Career Warrior Podcast #280) How to Break Your Career | Michael Gardon

Episode Transcript

Chris Villanueva 0:04
Welcome to the Let’s Eat, Grandma Career Warrior Podcast.

And welcome to the Let’s Eat, Grandma Career Warrior Podcast where our goal is not only to help you land your dream job, but to help you live your best life. Today we’re going to talk about how to break your career so you can make it work for you. If you feel like you’re stuck in a rut, this could just be your episode, we’ll cover what it means to break your career and how to do it properly. We’ll also look at how to give your life as a portfolio of options and cover a few other things that will help to maximize your success as a career warrior. Today I brought on Michael Gardon, CEO of Rejoined Media and host of career cloud radio. Michael is a former trader turned entrepreneur who holds an MBA in finance and entrepreneurship. He has built a career in online media previously holding roles at Money.com, Reviews.com and was a managing editor at the Simple Dollar. Mike is widely quoted in media, including good financial sense, the Huffington Post, Forbes, Business Insider, and many others. Mike runs his business remotely with his team scattered across the US. And right now he resides in the beautiful Midwest with his wife and three young boys. And their family is building their side hustle workbook. So let’s get right to it. This episode is going to be a lot of fun. We’ll dive into some personal stories, anecdotes and things to give you the motivation, strategies and tactics, you need to land that next dream job. Let’s launch right into it with the 200 and 80th episode of the career for your podcast.

All right, Mike, how you doing today?

Michael Gardon 1:46
I’m great, Chris, I’m really excited for this conversation. Thanks for having me. I am too.

Chris Villanueva 1:50
And I just wanted to say, you know, I’ve seen you around the circles and I love your story. And I think this would be a really great primer, perhaps to launch your episode, because I think it’s just something that a lot of people can relate to. So to read from your website, and 2018, I broke my career. Now I want to help others break theirs. The break is dedicated to career pivot authors and those daring to change their path towards a better life, whether that’s a new job, new business or new calling. So I’d love it if you can open up with your own story about breaking your career and what this means to you.

Michael Gardon 2:22
Yeah, sure. So you know, I was a that classic kid that didn’t feel like they had a passion or a calling didn’t know exactly what they were going to do in life in a career. And I’ve changed my career, I keep forgetting the count. It’s like six or seven different times, like as you said, I was a trader, and I got into online media, I started another business, I’ve done a bunch of different things. So what kind of fast forward to 2018 where I was taking a little bit of a break, I was having a starting my family and having kids and I was a little bit tired of the hustle bustle. And so I said, alright, well, how do I do this like, corporate consulting thing. And so I was consulting for a large fortune 500 company full time helping them innovate new products and services to their customer base, and all that kind of stuff. And I was pretty sure like, I wasn’t necessarily a big company, corporate guy. But I said, Hey, I could learn a lot of different things here that I haven’t in my sort of startup career and trading, investing career. And so I’m gonna give myself three years to do this. And we did some really cool work, build some new products and services, and then things would just kind of grind to a halt. And it was sort of like the bureaucracy took over, and you couldn’t get anything done. And it was at this point where I just became, you know, just sort of frustrated that those were things that I couldn’t control. I just had this moment where I was like, you know, this isn’t the right path for me, I wouldn’t trade it. But looking out at the future, I just had this moment. And I said, I have to do some things differently. And I have to chart a course in my mind of how I’m going to sort of get there. And so I started to incubate a side hustle really was kind of a portfolio of websites, SEO traffic, that kind of things that I sort of, you know, knew from my previous life and working in the industry. And I said, you know, how can I do this on my own. And I incubated that for about maybe a little bit over a year, cooked it to a full time gig stepped off of the corporate consulting, kind of gravy train. And I’ve sort of earn the earn the right to wear a hat every day, wear a hoodie, and really own my own career. And so the break is this idea that we all experienced this moment in time. I’m super interested in people’s moments. So it’s this moment in time where you’ve realized that what you’re doing isn’t working and you have enough desire to change that. And so you set out on a new course you not only break your career in terms of what you’re doing, but you also

Break the inertia behind what’s fueling your momentum, your vector, if you will, and you start to just take that apart. And so that’s what I did. And I’m really proud of that whole journey and how I was able to kind of see it, chart a path, take my time, being patient with myself and ultimately get to where I needed to go.

