Christine Bader on "Learning To Quit" & Life Reinvention

[01:43] Paul: Today I am talking with Christine Bader, who is currently living in Bali, Indonesia, where we are recording this interview. And she has taken some time off from the working world, potentially a longer-term journey to focus on family and self. She is the author of Evolution of a Corporate Idealist: When Girl Meets Oil and a former head of CSR for Amazon before leaving in 2017. Journey she details with an amazing essay I'm going to link up called The Year I Learned to Quit, published in The New York Times. We'll talk about this and more. Welcome to the podcast, Christine.

[02:24] Christine Bader: Thanks, Paul.

[02:26] Paul: So I wanted to start with that article as a jumping-off point, The Year I Learned to Quit, where you talk about saying no to opportunities, including quitting a marathon at the last minute. So I wanted to use that to reflect on what was your mode of thinking before before that? Instead of learning to quit, what were you, how were you operating in the world before that?

[02:50] Christine Bader: I love that question. So I was definitely not a quitter, whatever I was, right? So I was what some of those personality tests call a completer finisher, right? So if you gave me something to do, I was gonna finish it no matter what. And it wasn't until first I quit what was supposed to be my dream job at Amazon, I'd been working in corporate responsibility for 20 years and this was really the pinnacle of that career. But I had to give myself permission to quit because I realized I wasn't getting the time with my family that I wanted to.

But it wasn't until after that when I started training for the Big Sur Marathon as a way to, you know, this was another good goal that I could set for myself. But then my left, my IT band, my iliotibial band, really started killing me. And part of me knew that there was no way I was gonna be able to finish this race. But I was looking on all the running blogs like, how do you know when it's time to quit training for a marathon? And all the articles that I found were like, here's how to push through the pain and cross that finish line. And I knew that, yeah.

[03:59] Paul: Hardcore runners.

[04:00] Christine Bader: Yeah, exactly. And people who don't quit because we hate quitters, especially in America, right? Like the Little Engine That Could, like we hate quitters and we love grit, but I knew that it just, it wasn't right for me. So after I quit the marathon, I recognized a lot more parallels with giving myself permission to quit my job.

[04:22] Paul: Looking back, was the marathon a replacement for some of the things you were giving up in the corporate world?

[04:29] Christine Bader: Oh, that's a great question. Yeah, I think so. I mean, it was a way for me to channel my energy and a way for me to spend my time and a way for me to be a little bit analytical, right? And, you know, map out my training plan and see what's working and what isn't, and something to do with spreadsheets. And so yeah, I think it was, it was kind of a replacement because, you know, we spend a lot of hours at work, and then when you don't anymore, it's like, hmm, right?

[05:03] Paul: And this is what people say to me now: you can't just not work, right? This is almost a sentiment in the US, and I think what I found in talking to people is that when people take breaks, things do emerge, but it's that gap of saying, "Oh man, I don't know if I'm able to sit there and wait till those things will emerge." Yeah, and what I found is that you really do need to sit there and shut up for the right things to emerge, right?

[05:29] Christine Bader: Because after I quit my job, I was telling people, "Oh yeah, I'm taking some time off. I don't want to do anything for a little while." but I was actually poking around on LinkedIn and looking for jobs. And it wasn't until I kept doing that and seeing opportunities and I'd be like, oh, this one looks interesting. And then luckily I would stop myself and say, no, no, no, that would be just diving right back into what I was doing before and that wasn't right. So I really did realize that what I needed to do was clean the slate and shut up and go quiet so that I could actually listen really hard to what was truly compelling to me. And I recognize that's a huge luxury, right, to have the time to do that.

But I think it's really necessary to figure out what, you know, what work is truly mine to do.

[06:19] Paul: Well, I think sometimes people get to points where their identities are so wrapped up in that, that the— it's not even the resources you have, it's the willingness to go through that period of uncertainty I mean, how was it just going through that and trying to figure out like, what is my identity, who am I, what's driving me?

[06:40] Christine Bader: Yeah, it's hard, particularly because my whole career and everything that I've written about and talked about and acted on is about corporate responsibility. But I actually, again, really wanted to wipe the slate clean and think, Is that really what I'm interested in? And even if part of the answer is yes, what part of that really interests me? Is it the content matter or is it the skill set or is it something about what I think where I am right now is what's the kind of life that I want to lead and how do I construct work to fit into that instead of the other way around? Because I think when we think about jobs and we think about careers, we tend to focus on either the subject matter, right? Like, oh, I want to go into law or I want to go into medicine, and the content of the job, but not about the kind of life that you want.

