Thirty Minute Mentors Podcast Transcript: John Hancock CEO Brooks Tingle

I recently interviewed John Hancock CEO Brooks Tingle on my podcast, Thirty Minute Mentors. Here is a transcript of our interview:

Adam: Our guest today is the leader of one of the largest insurance companies in America. Brooks Tingle is the CEO of John Hancock. Brooks, thank you for joining us.

Brooks: Well, thanks, Adam. It's great to be with you.

Adam: Great to have you on. You've spent your entire life in New England. You were born in Connecticut. You grew up in New Hampshire. You went to college in New Hampshire and to graduate school in Boston. You lead one of the largest companies in Boston. Can you take listeners back to your early days? What early experiences and lessons shaped your worldview and shaped the trajectory of your success?

Brooks: Yeah, well, first of all, you make me sound very boring. I promise I've traveled a lot. I actually really enjoy traveling. So I spent a lot of time and have spent a lot of time growing up. My dad was former Navy pilot and captain for American Airlines. So did a lot of traveling. So yes, I've lived in New England my whole life, but have done a lot of traveling, but I'd be lying if I said I had some master plan, Adam. I was always a pretty responsible kid. And it was funny. My dad was a Navy pilot. very structured and regimented. And my mom just had a huge heart. She'd start like a little side business, but give away half her products to people that seemed to need them that couldn't afford to pay for them. So just a huge heart. So I, somewhere along the way, picked up that gene of being responsible and trying to do good things, but also having a heart. Certainly when I came out of my undergraduate studies, I didn't have a clue what I wanted to do. to some extent, even after graduate school, but just kind of fell into things here in this industry. And some folks may think, oh, geez, insurance, financial services, how exciting is that? But I can tell you, it's a remarkable industry in terms of being able to make a really profound impact on people's lives. And that's what's kept me here and energized and doing some of the leading edge things we're doing now.

Adam: You've not only spent your career in this industry, but you've spent your career at this company, John Hancock. He started off working in the customer service department, and today you're the CEO. What were the keys to rising within your career, and what can anyone do to rise within their career?

Brooks: Yeah, so a couple of things there. Again, I probably seem quite weird in this day and age to work for one brand their whole career. I will say we were acquired by a Canadian parent, Manulife Financial in 2004, just 20 years or so ago. And it became quite a different company then. So I joke all the time. I've worked for one brand in my whole career, but two very different companies. But nonetheless, first of all, I would say the experience of starting in operations, as we called it at the time, or customer service, what some today would call the back office, was really invaluable. And me starting there, honestly, was a product of me not having any clue what I wanted to do when I set out. I was fortunate enough to have some different opportunities in different parts of this company and others. And I remember saying at the time to one of the people that was doing the hiring here at John Hancock and HR, I said, you know, I don't know exactly what I want to do. I don't have to be obsessed with starting salary. I'd rather start someplace where I'm going to learn a ton about the business. And that will position me well, three to five years down the road, rather than just what's the highest starting salary today. And that proved to be very valuable because I just learned a ton. about what makes the business work, sort of from the inside out. There's no substitute for actually talking to living, breathing customers, the agents and advisors that sell our products. So those years I spent either on or very close to the front lines have proven to be invaluable, both from a leadership perspective and understanding the business perspective. In terms of advancing, I was fortunate enough to move along pretty steadily. It was always a matter for me of doing more than what I thought someone was expecting of me. And indeed, every Sunday night, I would sit down and make a list of 15 things. The first five were things that I had to get done in the coming week. If I didn't get those done, I wouldn't be doing my job. The next five were things that, well, no one's absolutely counting on me this week, but I probably should get those done. And then the last five of those 15 were things that no one was expecting me to do. It wasn't a reasonable part of my job description, but there are things that if I knew I explored or did or changed, it was going to make an impact. And then Friday night of every week. I would look at that list, review that list, and I would judge the success of every week based on how far I got down that list. If I just did the first five, I only did what was expected of me. If I got all the way into that 11 to 15 range, I knew I was going well above and beyond. And every week I really tried to get into that 11 to 15 range where I was spending time not just on the things I was supposed to do, but the things that no one expected me to do. But by working on them, focusing on them, I was making an unexpected but substantial difference and impact on the company.