Chris Villanueva 5:23
Yeah, and I love that term, “break your career.” It’s something that it stuck out to me. Because first, when I read break your career, I was like, oh, no, that sounds like a bad thing. I ruined my career with this progress that I’m making. But hearing about the way that you frame it, or reframe it, I think is just so brilliant. And I think that there are lots of probably a lot of jobseekers listening right now that think that this could be the right move. So how do I know as a job seeker, or even somebody who’s just sitting and working right now that I think it’s time that I should, quote, break my career or pivot?

Michael Gardon 5:58
Yeah, what I’ve learned in my time is that we have to tap into how we feel a lot more than we think of my head guy. I’m a numbers guy, strategic thinking type guy. And a lot of time, I would just, I gotta stick this out, this feels bad. But this is the way this is how people get ahead and progress. And so I think we need to really tap into how we feel and choose ourselves and say, like, actually, in 2022, there are 5 billion ways to earn a living, right? Like, it’s this idea that I don’t need a job, I need a revenue source. And I’m not saying everybody out there needs to be entrepreneurs at all. But if we stop thinking about someone else, giving us something as a job, and start framing our future life as how am I going to generate revenue for me and my family unit, a world of opportunity opens up. And so I would say like, feel it. And then don’t tolerate it. Create a path chart a future, figure out realistic steps, and understand that it’s not going to just happen overnight, right? For most of us who have obligations, we’re not going to just say, oh, yeah, my boss is treating me bad. I quit. Like, that’s probably not the path. For the majority of people, the path looks more like, This doesn’t feel right, I want more, I want to learn X, Y, or Z, I want to feel a different way. And then, you know, then use your logical brain and start to think about how you chart a course and get there while minimizing your risk.

Chris Villanueva 7:36
Yeah, I love that. And it’s funny, you mentioned numbers, like I’m a big head guy, I’m getting my head a lot. You know, I overthink things. I’m the type of person that would pull out an Excel spreadsheet to make a important decision in my life. That’s just the way that I roll. But I love your call to action for people to use their intuition a little bit more like how do I feel? What is my and I hope I’m not using this incorrectly compared to what other people say, Well, what is my gut say? And, you know, I’m thinking about the time when I quit my job. And I’ve mentioned this story before, but as a restaurant manager, it just something really didn’t sit right with me and how I felt about showing up to work every single day. But when I thought about doing this company full time, and thinking about the things that I would be doing just I felt this feeling of excitement. And I knew just sitting in a random Cafe up in upstate New York that I knew this was the right decision for me. And it was like just this gut feeling. So one thing that I might ask, you know, perhaps this is for head people, or for people who are maybe good at using their intuition a little bit more, but how do I figure out where I belong? Next? Do you have any practical tips or strategies in order to figure out like, Okay, I should start applying for these jobs or start nudging myself in this direction?

Michael Gardon 8:58
Yeah, and I mean, to be clear, like, you have to use both, right? I’m not saying like, you just forget all the head and the analytical stuff, right? It’s both. But when you’re thinking about just to take a step back, like if you’re thinking about all of you know, quiet quitting, and the great resignation, right, like, this is a big recognition by people that are saying, like, I need something different. And so I think setting yourself on the right vector comes from like the heart and how you feel, and then getting there comes from the head. So you asked about tips. And a lot of this comes from my experience in investments. And as a trader, the way I thought about how do I figure out what I should do and what my calling is, I have no idea was, I have to do a bunch of things. And each of those things is an option. So in finance, an option is this kind of scary word that’s very complicated, but all it really is, is you have the right but not the obligation to do something in the future. So what we need to do as with our careers is

Chris Villanueva 10:00
To create a portfolio of options, like when we have a lot of uncertainty about what we want to do in our life, we need to go see a bunch of things. So that’s the advice we give to college graduates, right? It’s like, go see the world do stuff. Because when you’re young, you have a lot more time to kind of, if you make a mistake, you know, get over it. Sure. So how I thought about it was,

it’s also good investing advice, and you can finance too. So just the analogy really works.

