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Fit Happens asks the question most leadership conversations avoid: why do talented people fail in the wrong roles — and thrive in the right ones? Hosted by Jason Baumgarten, an executive search specialist with decades of experience placing CEOs and building boards, each episode blends cutting-edge research with candid conversations with the leaders who've lived it. Because fit isn't luck. It's a science.
Jason Baumgarten
[0:00:00]
I'm Jason Baumgarten and you're listening to Fit Happens, the podcast where top leaders, investors and board directors share the stories, surprises and hard earned lessons behind finding the right fit. Let's get into it. Welcome back to Fit Happens, the podcast where top leaders, investors, experts and board directors share the stories, surprises and hard earned lessons behind finding fitness. Let's get into it. So today's guest is Jennifer Wallace, journalist and award-winning author of Never Enough and her new book Mattering — and one of the clearest thinkers I've encountered on a deceptively simple question: what does it actually mean to matter? And why should we all care so much, especially right now, about this idea of mattering. What struck me reading Jennifer's work is that fit and mattering are often treated as the same thing, but they're not. That you can fit somewhere and still feel invisible, and you can feel deeply valued in a place that's actually quite wrong for you. So today we'll explore where fit and mattering reinforce each other and where they tend to come apart. Jennifer, welcome to Fit Happens.
Jennifer Wallace
[0:01:08]
Oh, I'm so happy to be here.
Jason Baumgarten
[0:01:11]
Let's go back to the beginning. Publicly, you've said that your parents held you to high standards, made it clear that you mattered regardless of outcome. That combination is rare. It took me a minute. I had to reflect as a parent whether I actually was treating my children that way. What did that feel like day to day?
Jennifer Wallace
[0:01:28]
So of course, obviously I didn't necessarily know it at the time, but my parents — it began by knowing me really well, knowing who I was. They didn't try to mold me into someone that I wasn't. They certainly couldn't have. I wasn't great at math, so they couldn't have made me an accountant even if they wanted to. But they knew me. They accepted my weaknesses, helped to scaffold them, but really encouraged my strengths. And so they had a bar for me of what, you know, good work looked like. But it was never tied to a grade or a specific GPA or we want to see all A's on your report card kind of thing. It was mostly focused on how the work gets done at home. Are you doing it distraction free? Are you doing it, you know, right after school, after your activities, when you are still alert? Are you going to bed on time? So there was a real holistic view of what it takes to be a healthy striver. And so yeah, it was a great way to grow up.
Jason Baumgarten
[0:02:32]
Well, that distinction — standards without some contingency — feels like the seed of a lot of your research. And it's worth noting you carried it to two environments where perhaps they were slightly more conditional in the output: Harvard and 60 Minutes don't always strike me as environments that have no conditional approval, but in different ways they rewarded output. And what sets up your first book, Never Enough, was that the damage wasn't this notion of the high standards, but all these things we attached to them. And I'd love to start with your own career for a moment. You've written two amazing bestsellers after an amazing career as a reporter. Did you always know you wanted to be a nonfiction writer?
Jennifer Wallace
[0:03:15]
I don't remember this, but my friend from 60 Minutes — when I was in my mid-20s — said to me recently, you know, this was always your dream. Your dream was always to write a nonfiction book. I think it was. I think I was — and I still am — a big reader and I love a nonfiction book. So most of my 20s were spent on Saturday mornings going to Barnes and Noble, my local Barnes and Noble, because I couldn't afford all the books that I wanted to buy. And so I would sit there and I would read them at the cafe. It was very generous for them to let me do that. I don't know that I was supposed to be doing that, but I think the seeds were there.
Jason Baumgarten
[0:03:50]
And.
