Kelly connects with Bob Moesta, founder, maker, innovator, speaker, and professor. He is the president and founder of The Re-Wired Group, as well as an adjunct lecturer at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern and a research fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute. He is the author of Choosing College (with Michael Horn), Demand-Side Sales 101, and Learning to Build. His latest book is co-written with Ethan Bernstein and Michael Horn, it’s called “Job Moves: 9 Steps for Making Progress in Your Career.”  

This idea about when you should stay or leave a job is far more complex than maybe most people imagine. 

“What we tried to do is come back and hear all these different people who brought up this notion of: ‘This is what drives my energy, and I want to do more of this.’ And so, we end up asking how do you analyze your life by not just the things you love to do, or the things that bring you back. But where do you walk into a moment, and you actually get energy from it? And what is it about that moment that you get energy from? And then, conversely, where are those points where you walk in and you literally feel like the air has just been sucked out of you. Then you start to realize that the contrast helps you really understand where you should be and where you shouldn’t be.” 

What we know about our work is that you can successfully improvise if you’re working out of fear. You seem to think the same thing is true for people who stay in jobs that aren’t meaningful to them. 

“Actually, most people think about it as the box you have to stay in. And the reality is that it’s just not true anymore. You can go. You can just move anywhere you want. But you have to get the fear out of your head and stop thinking, ‘I can only stay in the finance industry,’ or ‘I can only stay in this industry because of this or that.’ And you start to realize – when you start to inventory your skills – what you’re good at and what gives you energy. you start to realize like. Once you start to realize what you love, the whole thing starts to open up and you start to get meaning for the different things you can do. And it’s the agency that we’re trying to actually give people to your point of getting rid of the fear.” 

I love how you talk about resumes being focused on what we did, but you want to know what someone can figure out. 

“Most people talk about what they did. Your resume is what you did as opposed to what you can do. And what happens is we end up putting all these accomplishments on our resume because we think people want these outcomes. But I would say when I’m hiring somebody, I’m not hiring you, because, of what you did, I’m hiring you because you can figure it out. I actually explicitly believe that you shouldn’t know the answers, you should know how to find the answers. And that’s really what I’m looking for. And most people, that’s what we actually want, and most people don’t know how to ask for it.”