Michael Gardon 10:26
It’s the idea behind a diversified portfolio of option of a diversified portfolio of investments. I mean, the greatest investors in the world, like they don’t know everything, they don’t find one company put all of you know, hundreds of billions of dollars into that one company, and right off into the sunset, they don’t do that what they’re good at is managing really recognizing that there’s uncertainty in the world, and they don’t know everything. And they get really good at managing that uncertainty. And so how you do that is you you diversify it, just from my own story, right? Like, I decided that I was going to lean on some of the skills that I had developed in the past from online media and all of that, but I still didn’t know what area or niche I was going to do, right? Like, I didn’t say, Oh, I love fitness. So I’m going to go be a fitness blogger, because in reality, there are 1000s, if not millions, of fitness Moroccans, right. And not all of them are going to rise to the top of Google search or on top of LinkedIn, and YouTube and all those types of things. So I said, If I don’t know what it is, what I need to do is I need to get a basket, I need to get kind of a little portfolio of sites that I could potentially work on. And so what happens then is if you have a portfolio, then what great investors do is that’s their ante, if you will, right, they put a little bit of money in each of these things, let’s just call it like three to five things. And then as you gain more signal, and you get more clarity, and you get more certainty about what is working and what is not working, then you can start to bet bigger. And so what I ended up doing was I sold one of the sites that I had purchased to work on, I shuttered another project. And I just started betting on career cloud and clear cloud radio, because it was just very easy to see the steps like it was work. Yeah, what we were doing was working. And over time, I just really started aligning my love for coaching. Like I love coaching kids sports, and I love coaching people. And I just started aligning that with this whole career space. And I kind of found my calling, and what I want to just put my energy into through that process. It wasn’t that I consciously went, Oh, I’m going to get into career and career coaching didn’t at all, it was through this development of using this kind of portfolio of options approach and then ruthlessly cutting things that aren’t working, stop spending time on that, and doubling down on what is working. I love that that makes so much sense. And I think a lot of people think about it a little too linearly, like I’m going to quit my job and this and then move over full time to this job that has like the perfect transferable skills. And I think that looking at it more as that portfolio of options, like you said, is just it’s going to yield more success. And I think it just, it makes more sense. It makes a lot of sense to me. Like, I don’t really understand how somebody can say my situation today is not optimal. But that one is, right. Like there’s so much in between that we don’t know. And so like, you have to be humble and you have to recognize like there’s just volatility and uncertainty and everyday decisions, right? Like they’re just things that we are not going to know until we’re sitting in the seat and experiencing them. I think about that idea of diversifying my decisions and almost everything that I do. It’s partly a hedge. But it’s partly like just recognizing that. I don’t know what I don’t know.

Right? Could you maybe give an example of somebody who maybe they’re not ready to take a leap to entrepreneurship, or it’s not right for them? I know it’s not right for a lot of people. But if I do want to work for a corporation, perhaps do some freelance work working within another company, what could using a portfolio of options look like for me? Yeah, so I think like, in your example of someone who’s freelancing, I think the first thing you do is start where you are right? Like it’s okay, you have a set of skills that you’re being paid for now, you go and use those as a freelancer by getting you know, one other client now you’re a freelancer. But I think the whole idea of freelancing is to sort of see different things in different projects. This is how I’ve transitioned my career in the past several times. It’s just by freelancing, Okay, you go out and you get, let’s say, three or three to four clients, and you just want to explore the world, right? Like you set up three to four different clients that are doing different things in different industries that are of interest to you, you go work for them for a while, and then at that point in time, you can decide, oh, maybe I’m not a full time freelancer. I would really like to spend 100% of my time working for this company in this culture. You’re and doing this type of work. That’s like the portfolio of options in action. You can use it to make a total career change. Or you can go explore cultures, you can go explore, do I want to work for a startup? Do I want to work for a more established company? There’s all sorts of kind of applications of that.

Chris Villanueva 15:16
Absolutely. That’s really powerful. We spoke about in a previous conversation about figuring out what our natural advantages are. And I made a note here to ask you about the concept of advantage mapping. So can you tell me what advantage mapping is? And how I can use it?