Right. Right? And that's what I'm really interested in right now.

[07:43] Paul: Well, and I think early in career it's easy to miss that point because your whole goal is just to get employed or let somebody hire you to let you learn, right? And then thinking about those questions, easy to slip away because you get caught up in what everyone else is doing and those narratives kind of take over. So early in your career, you actually, what I think is a pretty bold move, year 2000, we're in like the, before the dot-com bubble burst, you graduate from your MBA, instead of going to Silicon Valley, you decide to of course go to Indonesia.

[08:22] Christine Bader: Yeah.

[08:23] Paul: Where did that come from?

[08:25] Christine Bader: Yeah, not only to Indonesia, but to an oil company, which is totally crazy.

[08:32] Paul: And what came first, your interest in CSR or oil?

[08:35] Christine Bader: I'd say it was neither, although if I had to pick, I would say CSR, because what really drove me and drove me to go to business school was learning about how the world worked. So after undergrad, I did a couple years in nonprofits and a couple years in government, and I started to realize that the private sector was shaping a lot of the conditions that I was reacting to in these other jobs. So I was serving in communities that were poor because companies had either left and taken all the jobs with them, or companies had come in and not hired anybody from the communities they were moving into, or done things that were much more insidious, like pollution or, So, and then in government, I was working in New York City government and saw how companies were wooed for the jobs and the tax revenue, but they also needed to be regulated.

So it just really made me wonder about like, who are these business people and why do they have so much power and how do they think about their power and their responsibility? So that's why I went to business school to learn about business. But I didn't know what a career in business would be like, because my parents both worked in business, but I had no idea what they did. They would just kind of disappear and get on the subway in the morning and come back at night and be tired. But so when I got to business school and decided that I wanted to go into business, John Browne came to speak, and at the time he was the CEO of BP, then British Petroleum, and he had recently become the first head of a major energy company to acknowledge that climate change was real and urge action. And this was in the fall of 1998.

So this was a pretty big deal then. So I just started to think, wow, this is a guy who's thinking about his company's role in the world really differently from other companies. Like CSR wasn't really a thing then, right? Like there was Ben Jerry's, But it wasn't on everybody's lips like it is today.

[10:44] Paul: And how did your view of the business world shift when you started working in Asia? I know you also worked in Shanghai and a couple other places, but how did you start to think about it, at least from a global standpoint, or just working at a large global company?

[11:01] Christine Bader: Yeah, so I had an amazing run with BP. So my first assignment was out here in Indonesia. I was in Jakarta, and BP had just acquired ARCO, the American oil company. And so my job was as a commercial analyst, 'cause that's what you do out of business school. So I was crunching spreadsheets to analyze the assets that BP had acquired with the ARCO takeover. So looking at the financial and production data to figure out, okay, what should we do with this gas field and this oil field and this, solar plant, right?

How is it profitable? Should we sell it off? Should we keep it? How does it compare to the rest of the BP portfolio? So I was doing that. I was crunching my spreadsheets.

But this one project in particular was proving really interesting. And it was a gas project in West Papua, which is the eastern tip of Indonesia. And from a technical and an economic perspective, it was a really straightforward project. Great big gas field, and BP would build an onshore liquefied natural gas, an LNG processing plant. And BP's done that all over the world, no biggie, but never in a place like West Papua, where the human rights issues and the environmental issues were massive and could make or break the project. So, you know, I'm crunching my numbers, but as we looked at this project, it was clear that we needed more people to focus on this, and again, there wasn't an army of CSR professionals to deploy.

So I put my hand up and I was like, hey, can I work on this stuff? And they were like, yeah, please. So I did that, and then that became my calling, really. So the shift in how I thought about business, or the development of how I thought about business, was the fact that I was doing this work and had full support all the way up through the company, because it was a really important project. Everybody up to the CEO was like, "Yeah, let's invest. Tell us who you think we should partner with.

How much money do we need to do this?" It was amazing. I mean, this was my first job out of business school. My first time working in a big company. I was like, "Oh my God, I love big oil. These guys are talking about human rights and how important it is." I really fell in love with the company.

[13:21] Paul: And is that what led to your idealistic mindset about what the corporate world can achieve through these kind of efforts?

