December 18, 2024 • 21 mins
As season three of If I’m Honest with Julia Landauer comes to a close, I share five impactful lessons I learned throughout 2024. From navigating corporate life to appreciating impressive personal moments among friends, I reflect on a year of growth and transition. I discuss why good communication is so tough (and how to improve it), the importance of cherishing your unique perspective, and the comforting reminder that everyone is learning on the fly. I also highlight how AI is transforming productivity and creativity and is something we should all be knowledgeable about. And I give a well-deserved shout-out to parents—true superheroes in my eyes.
As we wrap up the year and this season, I share some thoughts on living more presently and intentionally, and encourage you to check in with yourself as we head into the holidays. Thank you for being on this journey with me, and as always, thank you for letting me be honest with you.
Learn more about Julia Landauer at https://julialandauer.com/
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hello everybody, and welcome to the season three finale of
If I'm Honest with Julia Landauer. I'm going to do
my very very best to not sound too nasally, and
I thank you for your patience as you listen to
the sick voice. I put off recording this episode as
long as possible after a very nasty bout of sickness,
which I'm clearly not fully recovered from. But alas, the
(00:28):
show must go on and we are rounding out our
third season. The show in this podcast started in May
of twenty twenty three, and it was an opportunity for
me to connect with you guys in a different way.
It stemmed from my keynote speaking actually and people wanting
more content and more stories and more perspectives, which was
(00:51):
so cool and reassuring that the messaging that I was
delivering was valuable, and so that was really really cool,
a fun journey. It is exceptionally difficult to maintain a podcast,
especially once you start working full time, so I have
total appreciation and admiration for the folks who work full
(01:12):
time and continue doing podcasting full time. I've done it
for about a year now and things are just ramping
up and my focuses are changing, and you know, it's
been a really fun journey. I'm not quite sure what
the future of this podcast is, but for now, at
this point, we're probably going to take a little break,
(01:32):
not retire it entirely. Clearly, I am not a fan
of fully stepping away from anything. I like to leave
the door open, but right now I think we're going
to take a pause. And this is the fifty ninth episode.
I can't tell you how much my OCD is killing
me that I wasn't happy with one of my episodes
(01:54):
a few weeks back, and so couldn't have a nice
round sixty for my three seasons. But you know what,
they're problems in the world. So we're going to move
on from that. And when I was thinking about how
I wanted to close out this incredible, therapeutic, interesting educational
(02:14):
podcast for me and hopefully for you guys too, I
decided I wanted to keep it simple and share five
lessons that I've learned throughout twenty twenty four. A lot
of these are going to be rooted in my corporate
experience and at work, but they're relevant for everyone, regardless
of what you're doing. The first big lesson that I
(02:36):
learned this year is that good communication is really hard.
And I knew this. I knew this conceptually, you hear
people talking about it all the time. But there was
a big shift in going from freelancing and how I
was having to communicate before starting a full time job
versus afterwards. The main ways that I communicated before working
(02:57):
in corporate were with my family and friends, which is
very intentional and practiced, and we ask for feedback and
we try to communicate in a way that is effective
for all of us. There's a lot of active work
that goes into making that communication because it happens all
the time right. Another big form of communication had been
(03:18):
in keynotes, which are very planned and thought out and
practiced and had feedback and very little of that is
spur of the moment communication. And then there was a
lot of communication with my racing teams. With that they
were the same people for a year, so I was
able to pay really close attention and learn their styles
(03:39):
and experiment and have different chances to continue communication. And
we were all clearly working towards that common goal of
trying to do the best we could on track. And
so when you have that very clear unifying goal. I
think it helps with communication because you know where you're
all trying to get. In corporate, everyone's got different agendas,
(04:02):
Everyone has different levels of involvement with other people. You
might need favors from someone, you might have regular communication
with someone. You might not know someone well enough to
know what their style is, and it's really really challenging
to bop around quickly figure out how people communicate and
to get out of your own mindset. It's also interesting
(04:24):
because you're interacting with so many different types of people
in a corporate setting, and so everyone naturally has different
strengths and weaknesses, and if you're not privy to them,
or if you're not interfacing in person, or if you
don't see the nuances of how anyone else is, you
might be less inclined to be able to communicate most effectively.
And so you have to somewhat develop a one size
(04:46):
fits all method for communicating to be able to be
most effective with the most number of people. And I
feel like in corporate you're able to see how bad
communication transpires as well. And they're people who rub people
the wrong way, and I can hear it specifically because
of tone used or because of word choice or kind
(05:09):
of not putting themselves in other people's shoes. And so
the big takeaways that I've had in this year or
so incorporate when it comes to communication are that tone
really matters, and I think it's pretty easy to come
across as passive, aggressive, or condescending and that has an
(05:32):
impact on people. And there are ways to get the
same message across in a different tone that I think
will be more empowering and encouraging than being negative and
having a negative tone with people. The second big thing
that I've learned with communication that is something I should
have thought about a lot more early on, but that
(05:54):
context matters, and the reality is that no one has
the lens with which you are about to communicate. So
if you're about to send an email, if you're about
to start a phone call, you know you've just been
thinking about whatever it is that you're going to communicate.
The other person hasn't. And I have found myself getting
called out by people I work with in a neutral way,
(06:16):
but being called out because I'll ask them a question
that in my mind makes total sense, like I'll send
them a note on teams Chat, and I'll get called
out I remember this one guy called me out because
he was like, I'm not sure I know what you're
talking about. And I realized that I had not provided
any context as to which project that we had been
(06:36):
working on I was referring to, and it was kind
of the kick in the butt that I needed to realize, like, Okay,
no one knows where I'm coming from, and someone might
receive my email when they're in the middle of something
else entirely, and so again, I think that's a kind
of a bubble that you live in with freelance a
little bit. And I don't know, maybe that's just me,
(06:57):
but I've been much more careful about providing context when
I reach out to people so that it's as quick
for them to understand where I'm coming from and they're
most likely to get it and not get frustrated with
me for not being explicit and clear, and overall it
helps communication. So I still have a long way to
(07:18):
go with communicating and I'm continuing to learn so much
and I'm kind of surprised that I still had so
much to learn with communication, but it really is different
in corporate it's pretty exciting. It's also cool to learn
how other people communicate and kind of pick the things
that I really like from other people. I do feel
like I've become a better listener, and I pause a
(07:39):
lot more before responding or before contributing. I let other
people talk more, and it's incredible how that changes the
dynamic and it's really exciting. The second lesson that I
feel I have gotten more examples of, and more explicit
examples of this past year is that everyone is learning
on the fly. I had done advising, I had done consulting,
(08:03):
I had done freelance work, content creation, keynote speaking, you know,
business development. I've done all this stuff, but not in
the corporate setting. And there were so many things that
I had to learn everything from. You know, I had
relationships with people at NASCAR prior, and how does my
camaraderie with them, or how do my interactions with them
(08:25):
change a little bit or shift a little bit to
fit the atmosphere of an office setting. Or I had
to learn, you know, proper amount of time to follow
up with someone. I had to learn what the flow
was of NASCAR and from a season perspective, when are
people really busy, when are people in a slower period,
How do interactions with leadership work, all of that stuff,
(08:49):
and I just felt like I was clearly playing catch
up for people from people who were there for a
while or had other jobs. And so I clearly remember
there was one time, probably back in all where I
was doing something completely new to me, completely out of
my depth, and was learning a lot, asking a lot
of questions of my colleagues and my teammates, and I
(09:12):
remember I was on a one on one call with
someone and I vocalized that I appreciated their patience because
I haven't done this before and I'm learning, and this
person immediately said, oh, that was the same with me
when I started. I had never done this, even though
I had all these jobs before. And it made me
feel a lot better, and it made me realize that
we're all learning. And I think it's easy to have
(09:35):
imposter syndrome if you're new to a situation. But there
was something about hearing from multiple people that they also
had to learn for the first time or had to
learn other things for the first time that made me
feel a lot less alone and made me feel confident
that I would figure it out, like I had figured
out a lot of new things before in my life,
and so being able to learn on the fly is important.
