Episode 126: The 20% You Love To Do: Find The Deeper Appreciation Of Your Work With Daniel Hood
We’re never going to love 100% of what we do today. A lot of us have dream careers, but for one reason or another, what you may have expected may not be exactly what you get. But if you could identify just 20% of what you do that you really love, then that’s all it takes to set you up for a purposeful life and career. This powerful message is brought to us by Daniel Hood, Editor in Chief of Accounting Today. In this episode, he shares stories about his parents that have had an impact on who he is today. He discusses how observing why you do what you do can provide you greater clarity into what you love about your work and how to adjust as a leader to bring out the best in the people around you. Join in and learn how you can find a deeper appreciation of the work that you do and how you can make little tweaks in the things that aren’t exactly your favorite things to do so you can bear with them a little bit better.
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The 20% You Love To Do: Find The Deeper Appreciation Of Your Work With Daniel Hood
In this episode, I interviewed Daniel Hood. We talk about the stories of his parents, and they are some great ones, that have had an impact on who he is now. We discuss how observing why you do and what you do can provide you greater clarity in what you love and the work that you do to adjust as a leader and bring out the best in the people around you.
If you don’t know Daniel Hood already, he is the Editor-in-Chief of Accounting Today. He has been with the publication for decades, previously serving as managing editor. He has also served as a Business Editor for the New York Daily News Express, and as a Production Editor for The Wall Street Journal Europe. I’m so excited for the readers of this episode and the learnings that Dan is sharing.
I also want to make sure that you know about my new book, Disconnect to Connect: Tap Into the Power Within You to Create the Life You Desire. It is available on Amazon as of April 25th, 2023, and we will be doing a series soon talking about each chapter of the book each week. Get your copy now so that you can join in and send in your questions. We answer it each week by doing a virtual podcast book club. I look forward to hearing your feedback on this show.
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I am interviewing my friend, Dan Hood, the Editor-in-Chief for Accounting Today. I’m looking forward to talking to him about his story. Dan, did you want to give a little background on yourself, and then we’ll get started?
As you said, I’m Editor-in-Chief of Accounting Today. I’ve been an editor for many years, which is terrifying because I didn’t realize it was that long. I’ve been with the publications for many years. I started in the late ‘90s as a managing editor. I’ve been there for a lot longer than I thought I would be. When I first started, I don’t know anything about accounting, but it turned out to be a pretty fascinating place to cover. Before that, I was primarily in production, so I was an art director and page layout person for a couple of different business publications.
This is fun to be able to interview you because you’re usually the one interviewing everybody.
I’m a little nervous. I got to be honest.
You’re not usually in that seat, aren’t you?
It’s like, “I never knew what it was like. This is terrible.” I’m putting all these people through this terrible interrogation all these years. Really, everyone just wants to ask other people questions. Actually, that’s not true. Most people are very happy to talk. If you give them a chance, they’re like, “I’ll talk.” If you got a couple of hours, let’s go.
This is all about breaking belief systems and things we’ve learned throughout our lives in our own stories. I would love to start off with your journey because probably people don’t know a lot about you just because you’re the one behind interviewing so many people. Where did you grow up? What did your parents do? We’ll start from there.
I grew up North of New York City in Westchester. My father worked for TIME Magazine for a million years. You should have my father on. Unfortunately, he’s not available, but his story is fascinating. He immigrated from Canada when he was seventeen specifically because he wanted to work for TIME Magazine.
He decides at the age of seventeen that he wants to move to New York. He desperately wants to work for TIME Magazine. He writes them and says, “I’d like to get a job.” They’re like, “Sorry, we don’t have any jobs. Please don’t come down.” He’s like, “I’m coming down. I’ll be there. If you don’t have jobs, that’s fine. I’ll get some other jobs, but I’d really like to work there.” They’re like, “No, don’t come down here. Seriously, we have no jobs for you.” Anyways, he shows up and then walks in on Monday at TIME. He’s like, “I’m that weirdo.” They’re like, “We don’t have any jobs for you.” They were so impressed that he’d done this that they found some work for him.
They got him temporary work. First off as a courier taking a film from Harry Truman’s inauguration in DC up to New York. His job literally was to follow photographers around to inauguration balls and they just toss canisters of film at him. He took late trains up to New York or early trains down to DC. The whole thing as he said, he’d been in the United States for less than eleven weeks at that point. He was in the same room with the president. He turns around and said, “That’s Harry Truman.”
They were like, “This kid, we’ll hold onto him.” They got him a job literally in the mail room, so he ended up working in the mail room. This tells you what day and age it was. They had an executive training program back in the day and they put him into it once he’d been in the mail room for a year or two. I could talk about my father for 300 or 400 years.
That is amazing. What a great story. First off, why did he want to come to the US, and how did he know he wanted to work there?