Adam: Brooks, I love it. You shared so much there that I'd love to dive into. Starting off with the fact that when you started, you didn't know what you wanted to do. You didn't start off with a master plan. You didn't start off with the vision of wanting to be CEO of a company. You don't need to have a grand plan to be successful. You just need to get started and to your point, work hard, be willing to go the extra mile. Something that you shared that I absolutely love, your focus on goal setting. When you started your career, you didn't have this huge goal, but once you got started, You set a lot of micro goals and on Sunday nights when a lot of people are going to bed early, watching Netflix, watching football, you were focused on how can I master Monday? How can I master the week? And on Friday night when most people are out at the bar or on their couch relaxing from the week, you were reviewing The previous week and understanding, was I able to accomplish what I set out to accomplish? And what can I do better this upcoming week?

Brooks: You summarized it even better than I said it, Adam. I appreciate that. But there's such satisfaction that comes from a balanced set of goals. Most people, particularly now in the role that I am, you're thinking longer term, big strategic ambitions, visions, mission, and purpose. And those mean a ton to me. I'm sure we'll talk about them in a moment. Those take a while to manifest. It can take a while sometimes to know whether you're on track or not. So that notion of micro goals, as you called them, The notion of here's what I want to get done this week and have I done that through an assessment at the end of the week is something I do to this day. The things on my list of 15 look quite different today than they did 30 years ago, but it's a nice balance because while I have a one year, three year, five year plan, and then even sort of a 10 year vision, I love the, for lack of a better term, instant gratification of, Hey, I set out to do these things this week and I got them done. Or if I fell short, the ability to course correct. in a really narrow period of time and get back on track.

Adam: What is your advice on how to set and ultimately tackle those larger goals? How, as a leader, can you ensure that you're setting the right vision for your organization and for your own life?

Brooks: I'm just a huge believer, and it may sound a little corny, Adam, but I'm a huge believer in mission and purpose and values and being motivated by something other than the tactical or something other than the self-absorbing, I suppose. Like I was never particularly motivated by the latest promotion or raise or whatever. I was motivated by making an impact. And I say to folks all the time, try to find, if you can, a role where you're feeling like you're making a legitimate impact. You know, I remember my mom pulled my brother and I aside when we were in university, I think, and she said, hey, both of you guys seem like you're pretty smart. I'm sure you're going to do good things in life. But always remember to find something to do where you're using your heart as much as your brain. And that always sort of stuck with me. I mean, I love business, so I'm commercially minded and I have shareholders, so I'm not running a not-for-profit. But in so many industries, and I'm blessed to lead in one that this is so, there's great alignment between customers and the company. In our life insurance business, for example, you know, I can assure you, Adam, that among friends, family, maybe a pet who wants you to live a long, healthy life, no one wants you to live a longer, healthier, better life than your life insurance company does. I mean, that's just how we make money, right? You pay us premiums. We invest those premiums. The longer we can do that, the more money we make. So why wouldn't I, why wouldn't we try to help you live a longer, healthier, better life through support and incentives and rewards and latest technology and things. So. To be able to kind of marry commercial success with making an impact on people's lives, the way that we're now doing. at John Hancock by offering people all those things that I just mentioned, incentives and rewards for healthy living, early cancer detection tests we offer for free, body scans, things like that, is so meaningful that innovation's hard, success, the modern digital economy moves fast, driving consistently strong results is hard. Anybody who says it's easy, I don't know what they're thinking. It's hard. And you need things to propel you through the barriers, through the long hours, through the resistance, anything really exciting and new you want to do, particularly in an industry as highly regulated and as old as, say, the insurance industry, is going to be hard work. They're going to be skeptics. They're going to be people that say no. And you need that sort of inner sense of drive and purpose to push through that hard work. And I mentioned my mom's advice to my brother and I. My mom also never smoked a cigarette in her life. but got lung cancer at a pretty young age. And because she wasn't a smoker, they didn't think to look for lung cancer. So she only lived for eight months after her initial diagnosis. And that is a huge part of what drives me and what we're offering our customers now, offering them early cancer screening and things like that to try to prevent people from going through what my mom went through and I did as her son. I'm just hugely guided by that sense of meaning and purpose. And everyone's will be different in different industries, different people, but find it. And if you're in a job where you can't relate to that, where you don't think you're making an impact beyond just whatever you're doing on a given day, I would suggest looking for something else because you'll never do your best work if you're not really driven by a profound sense of mission and purpose.

Adam: Brooke, something you shared right off the bat when you started off your career. You didn't care what your starting salary was. You were focused on other things. You were focused on learning, and now that you're the CEO of a huge company, your advice, which is advice that I share to audiences all the time. Focus on mission, impact, meaning, purpose, something that listeners of this podcast have heard me say over and over and over again. I believe very strongly that when you're trying to figure out what you want to do, you want to try to check three boxes. Number one, you want to do something that you love. Number two, you want to do something that you're great at. Number three, you want to do something that allows you to make a positive impact in the lives of others. We've all been there. We've all been in roles in our careers where it's one o'clock in the afternoon and you're completely drained. And drained from doing what? From working too hard or, Brooks, from, in your words, not using your heart as much as your brain or maybe not using your heart or your brain. But not checking those three boxes. And if you're not doing something that you love, if you're not doing something that you're great at, if you're not doing something that allows you to show up every single day feeling like you are making a positive impact in the lives of others, you're not going to be able to show up as your very best self. You're not going to be able to enjoy this kind of success, however you measure success. You're never going to get there.

Brooks: You're spot on. I fully agree that by definition, one can't be the best at something or even really good at something that they don't have at a minimum, some real interest in, if not overt passion for, because to be great at something, to drive great results, particularly consistently great results requires all the things, you know, tenacity, determination, resilience, grit, all those things. And those really are born, I think, more from passion and ambition. Like when I say ambition, not personal ambition, but ambition for what you're trying to do and the impact you're trying to make. And if you don't have those, you're just not going to push through the challenges or be as creative or purposeful as you're otherwise would be.

Adam: tenacity, resilience, grit, key characteristics among people who are able to succeed. I would imagine as a leader, as someone who has had extensive experience hiring, characteristics that you look for, how do you find those characteristics in people who you're hiring, in people who you are trying to bring into your organization, and people who you're trying to surrender yourself with?

Brooks: It's interesting, certainly in a company like this, we have certain very, very technical roles where to ignore technical competencies would be foolish, whether it's certain investment professionals, actuarial professionals, what have you. But more often than not, particularly at the leadership level, when I'm interviewing somebody, by the time I'm meeting with them, they have the basic credentials to do a given job. It's not about competency, really. What I'm really after is do they innately relate to our mission and purpose. When I talk about wanting to help people live longer, healthier, better lives, do they look at me and say, well, why do you want to do that? What does that have to do with insurance? Or are they like, totally get that? I understand why you'd want to do it. And boy, does that jazz me up because I want to do that too. And there are things that are actually pretty easy to pick up on in a conversation. It's funny, people will come in and want to talk about the salesperson, their record sales year here, or their, the technical person, their history here or whatever. And I'm oftentimes looking much more. or sort of what motivates the person, what excites them when they've done something great, what inspired them to do something great, not just what the great thing was, but what was the underlying motivator for them to achieve? Because a lot of the technical stuff, even if you don't know it coming in, most generally do, that can be learned quite quickly. You cannot teach a sense of purpose or a set of values. So I tend to really emphasize those when looking for people.

Adam: What do you believe are the key characteristics of the most successful leaders and what can anyone do to become a better leader?

Brooks: I think the ability as a leader to paint a really clear vision of where you're trying to go, not as an individual leader. But for your organization, whether it's your company, your department, what have you. So storytelling gets talked about a lot. I think storytelling gets a bad rap. Storytelling isn't like, you know, a marketing storytelling, making it up that marketers make things up, but it's not the shiny. Let me tell a good story here. It's being able to paint a really clear vision for where you want to take your industry, your company within that industry, your department within that company. And about 10 years ago, I woke up in our industry and I realized I was a leader in an industry where No one got any joy out of owning our products. You run into people on the weekend who are talking happily about owning life insurance. It's a wonderful product. Heaven forbid something terrible happened. You don't have it, but no one got any joy from it. Right. You heard from us twice a year when you got a bill or a privacy notice or something. And it was really, really difficult to buy. I don't know if you've applied for individual life insurance, but we put you through a lot medically and otherwise to get it. So I'm like, again, modern digital economy. and not fun to own and hard to buy, not a winning formula. So arguably I'm not smart enough to have a really clever strategy. So I said, why doesn't our strategy become let's make insurance easy to buy and fun to own? And people laughed at me saying fun to own, like you've lost your mind. No one's going to find life insurance fun. Well, we have a solution now. If you're bored, you can check it out online called John Hancock Vitality, which is an app where you earn points for doing healthy things and there are games in it. You spin wheels and you get gift cards and all this stuff, but the most common words, if you looked at a word cloud from our customers who use it, fun is one of the most prominent words. So we've done that. Now we've got to make it easy to buy. But the point is you've got to really fundamentally rethink what you're doing and find that sense of mission and purpose around it. And it becomes quite exciting for the leader, but for the organization. You know, to stand up in front of thousands of people and say, Hey, it's a complicated company, but we want to make insurance fun to own and easy to buy. There's not a person in the organization that can't understand that or understand what we're trying to do. A few years later, we said, let's refine that. Let's have our mission be to help people live longer, healthier, better lives. And again, everyone can relate to that. Particularly understanding why we would want that to happen both for societal reasons under our own economic interest. So I think a big part of success as a leader is. Painting that picture of where you want to go, setting a vision that everyone can relate to and feel a part of. Feel like, yeah, I'm making an impact if I achieve that. Having a goal, of course I have shareholders and we have goals around earnings and profits and sales, but splashing those around as a goal for most of our team just doesn't resonate the way helping people live longer, healthier, better lives does. Everybody can relate to that. Everyone, when I tell the story about losing my mom, to lung cancer despite having never had a cigarette. Everyone's had somebody in their life, a friend or a family member who's gotten cancer and had a tough. So when we say we're going to try to help our customers have better long-term health outcomes. Everybody can be a part of that. Other people may or may not care whether our profits go up next year, not all that much, but they all want to help people live longer, healthier, better lives. So I think the number one thing as a leader is setting an ambition, painting a picture with passion of where you want to go and why we want to go there. It starts with that. Then beyond that, I mentioned a few other things. I just think things like resilience, determination, tenacity, because a lot of people will say, no, a lot of people say you can't do that are important also.

Adam: something you shared, which I love, not being afraid to stand up for what you believe in. You had a vision that insurance, a dry, dull, bland, drab business can be fun. We can bring joy into this industry, into this product. People laughed at you, And you didn't shirk. You didn't really care. You said, I believe in this. We're going to do it. And you were able to get people onto your side. You were able to persuade people. And persuasion, an essential quality among the most successful leaders.

