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00:00:06
Speaker 1: Welcome to On the Job. Since we're focusing on pivots this season, we hear at OTJ figured why not check in with someone who knows all about pivots, the guy that literally wrote the book on them.
00:00:18
Speaker 2: So on today's.
00:00:19
Speaker 1: Episode, we're going to speak with Adam Markel, who, after a pivot of his own, went on to write a book called Well What Else?
00:00:28
Speaker 2: Pivot?
00:00:29
Speaker 1: Well more accurately Pivot, The Art and Science of reinventing your career and life. So stick around to hear some very useful advice from the pivot guru himself on how you can best tackle your next pivot. Before Adam Markel ever thought of becoming an author and keynote speaker, he was a lawyer in New York City, and a successful one at that.
00:00:54
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean I liked winning.
00:00:57
Speaker 3: I'm going to be really honest in my answer to you, Avery, and there's a part of you when you beat somebody in court that is just an exhilarating experience, especially when your client is super happy because you helped them out.
00:01:10
Speaker 1: And there were even parts of the job to fulfill them.
00:01:13
Speaker 3: On a psychological level, I was bullied as a kid, and at a certain point when I decided I wasn't that wasn't going to be my life experience anymore. I became the Carnivor's part of why I became a lawyer to gain the power, to be in control and to wield power.
00:01:31
Speaker 2: You know, it's like and I think.
00:01:33
Speaker 3: A lot of lawyers are kind of control freaks and have some aspect of their personality, you know, leans into that as well.
00:01:40
Speaker 1: And as you can imagine, being a lawyer in Manhattan was quite lucrative.
00:01:46
Speaker 3: You can make a lot of money, a lot of money, a tremendous amount of money in a very controlled environment. Like I'm a business owner now, but on a good day, business is really difficult.
00:01:58
Speaker 2: And the legal profession is a business.
00:02:00
Speaker 3: But it's a very traditional business with some very traditional parameters. And so if you're not a complete idiot, and if you follow the rules and you don't you know, screw people, you can just like steadily earn a lot of money for a long period of time in this very conventional and sort of dependable way.
00:02:19
Speaker 1: So on the surface of things, Adam Markell's life was ideal. He had the great job, the nice suits, and a lovely house out in a quiet leafy suburb where he and his wife could raise their children away from the noise and mania of the city. In short, Adam Markell's life was the type of life that so many people dream of having. And yet despite all the success, all the money, and all those courtroom wins, Adam could feel that something was off, or, more accurately, he could hear it.
00:02:52
Speaker 3: I would I could describe it almost like it was a hum, you know, like this like this noise in the background is very dull and only.
00:02:59
Speaker 2: And I would say, you know, it's like saying to somebody do you hear that?
00:03:02
Speaker 3: And they look at you like you're out of your mind, you know, like because you hear it, but nobody else hears it. And I say that because it was really successful in my practice. I made plenty of money and amazing family and married to my college sweetheart who to this day is the love of my life, and we have four healthy kids, and you know, life was really really good. So for me to say do you hear that? They go, they go, what are you talking about? I'll go, it's that home. It's that there's like this dull thing out that says this sucks.
00:03:34
Speaker 2: This is not right. But nobody heard it except me.
00:03:37
Speaker 1: So each morning he'd leave his house in the suburbs and make his way into the concrete canyons of New York City. But before he even got into the city, that home would start up again. He'd be on the train and there it'd be that buzzing in his head.
00:03:52
Speaker 2: And I would start to develop feel anxiety.
00:03:55
Speaker 3: I kind of fit well up in me when I got in the tunnel sometimes, and I'm not claustrophobic, not really, you know, but I would feel it then.
00:04:04
Speaker 1: So Adam, being the pragmatist that he is, tried different ways of commuting, wondering if maybe he just needed to make a change in how he got to work.