Jennifer Wallace
[0:03:51]
And when I had my kids, my husband works in a career where he's on the road a lot. And so I knew we both couldn't be on the road to raise the kind of family we wanted to. And so I moved from TV journalism to print journalism. And one of my articles in 2019 for the Washington Post is what led to the first book. I was covering two national policy reports — the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the National Academies of Sciences — that were looking at the youth who were most at risk for negative health outcomes. And for the first time, they named children attending high-achieving schools, public and private schools around the country, as an officially at-risk group. Meaning they were two to six times more likely to suffer from clinical levels of anxiety and depression and two to three times more likely to suffer from substance abuse disorder than the average American teen. And so when I was writing that article, I was also raising three kids in New York City in high-achieving schools. And so that was really me-search. There's a great term in sociology and psychology where a researcher is interested in a specific topic and so they call it me-search. So I would say Never Enough was me-search for me.
Jason Baumgarten
[0:05:05]
It's like the social sciences of hypochondria. In Never Enough, you hit a nerve because it's something so many parents kind of feel but can't articulate. That pressure isn't just about success. It's this fear of not being good enough, and we're only as good as our last accomplishment. And you did something unique. You did a survey of 6,000 parents in the book — or for the book. And I'd be curious, as a parent, is there one finding from that survey that has kind of lingered with you and you can't stop thinking about, if there was one?
Jennifer Wallace
[0:05:35]
I will say the thing that struck me the most — so 6,500 parents — and at the end of the survey, I said, if you'd be willing to be interviewed either anonymously or with your name attached, please reach out to me. And hundreds of parents reached out because they were relieved to be talking about something they were feeling, but no one was talking about: this hyper-competition of childhood. And it didn't feel good to be a parent in this environment. They didn't think they were doing right by their children, and so they wanted to talk about it. I think that's the thing that strikes me the most — how many parents were so willing to talk about it and so openly.
Jason Baumgarten
[0:06:13]
It is interesting that this idea of conditional worth has seeped into how so many people are raised, how so many parents are behaving. I just got back from Kansas City in a global tournament for two of my kids — a massive sort of science competition, for lack of a better term. It's this amazing program, actually, called Destination Imagination. I'll give them a plug because it's probably — if I could trade off more classes not to go to for my kids to do more of this, I would. But what's interesting is one of the things they're dealing with is that the winning has become so important that a lot of parents are actually doing more of the work for their kids because they want to win, as opposed to letting the kids learn through the process. How do you think about this idea of conditional worth, and how do you explain it to people?
Jennifer Wallace
[0:06:58]
What you're describing is something that I saw really throughout the country — that parents were sort of betting big that early childhood success, getting their kids to win these awards, getting them into a good college, would act as a kind of life vest in a sea of economic uncertainty. But what I saw, and what those two national policy reports were pointing out, is that that life vest that parents are hoping to strap on is acting too much like a leaded vest. And it's drowning so many of the kids that they're trying to protect. And that's because kids are getting the message that they are only valuable, that they only matter when they achieve. So I looked at both the kids that were doing well despite the pressure and those that really were struggling the most. And the ones that were struggling the most felt like their value was contingent. So they felt good when they were achieving and depressed when they weren't. Setbacks and failures were an indictment of their worth, as opposed to the kids who felt like they mattered no matter what. And I will say this was something that I enjoyed in my own childhood, where it freed me to take really crazy academic risks and go for things because I knew that if I didn't get it, it didn't define me in any particular way. It was just a setback, one of many setbacks. And actually, parents often say to me, is mattering — letting my kid know they matter — is that like taking my foot off the gas pedal and will my kids fall behind? And what I have found consistently, and the research bears this out, if you want to raise a healthy high achiever for life, it is on the path to mattering. Because the kids that I met, and the research finds this, that felt their value was conditional ultimately would get to a goal where they didn't think they'd make it, and so they would pull back. So there was a cap to their success. They didn't have mattering to spare. Whereas the kids who really felt like they mattered no matter what were set up to reach for high goals.