Brooks: If I could share a story about the payoff when you can do that. So when we first launched this program, I called Vitality to help people live longer, healthier, better lives. Many, many smart people, really smart people said, you can't do that. It's not going to be viable. Regulators won't approve it, all these different things. We got it done and had great results. A couple of years ago, we learned about this innovative thing called a multi-cancer early detection test. They're a blood draw that can detect over 50 types of cancer in your body. And I saw this on the news and I said to my team, we should be offering that to our customers. Close to 40% of our customers are going to get cancer. Surely we want them to learn of it early when it's much more treatable than late when it's not. We're totally aligned. We should offer this to our customers. And again, people said, no, Berks, you're not going to be allowed to offer that to our customers. It costs too much. Regulators won't allow it. Privacy, this and that. whole bunch of reasons. Everyone is well-intended in rattling off their list of reasons why it couldn't be done. Well, long story short, we pushed through that, got it into the hands of our customers. Maybe it was more like eight months ago now, I got an email from a customer that said, I'd like to come visit John Hancock's headquarters. Of course, my thought was, oh gosh, we must've really messed something up. If a customer wants to come address all of our employees, he said, I want to address all John Hancock employees. I'm like, oh heavens, So I called him and I said, Hey, did we get something wrong? I'm happy to get involved. He said, no, I want to come up to your headquarters and address every one of your employees and thank them for saving my life. I'm like, geez, tell me more. He said, I happened to buy a John Hancock life insurance policy a few years ago. I happened to participate in your vitality program. And I got this offer for this early cancer screening thing that you've started offering. And I did it. And he had a long story about it, but long story short. he discovered he had early stage cancer. He just finished surgery and he actually came up to our home office and did a town hall event and spoke to all of our employees about his journey. And by the way, he's one of many customers whose lives have been saved now by that. But imagine the satisfaction, not just as a leader, but as a team member to be part of an organization that figured out a way to get something done. That was hard. People said it couldn't be done. You got it done. And now you can actually stand next to a living, breathing human being that says, I'm here today because of what your company did for me. And to me, that's just what it's all about.

Adam: So how can you persuade people to get buy-in when you have an idea that they laugh at, that they dismiss? Even if you're in a position of authority, you're not going to be able to tell the people who you're leading, do this, do that, order, command. That doesn't work. And most people don't have that authority anyway. So how can anyone listening get the kind of buy-in for the ideas that they have such strong conviction in much in the way that you believe so strongly in this?

Brooks: What's a brilliant observation on your part, Adam, about what doesn't work. The traditional sort of do this because I said to the decrees don't work. People won't want to see it be successful. People will push back. Even if you can convince them to try to do it, it won't work if you're just bossing people to do things. The number one skill I would say of a leader today are influencing skills. You have to be able to influence folks. I virtually never tell people what to do. I think most of them probably would look at me funny if I did. But rather, I try to paint pictures and share a vision and create excitement and enthusiasm about a place we want to be, a journey we want to take, a destination we want to arrive at, and why I need their help to get there. And at the end of the day, like a multi-cancer early detection test, it's hard for people to really be opposed to the notion of helping people find out they have cancer earlier. You need to kind of appeal and not in a crass way, but just in a heartfelt way of what we're trying to do here. Again, some basic facts, 38% of our customers are going to get cancer in their lifetime. It would be really good for us and really good for them to find out earlier when survivability is like 8X or something at stage one or two versus three or four. And honestly, again, invoking stories, the story about my mom who just didn't have a chance because it was caught so late. Everyone's got a thing like that in their lives that they can relate to and say, shouldn't we try to figure this out? Yes, I know it's going to be hard, but let's take those points of resistance one at a time. I'm going to help whatever I can do to work through them. But can't we all agree? It would be a great place to be if we could help our customers that do end up getting cancer, learn of it much sooner than they otherwise would. So it starts with that. Can we all agree in this vision of this place we want to get to acknowledge the barriers, acknowledge the difficulty, but then as a leader, provide your support for working through them. And if you do that the right way and you mean it, as a leader, you can't not mean it because people will tell right away. But in my case, I mean it. I want to help people find out they have cancer earlier than not. If they're going to get cancer. It's pretty hard for people to say, no, we're going to pass on that one Brooks. If your heart's really in it to the contrary, people like, yeah, that sounds pretty meaningful. You know, my uncle had cancer, my so-and-so, I, and my friend, this let's go try to do this. And I'm very proud of that particular thing that we brought to market. We got to market within six months. which may sound like a long time in today's economy, but for something as complicated and technical and as regulation heavy as our businesses was quite quick.