00:04:13
Speaker 3: Well, I commuted like most people that live in around a metro area, but New York in particular. I tried driving. I tried the train, I tried the bus. The only thing I didn't do was walk, you know. And I did each of those things for some period of time, because at various points they all sucked. I mean, and I mean truly, because you're just aggravated and you're tense and anxious.
00:04:37
Speaker 1: So no matter how he made his way into the city, there was that home and deep down in his gut, Adam knew that this hum was trying to tell him something, that he had to make a change.
00:04:49
Speaker 2: But what could he do.
00:04:50
Speaker 1: He had his job, his family, his life was already set in motion, and so Adam just tried to pretend this HUM wasn't there, to focus more on his work, or, as he explained it, to become even more of an agro aggressive attorney. Until one day.
00:05:09
Speaker 3: You know, I ended up with a serious anxiety attack at one point, ended up in the hospital, and you know, the whole I'm thinking, I'm dying of art attack experience.
00:05:17
Speaker 1: Fortunately for Adam, the doctors checked him out and said it was okay that he's still at his health But he knew if he didn't make a change soon, it was only a matter of time, no matter how good his life looked on paper. But to understand the change that Adam made, we need to go back a few years, back to Adam's teenage years when he was a lifeguard on Long Island.
00:05:40
Speaker 3: I worked at a place called Jones Beach, was really active beach on the Atlantic Ocean, and we made like
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and I kid you not, we made one hundred plus saves every Saturday or Sunday in the summer, because we had one hundred thousand people on that beach and they were rip currents and they were always moving and changing, and the lifeguards we were or to those recurrencies suck because it would literally suck everything out to deeper water.
00:06:05
Speaker 1: But more than just being a beautiful place to swim and work on your tan and make a few bucks, adam summers at Jones Beach were a transformational time in his life, a period when he went from being this kid who was frequently bullied to being this heroic figure up there in the lifeguard chair, wielding the power of the whistle and ready to dive into action to save people in need. And the more Adam thought back on those times, the more he realized that not only did he miss the beach, but that he drifted so far from that version of himself that he loved. How he'd let himself become something of a bully himself, albeit in the courtroom.
00:06:46
Speaker 3: I think, as I look at it now, the pendulum swung quite a distance from being the bullied one to being the bully. Honestly, as a lawyer, I had that opportunity too, and I represented a lot of people who were being believed to be honest and fair. I got to use my power in a pretty decent way. But at a certain point I just realized that this was a bit of a pretense. It really wasn't who I was inside, and I didn't quite know who was inside, but I knew there was that divine discontent that was happening.
00:07:18
Speaker 1: So Adam found himself sitting with his wife and admitting to her that he was tired of being a lawyer, tired of being a bully, and what he really wanted was to give up on the big city lawyer life entirely and once again feel the sand beneath his feet.
00:07:35
Speaker 3: And why I feel so incredibly blessed to be married to the woman that I am married to is because she was good with that.
00:07:44
Speaker 2: She was good with you know what the big picture here? What's the big picture? We love each other. We have great family, great relationship. Will be great.
00:07:53
Speaker 3: Where we are, no matter what happens, will be great because we have each other. That's big picture. She's a much more advanced soul than I am.
00:08:01
Speaker 1: And with the support of his wife, Randy Adam said goodbye to the rat race of New York City. And then he and the family packed up all their belongings and moved way out to San Diego, California.
00:08:14
Speaker 3: I mean, we were uprooting our entire family. I figured I was going to have some therapy bills down the road.
00:08:20
Speaker 2: You know, we have four kids, like I said, two dogs. You know, we know a lot going on in our lives.
00:08:26
Speaker 3: And we were literally moving from you know, the East Coast we were living in Freehold, New Jersey at the time, to southern California, San Diego, and they're they're very different cultures. You know, people are people, but culturally speaking, they're different places.
00:08:41
Speaker 1: But moving across the country was just one of the pivots that Adam made. Because I didn't call up Adam Markel to talk about legal stuff. I called him to discuss a book that he wrote called Pivot. So when we come back from the break, we'll gain some Pivot advice from the Pivot master himself.