(09:58):
It's something everyone's doing. I've also learned that I don't
have to tell people that I don't know what I'm doing,
and I like to be transparent, and I've found that
on racing teams it was really important to be clear
about what I was learning for the first time or
what was new, and I guess in some ways it
helps justify if you make mistakes. But I'm gaining confidence
(10:19):
in my ability to just quietly figure it out on
my own and not let people know. And if they
call me out for or fine, but otherwise everyone's kind
of in the same boat of figuring it out as
they go, and it's okay to just own that privately.
That leads me to my third lesson, which is something
that I have really grown into this year, which I'm
(10:43):
so happy about, which is that we need to cherish
our own unique perspective. And I say this from the
context of I've realized that throughout my life, I try
to do things the quote unquote right way, which is
typically the status quo. But trying to do things as
a status quo diminishes the special things that I bring
(11:07):
to the table. And this was really clear in terms
of corporate because again I'm not a traditional candidate, but
I have so many unique experiences, particularly as a competitor
in NASCAR networking on the corporate side, so many perspectives
that other people might not have. And the reason I
was brought in was to leverage those perspectives and to
(11:29):
leverage those very niche experiences that so few people have
to be able to help the business. And that's a really,
really empowering thing. And I think that all of us
can really lean into the fact that we were hired
or we were brought into something, or we were nominated
for something, or we are here and we are at
(11:50):
this point in life because of all of our unique
experiences in our own ways that we look at the
world to be able to help whatever we're working on.
Each of our unique set of experiences are at least
partially why we are where we are, and we don't
want to abandon that. We want to lean into it.
(12:10):
We want to really encourage and nourish the growth that
we are bringing for ourselves and the way that we
are empowering ourselves and gaining confidence in ourselves and knowing
that our experiences are part of why we are contributing
members of whatever our communities are, and that was really
empowering to see firsthand and to remember, especially when there
(12:34):
was an element of imposter syndrome because of my lack
of other more traditional experiences. The fourth lesson is that
AI is a very useful tool now, truth be told.
The episode that I wasn't happy with was an AI
focused episode because I have been really leaning into it
a lot personally professionally, and I wanted to tackle it
(12:57):
because it's really cool. It's also really scared. It's so vast,
there's a lot of unknowns, and I just couldn't quite
encapsulate it in an episode the way I wanted to.
But I am a full convert to chat GPT. I
think it's really powerful. I think it's really helpful. I
(13:17):
try to not be pretentious about good use cases for AI,
because there are some people who will be proactively building
and doing really cool stuff, and then there will be
other people who are being much more efficient because of
some of the simpler ways that chat GPT can be used.
Myself included, like I know that I have a very
conversational written tone, and it's helpful to be able to
(13:39):
make it sound more professional sometimes, but AI is really powerful,
and so we can get into a whole existential discussion
at another time. But in terms of tools that we
can use in our day to day, it really helps
with communication. It really helps with ideas, and there's so
much that we don't know, and there's so much out
there that we can have really precise prompts that help
(14:00):
us come up with ideas. Whether it's for gifts or
vacations or projects. You just never know, and there are
a lot of cool things there. I've also learned that
there are a lot of really cool tools when it
comes to the content creation. You know, when I have
an hour long podcast episode with a guest, it can
sometimes be really time consuming to sift through that recording
(14:21):
and try to find the clips. So I use something
called opus Pro, which uses AI to identify what the
engaging clips will be from that full hour long video,
and it saves me so much time. And I have
to edit it right. It's not perfect, some of it
gets a little cut off or is not the main
point that I want, but it saves me a ton
of time to be able to then go go, you know,
(14:42):
focus on the promotion of the podcast. And other things
that I have to do, so AI is really useful.
I know that it's scary, I know that it who
knows where it's going to go. But I do encourage
everyone to at least become knowledgeable about it so that
you can the very least react if it becomes relevant,
(15:03):
but then also use it as a way to help
your own life and to help your own productivity and creativity.
And yeah, and a PSA to remember that large language
models and whether it's GROCK or chat, GPT or Bard,
they do use the data that you put in there
to train their models, So do not upload sensitive information
(15:24):
to any of these public AI models. The last lesson
that I want to share that I felt in my
bones this year is that parents are superheroes. We have
a bunch of friends who have one or two kids
under two and a half, and oh my gosh, I
think about how I feel tired. I feel like I
(15:46):
don't have enough hours in the day. I feel like
I get sick and I don't have any children. And
I see my friends who are down on sleep, are
down on personal time, are you know, having to deal
with the financial implications of kids, and they're thriving they're
getting out there, they're hanging out, they're being more social
than I am. And I'm just in complete awe because
(16:10):
I hadn't really interacted with babies very much before the
last couple of years. I didn't have babies in my
life growing up. None of my friends from high school
have kids. And it's wild to see the peak behind
the curtain because I was just so unaware. And I
think it's paired with social media also showing the real
(16:33):
life with kids. But it's incredible. Had I had no
idea just how much your life changes and how much
you handle on how you embrace the chaos, and how
you have germs brought into your home. And I just
want to give a shout out to all of the
parents because what you do is incredible. It is so
(16:54):
superhuman to be able to not only keep these little,
not self sufficient beings alive, but to engage with them
and act with them and encourage their growth, and to
be patient with them, and to deal with the illogical
reactions that they have to things, and then to love
them and to be so cute sy with them. It
(17:15):
is so impressive. It is so cool, And yeah, I
just wanted to give a special shout out to all
the parents out there, regardless of how old your kids are.
You are amazing. You are so impressive. You are tackling
so much. And especially when I see my friends still
(17:35):
having a good time and still enjoying being with people
around them and still going out and they're living their lives,
it's really cool to see, and a lot of things
that I want to model my own potential future parenting after.
It's really exciting and you all should be so so
proud of yourselves. So yeah, that was it was. It's
(17:57):
been impressive this last year to see how people evolve
as parents, and it's really really cool. So those are
my five lessons that I learned this year that I
want to share with you a recap. Good communication is
really hard. Everyone is learning on the fly. We need
to cherish our unique perspective. AI is a very useful tool,
(18:18):
and parents are superheroes. As some closing thoughts, this has
been a big year of growth for me, particularly in
that transition from racer to next chapter, and I'm very
happy to report that I am overall less sad about
not pursuing racing anymore, and I'm actively more excited about
this next phase of my life. I'm excited about the
(18:41):
future personally, and I found myself wondering more frequently if
I were given six months to live, what would I
want to do differently? And there are some small things,
but I'll admit that I've gotten to the point where
I'm living presently enough and and intentionally enough, then I
(19:02):
don't think there are massive things that I would change,
and I feel very lucky that I'm in that position.
But as we go into the holidays and we go
into this time of reflection, I would encourage you to
check in with yourself regularly. You know, if you didn't
have unlimited time, well none of us have unlimited time,
but if you were given a very short, finite amount
of time, what would you want to do differently? And
(19:24):
you might not be able to up and do exactly that,
right like, if we know that we only have six months,
we're going to live a little differently. But if there
are big things that you feel like you haven't done,
or haven't pursued or worked on with yourself, try to
lean into that. I think it's really important to be
as present as possible, you know, to focus on what
(19:44):
you love, to focus on the people you love, which
is a big thing for me. I think the people
in my life who I care about and who are
reciprocal and that caring are the most special and I
want to nurture those relationships as much as possible. On
the professional side, it's been really cool to grow in
the corporate setting and learn so much and get to
work with really cool people. I've evolved my keynote storytelling
(20:08):
more and I've done more this year and more tweaks
this year than I have in years past, and so
experimenting with the narrative arc and adding my corporate experiences
as some of the examples that I can talk about
in new ways has been really cool. I continue to
have my weekly facetimes with my siblings, and Ben and
I are doing great, and so overall it's really cool
(20:31):
to feel very happy with where things are, to still
feel a lot of little joys in life, and to
keep pushing and to not start cruising, not get comfy,
but to keep pushing and growing and figuring out what
else is out there in the world, because it is
a very big world and there's a lot of cool
stuff in it. Everyone. That is the end of our episode.
(20:56):
If you like this, show. I hope that you'll share
past episodes with people that you have in your life.
I hope that you will leave comments. I would love
a review. Let me know any big lesson that you
learned this year. I would love to know what everyone
else is learning about. I hope you have a wonderful holiday,
and as always, thank you for letting me be honest
with you.