Adam: It's great advice. One of the things that you shared as we started off our conversation, you were reflecting on the early stages of your career working in customer service, and you said that there is no substitute for talking to living and breathing customers, which I absolutely love. Now that you're the CEO of a large company, How are you able to create a culture of customer centricity and what are your best tips for anyone listening to this conversation on the topic of customer centricity?

Brooks: Yeah, a couple of things. It's hard to acquire late in your career, so I would say as people are progressing in their careers. Make sure they get stops along the way and roles that get them in close proximity to their end customers. Or by the way, most companies have distribution in one form or another, whether they're salespeople agents. Because early on, I was directly in one of those roles. I can tell you as a leader at the time, I don't know, I was probably a vice president or senior vice president. I personally signed off on every. 9-11 claim that we paid. We had 104 death claims associated with 9-11. And I wanted to personally look at every one to understand every one of those stories, every one of those customers of ours that lost their life on 9-11. And those stories, remember many of them, I won't share details of them for privacy reasons, but those stories were so, so impactful. I remember later in my career, just several years ago, I spoke at a university's career event of some sort. And there was 60 or 70 seniors in college in this room. And I participated in a panel, did my thing. And afterwards, I see a young man almost sprinting from the back of the room up to me. And I thought, boy, this fellow must really want a job. And I said, hey, what are you interested in? He said, no, no, no, I'm not here to ask for a job. I'm here to thank you. I said, well, it's not a big deal. I do these things all the time. He said, no, no, I want to thank you and your company, one of your agents. bugged my dad to get life insurance, bugged my daddy, bugged him for years to get life insurance. My dad finally got life insurance and was killed in a car crash on the way to work three months later. And he said, I can tell you, my brother and I would not be at this university if it wasn't for your company selling my dad that life insurance policy. So by being out and talking to people, and even today I spend arguably more time than I should, but I spent a lot of time out of the office talking to the people that are selling our products, our distributors. We will convene panels of policyholders to tell us their experiences with our vitality program, things like that. When stories arise, like the story I mentioned, now multiple people who have found out they have cancer, I've met with most of them or many of them for sure. So you just got to make time for talking to the people that are actually experiencing what you do. It's too easy as any company or any executive to see number of customers as a figure on a sheet or a policy holder as a policy number, not a human or an agent as an agent number, not a human. And you have to make the time to be interacting with those people face to face, honestly, even in the digital age, because that's where a lot of the color and the texture comes out of real needs and concerns and things like that. So. I would say start early and kind of stay connected throughout your career, whatever your job is. Try to learn about what's really going on at the point of interaction with your customers. But then even as a most senior leader, carve out the time and then talking to your own employees a lot. There are a lot of folks like to share their stories. So I do round tables constantly with people from different departments in the company and ask for their stories about what they're hearing from customers.

Adam: As a leader, you're modeling the behavior that your people are going to follow. And it's incumbent on you to lead by example. If you're out there talking to customers, the people who you're leading are going to follow. Yeah.

Brooks: And modeling behavior is essential across really all dimensions. Customer focus, customer centricity, tenacity, resilience, all the different things that we've spoken about today, for sure.

Adam: What do you believe are the keys to building a winning organizational culture?

Brooks: I would say it starts with assembling people that share a powerful mission and purpose, a set of values around what you're trying to accomplish and how to accomplish it. Certainly needs to be a complimentary team. You can't really have much dissension around alignment on that end. point, but you do need very different perspectives on the best way to get there. You need different life experiences from the people around your table as you assemble a strong team. But to me, it all starts with alignment on mission and purpose, and then assembling a team that's, of course, excellent at what they do, but fits together, doesn't all think the same way, doesn't all have the same background, fits together in sort of a mosaic that helps you get to that shared vision. in a better way than you otherwise would. And then again, I've said before, just constant storytelling, again, not fairy tale storytelling, but real life stories of where we want to go and the impact that we're having on people's lives, that we can have on people's lives, to me is a big part of success.