Jason Baumgarten
[0:09:08]
It's so interesting because we see this a lot in leadership selection, and people will say, well, they failed. Well, most people who are successful have failed. Most people who are entrepreneurs, CEOs, famous presidents, historians, military figures — mostly they've had some massive setbacks before they had any win. And what you're describing is sort of a culture of people who don't want to fail because the risk of the failure is not worth it. But that's where so many people learn the most. And I always encourage my clients. I say, I know you're afraid of this person because they had some setback on their resume, but without that setback, how would they know what good looks like? In fact, most people, when I ask them how they ended up navigating their career, there's usually some horrible boss story in there where they recount it and they say, you know, but if I hadn't had that horrible experience of a boss that treated me poorly and some failure along the way, I wouldn't have figured out what good looks like, or I wouldn't have figured out what not to do. So I love that you are raising up this idea of safe failure and it's not wrapped in that conditional view. As a parent, and you've said the research changed you as a parent, and it's been a few years. What have you stopped yourself doing that you might have done before? And what are you doing a little more of?
Jennifer Wallace
[0:10:19]
I never do this, but I was interviewing one of the world's leading researchers on childhood resilience. And I said to her, so my kids go to these high-achieving schools. What can I do tonight to buffer against the pressure? And she said something that's become a kind of North Star in my parenting, which is to minimize criticism and to prioritize affection. So minimizing criticism doesn't mean abandoning all standards. It means to separate the deed from the doer. What they did is not maybe how we would do things in our family. It's not the behavior we expect. But you yourself are never the failure. You yourself are never bad. And then when it comes to prioritizing affection, I think of it as greeting kids at least once a day the way the family dog greets you — with just total joy. I mean, so much of our lives as parents is just getting through an endless to-do list that our kids don't often get to see the joy we feel, the delight we feel in being their parent. But actually, one of the key components to attachment — a healthy attachment between a child and a caregiver — is this idea that the caregiver delights in them. And so I make it a point at least once a day to delight in my kids. I was on Scott Galloway's podcast and he was talking about how he grew up with a very affectionate mother. And to him, he said affection was the difference between hoping she loved him and knowing that she did. So that, to me, is what affection is.
Jason Baumgarten
[0:11:51]
It's a great line. And I see the idea — at work, people sometimes miss this idea of I'm beating up the person versus the problem. And high-performing cultures, there's often a culture of attacking the problem, making, you know, really refining the solution, but it's not personalized to the person. Whereas this critical nature of, well, if you have a bad idea, you're bad, is often something that then stymies creativity in the workplace and stymies people from actually speaking up — and I suspect feeling like they don't matter so much. That conditional work shows up a lot later at work because people often want to know that they perform, and then if they don't, then this leads to your second book obviously, and feeling like they don't matter. Never Enough focused so much on kids and parenting, and Mattering really zoomed out for all of us. And I love your Clementine story that opens the book. I think I have been on that same platform at a different time. You define mattering as ultimately two core things: feeling valued and having an opportunity to add value. What was surprising about this to most people as you've now interacted with a lot of people about the book?
Jennifer Wallace
[0:13:04]
What was surprising to me was how often people felt like they didn't matter. And it was often because they were going through a hard transition — whether they were let go, or retiring, or relocating, or, you know, facing an empty nest. And that's because we matter not in a vacuum. We matter to specific people in specific roles. And when those roles fade away, either because we choose them or they were chosen for us, that can definitely collapse our sense of mattering, sometimes overnight. So the people that I found that actually got through transitions somewhat intact, they did two things. They looked for role models. They looked for people who had gone through something similar and used their life as a kind of blueprint for them. And the second thing they did was they harnessed the power of invitation. And this is both accepting invitations, but also issuing invitations. So accepting them — you know, often when we're going through a painful transition, like a job loss, we feel messy inside, that we need to get ourselves in order before we can start going for those coffees. But actually, there's research called the beautiful mess effect, which finds that we overestimate how perfect we need to appear in order to be seen as a worthy relationship partner, worthy friend, or worthy colleague. When actually it is our vulnerability — it's letting people in to see a little bit of the mess — that makes us actually more worthy partners in friendship. And as colleagues, that vulnerability makes us appear more authentic. So if you are going through a hard transition, accept those invitations. And if no one is issuing you an invitation — I interviewed a woman who went through a painful divorce and her sense of mattering collapsed overnight. And her therapist said, well, you have agency. Start issuing invitations. Invite people into your kitchen. Start having people over for dinner. Order in. And that's how she rebuilt her sense of mattering. I guess what I'm trying to say is we have more agency than we think we do when it comes to protecting and building our sense of mattering.
Jason Baumgarten
[0:15:25]
That's such a good point. And I think at work, people often especially can feel like they have no agency. And so really reclaiming that agency is so important. And I hope everyone who posts on social media heard that. And if not, please replay it so that your next post is not the perfect post of how incredible your life is, but share a little mess with the world. We all want to feel better about ourselves. You have so many great stories in Mattering about people who felt like they mattered and why, and people who didn't. One of the things that struck me is that often the people who are in a place of helping others feel like they matter are in places of leadership or, as we would say, in power. But sometimes those people are struggling with their own sense of mattering. Was there a conversation with someone along the way who was in a role to make other people matter — whether they were a leader or a manager — but was actually struggling with their own sense of mattering, and that got in the way?
Jennifer Wallace
[0:16:18]
Oh my goodness. If I tell you how many times I have heard from leaders — it has never been a harder time to lead. Between technology, a disengaged workforce, the forces, the headwinds coming at leaders today are extraordinary. I was giving a talk at a women's conference and these were women who were the top of their field. And after my keynote, one by one they came up to me and asked me some version of this question: but how do I know how to matter to myself? I know I'm so important to everybody else's needs. I know that as a leader, I need to make my employees feel like they matter. At home, I need to make my kids feel like they matter, my aging parents. But what about myself? And that is a critical part of mattering — is learning how to balance our own needs with the needs of others. No one tells leaders that you need to fill your own bucket of mattering, but you actually do. What I've come to realize in the research is that if we want to show up as our best selves for the people who rely on us, we need to prioritize our own sense of mattering. And what does that mean? It means there was research conducted out of the Mayo Clinic of busy physicians who were also mothers — and it has since been replicated in men and also virtually. But this study looked at a group of extremely busy medical professionals who were reporting low levels of well-being and high levels of stress. The researchers conducted a small intervention for one hour a week over the course of 12 weeks. They had the women meet in small groups of five or six to support each other, to feel seen and heard and valued, just like they try to do for their own patients. Over the course of the 12 weeks, not one woman dropped out. Despite their busy schedules, they reported feeling like better colleagues, better doctors, better parents. And that was because for one hour a week, they prioritized each other. For one hour a week, their needs were met. And again, this was replicated with heads of school who were men and others. The idea: we know that it takes a sturdy adult for a child to thrive, a sturdy leader to keep people on their team sturdy. But sturdy leaders need other sturdy people in their lives to keep them sturdy. So what does that look like? It looks like having one, two, or three people in your life who you can open up to and who you can feel like you are not going through this world alone. And also it's about figuring out what you need every day — what small need you need to fill for yourself so that you can show up as your best self. So it's really keeping your own mattering front and center as much as you can.
Jason Baumgarten
[0:19:13]
It's such a good reminder. I think people tend to take the notion that leaders eat last very, very literally. And they sometimes actually don't realize how much they're degrading their ability to be stable. You make this distinction about belonging and mattering — and belonging gets you a seat at the table, and mattering actually makes you feel like you're needed and valued and seen at the table. And you have this great framework. You introduced the mattering core: recognition, reliance, importance, ego extension — which I have to admit I thought was a great addition to the framework — and attunement. Maybe take a minute and just explain the framework, and then I want to ask you a question about where people struggle with it.