Hello everybody, and welcome to the season three finale of
If I'm Honest with Julia Landauer. I'm going to do
my very very best to not sound too nasally, and
I thank you for your patience as you listen to
the sick voice. I put off recording this episode as
long as possible after a very nasty bout of sickness,
which I'm clearly not fully recovered from. But alas, the
(00:28):
show must go on and we are rounding out our
third season. The show in this podcast started in May
of twenty twenty three, and it was an opportunity for
me to connect with you guys in a different way.
It stemmed from my keynote speaking actually and people wanting
more content and more stories and more perspectives, which was
(00:51):
so cool and reassuring that the messaging that I was
delivering was valuable, and so that was really really cool,
a fun journey. It is exceptionally difficult to maintain a podcast,
especially once you start working full time, so I have
total appreciation and admiration for the folks who work full
(01:12):
time and continue doing podcasting full time. I've done it
for about a year now and things are just ramping
up and my focuses are changing, and you know, it's
been a really fun journey. I'm not quite sure what
the future of this podcast is, but for now, at
this point, we're probably going to take a little break,
(01:32):
not retire it entirely. Clearly, I am not a fan
of fully stepping away from anything. I like to leave
the door open, but right now I think we're going
to take a pause. And this is the fifty ninth episode.
I can't tell you how much my OCD is killing
me that I wasn't happy with one of my episodes
(01:54):
a few weeks back, and so couldn't have a nice
round sixty for my three seasons. But you know what,
they're problems in the world. So we're going to move
on from that. And when I was thinking about how
I wanted to close out this incredible, therapeutic, interesting educational
(02:14):
podcast for me and hopefully for you guys too, I
decided I wanted to keep it simple and share five
lessons that I've learned throughout twenty twenty four. A lot
of these are going to be rooted in my corporate
experience and at work, but they're relevant for everyone, regardless
of what you're doing. The first big lesson that I
(02:36):
learned this year is that good communication is really hard.
And I knew this. I knew this conceptually, you hear
people talking about it all the time. But there was
a big shift in going from freelancing and how I
was having to communicate before starting a full time job
versus afterwards. The main ways that I communicated before working
(02:57):
in corporate were with my family and friends, which is
very intentional and practiced, and we ask for feedback and
we try to communicate in a way that is effective
for all of us. There's a lot of active work
that goes into making that communication because it happens all
the time right. Another big form of communication had been
(03:18):
in keynotes, which are very planned and thought out and
practiced and had feedback and very little of that is
spur of the moment communication. And then there was a
lot of communication with my racing teams. With that they
were the same people for a year, so I was
able to pay really close attention and learn their styles
(03:39):
and experiment and have different chances to continue communication. And
we were all clearly working towards that common goal of
trying to do the best we could on track. And
so when you have that very clear unifying goal. I
think it helps with communication because you know where you're
all trying to get. In corporate, everyone's got different agendas,
(04:02):
Everyone has different levels of involvement with other people. You
might need favors from someone, you might have regular communication
with someone. You might not know someone well enough to
know what their style is, and it's really really challenging
to bop around quickly figure out how people communicate and
to get out of your own mindset. It's also interesting
(04:24):
because you're interacting with so many different types of people
in a corporate setting, and so everyone naturally has different
strengths and weaknesses, and if you're not privy to them,
or if you're not interfacing in person, or if you
don't see the nuances of how anyone else is, you
might be less inclined to be able to communicate most effectively.
And so you have to somewhat develop a one size
(04:46):
fits all method for communicating to be able to be
most effective with the most number of people. And I
feel like in corporate you're able to see how bad
communication transpires as well. And they're people who rub people
the wrong way, and I can hear it specifically because
of tone used or because of word choice or kind
(05:09):
of not putting themselves in other people's shoes. And so
the big takeaways that I've had in this year or
so incorporate when it comes to communication are that tone
really matters, and I think it's pretty easy to come
across as passive, aggressive, or condescending and that has an
(05:32):
impact on people. And there are ways to get the
same message across in a different tone that I think
will be more empowering and encouraging than being negative and
having a negative tone with people. The second big thing
that I've learned with communication that is something I should
have thought about a lot more early on, but that
(05:54):
context matters, and the reality is that no one has
the lens with which you are about to communicate. So
if you're about to send an email, if you're about
to start a phone call, you know you've just been
thinking about whatever it is that you're going to communicate.
The other person hasn't. And I have found myself getting
called out by people I work with in a neutral way,
(06:16):
but being called out because I'll ask them a question
that in my mind makes total sense, like I'll send
them a note on teams Chat, and I'll get called
out I remember this one guy called me out because
he was like, I'm not sure I know what you're
talking about. And I realized that I had not provided
any context as to which project that we had been
(06:36):
working on I was referring to, and it was kind
of the kick in the butt that I needed to realize, like, Okay,
no one knows where I'm coming from, and someone might
receive my email when they're in the middle of something
else entirely, and so again, I think that's a kind
of a bubble that you live in with freelance a
little bit. And I don't know, maybe that's just me,
(06:57):
but I've been much more careful about providing context when
I reach out to people so that it's as quick
for them to understand where I'm coming from and they're
most likely to get it and not get frustrated with
me for not being explicit and clear, and overall it
helps communication. So I still have a long way to
(07:18):
go with communicating and I'm continuing to learn so much
and I'm kind of surprised that I still had so
much to learn with communication, but it really is different
in corporate it's pretty exciting. It's also cool to learn
how other people communicate and kind of pick the things
that I really like from other people. I do feel
like I've become a better listener, and I pause a
(07:39):
lot more before responding or before contributing. I let other
people talk more, and it's incredible how that changes the
dynamic and it's really exciting. The second lesson that I
feel I have gotten more examples of, and more explicit
examples of this past year is that everyone is learning
on the fly. I had done advising, I had done consulting,
(08:03):
I had done freelance work, content creation, keynote speaking, you know,
business development. I've done all this stuff, but not in
the corporate setting. And there were so many things that
I had to learn everything from. You know, I had
relationships with people at NASCAR prior, and how does my
camaraderie with them, or how do my interactions with them
(08:25):
change a little bit or shift a little bit to
fit the atmosphere of an office setting. Or I had
to learn, you know, proper amount of time to follow
up with someone. I had to learn what the flow
was of NASCAR and from a season perspective, when are
people really busy, when are people in a slower period,
How do interactions with leadership work, all of that stuff,
(08:49):
and I just felt like I was clearly playing catch
up for people from people who were there for a
while or had other jobs. And so I clearly remember
there was one time, probably back in all where I
was doing something completely new to me, completely out of
my depth, and was learning a lot, asking a lot
of questions of my colleagues and my teammates, and I
(09:12):
remember I was on a one on one call with
someone and I vocalized that I appreciated their patience because
I haven't done this before and I'm learning, and this
person immediately said, oh, that was the same with me
when I started. I had never done this, even though
I had all these jobs before. And it made me
feel a lot better, and it made me realize that
we're all learning. And I think it's easy to have
(09:35):
imposter syndrome if you're new to a situation. But there
was something about hearing from multiple people that they also
had to learn for the first time or had to
learn other things for the first time that made me
feel a lot less alone and made me feel confident
that I would figure it out, like I had figured
out a lot of new things before in my life,
and so being able to learn on the fly is important.
(09:58):
It's something everyone's doing. I've also learned that I don't
have to tell people that I don't know what I'm doing,
and I like to be transparent, and I've found that
on racing teams it was really important to be clear
about what I was learning for the first time or
what was new, and I guess in some ways it
helps justify if you make mistakes. But I'm gaining confidence
(10:19):
in my ability to just quietly figure it out on
my own and not let people know. And if they
call me out for or fine, but otherwise everyone's kind
of in the same boat of figuring it out as
they go, and it's okay to just own that privately.
That leads me to my third lesson, which is something
that I have really grown into this year, which I'm
(10:43):
so happy about, which is that we need to cherish
our own unique perspective. And I say this from the
context of I've realized that throughout my life, I try
to do things the quote unquote right way, which is
typically the status quo. But trying to do things as
a status quo diminishes the special things that I bring
(11:07):
to the table. And this was really clear in terms
of corporate because again I'm not a traditional candidate, but
I have so many unique experiences, particularly as a competitor
in NASCAR networking on the corporate side, so many perspectives
that other people might not have. And the reason I
was brought in was to leverage those perspectives and to
(11:29):
leverage those very niche experiences that so few people have
to be able to help the business. And that's a really,
really empowering thing. And I think that all of us
can really lean into the fact that we were hired
or we were brought into something, or we were nominated
for something, or we are here and we are at
(11:50):
this point in life because of all of our unique
experiences in our own ways that we look at the
world to be able to help whatever we're working on.