Adam: Brooks, what can anyone listening to this conversation do to become more successful personally and professionally?

Brooks: Well, I say to people all the time, I'll get up and talk somewhere and I'll talk about what we're trying to do about helping people live longer, healthier, better lives. And they say, boy, you seem so authentic. And you speak about that with such passion. Well, it seems authentic because it is, I believe in it. I think number one is, and you kind of mentioned this earlier, it'd be really hard to be as successful as you may want to be, or as you could be. If you're not working with something, on something, towards something that you don't have a lot of conviction about, that you don't feel passionate about. So make sure you're in a place where you have that sense of purpose. And first of all, if no other reason, it makes work a whole lot more fun. We all spend, Adam, I'm sure you do. I know I do. We spend a lot of our life on what we call work. Frankly, life's just too short not to be doing something that you can find a sense of meaning, purpose around. So I would say if you don't have that, it's going to be a constant struggle. And I make it sound like it's super easy to switch careers, fields, whatever. I'm not minimizing that. But I would say the first thing is, make sure you're in a place where you can find that alignment. Second of all, as I would say, I've been talking about helping people live longer, healthier, better lives. People find all sorts of different types of meaning and purpose in their work. You don't have to be curing cancer, but most work settings, most professional settings, if you think about it or look the right way, you have the ability to impact people in really profound ways. Your own team members, maybe that motivates you. Maybe the particular product you're manufacturing. A little harder than some to say, hey, we're changing the world, but you can still have a big impact on your team members and your community to find that sense of meaning purpose and drive to that. Beyond that, you mentioned it earlier, but really clear goal settings, ambition. Rarely do you just completely stumble into success. It doesn't mean you have to have a clear plan. but you need to have a sense of, hey, I want to accomplish things. I want to impact people in a positive way. I want to drive change and have that mindset. I mentioned my list of 15 items every week, but be intentional about it. You don't have to have a plan for exactly where I'm going to be in five years or 10 years, because that's oftentimes a fool's errand. I tell people today, Adam, that probably the best job to have in two years doesn't exist today. Is it with the pace of change, with AI and all these things? So don't lock yourself into this traditional mindset of, oh, I want this job next year and the next job three years. Think about the characteristics of it. I want a job where I can be creative and add value and make an impact. And honestly, if you're in a place where you don't feel like you can do those things, again, easy for me to say, but think about a change. But I would say most people can find that where they are if they look the right way and think about what they're doing the right way and are willing to lean in to really make an impact.

Adam: Brooks, thank you for all the great advice and thank you for being a part of Thirty Minute Mentors.

Brooks: My pleasure. Thanks, Adam.


Adam Mendler is an entrepreneur, writer, speaker, educator, and nationally recognized authority on leadership. Adam is the creator and host of the business and leadership podcast Thirty Minute Mentors, where he goes one on one with America's most successful people - Fortune 500 CEOs, founders of household name companies, Hall of Fame and Olympic gold medal-winning athletes, political and military leaders - for intimate half-hour conversations each week. A top leadership speaker, Adam draws upon his insights building and leading businesses and interviewing hundreds of America's top leaders as a top keynote speaker to businesses, universities, and non-profit organizations. Adam has written extensively on leadership and related topics, having authored over 70 articles published in major media outlets including Forbes, Inc. and HuffPost, and has conducted more than 500 one on one interviews with America’s top leaders through his collective media projects. Adam teaches graduate-level courses on leadership at UCLA and is an advisor to numerous companies and leaders. A Los Angeles native, Adam is a lifelong Angels fan and an avid backgammon player.

Follow Adam on Instagram and Twitter at @adammendler and on LinkedIn and listen and subscribe to Thirty Minute Mentors on your favorite podcasting app.