Nobody knows. There are a million great magazines. Why did you choose TIME? “Simple. It’s a great news magazine. I just wanted to work there.” He’d grown up in Canada in the midst of the Great Depression and his family was used to moving around or picking up sticks. He thought, “I want to go someplace where I can be stable and a place that has a good reputation.” It’s TIME at that point. It’s still a great magazine, but at that point, TIME was a much bigger deal than it is now.
We were previously doing an episode with me on your podcast talking about my book, Disconnect to Connect. We had talked about getting silent and you said, “I don’t think about anything. I’m just silent.” You talked about your dad being like, “I like the magazine. There’s so much more to it.”
Disconnect to Connect: Tap into the Power within You to Create the Life You Desire
Why do you need a reason? It’s TIME. Going back to Disconnect to Connect, it’s the stories we learn through generations. Self-reflection is not a trait that runs strong in the Hood family. There are reasons and you just do things because there are reasons.
It’s not that deep. Did he go to college?
He did. He went to school at night while working at TIME. Again, this might be all about my father. He was Canadian citizen still. The Korean War comes along and there was a draft, but he was not required to participate in the draft. He was like, “I intend to become a citizen at some point. I can’t shirk that duty. Of course, I’ll register for the draft.” Everyone around him was like, “Why would you do this?” He’s like, “What? I intend to become a citizen.” He registers for the draft and then his number comes up. There’s a whole long series of stories about this. He goes through all the basic training.
At the end, while he’s doing that, TIME says, “We’ll keep your job for you.” They write an editor’s letter about him saying, “We’re really impressed by this kid.” At that point, he was 20 or 21. They write this editor’s letter about him, how impressed they are with him, and how impressive they think it is that he volunteered for the Army.
A week or two weeks later, he’s grad from basic training and getting his assignment. His assignment was to be a radio operator. He had some college at a point. I don’t think he’d finished his degree, but he had some college, which at that point, was much less common than it is now even. They were like, “He’s a smart kid. We’ll make him a radio operator.” The radio operator is in Korea because they have a giant antenna coming off the back of their radio pack where it targets.
The combat lifespan of a radio operator in Korea was something like 30 seconds. As soon as the bullets start flying, you’re the first person they shoot at. He’s sitting there looking at his assignment and some high-ranking officer comes roaring up a jeep and says, “Where’s Hood? Who’s Hood?” He says, “I’m Hood.” The guy said, “The Hood who’s in TIME Magazine?” He says, “Yes, I’m the Hood who’s in TIME Magazine.” The officer says, “What’s your assignment?” He says, “I’m assigned to be a radio operator.”
The guy says, “No, you’re not. We do not want a second article about, ‘Do you remember that guy who was so impressive?’ He died in Korea.” Throughout his life, he was allowed to call himself a Korean War veteran, but he was never more than 75 miles from New York City throughout his entire service. They found him the safest possible spot and the safest possible base with the safest possible job. They were like, “You just stay there. Just don’t do anything.”
I would call that karma that he did the right thing.
He got rewarded for that.
That’s an amazing story. What did he do for TIME Magazine?
He was not on the publication side. He was on the business side. He did a bunch of different things. As I said, their executive training program was like, “We’re training you to be an executive. Not just an executive in a particular area, but to be a good business person.” He was an HR for a long time. For most of the time that I was aware of him, he was in their real estate department. He would do things like to manage their bureaus. If their Los Angeles bureau needs a bigger officer or a different officer or whatever, he would go out, manage that, and do the negotiations for it. If it needs to be redone or they need to do some work on it, he’d be in charge of all that stuff. He’s managing their real estate assets. It’s a random thing. That’s not what he planned to do. He just wanted to work for TIME.
I love the stories about immigrants because I feel like we get so far away from that mindset of how they felt so proud to be Americans. My grandmother was an immigrant as well. When she was being taken to the hospital from her house, she was singing God Bless America at the top of her lungs. Those things about his spirit of, “No, I’m so proud to be American. This is something that I need to do.” We get away from those things generation by generation because we become comfortable. We didn’t strive to be here, those people did. It’s such a big impact on your life when you’ve got immigrants around you.
It gives you a whole different perspective. I have to tell a little wrinkle on this because technically, as he was going into the Army, he was not yet an American citizen. This is what my father was like. He had read up on the regulations and there’s technically a different oath that you swear if you’re a non-citizen joining the US Army. He goes to the main induction center in New York City. There are 500 guys who’ve been ordered to assemble at this point. Four hundred ninety-nine of them are American citizens and then there’s him.
He goes in and some sergeant goes, “All of you, stand up. You’re going to take the oath.” He says, “Sergeant, I have to take a different oath, sir.” The sergeant was like, “Are you crazy? You take the same oath as everybody else.” He’s like, “No, I looked it up.” He goes, “What’s your name? Do you want to make all these guys wait while you take a different oath?” He’s like, “I have to, sir. I’m not an American citizen. I can’t take the oath.”