[13:29] Christine Bader: Yeah, so that, I mean, I was already, I've always been an optimistic, idealistic person, but that was when I was really like, wow, business can do amazing things and really wants to and really gets it, at least so I thought.

[13:47] Paul: Right.

[13:47] Christine Bader: For the years that I was working in Indonesia and then on a similar project in China, in Shanghai, and then in London in BP headquarters working with people around the world in quote unquote difficult places who similarly were trying to get it right. So I left the company in 2008, but then the Deepwater Horizon disaster happened in 2010, and that was one of the largest oil spills in world history. And the BP that emerged in the aftermath of that disaster was not progressive and enlightened and thoughtful. It was negligent and callous and whatever other horrible words. And so that's when it really broke my heart because I thought, my first thought was, oh, that's not my VP. That must be the wrong company.

And then my second thought was, or was that my company?

[14:46] Paul: Right.

[14:46] Christine Bader: Like, did I miss a memo or something? And so that's what drove me to write my book because then I started questioning everything I thought I had learned about business and started talking to my friends in similar roles in other companies who I realized were facing similar challenges and similar mixed messages and questioning if we were really changing the way that business is done or just tweaking around the edges and that there's this community of people who are fighting the good fight, if you will, right, and facing similar challenges. So I wanted to tell our story.

[15:22] Paul: So what pieces were missing? What did you uncover in that journey? What are some of the ways, mental models of either looking at CSR or the environment that were missing from the corporate world or even how you were analyzing or breaking down problems?

[15:37] Christine Bader: Yeah. So there are a couple themes. That emerged, and I don't know, I don't know if it's about really what was missing or not, but just a couple themes that I think showed up in everybody's work whom I spoke with. One of them is that no one gets rewarded for what doesn't happen.

[15:56] Paul: Right, counterfactuals.

[15:58] Christine Bader: Yes, so a lot of it is about prevention, right? So I spoke with one woman who manages a supply chain for a large food company, and one of their internal awards, which are really prestigious, you know, in a big company, went to one of her colleagues who managed a big safety disaster, right? Like something horrible happened and he came in and like cleaned it up. And she was livid because she thought, I have prevented 30 of those.

[16:26] Paul: And it's impossible to measure, right? Yes. If you're doing the day-to-day good work in a business, there's no way to measure what major disaster you've helped some executive avoid or things like that.

[16:37] Christine Bader: Exactly, exactly. And another piece of that is if you're really good at your job and nothing bad happens, then after a while other people look around and go, why are we paying you? We clearly don't need this role. Nothing bad has happened. And you're like, oh my God, nothing bad has happened because I'm in this chair doing this work every day. But again, it's really hard to report for.

[17:02] Paul: Well, there's also the challenge of factoring in long-tail risks or black swans as they've been popularized by Taleb.

[17:10] Christine Bader: Totally.

[17:11] Paul: In a spreadsheet, right? Your spreadsheets are going to get rounded to the hundredth and you're not going to cover those long-tail risks. Do you have any evidence that some of this has changed? Different ways of modeling this or since we've avoided major disasters We kind of just lose sight of it over time.

[17:29] Christine Bader: I think that's part of it is people's memories are short. But I think part of it also is the reputational disaster wouldn't show up in a spreadsheet. But I found that even though spreadsheets are really important and to the extent that you can make that argument, and I found that particularly oil, gas, and mining people can because if you have to shut down a mine, You know, one person I interviewed for my book said, you know, that's $10 million a day.

[18:00] Paul: Right.

[18:01] Christine Bader: Right, of revenue, like easy. Like she knows the number, all of her guys know the number, right? But I think that reputation and appealing to people's visceral desire not to be on the front page of the New York Times is actually incredibly powerful. And wouldn't show up on the spreadsheet. So it's a tricky balance because you don't want to be the kid who cried wolf over and over again, right? And yet there's no shortage of examples that all of me and my fellow corporate idealists could sort of pull up on any given day and be like, okay, here's another one.

Do you want to be next? Right, so that, again, that's a card that you need to play strategically and not all the time. But it's very effective.

[18:51] Paul: So how did you end up at Amazon and why did you decide to join at the best possible time? Leading question here.

[19:00] Christine Bader: Sure, so my book came out in 2014 and I had a great time for a couple years after that being on the freelance circuit and just seeing where the book resonated and how much it resonated, not just with people doing corporate responsibility, but people working in in HR or ethics who saw similarities in their stories and people not in companies, people working as activists or regulators who really appreciated the inside view and even people who had nothing to do with companies professionally but were really intrigued, right? And so that was super fun, but I think being on the freelance circuit, as you know, it can be kind of exhausting But I also realized that I'm so passionate speaking about this community of practitioners because I am one.

So I started to think, okay, it's time to go back into a company, but where could I possibly go now that I've had such a broad view of different industries? And I wanted to be at a place where it was a unique opportunity. And gosh, what company could possibly intrigue me so much?

[20:11] Paul: The biggest company in the world.

[20:12] Christine Bader: Yeah. Yeah.

[20:14] Paul: Not at the time, but now they are.

[20:16] Christine Bader: Well, yeah, and even then. In terms of historic and innovative and disruptive. So that opportunity came up and it was impossible to turn it down.

[20:28] Paul: So I was leading you before, but you told me offline that you ended up joining around when they had their big article buyout. Published about how they were treating their frontline employees, and I think there might have been something else, but that happened on a weekend and you started that Monday, so what was that like? Were you just ready to say, maybe it's time to just leave for good now?

[20:54] Christine Bader: So yeah, I joined, I think it was 5 days after, maybe, the front page New York Times article about Amazon's, quote unquote, bruising workplace culture. So I joined, and then there was a little bit of press in the tech papers and in the Seattle press about Amazon admits criticism, appoints director of social responsibility, as if I was sitting by the bat phone. But also, it wasn't my remit to think about workplace culture. It was more about the supply chains for Amazon's branded products. That said, though, obviously, the story comes out and it was a huge story and people were asking me what do I think. I knew a fair amount about the company.

I mean, I did my due diligence and talked to people who'd been there and were there. I think I knew what I was getting into and I wanted to go to a place where social responsibility, you know, where it might be a challenge, right? I didn't want to go to Ben Jerry's, as appealing as that might be sometimes. But, right, so yeah, I mean, it was— the timing was funny, but I was ready to dive in.

[22:13] Paul: So during that period, when did you start thinking that maybe it's time to either take a break or go back to freelancing, or just maybe full-time employment is not the—

[22:26] Christine Bader: yeah.

[22:26] Paul: Container you want to do your work in, for lack of better.

[22:30] Christine Bader: Yeah, it— so when we— so my, um, when I got the job, my husband and I packed up our life and our 2-year-old twins in New York and moved to Seattle. And he left 17 years on Wall Street to do that, uh, and so he assumed the role of full-time dad, which he was excited to do, um, but it was really hard. I mean, adjusting, you know, in a new city, and you've got these kids who are a handful. And so it was actually one day when I came home and he was reading on the couch with my kids, as they often were when I got home from work. But one day I came home and they were reading to him, and I was like, when the fuck did you learn how to read? Wow.

And I just thought, oh man. I mean, I wasn't working crazy hours, so despite the New York Times story, it was actually pretty balanced. I mean, I didn't bring my laptop home. I told my team I wasn't bringing my laptop home and did not expect them to do so. I can count the number of times on one hand I went into the office on a weekend in the almost 2 years that I was there. So it wasn't crazy, But it was intense, and so even when I was home, I sort of mentally wasn't fully there.

And I've got these gorgeous twins, and I'm not having any more kids, so I realized I'm just, I'm never gonna have a 2-year-old again, and I'm never gonna have a 3-year-old again, and I'm never gonna have a kid that's reading for the first time again. And so the work was everything a job should be. It was purposeful, and I was learning, and I had support, supportive colleagues and managers, but it still didn't work for me.

[24:20] Paul: Right. When was the moment where you decided, okay, I'm making the move?

[24:26] Christine Bader: Yeah, so that happened and I started to think, okay, I need to see if I can shift some things. So can I get home a little bit earlier? But still I felt like I was rushing out at the end of the day, and that was on me, right? That was all sort of my perception, but that's what it felt like. And then when I was home, I still wasn't mentally there. So we went to a friend's wedding in Hawaii, and granted, a week in Hawaii would really make anybody want to quit, but it was just the quality time that I had with my husband and my kids.

And I came back and thought, you know, I really need more time with them now. Like, it's all going by way too fast. Wow. Yeah.