Each of our unique set of experiences are at least
partially why we are where we are, and we don't
want to abandon that. We want to lean into it.
(12:10):
We want to really encourage and nourish the growth that
we are bringing for ourselves and the way that we
are empowering ourselves and gaining confidence in ourselves and knowing
that our experiences are part of why we are contributing
members of whatever our communities are, and that was really
empowering to see firsthand and to remember, especially when there
(12:34):
was an element of imposter syndrome because of my lack
of other more traditional experiences. The fourth lesson is that
AI is a very useful tool now, truth be told.
The episode that I wasn't happy with was an AI
focused episode because I have been really leaning into it
a lot personally professionally, and I wanted to tackle it
(12:57):
because it's really cool. It's also really scared. It's so vast,
there's a lot of unknowns, and I just couldn't quite
encapsulate it in an episode the way I wanted to.
But I am a full convert to chat GPT. I
think it's really powerful. I think it's really helpful. I
(13:17):
try to not be pretentious about good use cases for AI,
because there are some people who will be proactively building
and doing really cool stuff, and then there will be
other people who are being much more efficient because of
some of the simpler ways that chat GPT can be used.
Myself included, like I know that I have a very
conversational written tone, and it's helpful to be able to
(13:39):
make it sound more professional sometimes, but AI is really powerful,
and so we can get into a whole existential discussion
at another time. But in terms of tools that we
can use in our day to day, it really helps
with communication. It really helps with ideas, and there's so
much that we don't know, and there's so much out
there that we can have really precise prompts that help
(14:00):
us come up with ideas. Whether it's for gifts or
vacations or projects. You just never know, and there are
a lot of cool things there. I've also learned that
there are a lot of really cool tools when it
comes to the content creation. You know, when I have
an hour long podcast episode with a guest, it can
sometimes be really time consuming to sift through that recording
(14:21):
and try to find the clips. So I use something
called opus Pro, which uses AI to identify what the
engaging clips will be from that full hour long video,
and it saves me so much time. And I have
to edit it right. It's not perfect, some of it
gets a little cut off or is not the main
point that I want, but it saves me a ton
of time to be able to then go go, you know,
(14:42):
focus on the promotion of the podcast. And other things
that I have to do, so AI is really useful.
I know that it's scary, I know that it who
knows where it's going to go. But I do encourage
everyone to at least become knowledgeable about it so that
you can the very least react if it becomes relevant,
(15:03):
but then also use it as a way to help
your own life and to help your own productivity and creativity.
And yeah, and a PSA to remember that large language
models and whether it's GROCK or chat, GPT or Bard,
they do use the data that you put in there
to train their models, So do not upload sensitive information
(15:24):
to any of these public AI models. The last lesson
that I want to share that I felt in my
bones this year is that parents are superheroes. We have
a bunch of friends who have one or two kids
under two and a half, and oh my gosh, I
think about how I feel tired. I feel like I
(15:46):
don't have enough hours in the day. I feel like
I get sick and I don't have any children. And
I see my friends who are down on sleep, are
down on personal time, are you know, having to deal
with the financial implications of kids, and they're thriving they're
getting out there, they're hanging out, they're being more social
than I am. And I'm just in complete awe because
(16:10):
I hadn't really interacted with babies very much before the
last couple of years. I didn't have babies in my
life growing up. None of my friends from high school
have kids. And it's wild to see the peak behind
the curtain because I was just so unaware. And I
think it's paired with social media also showing the real
(16:33):
life with kids. But it's incredible. Had I had no
idea just how much your life changes and how much
you handle on how you embrace the chaos, and how
you have germs brought into your home. And I just
want to give a shout out to all of the
parents because what you do is incredible. It is so
(16:54):
superhuman to be able to not only keep these little,
not self sufficient beings alive, but to engage with them
and act with them and encourage their growth, and to
be patient with them, and to deal with the illogical
reactions that they have to things, and then to love
them and to be so cute sy with them. It
(17:15):
is so impressive. It is so cool, And yeah, I
just wanted to give a special shout out to all
the parents out there, regardless of how old your kids are.