Eventually, the sergeant said, “All these guys are going to hate you.” It takes an extra ten minutes or whatever for him to find the right oath. They finally get the thing and he swears him, and then he swears the other guys in. They’re sent off on the buses to go out to Fort Dix. The basic training is out in New Jersey. My father gets on the bus and all these guys are looking at him and they’re like, “Are you Hood?” He’s like, “Yeah.” This is where the trouble starts. They’re like, “You’re the guy who gave the sergeant all that trouble.” He’s like, “Yeah.” He’s waiting for them to take it out on him. They’re like, “That was great. That was fantastic. You told him where to get off.” Luckily, they did not hold him against it. You’re right, having that perspective is tremendous. Even having it as a native-born, you take it a little bit for granted.
When did he meet your mom?
Again, this is going to go on forever. He comes down. He’d been in New York probably for fifteen years or so. For the time, they met a little later. I think they met in their late 20s when most people were married a little earlier in those days. They met through some mutual friends. My father’s roommate was dating my aunt at that time, which is weird because my father’s roommate then became a priest, but that’s a whole other story. It’s not because of my aunt. It was not her fault. Don’t blame her.
If my father had not passed away, I would’ve had him on as a guest. When he came down when he was seventeen with no job coming to pester TIME to hire him, he took the bus down. The bus went through all these windy back roads because there were no interstates. This is 1947 or 1949. There are no interstate highways. To go from Toronto going through Upstate New York, it’s all windy local roads. You get on the bus in Toronto at 5:00 in the afternoon and it goes all through the night. By 8:00 in the morning, they pull into this sleepy tiny little town in Pennsylvania. They say, “If you want to get off to use the bathroom or get some breakfast.” This is his first time in America. He goes out and he’s in this tiny little one-horse town and gets himself something to eat and a cup of coffee.
Fifteen years later, he meets my mother. They fall in love. They’re going to get married. They travel off into the middle of Northern Pennsylvania and meet his parents. My grandfather takes my father’s set. He says, “I’ll show you the town,” which is his way of saying, “I want to have a little quiet talk with you and explain what’s what. How you’re going to treat my daughter,” and so on and so forth. They’re driving through town and my father was like, “This looks familiar.” My grandfather was like, “It could not look familiar. We’re in the middle of nowhere.
I love this place, but this is the middle of nowhere. You have never been here.” My father was like, “We’re going to turn here. There’s a street up to there and there’s a courthouse at the top. If you go around the corner, there’s a place that sells rolls and coffee.” My grandfather was like, “How could you possibly know that?” He goes, “Because this is the first place I ever ate a meal in the United States.” It was in this tiny one-horse town in the middle of nowhere, which happened to be where my grandparents lived and where my mother had spent a lot of her time growing up. It was a random weird coincidence. That’s how they met in New York City because they were both living there. They stayed in the area eventually when they had kids and moved out to Westchester, just North of the city.
Did she work?
She did at the time. Before, she worked at a bunch of different libraries. She was a stay-at-home mom for most probably until I was about twelve. We got four, but I’m by far the youngest. My brothers and sisters are all 6 or 7 years older than I am. By the time I was in high school, she became a tax preparer, which was random. She started working for H&R Block and eventually ended up running their local office. She loved it. She worked there for 20 to 30 years.
You’re the youngest of four. As you’re growing up, what are you observing about your parents, your siblings, and so forth?
There’s a lot to unpack. If you’ve ever seen Mad Men, that’s the generation of my parents. There are those weird interactions between mothers and fathers and how they interact with each other. They had very different expectations of what marriage would look like. Partially because my father grew up during the Depression and they moved all over the place.
Work Appreciation: If you've ever seen Mad Men, that's the generation to my parents. There are weird interactions between mothers and fathers. They had very different expectations of what marriage would look like.
My grandfather was an alcoholic and had some trouble honing down jobs, but it was also the middle of the Depression, so jobs were hard to get. He would move anywhere to get a job. They were frequently separated, not legally but physically separated. He would go to other parts of Canada to get work. My father would also be separated from his siblings because wherever they could find a place to live, if you had a bed, that was where you slept. This was in the middle of the Depression. We aren’t always able to be together.
He had a very different idea of what a family life would be like compared to my mother who grew up with her parents always in the same house and they were very close and very tight. They both came with very different expectations and then it was also that era of the ‘50s and early ‘60s. I always love this story of the advice they would give to wives. It was, “Fifteen minutes before your husband gets home, flick your baby’s feet to make them cry because then they’ll get the crying out and then they’ll be happy. They won’t cry when your husband comes home.”
My mother was not into that but my father was like, “That sounds good.” They did not always see eye to eye on that, but they were great parents. They may not be happy necessarily in their marriage but I don’t think they were unhappy. I don’t think it was a blissful love match that it might have been. They were great parents. They very much made sure that we had everything we needed and looked after us. Every opportunity that we could take, they were happy to support those. In some ways, it was a little weird because they were more of a partnership. Let’s put it that way.