00:09:01
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00:09:31
Speaker 1: We're back with Adam Markel, who, after leaving his job as a big shot lawyer in New York City, moved his family out to southern California, where he's now an author, keynote speaker, and business mentor. And that massive mid career pivot that Adam made was a big influence on his decision to write a book all about pivoting.
00:09:51
Speaker 2: It's called pivot. I mean, it's just that simple. That's why I held it up when you said it.
00:09:55
Speaker 3: I wish I had like a nickel or a dime or a dollar for every time a person's used word pivots. Since this book came out, it hit the shelves in twenty sixteen, assignment and s just the book. It was hardcover, and now it's the second edition it's a paperback. But yeah, no, it was a pejorative term, kind of a negative thing back in the day. I wrote it in part because I wanted to shift that sort of the vernacular a bit. And I will not claim any credit for having done. So there's some pretty big shows with that term now. But when I wrote the book, honestly, it was pretty new and different. I felt like we were ahead of the curve.
00:10:32
Speaker 2: And who pivots? Is it just individuals? Is it businesses as well? Yeah?
00:10:37
Speaker 3: Everybody pivots And the best businesses, the ones that we try to position ourselves to work with, are the ones that are are thinking about those pivots before the marketplace is forcing them upon that organization or those teams.
00:10:54
Speaker 1: And while pivots take all shapes and sizes, there are basically two versions of a pivot, those we consciously choose and those that are forced upon us.
00:11:04
Speaker 3: You have to have a plan. And because we pivot either by default or by design, I'll say, and the design pivot is what the book is really about. The default pivot is when you are forced to make a change in life. Because I'll give you some examples. Your spouse or your partner leaves you, or they die, or your business ghoes bust and you have to file bankruptcy, or your health takes a turn for the worse and you get a diagnosis and now, oh wow, I guess I do have to change what I do and how I live, etc. Those are default pivots, and I think again, because
people are afraid of change, we have to override that with design, and that's what the book Pivot is about designing your changes in life.
00:11:46
Speaker 1: So his advice for you on the job listeners is the plan ahead to take a proactive approach to your life.
00:11:53
Speaker 3: Listening to you the instincts that you have, paying attention to them, being having enough time during the day when you're breathing in a gentle way and your mind is not racing all over the place, you're not amped up on caffeine or touringe or you know whatever. In those moments when you can actually hear yourself think to use the term I grew up hearing a lot, or hear yourself feel.
00:12:21
Speaker 2: Then you can get instincts.
00:12:24
Speaker 3: And if you follow those instincts, you're rarely ever wrong. And that's a pretty bold statement because I don't know everybody. Obviously, I don't know everybody's life experience. But I can say with almost absolute certainty that when you follow your instincts, which I could also say is following your heart, I don't think you go astray. You might pivot off into the you know off the highway for a bit. You might be on a road that's unfamiliar and dark and is it's a bit and it's uncertainty scary for you.
00:12:54
Speaker 2: But all those roads lead to where they're supposed to lead to.
00:12:58
Speaker 3: So my advice to people that are looking for vice, you know, from somebody they'd never heard from before, is that you just pay attention be present in your own life.
00:13:09
Speaker 2: Again, great sort of like statement.
00:13:11
Speaker 3: It's not as profound as it sounds, but to actually be more conscious and aware, self aware and present in your life means that you will have access to insights and an inner guidance, a wisdom of sorts, and a gut instinct you could call it. And for those that are more spiritually inclined, there's ways to describe it through that lens as well, where you'll just realize.
00:13:39
Speaker 2: That it's time for something to shift.
00:13:42
Speaker 1: And then when you do feel it's time to make a change in your life, Adam wants to remind you that it's all about that first step, however small it might seem.