Jennifer Wallace
[0:19:52]
Great. So to simplify the framework, I've put it under an acronym I call SAID, so people can remember it — the four key ingredients to mattering. And that is: feeling Significant, feeling Appreciated, feeling Invested in — that's that ego extension — and feeling Depended on. So I'll quickly go through them. Feeling significant: one of the things that struck me most in the research, interviewing hundreds of people — when I would ask them, tell me about a time when you felt like you mattered at work, it was never an award or a promotion. It was the small moments. It was a colleague checking in after a particularly rough week, or another colleague saving them a seat at the table. We crave as humans to matter in the mundane, in the everydayness of life. So that is what it feels like to feel significant. Feeling appreciated: I've come to think of this as appreciating the doer behind the deed. So if you have a colleague who is great at planning team-building events, instead of saying to them, thanks for another fun happy hour, you could send them a text and say, you know what, we are so lucky to have you on our team. You are the glue that keeps us together and we are so much more productive and we are such a stronger team because of you. Thank you for that. Feeling invested in is that idea of ego extension, which is the idea that you can literally extend your own ego to include the egos of others so that their successes begin to feel like your success. Often in our zero-sum culture, someone's success can come to feel like a subtraction from our own. But that's a really uniquely American viewpoint. There are other cultures — more collectivist cultures — that look at the success of others as part of our own success. And actually it lights up the reward centers of our brain. We are wired to want to invest in our group. And so that invested feeling is not only investing in others, but also welcoming that kind of investment in our own lives. And D is feeling depended on, relied on. It's knowing that there are people at work and in life who rely on you, and that there are people that you can rely on. It's what gives us the psychological safety that we are not going through this world alone.
Jason Baumgarten
[0:22:19]
I love that, and I love the real, authentic nature of it. I always say, you know, company culture isn't what you put on a poster in the break room. And I think there's a — that notion that people care about the thing that's quite mundane. I think in part it's because we've automated. We've made processes out of recognition, out of these things like engagement. And so when you feel like you're on the other end of that, even though it still matters a little — like it's still nice to get the form email thanking you for a good year — it doesn't matter nearly as much as something that actually feels sincere and authentic. I love that distinction and that notion that we're collective beings. I mean, I think humans are unique in that we are the only species that hands our young off to others. It's really acknowledging that we are a very relational species. What do you think modern institutions struggle with the most as you've interacted with more and more people, and specifically leaders, around this idea of your framework? Where do people get it wrong the most? Where do they find it the hardest?
Jennifer Wallace
[0:23:24]
So, you know, I think it is — as we mentioned earlier — never been a harder time to be a leader. We have so much input coming at us all day long and so much output demanded of us today that often, just to get through the day, we have to go through life on autopilot. But when we do that as leaders — when we don't pick our heads up — we miss the signals that others are sending to us and that we can send to others that they matter. So I think one of the things with a leader who has little bandwidth is the idea of attunement. It is tuning into someone. There's a great phrase called the Platinum Rule. If the golden rule is do unto others as you would have them do unto you, the Platinum Rule is do unto others as they would want to have done unto them. So it is taking the time to tune in and knowing. I was in one company that was struggling with employees feeling valued. And one employee said to me — I don't want to out the company, but they have this recognition program where they do something very publicly. And this person said, they did it to me and I am an introvert and this is the last thing in the world I would want. They made him wear a thing he didn't want to wear. It hit the opposite. And then I was at a national conference where a leader was getting an award and his colleagues were handing him the award and saying all these wonderful things about him. But what brought tears to his eyes was what happened next — the colleagues went behind the podium and brought out a gigantic jar of M&Ms, because that was his favorite four o'clock snack. Now, those M&Ms said something that a plaque couldn't. It said: we know you, quirks and all. We know you. We value you. He felt seen and known and valued in a way that the other guy didn't.
Jason Baumgarten
[0:25:23]
It's such a good example of that empathy and that really understanding — just asking the questions. Often I find leaders don't ask questions of their people. And people are really open to sharing what matters to them. They're really open to sharing certain elements of what they're struggling with. You know, obviously you have to have the right environment. But it's amazing how leaders can often be quite afraid to ask those questions and to get into that dialogue with people. They get so caught up in having to know the answer that they don't want to ask it. And then you lose that empathy and you lose that attunement, because you can't get in somebody's head. You can't totally guess your way there.