They had a belief system together that worked, just as separate units. They hadn’t come together before they got married. This happens a lot in the workplace or in families. We don’t talk about what those things are until we become a family, and then you’ve got different memories and different patterns because of it.
As you say, a lot of this is unspoken. You’re just, “This is how it is.” Other people think, “This other thing is how it is.” You’re never talking about it. This is also the ‘50s and the ‘60s. No one is talking about these things. Nowadays, we at least have the notion that you can talk about stuff. That was not what they were doing then. It was not like they were fighting all the time or anything like that. They had very different expectations of very different lives. They ended up working out a pretty good modus operandi where they managed to do their own thing and everything worked out pretty well. As I said, from our perspective, for me and my brothers and sister, it was great. They made it work for everybody.
You guys were a priority, it sounds like, as far as them. What were the things you were most interested in when you were younger?
I’ve always liked writing. Originally, my goal was writing fiction and I ended up writing some fiction when I first got out of college and did all right with it. It is a much harder business than I thought. It’s maybe not as good as I thought, so I ended up moving more towards writing for work. When I started, I had no career plans. I was like, “I’m going to be a writer.” I had no actual career plans and I was like, “I have to make money and I have to earn a living. I’ll get a job.” I got a job that ended up being in production and design, which I liked. It was fun. It was literally laying out publications and laying out magazines. This is in the early ‘90s when there was Confluence.
Two things came together, which was desktop publishing, which meant that people could lay out their own magazines. Previously, editors would send all their stuff to a preprint place somewhere. They wouldn’t see any of that. It would just get done and then they’d get proof sent back to them. They came disappeared with desktop publishing where suddenly, editors could lay out their own stuff. I came in as somebody who knew how to lay stuff out, and then there came this Confluence.
They’re like, “You know how to lay stuff out. You’ll be an editor. We know you can write. We know you can spell.” That’s become this thing where I was in this weird middle of having been layout and design mostly and then getting more editorial responsibility. At some point, those things diverge. There came a thing where production, design, and editorial are together very closely, and then they diverged. It became much more of a production that went its own way in the editorial. I somehow ended up on the editorial side of that.
Did you have an interest in this because of your dad and learning about TIME Magazine?
No. As I said, he was on the business side. He read TIME religiously and all of its other many publications. People in Entertainment Weekly flood all the Time-Life books. We’ve got a lot of swag. It was good. He was more on the business side. The reporting and journalism aspect of things was not an element that we learned much about.
How did you know you even liked to write, that you were good at fiction, or whatever that passion was? Where did that begin? What’s the first time you remember like, “I love this?”
It’s because I love to read.
What type of books?
Anything. Cereal boxes. We were all big readers in my family. My father was a big reader, and then all my brothers and sisters loved to read. Literally, you would come down at breakfast and we would all be studying our individual cereal boxes because if there are words on it, we’ll read it. There were always books around the house. That’s where I talk about them making sure that we had every opportunity we wanted. They wouldn’t necessarily buy you anything you wanted, but any book you wanted, they would get you.
Work Appreciation: They wouldn't necessarily buy you anything you wanted, but any book you wanted, they would get you.
One of my earliest memories is going to local bookstores. For some reason, I don’t know why I remember this strongly, but it was in the middle of the oil embargo of the ‘70s. I remember people talking about no unnecessary trips. You can’t go anywhere because there’s so little gas and we’re rationing gas. I remember frequently going to bookstores in that period and my mom was like, “Do you need a book? Let’s go get a book.” I was like, “Can we drive?” She was like, “Yeah, it’s fine. Don’t worry about it.”
You’re walking into a bookstore. Would a certain aisle draw you like, “I want to go to fiction first or I want to go to comics first?”
Whatever was going on. I ended up drifting more toward science fiction and fantasy, but whatever was available. I was speaking to Indians for a long time. We can get into stories about Native Americans. This was a library about Geronimo that I read. At some point later on, I went back to that school library and I checked it out 35 times. I’ve read that story over and over again.
What was it about that story that you wanted to keep reading?
He was a badass. He comes to a bad end, unfortunately, but I always thought Native American culture was fascinating. It was a very well-done book. It was meant for people in elementary school. It included a lot of what was going on in terms of the US Army forcing Indians out of their homelands. It was a lot of background, so that story is a big story. You’re like, “What’s going on?” There’s all the stuff that he does and he’s an amazing guy. Having looked up more about him later, he’s maybe not as amazing a guy as this book portrayed because he had some other problems. He had some other things that may not but there are other Native Americans who are probably better exemplars. He was a fascinating character.
I always find that interesting when we get drawn into one thing or another that makes an impact on us where you’re going back and repeating it. However, it’s probably been something throughout your life you might go back and reflect on a piece of that story and so forth because it impacted you. I’m wondering with your love of reading, did your mom, as a librarian, get you guys all started in this?
