Mar 12, 2019
My guest is Laura Gassner Otting and her new book is called “Limitless: How to Ignore Everybody, Carve your Own Path, and Live Your Best Life.” In the book, Laura interviews highly successful globe changers and has uncovered strategies to help you get unstuck. Laura's background spans this world's of successful startups and non-profits as well as political and philanthropic landscapes. She's coming to us after being interviewed on the Today Show… so we're excited to have her on! Listen To The Podcast: Resources: The Book: Limitless The Assessment: limitlessassessment.com/DTD Instagram: @heyLGO Twitter: @heyLGO Interview: LauraL Hey, hey out there to everyone in your Dream, Think, Doer Universe. I love that. I love people who are dreamers, thinkers, and doers. Mitch: Right? It's a great crew. And as we talked about before we hit record it's an awesome, awesome crew. We tend to totally offend grumpy people so there's just a lot of love here 'cause that's what we do, I love it. Laura: Fantastic. Mitch: I could go through the list of successes that you've had in your life, I mean you were appointed by President Bill Clinton to help shape AmeriCorps, you've helped grow startups and non-profits, you've been interviewing globe changers for this book, it's a bestseller, all of those things, but somebody might look at you and go, "Wait you've never felt stuck." How about you? What's a time in your life where you Laura personally felt stuck? Laura: Boy where do I start? You know it's really interesting this idea when people look at you and they go, "Oh she's got it all together. He's got it all together." Cause I really do think that people see us as the fully formed person we are today, and number one, I hope that I'm not fully formed, I hope there's still evolution and change and growth that's going to happen, because boy it would pretty boring to stop here, right? Mitch: Exactly. I'm done. Laura: Been so fun so far. Mitch: I'm done. Laura: I'm all done. So number one, A, I'm not fully formed and B, it's not that I came into the world as this I'm just maybe five or 10 or 25 years ahead of the person who's looking at me. I'm just the future them, and they look at me as this unachievable thing when in fact it's completely achievable if they dream, think, and do. So a time when I felt fully stuck was probably when I was at the big traditional gold standard search firm that I was at, and I was supposed to be happy. I had done all the right things, I had checked all the right boxes, I went to the right schools, I got the right jobs, I got the right promotions, and there I was as the youngest Vice President at this very well known search firm, and I wasn't happy. And I couldn't understand why I wasn't happy, and I thought about the thousands of people that I'd interviewed for jobs who were all at the top of their game, who all were successful, and not all of whom were happy. And I couldn't figure out why that was until I realized that I wasn't happy either. And then I looked around and I thought, "Well why am I here? Why did I join this firm?" And I joined this firm because it was the very top firm in the country, in the world that was doing specifically mission-driven non-profit executive search, and I thought I was there to change the world. Mitch: Yeah. Laura: But then I realized that I was actually there to create profit for the owners of the firm. So my job was to sit on one side of the table with the firm and on the other side of the table as my client who wanted to cure cancer, or save the whales, or feed the poor, or create educational access, or anything else that it might be. And in between us silent unspoken was the elephant, the profit, and loss statement of the firm. And it turned out that I had two masters. I was serving the firm, and I was also serving my clients, and the truth is I wanted to be on that side of the table with them and not on...