Jennifer Wallace
[0:26:00]
I was at — I won't name them — a private equity company, and the chief human resources officer was saying this company really underscores the idea that they are built as a team, that they are bigger than any one individual. And she said, that is really hitting people the wrong way. There was a time for that back in the '80s and '90s — or even the 2000s — where people were really the rainmakers and getting all the credit. And so this company was trying to emphasize the idea that it's not on one person, it's bigger than any one person. But what that message was really sending to the employees was: you don't matter as an individual here. You're just a part of the team. It made them feel like a cog in the wheel. So even things that we try to say — again, it's not tuning in, it's not saying, how is this messaging hitting? How is what I am saying hitting you? It's being curious and staying curious and being humble as a leader.
Jason Baumgarten
[0:27:04]
And often there is good intent. I think you're bringing up such a good example because there's usually good intent behind all of these initiatives. I've never seen a workplace initiative where everyone said, hey, let's wake up and make everyone miserable. So there's always some good intention — whether it's the after-work party where too much alcohol is served, or the corporate retreat in a place no one wants to go, or the award that all anyone's thinking about is, you just spent my bonus on that award and nobody even wants the award. And so I think there's always good intent. But I love this idea of attunement — to really have empathy the same way you would with your customer. If your customer wouldn't want to buy it, why would your employee? I was struck by an example in your book where you describe a CEO as having one of the most profound work environments for mattering, and you say no employee has left other than for retirement. Now, given that I spent a lot of my time researching fit, I have to admit I thought to myself, okay, maybe they took mattering too far — where an employee was engaged in a role or even in the company that doesn't fit them anymore, and the right thing to do would have been to help them move beyond the organization. Do you think there's a moment where you can be too embracing — that you're not actually stretching people to the place of go do something you can't do here?
Jennifer Wallace
[0:28:20]
No — the CEO that you're talking about, it was his direct reports. So it was senior, senior leadership. They spent a lot of time getting to know who they were hiring before they hired them. So they were really invested in fit. And then once fit came, it was really doing everything they could to bring out all of their strengths. So in that particular instance — it was the CEO of a hotel chain, and I spent time there. It's an extraordinary company. I name it in the book. It's Drury Hotels. One of the things that I found — I don't think it made it into the book — fascinating, was that the woman who takes all of the customer complaints, the 1-800 woman, she is the one who absorbs all of them. All she does all day long is deal with complaints. Her office was the closest to the CEO's. That was the signal to her that she was a critical component to the company. It was like an open-door policy. He would go and check in on her. It was not only the, you are important here, but I'm going to show you how important you are. Your office is the closest to mine. This is how important our customers are. This is how important that role is. And, you know, I think she's been in that role for 20 years.
Jason Baumgarten
[0:29:43]
I will say I've stayed in Drury Hotels and I was tickled when I read the story in the book because it really does come across when you're in the hotel that people feel like they're part of a work family — in a good way. And as one of my friends would say, they probably have some crazy uncles running around too, but that's part of the experience. Now you're doing more than writing about mattering. You've built an institute and this has become almost a movement. You're doing a lot of speaking. I hope this means you will still be working on a third book, by the way, because I can't wait to read a third. But what did you discover as you've been trying to help people operationalize this a little more — that the research and the writing didn't fully show you — that sort of evolved as you've taken it out?
Jennifer Wallace
[0:30:28]
The next step I've been taking — as you mentioned, a lot of speaking events — and after these keynotes at corporations, a senior leader inevitably comes up to me and says, I agree, this is the key to employee engagement. How do we bake it into our employee experience so that it is not left to chance, or just one great leader? And so I've partnered with a woman who spent her career at Bain to build out Mattering by Design, which is a blueprint for companies to embed mattering more regularly in the employee experience. So one of the things that's really come out of this is how much leaders really want the nuts and bolts. They want the blueprint on how to do it. So that's what I'm currently building, and that will be piloted and ready to launch in the fall. That's the one that's taking up most of my time.
