the world.

I had no contacts when I started off, but my pitch was not, hey, pay me all this money, come join my network. My pitch was, look, why is it that you are a top 50 chief marketing officer or chief sustainability officer or financial officer but never get any benefit from networking the way that everyone else in the world does?

Because of all of these problems that you suffer—you know, it’s never my peers in the room, everybody's always trying to sell me stuff, you know, it's on the record. So I can't be open and honest. I'm just here to help you. I'm going to eliminate all of those major problems in your life, and therefore you can now reap all these benefits.

Another quick example is Apple. I think Apple people genuinely believe that Apple exists to make my life better. Now in the process their stock goes up. They make a lot of money. People don't believe that they're trying to shove their products down your throat. And that creates that same sense of selflessness, even in a for-profit situation.

Anita Brick: That's all great. Thank you for making that clearer. Someone had asked the question, how does this “big, selfless, simple” apply if you're not an entrepreneur, if you're looking for a job inside your company, but it seems like it'd be exactly the same.

Rick Smith: I don't know exactly how you apply it in a job search. It is applicable if you have a job in almost anything that you're trying to do. The outcome that you're trying to achieve is, how do I bring others along with me in my journey? You know, what I found in all these people that successfully made the leap was they didn't really go it alone.

They didn't stick their neck out there. They were effective at bringing other people with them. A major part was that they latched onto an idea that was big, selfless, and simple, that engaged people in their journey and had the effect of then amplifying their impact. So if you're in a job, in whatever you're attempting to do, you run things through this filter of big, selfless, and simple.

How do I make it more bold and ambitious to break the attention barrier and get people to really pay attention to what we're trying to do? How do I make it selfless? Silvia Lagnado with the Dove campaign for real beauty. I'm still selling soap, and I'm still making money off of it. But how do I make it about the cause rather than about sales or my own individual success?

And then the third and potentially most powerful is, how do I simplify the goal? So many times, particularly with MBAs, you know, we feel like the goal is to make things much more complicated and complex, and therefore it justifies our intelligence and our fee.

Anita Brick: Oh, absolutely. Oh, totally true.

Rick Smith: That whereas the most powerful ideas are the simplest. It's like Mark Twain said, you know, I would have written you a short letter, but I didn't have time. You know it. It's hard to do. But if you can distill your brand messaging, your objective of what you're trying to accomplish, if you can distill it down into three or four or five words that really sum up immediately, here's what we're going after, it becomes much easier to understand, and then is quickly and broadly translated into action by a whole range of people. Again, you have the effect of bringing people along and amplifying the impact that you're trying to make.

Anita Brick: Well, true. And I think that when you think about it in terms of job search, I think there is a parallel: really, your employer wants you to solve a problem for them, because if they don't have a problem that isn't being solved currently, they don't need you.

Rick Smith: Yeah, absolutely. I harp on this all the time. It's not about solving your own problem. It's about solving somebody else's problem. And the more you can, in your research, identify and articulate what that real problem is so that you immediately have empathy with the person—that you're with your boss where they're like, well, you know, wow, boy, you feel my pain. You know exactly what my frustration is. Then that leads to being able to articulate how you are uniquely situated to solve that problem.

Anita Brick: Good point. Do you have time for a couple more questions?

Rick Smith: Sure do.

Anita Brick: OK, great. So one of the students personally is determined to create a leap in their life, in their career, and the question was maybe this very simple question, but where does this person start?

Rick Smith: In almost every case that I found, the beginning of that leap was that people found themselves in a position that leveraged their strengths and their passions every day. Now, unfortunately, myself, most of the people I studied, ended up having to stumble into that. But my hope through the book and some of the resources we've created is that you can be much more deliberate about that first step.

So I've created this primary color assessment, and the basic idea is that everybody has a primary color, which is the intersection of your greatest strengths and passions. And if you know what that is, if you know where that is on the spectrum, you can then look at your current job. How closely aligned is it to my own primary color? If I get promoted once or twice, am I moving closer to fully engaging my strengths and my passions every day, or am I moving farther away?

That first step is gaining this actionable information about yourself, and then slowly moving in that direction, and then taking the energy that gets released from that and applying it to an idea that's big, selfless, and simple.

Anita Brick: You can actually go and take the assessment at LeapBuilder.com. And Rick, thank you so much for putting it up there. Because there's no cost to people who do it.

Rick Smith: This is one of those things that you sort of do it and you don't really know why, or you don't really have an objective. I came up with this idea, had a sort of flash of this idea in the year 2000. I took it to one of the leading industrial psychologists, and we've spent a lot of the last eight years developing and testing this model and just threw it online for free in July.

We've had over 200,000 page views. Just with the thing spreading virally. We've done no advertising or anything, and it's really taken off. And I think in a lot of cases, you know, changing people's thoughts on their direction, a number of organizations where I speak, you know, they send it out to everybody in the organization and they use it as a tool to figure out, how are the competencies divided up among the individuals?

How do we—as an organization or as a leader—move people more in roles that leverage their strengths and their passions every day? You know, because everybody wins through that process.

Anita Brick: Actually, it doesn't take very long. I did it. I thought it was great. We'll add the link in your bio that will be up on our site. I think that one of the things that is really crucial is that there were a few questions about losing hope, losing hope when the model and the way you view the world, the belief system, … some people feel like it was shattered over the last couple of years. A couple of people mentioned that when you're able to identify where your interests and your passions and your strengths all intersect, that in itself can be a boost to get you started again.