[25:11] Paul: So I'd love to jump back to your article you wrote, "The Year I Learned to Quit," and you talk about some of these changes. I definitely encourage people to read this, but can you talk to me about the Greek notion of kairos? Am I pronouncing it right? Sure.

[25:27] Christine Bader: Yeah, kairos. Yeah. So one of the people that I interviewed for that piece was a guy named Wayne Muller, who's written a couple of beautiful books called Sabbath and A Life of Having, Doing, and Being Enough. I might not have the order of those three words right, but they're all in there. So I chatted with him, and he talked to me about how Kronos, how the ancient Greeks had these two different notions of time. And Kronos is the kind of linear marching on, you know, keeps going, doesn't stop notion of time.

But Kairos is about recognizing when things are ripe, right? It's really about timing. And so in the essay, I kind of jokingly butchered it as knowing when to hold them and when to fold them. Yeah, right. And so it's probably recognizing that like at a different point or age and stage, right, that job might have been perfect. And at a different age and stage, like, I will try to run a marathon again.

But just right now, I have to acknowledge that it's not right right now, and there's nothing that I can do to make things ripe, right, when they're not. And that's part of why being in Bali is such a great experience. One of the things that we're doing here is my husband and I are going once a week to spend the day with a group of rice farmers. And we go there and we plow the fields and we're planting, but we do a lot of sitting around. And some of us who come from business backgrounds are trying to figure out how can we help them optimize and maximize their production, and we've all had to dial it back a little bit and realize that actually it's just about sitting and waiting for the right time.

So that's why also, you know, this notion of really going dormant and not trying to push the next opportunity or kind of yank the next opportunity out of thin air and impose it on myself, how realizing that that isn't working, right? And that going dormant is actually a very natural thing to to do. And when Wayne Muller and I spoke, we talked about how humans are the only species that really resist the need to go dormant, right? Because the bears don't go, "Oh man, I gotta hibernate again. I'm too busy. I'll do it next season," right?

Like, you have to in order to survive. You can't put it off or cut it short, right? Right. And trees go dormant, plants go dormant, right? A lot species go dormant, and we're the only species that try to push through it and, and deny that it is a part of living on this Earth.

[28:24] Paul: That's fascinating. I love that framing of Kairos versus Kronos. I think Kronos— you clearly can see this in career thinking, right? Modern career thinking, I think because of an aberration of history, of a steady period of some people had certain steady paths and these ladders that we think that a career should be this steady ladder and you should never take a pay cut, you should never take a break, you should always be working towards the next thing.

[28:52] Christine Bader: The next bigger thing, yeah.

[28:54] Paul: And there's always a bigger thing, right? I've talked to— I used to work with CEOs and boards and the CEOs would come to us and say, how do I get on a board?

[29:04] Christine Bader: Right?

[29:04] Paul: It's like Do you not have enough to do? Aren't you good now? And I hear this from people I have conversations with in their careers, and they say, I don't have time to take a break or rest. And I think we need new language, and I think words like this are powerful. And also just reading Greek and Roman philosophy, for me, discovering words like leisure, don't didn't mean what they mean now. Leisure now means not working, right?

Whereas then it may have actually involved some working, but something you were drawn to, something that was actively energizing you, bringing you alive.

[29:45] Christine Bader: Yeah.

[29:46] Paul: So I love that framing of different ideas.

[29:50] Christine Bader: Yeah, and I love, Paul, about, you know, your thinking and writing, how you've really been diving into the history of work and of thinking about work, because it's something that really fascinates me too because we have to understand the context that we've been coming from, right? Because then those of us who are trying to do something a little bit different, it's really helpful to understand where we're going to be swimming upstream, right? And what trends are we working against so that when something feels really difficult, it's like, oh, well, yeah, this is about 50 or 300 years or whatever of history that that we've been building up to this point.

[30:28] Paul: Well, and I try to frame it around what are the questions? What is it all for, right? We started farming to feed ourselves, then we started trying to farm more efficiently so we could feed more people with less work, right? And then we did this industrially, and I mean, John Maynard Keynes wrote this article 90 years ago around aspirations for our grandchildren saying we'll probably solve our basic economic problems problem of meeting food, shelter, and health.

[30:55] Christine Bader: And working a 20-hour work week, or whatever he's saying.

[30:57] Paul: Well, he's saying we have this urge to still do things, so we're going to have to figure out a way for us to work, right? And I think Europe is experimenting with this, 4-day work weeks. In the Nordics, they're doing 30-hour weeks and experimenting different modes of working. But I think it all starts with answering the question, what is it all for? What is it all for, right?