Jason Baumgarten
[0:31:30]
If a workplace fixed mattering but not fit — they didn't get the alignment right, everyone felt good, everyone felt like they mattered, but the fit wasn't right — what do you think would still be broken?
Jennifer Wallace
[0:31:42]
I think if the fit wasn't right, then the employee would not feel valued for who they were. They would feel that misalignment. I spent time at David Weekley Homes, which is a construction company in Texas, and was struck by one of the things they did. They get very high rates of employee satisfaction — great places to work and other surveys. And one of the things they do to really emphasize fit is they take a long time to hire their employees. Not only do they take a long time, they also have a dinner — do you know about this? — where they invite a friend, a spouse, a sibling, a child to come to the dinner to ask any questions they want on behalf of the person that they're about to hire, before they give the official offer. So they are saying to that potential employee: you matter so much to us that we want to get this right. We want to know that this is a place you are going to thrive. And so we're going to spend a lot of time making sure this is the right fit for you, and we're going to cap it off with a dinner where a significant person in your life can ask us anything they want.
Jason Baumgarten
[0:32:55]
It's such a good example. And I think candidates often, especially in an environment where jobs are feeling scarcer and maybe a little more at risk — I do think people sometimes don't want to ask the questions they most want to ask to figure out if it's right. And by the way, I feel this way about colleges. I think it's this idea that if I get the thing that's highest on the list — the job that's most sought after — I've won. But we see all the time that satisfaction later in life has nothing to do with it. And the person who finds the thing that they really feel fulfilled doing is much happier. You talk about this cascade effect of people not mattering and bringing it home. We see that with fit as well — if you don't fit, you come home, and I don't say you take it out on the people around you, but inevitably you do. So I think that's a very powerful example of the company investing in a mutually shared positive outcome. I'd be remiss in this world and moment of AI if we didn't spend at least a minute on it. We saw — well, I shouldn't say great — we saw a concerning story out of China recently where employees were asked to train models so that their jobs could be eliminated. And clearly we've also seen a real bifurcation in how leaders are approaching the transparency they have with workers around their expertise and sharing that with AI models. I know it's early and nobody can predict what's going to happen. One of the top AI leaders said to me the other day, anyone who predicts what's going to happen with certainty is only certainly wrong. But I think it's worth exploring the edges for all of us. What do you think is the positive side of AI and mattering, and what do you think might be the destabilizing or negative side?
Jennifer Wallace
[0:34:36]
All right, so let me start with the negative so we can end on the positive. So I'll tell you what keeps me up at night is a study that I read — that I talk about in the book — of suicidal men, and the two words they most often use to describe their suffering are useless and worthless. I fear in the next few years, not so long from now, that we are going to feel this sense of uselessness on a scale that we have never seen before — on a global scale. As tech leaders like Bill Gates predict, humans won't be required for most tasks within the next 10 years. We are right as a culture to be talking about things like universal basic income, but we also need to be talking about how we can protect this fundamental human need that we all have — not only to feel valued, but to have the chance to add value to the world around us. I am nervous. We have seen these revolutions take place and we have made really bad decisions, and we've seen the ripple effects that continue in the opioid crisis, for example. So I hope that in the conversations around the economic impact and the job impact, we are also talking about the mattering impact of AI. In my more hopeful moments, I think about a trip that I took recently with my husband. We took this trip 26 years ago. We were driving through Europe and I was the navigator, which I'm not good at, and I was looking at all the maps and worried about missing turns and keeping an eye out for gas stations and places to stop, and it really hijacked the trip — all the logistics.
Jason Baumgarten
[0:36:20]
I feel like I've had that trip.