Rick Smith: Yeah, absolutely, because it energizes you with the feeling that there's not only one perch to view the world, either. Stories in the book of … one of my favorite stories is of a guy named Jeff Gray who was, you know, a really successful business person that decided to volunteer at a local homeless shelter. Ten years later, he's now done these amazingly entrepreneurial and impactful things.

Now working full time in the nonprofit world. That clearly was not the path that all of his peers were on or by which they were all measuring success. And yet he tells the story: he walks downtown by these big, shiny buildings, and he sits there and says, you know, is that right for all of those people that are in that building? Like, maybe some of them are, but it sure doesn't seem like it might be right for all of them.

So, you know, I think you're right. It's like that exploration. If you figure out, here's the intersection of the strengths and passions that are unique to me. And now I'm empowered to start to move in that direction. I'm not going to just climb some predefined corporate ladder that was designed by some HR person, but I'm going to start to move in the direction that I know is uniquely correct to me.

You feel like—you’re starting to define success for yourself on your own terms.

Anita Brick: As you said, I think with that renewed kind of focus and motivation and energy, it can help propel you forward. And if we circle back to a question that we were talking about earlier in our conversation, you have to have confidence. And so if you know what you're good at and you know what your passions are, that in itself can be another way to build or expand your confidence.

Rick Smith: Absolutely. I mean, you hit on a couple things that I love to think about. You know, there's a lot of science behind all these different things. When I was doing the research, it sort of started out with this revelation that, boy, isn't that interesting that people that I meet tell me the first thing that happened is they found themselves in a job that leverages their strengths and their passions.

As you go back and look at the scientific research that's coming out, the neuropsychology and neuro economics and things, there's a lot of reasons why, if you can get to that position that leverages your strengths and your passions every day, your practice becomes more powerful, your performance is higher. You start to perform better at an accelerated rate. It actually starts to rewire some of the circuitry of your brain if you're in those positions.

So there's all these benefits that you find, which is so exciting. Like myself, all of a sudden you see yourself performing at a level that you didn't think was possible. And then doors open up like crazy.

Anita Brick: Well, I love the story, and I'll let people read it when they have time, about your own venture with World 50, when the first person in the chief marketing officer network of 50 called you on the phone. You were in your home office, and they asked to speak to whomever was head of accounts payable to find out who to make the check out for $50,000, which was the fee to join the network.

Rick Smith: Yeah, absolutely. And I dropped the phone to my lap—it was like, what accounting department? Like I'm the only employee. And then I realized we don't even have an employee. The company doesn't even exist yet. So I was happy to take a message and say, oh, I'll pass that along to our accounting department and we'll get the invoice.

And then the ironic thing is I didn't even know what an invoice looked like. So that night I stayed up all night creating our first brand logo for the company and creating an invoice that I sent, you know, first thing the next morning.

Anita Brick: Well, there you go. We talked about a number of things. If you were going to crystallize into, say, three key points that people could take away and take action on if they're feeling stuck right now, either they're in a job they don't like and they feel stuck because they there aren't a lot of jobs, or they're not receiving a lot of jobs or someone who is trying to reenter the workforce, either because they lost their job or took some time off, what would you tell them to do?

Rick Smith: I think the first step is optimism. You know, what I discovered in this process is that it’s possible for ordinary people to break out and achieve extraordinary things, that it actually happens much more than you think, and it follows a consistent and knowable and replicable set of patterns. Specifically, this sort of sums the book up in a statement.

First, figure out what your primary color is. Go to some of the tools and resources at LeapBuilder.com. Figure out what your primary color is. Move in that direction in your job. Take the energy that gets released from that. Apply it to an idea that is big, selfless, and simple, and then start moving in that direction by sparking for safe, exploratory steps that allow you to eliminate risk over time, not assume more risk.

Anita Brick: One thing we haven't really talked about—which is shocking because I always talk about this in the CareerCast—is that the glue that keeps it all together are the relationships that we build and develop where we help other people. And it's reciprocal because without those relationships, these ideas are great, but they can never actually happen.

Rick Smith: Absolutely. And when you look at people that have successfully made the leap, again, it comes back to a lot of these ideas, but they've done something positive that has benefited a legion of people around them, and that ultimately is why they have been successful. You can't just be successful on your own unless you get incredibly, incredibly lucky. Very few people do. You know, it ends up being around the relationships.

At the end of the day, it's leadership. It's not about managing, which is basically commanding action. It's about inspiring excellence in people, in projects, in whatever you get involved in. If you can inspire that excellence, you will bring people along with you and you will achieve way more than you ever could on your own.

Anita Brick: That's great, and thank you for writing the book. It is very encouraging, very practical, and very inspirational. It is so important to take a step forward and have the courage and engage people around you, because not everybody believed in your World 50 until you made it happen.

Rick Smith: It's an interesting point in time right now that we find ourselves in, where, you know, we're coming out of a recession and people are like, OK, you know, wow, I was looking off the end of the cliff. Now I feel like I'm going to survive. I don't want to just survive. You know, there's more to my life. There's more to my significance, to my contribution, than just surviving in a job. And I think that's why the book seems to be hitting the bestseller list so quickly. It's that time when people are really asking themselves the question, is this it? Is this what I'm supposed to be doing with my life?

Anita Brick: It's true. But again, thank you for writing it and thank you for taking the time. I know you are very, very busy and have lots of new things going on, so thanks for speaking to our students and alumni.

Rick Smith: I appreciate the time as well.

Anita Brick: Have a good one, and we want to hear about the next leap.

Rick Smith: All right. Great.

Anita Brick: OK.

Rick Smith: Thanks so much.

Anita Brick: And thank you all for listening. This is Anita Brook with CareerCast at Chicago Booth. Keep advancing.