[31:19] Christine Bader: So I think this question of what is it all for, one of the things that I've been able to do with this luxury of some time and space to really think about it is first when we got here and when I left the job and we were trying to figure out what to do, part of me was like, wow, work, I just, I don't know about work, like the working world. It just didn't work for me, and would I be able to do that again? I mean, again, I had a really purposeful job.

And so what I've been able to do here is, again, as I've gone quiet and really seen what's popped up, like what opportunities for projects and things to get involved in, what really compels me, I think what I have realized is that there are skills that I have and experiences that I have that I am really good at and can use to serve others and can use to have an impact in the world and help other people move forward with their aspirations and help organizations move forward. And I really want to do that. So that's been great to realize that, oh, okay, that for me is work. It doesn't have to be about this title. It doesn't have to be about managing a big team in a big company. It doesn't even have to be about CSR or whatever, but it's about my skills and my experience and really putting those to work.

So, okay, that to me is work. Now, how do I build a life where I can do those things and have all the time that I want and need for my family and for life and for living and for, you know, everything. How do I, how do I now put together the package?

[33:14] Paul: Right.

[33:15] Christine Bader: So that for me has been a real, um, I don't know, awakening in the past couple months of being here.

[33:21] Paul: So one challenge I see with that is a lot of people get to that point And they also layer on, I must make money for all of that, right?

[33:31] Christine Bader: Yeah.

[33:31] Paul: And that is where I think people come into challenges, either because they're not willing to kind of put in the work over a certain period of time, two, they don't have the resources to take these leaps, or three, like, it just may not be something you can make money for, right? Like, yeah, people take care of their parents and that is a form of work. People take care of their kids, We show kindness to strangers. We help people out, uh, just with conversations. And we don't value some of these things. Um, how are you thinking about making sense of all that, like, moving forward in your life?

[34:08] Christine Bader: Yeah, it's a good question, and I don't know the answer yet. I, um, do know that some of the skills that I— and the experience that I have, thankfully, are totally monetizable, if that's a word, right? Like, I have expertise in corporate responsibility and companies need that. I have skills in facilitation and speaking, and those are things that I can get paid for. So it's trying to figure out, for me, it's not so much the what and the why, but it's more of the how. How do I now construct this life?

But I fully appreciate— what intrigues me now about this inquiry is that this can't be a conversation for the privileged, right? Like, work is broken for people of all classes. And who needs more space more than people who are trapped in debt with family obligations, with medical bills, right? And so I'm really interested in this inquiry now because clearly there are policy changes that have to take place. In the US, obviously, like healthcare is a huge one. Childcare.

Healthcare, childcare, parental leave. And so what are all the dimensions that we need to look at in order to fix work? So there are policy changes that need to take place there are changes that need to take place within organizations, either within companies themselves, and then there are lots of startups who are trying to figure out, like create tools for others or whatever to make work work better. And then individuals hopefully can have some agency and feel like they have power if the policy pieces are in place, right? And if there are enough companies that would welcome people people who want to create the lives that they want, in part because they'll be better employees.

But one of the things I also love about what you pointed out, Paul, in your newsletter too, was about all these articles about how to be more productive and how to make your employees— you should definitely give people more breaks and more rest time. It's like—

[36:25] Paul: So they can be more productive.

[36:27] Christine Bader: So they can work more. It's like, no, no, no, no, no. I don't know. But anyway, so this problem is obviously multidimensional, but it's also, this affects people of every class. And so I'm really interested in understanding what it takes to fix work for everybody.

[36:45] Paul: What, if you were starting your career now, having, or maybe even advice you give to somebody, I'm sure you have conversations with a lot of young people today.

[36:54] Christine Bader: Yes.

[36:55] Paul: What are you telling them differently that I mean, the world of work has changed dramatically and people are still going into it with the same playbook. Even the 12 years ago when I graduated, it's changed so much. Yeah, like LinkedIn didn't even exist. YouTube, like learning anything didn't exist. So what, what do you think you would do differently or advice you're giving to people who are entering their careers now?

[37:21] Christine Bader: Yes, so the first The first piece of advice I always give to people who ask is never take anybody else's advice.

[37:30] Paul: That's my favorite piece of advice too.

[37:33] Christine Bader: Right? Because nobody else knows what you need to thrive and what situations you're going to really excel in. So that's the first piece of advice. But the second piece of advice is related to that, which is when somebody asks you or when somebody tries to give you advice with the best intentions, and they start a sentence with, "You should," ask them to turn it into an "I did" and to tell their story. Because when somebody gives you a "you should" piece of advice, they're pretty much always imposing their own experience and assumptions on you anyway. And you would actually be better served if you hear their story and then draw your own conclusions, right?

So if somebody says, again, with the best intentions, Paul, you should really go to law school. Then you can say, oh, thank you so much. Are you saying that because you went to law school or because you really wish you'd gone to law school or because the jobs that you could never quite get seemed to go to people who went to law school? Like, why do you ask? What happened to you? Right, so that's a big one is turn the you shoulds into I dids.

But the third thing that I've just been exploring recently and now that we're, you know, I'm pretty involved with the school where my kids are now. What I'm really interested in is how, for the older kids, my kids are in primary school, but how the high school kids are having these conversations about careers. So I've spoken at a couple of schools on the island about their career day, and it does still seem like career day is about what field you want to go into. It's about you. Here's what it's like to go into law. Here's what it's like to go into humanitarian aid.

But I'm really intrigued as to whether there are schools out there that are talking about, well, actually, what's the kind of life that you want? And I don't know if anybody is. Like, I know the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University, where I was a fellow some years ago, has an initiative about what is it— I don't remember what it's called, but it's something like, what does it mean to live a good life?

[39:45] Paul: Right.

[39:45] Christine Bader: Right. And so they're trying to guide students in this inquiry, but there's still like the career conversation and the career office, right, right, which are very tactical. But I, I don't know how schools are, are thinking about it, but that's, that's what I'm trying to inject when I can get into these conversations.

[40:05] Paul: That's fascinating.

[40:06] Christine Bader: Yeah.

[40:07] Paul: So what's next for you now that you're living in Bali? How are you thinking just about life and building that good life for yourself? I'll turn the philosophical question around on you.

[40:21] Christine Bader: It is still very much a work in progress. So I think I'm still, I'm still sort of playing a little bit, like still experimenting with things and getting involved with the school, like doing a little bit of strategic planning and a little bit of facilitation for teams within the school. And again, seeing what appeals and how I can really hone what it is that I have to offer. But I also recently reconnected with a friend, and I was telling her about how after I wrote the quitting essay, a publisher reached out to me and said, oh, I hope you're planning to turn this into a book. And I had to say, oh, Thank you, but the irony is that I quit, so I don't want to take on a book project right now, but I've been thinking about it a lot, obviously.

But I don't really want to write a book about quitting because I don't need to become the expert in quitting, and it's not really about quitting because you quit in order to do whatever the next thing is. And so what is that? So I was sharing this with my friend and she said, Oh, that's interesting because I've just created this new section on my blog called The Life I Want. So cue the goosebumps, and now we're exploring whether we could write a book together exploring all these things that I talked about. Who are the pioneers who are either individually making interesting choices or who are creating tools for companies to try to better empower employees and what are the policy changes that need to take place. So I think that part of that skill set that I know I have to offer is to write in service of others.

And so this is most likely going to be a big part of whatever the next piece is. But the funny thing is that when we first talked about it, I thought, oh, I still don't know if I want to take on a book project, right? Because what I'm cultivating here is these wide open spaces, and I don't want to encroach on that. But then I thought, whoa, this is exactly what the book is about. So it's a sort of meta— can I do this piece of work without it taking over my life? And the piece of work is about how do you work without it taking over your life.

[42:41] Paul: Well, I think these are the challenges that the future of work helps solve. And still present because many people are still looking at something like creating a book as the same process you probably went through in 2013, 2014, right? Which is through a publisher, highly focused work, really intense working with editors. But I mean, even now there's different ways to do that. You look at like the Chinese ecosystem and people write one chapter at a time and then all the readers pay you to write the next chapter, which is crazy. And you have things like Substack.

And so I think there's so many different ways to do this, and I think that's a lot of what the future of work is about, which is reinvention of the way we imagine how to do things and also just how to be in the world.

[43:30] Christine Bader: Yes.

[43:31] Paul: So where can people learn more about some of your stuff, read some more of your writing? I'll link up to a few of my favorite pieces I've read.

[43:39] Christine Bader: Awesome.