This is what’s fascinating. She worked at Widener Library at Harvard. She worked at a library in New York, but she was not a big reader of books. It was really my father. She would get you any book you wanted, but what she mostly read was a ridiculous quantity of magazines. As I said, my father got all the magazines at work because Time Life at some point produced something like 35 different titles every week. Some of them were, then there’d be others. By the time we were all adults, she was 4 or 5 years behind on everything because she’d have these stacks. She’d have to go through People, Sports Illustrated, TIME, and then 3 or 4 other magazines and the newspaper.
It was not uncommon for her to at some point be like, “What’s going on with the Pope?” You’re like, “What do you mean the Pope?” She’s like, “Did he just got shot?” You’re like, “He got shot four years ago. Why are you reading these magazines from four years ago?” She was never that bad, but it was definitely stuff like, “What’s happened with this?” She did not read novels or books. She read a ridiculous quantity of magazines and newspapers.
I’m the same way. Sometimes I don’t want to think. I want to have easy magazines and gossip magazines. It’s completely different than your life.
My father was not like, “You should be reading a book at all times.” He was always reading and there were always books around.
It was just a way of life.
That’s what you do.
You said you started out in layout. Was that a passion of yours? As you started moving into the editorial space, did you miss some of that? Like so many, we start diverging in our careers and specializing in areas because we have to at a certain point. Sometimes we don’t even pause to say, “This part of me is missing now and I didn’t realize it.”
Everything in my career, I drifted into it. At no point did I make any serious decisions about anything? This job I got because someone was like, “You can take this job. It’s available if you want it.” I’m like, “Sure, I’ll do that. I love layout.” There’s something very OCD about it. It’s very nice to figure out and make things work and fit. What I really liked is the combination of the two. I liked being able to put something together, but then also being like, “If this headline doesn’t work, I can rewrite it.” Mostly in production, you have to call an editor and be like, “I need to rewrite this headline. Can you fix it? It’s too long.” You got to wait for them to do it.
When the two were combined, it was great because then I could be like, “I don’t like this headline. I’m going to rewrite it. This story is too long, I can cut it. If this story is too short, I can go in and write three extra sentences.” It was perfect. As I said, things diverged and we reached the point that the company that stay where they split them off entirely. We reached a point eventually where it went very gradually. Editors won’t be doing layout anymore, but they’ll have access to the files so you’ll be able to go in and make changes if you want. That slowly shifted from, “No, you can’t make any changes at all. You just send them all through production.”
That was the point where I was like, “You’re going to take away my license? I love that. I love laying out. This is great.” I did miss that. I do miss that element of it. It’s one of those things where you’re like, “Is that the best use of my time?” I could understand why the company was like, “If you want to do that all the time, you can do that, but we’re not going to pay you. We will pay you as an editor because there’s more valuable work. We would pay you more for it.”
I think that’s an important connection to where people get promoted a lot of times to levels of things that they want for the title, the pay, and so forth. I see this a lot of times in CPA firms where the partners don’t like working on the business. They still want to do the client work. Once you get into those leadership positions, you hash to make hard choices, and then figure out as a human, “How do you still get that energy from outside of work if you’re missing it inside?” It is a very hard thing to do. How did you reset around that?
You get promoted to manage other people because you’re good at what those people do, but that means you’re not doing it anymore. You’re like, “I want to do it. You’re doing it wrong.” We mentioned it when we were talking earlier about your book on our podcast. We talked about that. So much of leadership is not doing it right but it’s getting other people to or helping other people to do or training about to do. That’s not why you got this job at all. You got this job because you’re good at laying it out or being in there doing an auditor and the tax work. It’s not because you’re good at getting other people to do it.
Work Appreciation: So much of leadership is not about doing things right. It's getting other people to do them.
That’s not even an interest.
That’s another thing. Very few people are interested in managing other people because it’s hard and other people are mostly annoying, so they’re very difficult in managing. That’s one of the reasons why that’s where the money is. It’s in managing other people. It’s a very difficult thing. What I found is there are so many things I like about editing that those became the things that I miss. I miss laying out pages and stuff like that, but it’s usually the small stuff of editing that I like the best.
I was at a conference somewhere and I saw a guy named Marcus Buckingham. I haven’t discovered him. I didn’t make him up. He’s been around for a while and famous but I only discovered him. He talks about something that I thought was fascinating which is for highly engaged people, and I think of myself as pretty highly engaged. He talks about, “You have to have about 20% of the work you do every day that you love doing.” He’s got a whole thing where if you have more than that or if you like 50% of what you do, that’s great, but it doesn’t matter. You’re not going to be any more engaged than if you love 20%. If you love less than 20%, like if you love 19%, it drops off steeply and the gap gets huge if it’s further below roughly 20%.
I started to think about, “What do I like to do? What’s my 20%?” We talked about the need for my utter lack of introspection. On a few occasions, when I read your book or when he was talking about what’s your 20%, I started to think about what I love to do every day. There are some things I hate doing every day, but the things I love doing every day are working in your business. It’s proofreading or taking a headline and making it 2% better because I picked a better word or a word that has three less letters. Shorter headlines are always a goal. I wrote the perfect deck or made the right cut. I do a fair amount of writing, but a lot of what I do is in other people’s writing.