Michael Gardon 15:32
Yeah, sure. So this is one of those things that came out of my, again, out of my trading and investing background. So Warren Buffett, who almost everybody knows who he is, he’s a billionaire, greatest investor in the world talks about this concept of circle of competence. So know, the things that you know, really, really well and stay around that area. And you can make a really good living doing that. But you have to, there’s a difference between like, what you think you know, and what you actually know. And so he’s talking about it from the standpoint of, of knowledge. When I started talking about this concept, people started asking me, Well, how do I figure that out? And I said, in my head, I thought about it. And this, this has just happened recently, in the last few months that I’ve mapped this out, I said, it’s not really about what you know, it’s about what are your unique natural advantages, and then figure out how to use those and exploit those. So I set up this process called advantage mapping, where I kind of outline sources of advantage, things that people might not really think about things like energy, like, what gives you energy versus what drains, your energy, all of that kind of stuff, and send people through a process of gathering feedback. And each of those areas, some of it is, is just in your head, and what you know about yourself, and then some of it is you could go you know, use 360 review material or whatever. But the idea is that you go through like a week long process, or you could do it faster, but like I think like an hour or so a day in each one. And then you just start to pull out like, what are the common themes here? Where’s the criss cross? What are people telling me I’m really good at. And then we have this exploratory process of how do I use those advantages in maybe some way that you haven’t thought about before, you know, to really get greater alignment between who I am naturally what I want to learn about and what I want to do to bring money into my bank account. It’s in process, and I’m still kind of working on it as we go. But I’m talking about it in my newsletter. And if you hit career cloud.com/the break, you can figure out how to get over to some of those archives and learn with me as I develop that concept that was gonna ask if you had a blog or resource about it. But it sounds like the best way to keep up to date will be to subscribe to your newsletter. Yeah, cuz you can see the archives. And so I have one specifically dedicated to like what the advantage mapping system is. And now I’m in the process of writing, like on each week different source of advantage and how you use that. It’s all in process. But I’ve been really helpful. I’ve gotten great feedback from people. So far. I had one guy that basically said he wanted to really get into YouTube. And he figured out through this process that he actually needs to go look at like community management jobs for like nonprofits. It was this crazy thing where that was way more aligned with how he felt and what gives them energy. And so set them on a completely different course that he never would have thought about before. So it was kind of an interesting little case study.

Chris Villanueva 18:21
I love that you use the phrase, like what gives you energy, like the thing that gives you energy I was reading a book is from a past podcast, guest of mine, Lisa Lewis. And one thing that a lot of career coaches talk about are just a lot of career advice is given, like, what are your strengths, ask what your strengths are. And what she said in the book is strengths don’t necessarily need to be what you’re good at right now. I think a lot of people put strengths in this box being like, Oh, what am I good at the moment, I’m good at SEO, I’m good at marketing. And I’m not good at this thing or that thing. But a strength can be something that you feel just this burning desire to complete or this passion to actually put the work in for because you know, that’s going to be a strength over the person that doesn’t have that same sort of passion, because you’re going to be the ones who put in the work and the hours. So I don’t know if you have anything else to say about advantage mapping. And, you know, I guess how to figure out the things that give me energy. But for me, I think that is one of the most powerful insights that we could look at when we’re finding that career alignment.

Michael Gardon 19:30
Yeah, so like, there’s this kind of concept that the easiest plan to execute on is one that you can adhere to, right, like if you if you all of a sudden go from couch to wanting to do CrossFit every day, you know, for fitness, like you’re gonna last a couple of weeks, you’re gonna quit but if you just say, Hey, I’m gonna start by walking five minutes a day, and I’m going to just cross the days off that I do that and then I’ll build from there that you can stick to and adhere to the idea of the advantage map is teasing out these advantages.