00:13:52
Speaker 3: And then you'll be inspired to do the one small thing. Like in Pivot, I talk about the process, and that process always starts with the tiniest little step what we like to refer to as the small domino, the very smallest domino that you can think of. And a lot of people don't do that tiny thing because they think this tiny thing is meaningless in the grand scope. If I'm unhappy, if I'm in pain, if I'm not making enough money, if I'm in the wrong relationship, if my health is south, you know, I can't just start with one tiny thing. How I need this massive change. So it's ironic because they're afraid of the massive change at the same time as they won't take the tiny step because they think that's insignificant.
00:14:36
Speaker 1: But I should clarify that neither Adam nor I are saying that you have to drop everything and move across the country or change careers.
00:14:44
Speaker 3: There's something really amazing when you find yourself in a role in an organization, in a profession that you could you could be there for decades and experience it, grow in it and love it. Not maybe loving it every second or every day even, but just realistically, the trajectory is I love what I do. I love the impact I have, I love the people I get to work with.
00:15:09
Speaker 2: That's the best man. I don't think you pivot for pivot's sake. That's that would be silly. That's the equivalent of like when you're.
00:15:16
Speaker 3: Eight years old and you're bored, and so you just got to go break something or you got to go do something stupid because you're bored. Well, an eight year old is not a lot different than when they're you know, like than a twenty eight year.
00:15:28
Speaker 2: Old or a forty eight year old. Like, we're all just the same person.
00:15:32
Speaker 3: And so my caution would be if you're thinking of a pivot because you're bored, be careful of that.
00:15:38
Speaker 1: Whether we realize it or not, we're all pivoting all the time.
00:15:42
Speaker 2: Every day, we're leaving our old self behind.
00:15:44
Speaker 3: And not to be too philosophical here about it, but I believe it's true that we are constantly growing and our cells are replicating in our bodies. Old cells die and new cells are created. This is the fa this is the cycle of life.
00:16:00
Speaker 2: This is not and make it up. This is what it is.
00:16:02
Speaker 3: So you either recognize that that's the truth of who you are, or you try to stay the same somehow, thinking that staying the same is more stable, it is more secure or safe or something. And then you're literally resisting life, and to live in resistance to life. I just don't have to say what comes to that. We all get it, like intuitively, we know it's just not setting yourself up for success to do that.
00:16:29
Speaker 1: So, whether your next pivot is going to be as big as Adams or as subtle as a change in your perspective, make sure that you listen to that voice in your head, to that gut instinct that we're all so lucky to have, then make that initial step, however small it might be. As for Adam, he'll admit that the first few years of relocating weren't always easy, and there are days that he's still misses being a lawyer, But he and his family have pushed through that challenging period, which, to be fair, is part of any pivot story.
00:17:03
Speaker 3: If I look back today, it's sort of twelve thirteen years later. Every one of my kids and my wife and I we would say best decision we ever made, would never change a thing, So happy we're here.
00:17:16
Speaker 2: I do a lot of research these days.
00:17:18
Speaker 3: For my books as well as for the talks, because we have a company called work well, and it works with organizations to create workplaces of well.
00:17:26
Speaker 2: Being, and so my life today is not the grind.
00:17:31
Speaker 3: And so when you learn that, then you can create a day where you can toggle back and forth between your focus and your productivity and still feel the energy that when I come home, I have energy for my kids, I have energy for the people I love. I have energy for the things I want to do for myself, whether it's to swim or play tennis, or golf or read, write, you know whatever.
00:17:52
Speaker 1: Are you living the Southern California lifestyle?
00:17:56
Speaker 2: Brother? I am.
00:17:57
Speaker 3: I love the sun, I love to surf, I love to play tennis, and I love Southern California.
00:18:02
Speaker 2: I just don't love the taxes. But you know, that's a whole other bag, you know.
00:18:07
Speaker 1: But it's certainly not all play and no work for Adam Markel. He's got a thriving business and a new book out called Change Proof, which you should definitely check out, but not before you read Pivot, because come on, folks, haven't you been listening? Pivots are so hot right now for on the job. I'm Avery Thompson,