It’s saying, “This paragraph will be perfect here. You’ve got it in the wrong place, I’m going to put it right here.” That small nitty gritty stuff is things that I love doing. That’s my 20%. The rest of it is managing people or managing things within the company. As I said, there’s very little that I hate doing, but there’s stuff where I’m like, “This is what I got to do.”
This is such an important concept because we get so wrapped up a lot of times in our circumstances and we’re seeing it in the world after COVID of everyone wanting to quit, start over, and go somewhere else. People are quitting without a job and so forth rather than taking that pause and writing down, “What are the things I love about what I do and what are the things I don’t love about what I do?”
Taking the ego out of it because that’s an important part. A lot of why we don’t delegate or empower others is our own ego thinking someone else can’t do it as well as us or won’t do it our way. Not to say that that other way can’t be successful too. That part of taking the pause before you make a big change in your life and saying, even if you want to get to 40% versus 20%, “Out of that 80% I don’t love, what could I do to make little shifts in those other tasks so that I can find more joy? Maybe I delegate certain of those things because that isn’t my strength, but it could be somebody else’s strength.” Those can create the joy and the energy that you want in your own body so that you create more energy.
When COVID happened, everyone went remote right away. Everything changed and people are complaining constantly like, “I’m in my house all day.” Now, people go back to, “I don’t want to leave my house.” It’s because we start finding joy. When we go through change, change is always uncomfortable, but then we have to start noting, “What do I like about it and what don’t I like about it?” Sometimes it’s that pause of questioning ourselves, and then we’re like, “I actually do like what I’m doing. I just need to make a couple of changes.”
It starts with the examination, but it also starts with the notion that you can make changes. None of this stuff is set in stone. You can make changes that aren’t, “Let’s blow it all up.” That’s what we saw over the last couple of years. A lot of people are going, “I don’t want to do this anymore.” When in fact, as you said, “If you step back and thought a little bit more quietly about things, you could change these small things and they’d be better.”
I’m terrible at delegating. That’s the thing I’m always batting at. As you say, a lot of it is ego. I’ve finally gotten to the point where I overcompensate it being like, “However they’re doing it is fine.” Now I find the big struggle is, it turns out that however they’re doing it is not always fine. Often it’s not right, but being able to make the distinction and think, “Is it wrong because it’s different from how I do it or is it wrong because it’s wrong and that’s not a good way to do it?” That I find now is my struggle. I’ve gotten to the point where I can hand work off, but now I have to be like, “I need to examine this very carefully to make sure this is not how I feel that it’s wrong.”
That’s an important thing that a manager and a leader need to do because we initially react to what we know versus taking the time to observe. I would add a third thing to that. If it is wrong, now I need to coach not do it. When I see a lot of people do what’s wrong, I’ll just do it and take it. That never makes the other person better to know whether they are a valuable person in the organization that can grow, learn, and do it better the next time.
I still fall into that every once in a while. That’s wrong so I’ll just do it. It’ll be easier. That’s a constant bell. This is a very positive discussion, but I’m going to give a little sneaky trick that I have found when you’re on the other end. When you’re facing someone who is giving you and it doesn’t need necessarily to be in a boss-employee relationship. It’s sometimes when you’re dealing face-to-face with other people who may be at the same level or in different departments.
One of the things I’ve found is requiring people to explain why they’re saying something or why they’re suggesting one particular way of doing something when you’ve got a different way, it’s devastating. Often, what they start to realize, even if it’s just subconsciously is, “I’m just saying this because this is what I like. This is my preference. This isn’t right or wrong. This is just how I like to do it.” You can back people up. Don’t do it in a mean way.
This is a nasty skill that I have, which is the ability to explain what I want done way that sounds very plausible. Often, it’s because I thought it through. There is a real reason to do it, this is the reason to do it, and this is why we should do it this way. I can explain in a couple of sentences why we should do it this way. If you ask somebody else, “What are you thinking about? What do you want to do? Why do you want to do it that way? They then realize they don’t have anyway. It’s just because that’s what they want to do or that’s how I like it.
Often, I would have this with art decisions about the covers of magazines. You’d get a group of people. Someone would say, “I want it to be blue. I want it to be green. This is bad. This is terrible. We can’t do this.” When you push to say, “Why do you think this color is better or this is better?” You start to realize it’s because that’s the color they like.
It’s the same thing as your dad. He just wanted to work at TIME. There wasn’t deeper than that.
It seems obvious to me, but that’s right. The ability to have an explanation for it put you ahead of everybody. He would say, “It’s TIME.” Everyone understood, “Yeah, it’s TIME. That’s fine.” If things like, “Why do you want this color?” At some point, I remember somebody saying, “Blue is the color of digital.” “No, you just like blue. Blue isn’t digital. What are you talking about?” Being able to say, “This color works well with this image because this image will pop off a blue background better than it will of a yellow background.”
If you can articulate that, it puts you ahead of everybody else. A lot of times, people’s decisions, even if it isn’t a personal preference or they do have a reason behind it, they can’t articulate. That’s why it’s a sneaky trick because sometimes you’re just taking advantage of people’s articulateness which is mean in one way.
Work Appreciation: A lot of times, people's decisions, even if it isn't a personal preference, even if they do have a reason behind it, they can't articulate.
I find that in organizations a lot, especially working in tech companies. You’d be working between the designers of the field in the look and the subject matter experts of like, “No, it has to do this.” There is a disconnect a lot of times in organizations between different skillsets. My son is looking into going into architectural design and that’s one thing I said to him. People think they go into art and get to make whatever they want to make, but you really are taking in other people’s requirements and inputs and have to make it the way they want it. It’s the same thing in a magazine. Whatever the branding and the formatting of the magazine and who its audience is, you don’t get to make it wild and crazy just because you want to.
You’re going to be designing a lot of houses and office buildings. You’re not probably going to like that much because you’re serving somebody else’s vision.
In most of our jobs, that’s what we do. That’s why that percentage role is important. A lot of what we do isn’t necessarily the way we would’ve done it or if we could have done it on our own. What things do we feel empowered in creating that energy and empowerment in our role? It’s important no matter what you do. I want to end with rapid-fire questions. I’ll ask you to pick a category. Family and friends, money, spiritual, or health.
I’m going to go with family and friends for $200.
With my family and friends, things or actions that I don’t have that I want to have.
I don’t have enough time with them. Some of that is because I got a brother who lives in England with his family so I don’t get to see them as often as I like. Particularly not as much over the last few years. Also, my other brother and my sister are there. One brother has his kids play baseball all the time. They’re constantly in Florida.
They’re 14 and 16, but they’re going to spring training and stuff. We don’t often get to see them as much. I don’t get to see my friends as much, even people around the city. Since the pandemic, people are going out a lot less and we’re not in the office as much. It’s a natural like, “Let’s go out and get a couple of drinks after work or have lunch or whatever.” There’s a lot less of that. I would like to have more of that. I’m sure we will as things get, not more normal, but achieve some new normality. More time with friends and family would be good.
Things or actions that I do have that I want to keep?
The little interaction I have with them is good. We all bust on social media a lot. A lot of it is terrible but it’s allowed me to keep in touch with a lot of people who I would never have kept in touch with. For people who live near me, I’m going to be in touch with them probably on a regular basis. There are all kinds of friends that I hadn’t talked to until I got on Facebook a few years ago or whatever. It was great.
I had a high school reunion in 2022 and I was in and out in an hour. I’m like, “I know everything that’s going on.”
I had to say I didn’t go to the high school reunion because I’m like, “I see these people on Facebook all the time. I know their lives. I probably know more than I want to know about them.” Some of these people I wish I didn’t know as much about. That’s the person I would’ve avoided at the high school reunion.
Things or actions that I don’t have that I don’t want to have?
I don’t have a lot. My family gets along really well. We’re not perfect. Obviously, my brothers and sisters are going to disagree from time to time, but most of the time, we get along well and I like that. One of the things we get along well over is we would look at other people, our friends, or other more distant family and some of their drama. We’re like, “We don’t have that drama. This is great.” We get out with popcorn and watch their drama. There’s not a lot of that and I like that.
You shared so many awesome stories. It’s been great to learn about your parents and your family. Is there anything you didn’t say or something you would like people to walk away with or a takeaway from your story?
Nothing that brings to mind. The thing is now that I’ve been thinking about my father and my mother, both of them have a ridiculous quantity of great stories. I want to tell five more stories about my father because I’m like, “That’s a great story. I should have told that.” Some of them are pretty fascinating. We talked about it because we were talking on another podcast about your book. I think that all of this has given me a deeper appreciation for the need to examine yourself and think more about yourself.
It’s not about self-criticism or anything, but it’s more about understanding yourself. It’s about understanding, “Why do I behave this way?” Not in a, “Why am I like this?” way. Not so that you can blame it on your parents or your grandparents or the teacher who told you, “You’d never achieve anything.” It’s not about that. It’s to understand why you do what you do. As I said, I have a newfound appreciation for that. I’m going to give you a plug. I’m going to go ahead and plug Disconnect to Connect because it gets you thinking in a very good way.
Thank you so much. I think that is an important delineation. It’s the research of ourselves and the messages that have come to us through our lifespan of which there are so many. Deciphering what serves us and doesn’t so I love that. Thank you so much for being on and sharing your story. I’m sure a lot of people are going to love hearing some of these stories about your dad. You’re going to get to tell a whole lot more after this.
Thank you for having me on. It was fun.
