Please Advise: Do You Actually Have the Talent, or Just the Interest?

Becoming You with Suzy Welch

Suzy Welch advises listener Jess, a 27-year-old nonprofit worker who dreams of becoming a professional writer but values privacy and financial stability. The conversation quickly pivots from a

Key takeaways

• Jess (27) works in the nonprofit sector but dreams of being a writer, creating tension between her desire for privacy/affluence and the public nature of modern content creation.
• Suzy Welch introduces the concept of the 'B plus life' and the 'velvet coffin,' describing how comfortable but unfulfilling careers can slowly drain passion over time.

Main topics

• Career transition and strategic pivoting
• Values versus aptitudes in career planning

Notable quotes

The velvet coffin is related to the B plus life, which is that you're in this situation and it's comfortable, but you're slowly dying inside.

Conclusion

The episode provides a realistic framework for evaluating whether a dream career is viable or merely a

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:00) There's a game I play in my Becoming You class at NYU. It's called sliding doors, and it's really, really fun for everyone until it's not because it forces you to ask the question, why aren't I doing that thing I really wish I was doing? Why aren't I chasing my dream of a life? Why aren't I working at my secret crush career? The answers to those questions, you know, a lot of times they could make you cry, and people do cry, including me. Speaker 4 (0:31) Hi, everyone. I'm Susie Welch, and this is Please Advise, a companion podcast to Becoming You, where I answer listener questions live, right here and right now. And a lot of the time, very unexpected things happen, which is fantastic. And this episode is no exception. Today's conversation is with a 27-year-old listener. Her name is Jess. She said she wanted to be a writer. And she wanted to be a working writer, a journalist, someone who told her own story. But there was a catch. There were actually two catches, and she named them both herself. The first was that she doesn't want to be seen. She doesn't want to be seen. famous. She doesn't want to have people know her story, although she wants to tell it. And the other is she wants to make money. She has affluence as her number one value. So this comes to me looking like a values conflict. And that's the dilemma she wrote about, wanting her work to be seen without her life being consumed by publicity and wanting to be a writer, but also wanting to make money. But here's where our conversation actually goes. And I hope you stick around for it. We started talking about values and values tension, but we did not stay there because underneath her values question was something that was sitting there waiting to be asked. And it was not what does she want, but what is she actually good at? The question really I had was about aptitudes. Does the raw material match the dream? She was saying, I want to be this, but I think I have a values conflict. And I was saying, you want to be this, but do you have the aptitudes for it? So this opened up a whole different conversation. I think you're going to find where we land in this conversation. Very interesting. Just did. So listen in. Speaker 3 (2:04) I am in my 20s, and I think I might have figured out what my not-so-secret dream job would be, but it does conflict with one of my main values. So I would love to be a writer, but I feel like right now that job doesn't really exist the way it used to. Like traditional media, as in magazines and things like that, is kind of turned into content creation, and a lot of that is being seen and being out in public and people knowing a lot about your life. And my... very bottom value is luminance. Yeah. It's not even that I like am necessarily scared to be seen or anything like that. I just really value my privacy and like to do things on my own time in my own way. I'm struggling right now with like Is it just that I want to have my cake and eat it too? Or is this just something new that I have to figure out? Because it kind of shows up in the workplace as well. Like how private is too private? When do your coworkers feel like you're being closed off versus, you know, being able to share with them in the workplace as well? I don't know if you have any advice on your experience of your work being seen versus Speaker 4 (3:07) sharing your life with everybody. Hats off to you for understanding what the tension is, okay? Because it feels to me like you have a high value of voice, self-expression. You know, all writers have this desire to tell their story. And maybe even we've got some high scope going on, this desire to kind of swallow the world with stories. This is another value that's probably presenting for you. But I have to ask you about another value. And then I'm going to go into some sort of diagnostic sleuthing here. But let me ask you about another value. How's your value of affluence? you Number one. Oh, well, thanks for mentioning it. I mean, okay. Oh, Jess, Jess, Jess, Jess, Jess. Okay. Give me a sense of what you do currently. Like, are you in finance? Are you in insurance? I mean, how far away are you from being a content creator at this moment? Speaker 3 (3:59) So I work in the nonprofit sector and human services because that's what my degree is in and my background is in. I did a little stint for like nine months at film school. That's kind of like a, I don't, I'm not out of my bachelor's and I don't know what I'm doing kind of thing. So I did a little writing then. but never in like a journalistic sense, novelist sense, content creator sense. Speaker 4 (4:20) Okay. So you're working in the nonprofit sector and you are maybe client facing, correct? It sounds like that. I used to be, and now I work in an office as an assistant. Okay. How do you like it? I Speaker 3 (4:32) really like... the systematic side of everything, but it's coming to the point where I've been in my role for about a year now as an assistant and I'm learning that there are just some things that rub with my personality. I kind of want to have a little bit more control over my schedule of the day and things like that. So it's definitely a path to a B plus life. I like it enough to keep doing it, but I don't know if I'm Speaker 4 (4:54) fulfilled. Okay. So I want to just say, you said it before I did, but this is 100 % the path to a B plus life. This is a dynamic, a phrase I used to describe, a really common dynamic, which is that we settle for a life that is somewhat approaching our values, somewhat approaching our aptitudes and somewhat approaching our interests because it's good enough. The icing on the cake is that we like the people we work with. and we're making good money. And we can talk ourselves into this B plus life very easily. In a way, you're better off if you have a B minus or a C plus life, because those are pretty unsustainable. And of course, if you've got like a D minus life, you're like, I must get out of this. But a B plus life puts us in a situation, I'm about to use a phrase that people understand immediately, but is kind of disturbing. And that's the velvet coffin. So the velvet coffin is related to the B plus life, which is that you're in this situation and it's comfortable, but you're slowly dying inside. I mean, you are in, you have given up and slowly, but surely the lid can. clothes and you've got to take the heel of your hand and shove it open. Otherwise, that happens. And the first time I heard about the B Plus Life, I was like a young reporter. I was working in Fort Lauderdale at that time. And there was a spectacular reporter who I thought she kind of had it all. She was like the most respected of all the reporters. And her life looked pretty perfect. I kind of admired her in every way. And one day I came back to the office after an assignment and they said, she's She's leaving. Did you hear that Geraldine is leaving? She's going to another newspaper up in New York. And I like ran up to her desk and I was like, how could you do this? You're on the fast track. What are we going to do without you? And she said to me, look, I'm in the velvet coffin. I mean, I was like 22 years old when this was said to me. She didn't use these words, but here's what she basically said. She basically said, my top value is family centrism. I'm far away from my family in Long Island. I don't want to live this way where I have a slow ache of missing them constantly. I'm building my life in a place I don't want to be. She obviously had places of very high value along with family centrism. And she said, I'm getting. out of here. This is good and I could... muddle along and talk myself into staying in this job forever, but I'm getting out of the velvet coffin and I'm going to go do the work I love in the place that I want to be in with the people I want to be with. You are right at the edge of that because you're doing work that you could probably tell yourself is pretty meaningful, right? If you're in the nonprofit sector and you're helping people, you could say, yeah, I should feel really good about this. I'm doing really noble work and I'm working with people I really like. And you can kind of get used to it, correct? Definitely. Yep. Give me a little sleuthing about your upbringing. When you were growing up, what did you want to be? I Speaker 3 (7:35) come from a very creative family. Everyone in my family is like some sort of musician or musical theater type person. And I always took to more of either the writer or the manager. Like I will manage my family as artists or I will like write the... songs that they sing, but I would never want to be the one on stage. So I did