Jennifer Wallace
[0:36:21]
Right, and I just took it again a year ago and I plugged in the destination into Google Maps and we proceeded to have the most extraordinary several-hours-long conversation. So what I'm hoping is that AI could give us the bandwidth that we all need to be more present for the relationships in our lives that are now feeling a sense of hollowness because we are so busy. So this will require us to be thoughtful. This will require us as individuals to set personal policies — rules for ourselves around how we use AI. For example, using AI to nudge you to send a follow-up text to someone versus you being the person to actually write that text, to feel that connection. Or nudging you to remember a birthday, but you actually being the one to send the card. So I think there are ways that we can use AI to lean into the things that make us human, but it will take intention.
Jason Baumgarten
[0:37:25]
Goes back a lot to your point around attunement — and you need bandwidth to be able to tune in, and hopefully AI can give you a little bandwidth. Well, I'd love to do a quick round of speed questions, and there are always some great nuggets. So I'll start easy with a self-professed book lover: a book you've read that has had a real impact on you.
Jennifer Wallace
[0:37:46]
I will say it's a series of books by an author, P.M. Forni, who was with a civility institute at Johns Hopkins University. And I have two of his books in front of me actually: The Thinking Life: How to Thrive in the Age of Distraction and The Civility Solution. These are small, really gem-like books of what is missing so often in our world today.
Jason Baumgarten
[0:38:11]
Those two books — those are great. We'll find a way to put them in the chat. Common leadership advice that you actually think is bad — that you hear all the time and you're like, boy, that is terrible leadership advice.
Jennifer Wallace
[0:38:25]
I think it's the knee-jerk recognition programs that are so out of tune with particular people.
Jason Baumgarten
[0:38:34]
Okay. Looking back to a younger you, what advice would you give yourself? And you can pick how much younger.
Jennifer Wallace
[0:38:40]
The advice I would give myself would be to figure out what you're good at and build those skills. In your 20s, stop looking for a specific job title and start looking for a place that can build your skills to set you up for a bigger future.
Jason Baumgarten
[0:38:59]
I love that advice. And to digress for a second — I think with AI, a lot of the advice I keep telling people is figure out what you love doing and what you're good at. Because when you're great at something, the world will still need it. And it won't need average, because AI can do average. But exceptional talent in any field will still be uniquely better than what can be produced by what's already out there. When we think about fit — one of the things I often refer to is the famous work on flow that was done out of the University of Chicago, that sense of losing a sense of time, being in the moment, doing your best work. Is there an activity or a hobby where you feel totally in the flow?
Jennifer Wallace
[0:39:34]
It's writing. And my favorite sort of secret to writing is getting up at 4 AM to write because the self-critical voice is off — it's still asleep — and I can just pour words on the page. So 4 AM is my golden hour for flow.
Jason Baumgarten
[0:39:50]
I will have to try that. I think 4 AM is not my golden hour for anything, but I'm going to try. We'll see. You've shared a lot of the personal impact that your first book had on you as a parent. We talked a little bit about that. What's something you've done in your personal life after writing Mattering?
Jennifer Wallace
[0:40:05]
It's a challenge that I try to live and I'm not great at it every day, but it's something that I aspire to. And that is to imagine everyone I meet wearing an invisible sign that says, tell me — do I matter? And we can all meet that question. I mean, all of us have that running in the backs of our heads, even if we're not aware of it. Do I matter in this conference room? Do I matter at this table? Do I matter in this group? Do I matter in this friend group? Do I matter in this neighborhood? Everyone's asking that question all the time, and we can answer it for each other.
Jason Baumgarten
[0:40:39]
That is a great and very profound idea for all of us. I'd encourage everyone to look at their calendars and schedules for the rest of the day and just stick that invisible sign against every single meeting, every single conversation you're going to have. What a great piece of advice, Jennifer. This conversation reinforced something that I have been coming back to — that fit helps us find the right place, but mattering tells us that we have a place at all. Thank you for giving so many people who read your book the language for something so deeply human. And for all of our listeners, please pick up a copy of Mattering. It is fantastic. We'll link the book in the show notes. And as always, thank you for listening to Fit Happens.