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Now, for my Mindful Moments with my interview with Daniel Hood. There were so many great stories that he shared. Immediately, you can see the love and admiration he had for his father that was an immigrant from Canada. We talked about the risk-taking and the wherewithal encouragement to come to the US to try to get a job with a company like TIME Magazine that had no interest in hiring him. It was his perseverance that allowed them to see that he would be someone that they would want working for him. That alone, so many times, we get rejected for something or we’re told no and we give up. Instead of looking for opportunities of how we can get the yes and not allow those noes to take us down.
Many times, that might be even in our own head that a job opportunity comes up that might be to help you get to the next level. When that happens, you tell yourself that you don’t have the skillset to get that job or you have a belief system from somebody else that might have that negative self-talk that is telling you that as well. This is all about you stepping back and saying, “If that doesn’t work out, how else can I get there?”
Using that example of a job interview is so important because a lot of times, I would go on job interviews that maybe I wasn’t ready for. What you find out during those job interviews are the skillsets that you need so that you can get the job next time. By going through the process, you learn. That was one thing that his father definitely had some luck on his side as well. That perseverance is what got him through because he took any job that they were willing to give him at TIME Magazine so that he could eventually move into roles that would give him and his family the life that he wanted.
I also thought that such a poignant story was about his father coming to America and being an immigrant. Not even being a US citizen but feeling like he should be part of the draft and doing his part as an American citizen. I know so many of us will know the right thing to do in our hearts, but we don’t necessarily do it because we don’t want to have to do it. This can apply in business and in our personal life that if we did it, it would be inconvenient, cause some financial stress, or whatever the reason might be.
Instead of taking responsibility for the decision not to do it, we will blame the outside or use an excuse. His father could have used an excuse for the fact that he wasn’t a citizen yet. He didn’t need to apply for the draft, but he did what he felt was the right thing to do. I think these lessons that we can learn from others are so important. Giving ourselves that observation of the way thoughts go through our heads, the excuses that we may make for the things that we know in our gut and our intuition are the right things to do.
We also talked about Dan’s journey of becoming a writer himself, going into journalism, and how much he loved to read as a child. I think it’s important to go back to, “Why do we do what we do? What is it that we enjoyed about it?” He loved reading. He didn’t care what the topic was. He just loved reading. That was an important thing because this is what drives what I talk about a lot of times as a personal purpose. His personal purpose is reading and sharing information and knowledge that he gets from reading.
Whatever career decision he makes. He started out writing fiction, it didn’t work out for him. He moved into journalism where he was doing layouts. It still served his personal mission because that personal mission or personal purpose is to read, learn, and be a part of it. He’s in the career that he is in taking something that he loves to do as a personal purpose and allowing it to go out to so many other people that will enjoy the work that he produces as well.
When we make career choices, sometimes it’s not the exact thing. As he said, “I started out in fiction. I loved fiction, but that’s not where I ended up. I even loved the layout in the creative piece, but I ended up as an editor.” When we can get back to what we talked about, that 20% of our job that we love to do every day gives us joy and then align that to our personal purpose of making sure that it is serving our personal purpose. It is what gives us energy every single day.
Work Appreciation: When need to get back to that 20% of our job that we love to do every day, that gives us joy, and then align that to our personal purpose.
What that can do is make sure that the other things we don’t love about our job, we’re okay with. We’re never going to have 100% that we love every single day. What we can figure out is how to make little tweaks in the things that maybe aren’t our most favorite things in the workplace or in the job that we do. How can we change it to 10% or 5% to make it a little bit better, to enjoy it a little bit more, or to delegate it to somebody else because that’s something that they’re good at?
You don’t create energy from it so that you can spend more time in the things that you love. That’s an important piece of observation. We don’t let ego get in the way of us taking on roles or work that we’re doing just because that title is important or the money is important, but not necessarily doing the job as the job is required to be done.
We ended with him talking about having that deeper appreciation to examine yourself. To step back, observe, research, and not judge, but understand why you do what you do so that you can better understand the actions that you take all day long. When you can make those little adjustments, how that can change your energy for yourself and the people around you.
I hope that you enjoyed this episode and you share it with the people around you as well. For those of you that also want to go deeper on this journey, I have my book. You can buy it through Amazon or on my website, AmyVetter.com/Disconnect-To-Connect. There’s a link right there to get to the book and also lots of other resources that have to do with the book. To help you on this journey of moving through observation research of yourself so that you can take the journey to work-life harmony. We’ve got to start somewhere and that starting somewhere is to pause, to observe, and to take stock and research into who we are and what serves us and what doesn’t serve us. I hope that this book, these episodes, and these conversations all help you in your journey of creating business balance and bliss.
Important Links
About Daniel Hood
Daniel Hood is editor-in-chief of Accounting Today. He has been with the publication for over two decades, previously serving as managing editor. He has also served as a business editor for the New York Daily News Express, and as a production editor for The Wall Street Journal Europe.