Where things are easier for you to do? Right? There’s plenty of people who are good at something and don’t like it. Like, think about all of the lawyers that we have in this country that like, went to law and developed some expertise and are good at that. But they hate it. There are so many of those people. And that’s a skill that isn’t a source of energy. Right. So the other advantage areas that I have kind of come up with are obviously expertise, what we’re talking about with skills, how you take action, like how you actually do things and work aptitudes. So that’s just the natural things that come easy to you. A lot of times we issue those, like, my son’s really good at drawing, if I was really good at drawing, which I’m not, I would think about that as an aptitude. And then I would start to think about like, well, how can I use that more in what I’ve learned what I do in the future, even though I’ve put it in the trash can of my mind for the last, you know, 20 years, your personality, just like how you’re wired and how you act and like and how you make judgments. And then there are how you learn in areas of interest. So there are all of those sorts of advantages, things that we don’t necessarily think about all the time. But when we put them together, we can start to see patterns. And then we can have a nice brainstorming session about how we use those things. Because those are the things that I’m good at are going to fuel my energy centers, and then that’s going to fuel the plan that I can stick with over the long term. And it’s going to feel how I feel as a human being doing the work that I do in the future.

Chris Villanueva 21:25
I love that so powerful. So Mike, you built this amazing brand called Career cloud, and rejoin media, obviously, it takes a lot of marketing and getting the right types of attention. And I think for job seekers getting their resume out there getting their personal brand, their LinkedIn, etc, is marketing, its sales, it’s getting the right types of attention. So for me, I’m connecting those two things. And I’m wondering, are there any lessons learned or transferable things about building your own brand that you could transfer over to job seekers who are looking to get the right type of attention?

Michael Gardon 22:03
Yeah, for sure. So you have to come up with at least for building an audience or building a brand, you have to come up with a unique point of view that cuts through the clutter. Because there’s so many people out there talking on social media and doing things and vying for PR and all this stuff, right? Yeah, what’s your point of view, and mine is the break. And mine is how to use you know those principles to change your life and change what you want to do in the future. And so I think for somebody that’s looking for a job or getting out there, it’s like, your clutter is the number of resumes and the process that set up for companies to screen resumes, like we need to just stop mass applying. And we need to put more creative energy into the ways that we stand out. Yep, and the ways that we get our resume, which is kind of our teaser product in the hands of the right people. And so from my investment background, I always say like, invest in yourself and use money to solve problems. And one of the big problems that I see people have all the time is they come to me with like, how do I do this resume thing, like, I’m going to rewrite my resume, I’m like, don’t like give it to some professionals. And Let’s Eat, Grandma is not paying me to say this, like I actually feel this way, spend $100 or whatever, and have some people write your resume, take that off your plate. And now take that time that you’ve just created, and put it into creatively finding an edge and how you’re going to get noticed. And just a couple of examples like that I’ve heard that are kind of wacky, and out there. You know, I recently saw a young woman sent a cake with her resume, like printed on it to like somebody in Nike, like in marketing at Nike or something. And nobody does that. Right? She just bypass like 1000s of people in the circular inbox file, right? Yeah, even if her resume wasn’t good, or she’s not qualified, she’s gonna get an interview. Because she’s she stood out. Another one is my favorite one is I saw a guy, he found a hiring manager on Venmo. Somehow, I don’t know how he did that. I would love to talk to this guy, but found him on Venmo sent a request for money for $50,000 over Venmo for copywriting services. And it’s like, that’s genius. He got hired, right, he got an interview and got hired. That’s awesome, too, because that’s so creative. And I don’t think everybody has to do that. There are less crazy things. There is LinkedIn where you can actually go find hiring managers at companies and start a dialogue with them and build a relationship. You can use video resumes and or video cover letters and just shoot a video like super simple, I can hit loom and I can say here’s who I am and this is what I’m doing and what I’m looking for and not that many people do that. So take the tasks off your plate that aren’t going to like move the needle in terms of marketing and put your creative energy into figuring out how to get your name and face in the hands of the right person.

Chris Villanueva 24:58
I love that. I think a huge mistake a lot of people are making on the same vein, just talk about, what you just spoke about is they’re sending these resumes that look the same, they look good. They sound like poetry in a way very vanilla poetry in your reading, and you’re like, gosh, that sounds, you know, grammatically correct. And it sounds like something that’s professional, but it looks like every other resume that is probably going to come across the desk of a hiring manager, or somebody looking to recruit for a job. And I remember looking at this one person’s this guy had amazing history, he spent a lot of time in the creative fields, you know, doing creative direction, and other jobs like that. But I read his summary. And it was a few sentences of something that could have been copied and pasted from Google. And I remember he did a music video for share. And I was like, you’ve had this really amazing history. And this is something that no one has ever claimed that they’ve done, why don’t you put that somewhere on your summary, because this is going to make you stand out. And so I think if a lot of job seekers took that advice, and what you’re calling people to do, which is to use some creativity to stand out to differentiate, I think that the not only would they get noticed a little bit quicker, but I think just the the world of recruiting a job seeking would be a better place because people would find these matches a little bit better. So I love that advice.