You are amazing. You are so impressive. You are tackling
so much. And especially when I see my friends still
(17:35):
having a good time and still enjoying being with people
around them and still going out and they're living their lives,
it's really cool to see, and a lot of things
that I want to model my own potential future parenting after.
It's really exciting and you all should be so so
proud of yourselves. So yeah, that was it was. It's
(17:57):
been impressive this last year to see how people evolve
as parents, and it's really really cool. So those are
my five lessons that I learned this year that I
want to share with you a recap. Good communication is
really hard. Everyone is learning on the fly. We need
to cherish our unique perspective. AI is a very useful tool,
(18:18):
and parents are superheroes. As some closing thoughts, this has
been a big year of growth for me, particularly in
that transition from racer to next chapter, and I'm very
happy to report that I am overall less sad about
not pursuing racing anymore, and I'm actively more excited about
this next phase of my life. I'm excited about the
(18:41):
future personally, and I found myself wondering more frequently if
I were given six months to live, what would I
want to do differently? And there are some small things,
but I'll admit that I've gotten to the point where
I'm living presently enough and and intentionally enough, then I
(19:02):
don't think there are massive things that I would change,
and I feel very lucky that I'm in that position.
But as we go into the holidays and we go
into this time of reflection, I would encourage you to
check in with yourself regularly. You know, if you didn't
have unlimited time, well none of us have unlimited time,
but if you were given a very short, finite amount
of time, what would you want to do differently? And
(19:24):
you might not be able to up and do exactly that,
right like, if we know that we only have six months,
we're going to live a little differently. But if there
are big things that you feel like you haven't done,
or haven't pursued or worked on with yourself, try to
lean into that. I think it's really important to be
as present as possible, you know, to focus on what
(19:44):
you love, to focus on the people you love, which
is a big thing for me. I think the people
in my life who I care about and who are
reciprocal and that caring are the most special and I
want to nurture those relationships as much as possible. On
the professional side, it's been really cool to grow in
the corporate setting and learn so much and get to
work with really cool people. I've evolved my keynote storytelling
(20:08):
more and I've done more this year and more tweaks
this year than I have in years past, and so
experimenting with the narrative arc and adding my corporate experiences
as some of the examples that I can talk about
in new ways has been really cool. I continue to
have my weekly facetimes with my siblings, and Ben and
I are doing great, and so overall it's really cool
(20:31):
to feel very happy with where things are, to still
feel a lot of little joys in life, and to
keep pushing and to not start cruising, not get comfy,
but to keep pushing and growing and figuring out what
else is out there in the world, because it is
a very big world and there's a lot of cool
stuff in it. Everyone. That is the end of our episode.
(20:56):
If you like this, show. I hope that you'll share
past episodes with people that you have in your life.
I hope that you will leave comments. I would love
a review. Let me know any big lesson that you
learned this year. I would love to know what everyone
else is learning about. I hope you have a wonderful holiday,
and as always, thank you for letting me be honest
with you.
Popular Podcasts
The Breakfast Club
The World's Most Dangerous Morning Show, The Breakfast Club, With DJ Envy And Charlamagne Tha God!
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Decisions, Decisions
Welcome to "Decisions, Decisions," the podcast where boundaries are pushed, and conversations get candid! Join your favorite hosts, Mandii B and WeezyWTF, as they dive deep into the world of non-traditional relationships and explore the often-taboo topics surrounding dating, sex, and love. Every Monday, Mandii and Weezy invite you to unlearn the outdated narratives dictated by traditional patriarchal norms. With a blend of humor, vulnerability, and authenticity, they share their personal journeys navigating their 30s, tackling the complexities of modern relationships, and engaging in thought-provoking discussions that challenge societal expectations. From groundbreaking interviews with diverse guests to relatable stories that resonate with your experiences, "Decisions, Decisions" is your go-to source for open dialogue about what it truly means to love and connect in today's world. Get ready to reshape your understanding of relationships and embrace the freedom of authentic connections—tune in and join the conversation!