Michael Gardon 26:24
I bet that guy in that example, probably said to you, Well, I’m just following directions, like the company’s process is to submit my resume and a cover letter and whatever. And so he’s not thinking, how can I get my best work in front of them break that process, that is a process that needs to be broken, right that the herd is doing that, right, the herd is following that you need to go against the herd against the grain in order to stand out.

Chris Villanueva 26:49
I love that, Mike, you’ve been a great guest, what is one thing you absolutely want every single person on this podcast to take away?

Michael Gardon 26:59
It is to choose yourself, like, no one is going to hand you even if you have the greatest mentors in the world and you’ve got a great boss, like there are going to be times in the future where that person is going to have to make a decision between their job and you or they’re going to have some other competing interests, you have to choose yourself first, and listen to your gut and decide where you want to go. You can have virtually anything you want, but you can’t have everything you want. And if you’re sitting around waiting for other people to sort of give you a break, that’s not in my experience going to work. But when you start channeling what you want to do, and you go through a process of aligning yourself with the work that you do in order to have a happier existence on the planet, with the time that you spend at work, like that’s how you’re eventually going to get to where you’re going.

Chris Villanueva 27:51
I love that. Amen. Very powerful words of wisdom. So typically, at this point, ask guests to share a little bit about themselves and where they can find out more information. But I want to have a little bit of fun, because we just talked about differentiation and standing out. But how do you think that career cloud is different than another source of information for job seekers? Like, what do you do that is special and stands out that could really add value to job seekers?

Michael Gardon 28:17
Yes, curricula.com online content, you’re gonna get a lot of the resources that you might see somewhere else, but we’re doing is layering on top of that, you know, the podcast and the newsletter, which has a very different kind of Slant than that. And so I think like, there’s something for everybody, if you need tips for job seeking, you can get that right, you’re gonna get that through Google search. If you’re someone who really wants to think holistically about their career and their life going forward. The break, I think, is where you’re going to resonate the most. Because it’s not just for entrepreneurs, I am one. So I have a little bias there. But I’ve been through jobs, and I’ve changed my career. And if you’re ever thinking about any type of change, you’re gonna get a lot of value out of that. And then the rest of the crew cloud radio podcast, what I try to do is just have like inspiring conversations with people where they’ve done something different. And it’s sort of that inspiration of Yes, I can do it too, to motivate people to start choosing themselves and forging their own paths.

Chris Villanueva 29:21
Cool. So I will make sure to link everything in the description as I normally do. But I think it’s great what you’re doing, Mike and thank you for all your service and the things that you’re doing for the world of job seekers. I think it’s great. Well, likewise, thanks, Chris, for having me. Pleasure to talk to you. Perfect to take care and listeners. This wraps up Episode 280 of the Career Warrior Podcast really enjoyed doing this one had a lot of fun and me in particular, I can resonate and vibe along with the concept of being different I think really, this is one of the best ways to stand out. I recommend all jobseekers take inventory look at the personal brand their strengths and find out out what makes them different and where their advantages are. I’ll make sure to link Mike’s blog, the podcasts, all of these resources so you can get the most out of them. And I can’t wait to see you next time. Remember, we release these episodes every other Monday, so make sure to subscribe and stay tuned. Thanks for tuning in. This was the Career Warrior Podcast.

Career Warrior Podcast. And before you go, remember, if you’re not seeing the results you want in your job search, our highly trained team of professional resume writers here at Let’s Eat, Grandma can help head on over to letseatgrandma.com/podcast to get a free resume critique and $70 off any one of our resume writing packages. We talk all the time on the show about the importance of being targeted in your job search and with our unique writing process and focus on individual attention. You’ll get a resume cover letter and LinkedIn profile that are highly customized and tailored to your goals to help you get hired faster. Again, head on over to letseatgrandma.com/podcast. Thanks, I’ll see you next time.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai