Career Leadership 2024-02-22 AI Indicators of Success === [00:00:00] Isaiah Hankel: So you look very concerned. How are you? Donna Serdula: I'm only on my 3rd cup of coffee. Isaiah Hankel: That'll do it. I know. I had I used to work at a grocery store that's was like my job of choice back in high school. And I would, and I slowly started moving from like bagger to stocking shelves to, they started to recruit me for the cause of course nobody wanted this job, the stocking, the shelves overnight. Have you ever come in like a grocery store late at night and there's all these boxes in the center? Yeah. So you'd work overnight. And for me, I'm like introverted. So I thought this was the best thing in the world. Anyway, there were some people there, like my manager, burnt out, like 50s, because you got to stay up overnight. And when you're 18, whatever, that's not a problem. But this guy was like, I got to drink a whole pot of coffee to get out of bed. And I'm like a whole pot of coffee. What are you talking about? And now I'm like, I think I drink a pot of coffee. Okay. I'm not sure. Am I that guy? So [00:01:00] Donna Serdula: you hit a wall, I think at some point where it's a little harder than it was when you were a kid, a teenager, I just love Isaiah Hankel: coffee. I, and plus everything out there is coffee is great for you. So there's no. Donna Serdula: Do you, how do you take it though? Do you put sugar and cream in or just black? Isaiah Hankel: That was a long time ago, Donna. Just black. I Donna Serdula: just recently transitioned to black coffee and that was not easy to train myself to stop putting the Cremora in, which is what I always did. But I think it's better to go, to do black coffee because if you're into intermittent fasting. Okay. Black coffee is totally okay. But as soon as you put a little bit of cream in, then your metabolism kicks in. Isaiah Hankel: I do like once a week, I'll do a full, I can't no, I can't do like a full latte. Cause I just, I don't have the stomach for it where they, I think like a regular latte is I don't know, 1000 shots of some sort of sugar, but I can do two pumps. It was my [00:02:00] max. And I'll do it once a week as like a treat. I try to do it like after I work out or do something active because then the, whatever it is. Sucrose or glucose gets right into your doesn't give you the big spike, but I can't, but I'm just hanging out and I had early morning sugar like that. I don't know. It just doesn't work for me Donna Serdula: and it might be a little fat. I can have Isaiah Hankel: fat. I can have I could have MCT oil, butter, any of that stuff. And I, my brain loves that. I don't know what it is. Maybe it's in my imagination. Donna Serdula: You never know. It's nice to know yourself though. Isaiah Hankel: Yeah. Yeah, it's true. So what did you learn this week that you wanted to share? Donna Serdula: I let's, so let's go back to something we talked about last week because it's been eating at me, Isaiah eating at me, the baseball. Okay. AI and baseball. Isaiah Hankel: Yeah. Donna Serdula: At first when you said it to me, Oh so let's go back and like revisit [00:03:00] what was stated. So you had said that you were, you read an article and that these companies are truly utilizing AI now and they are feeding it with old Employees resumes to try to understand who is the perfect employee. And one of these companies had noticed that all of the great employees that they've had all played baseball Isaiah Hankel: and Donna Serdula: so they started to filter. Or baseball in these resumes and that it knocked me for such a loop when you had said that I thought that's fascinating. That's really interesting. How else could they use that? But then I started to think it's going to stop innovation one and two. How about the perfect people who don't play baseball, right? That's [00:04:00] probably a lot of women, probably a lot of people of, diversity. Okay. Isaiah Hankel: It was ball based sports, but yeah but I, but your point is still valid on the, in the innovation, I think, yeah, it was ball day, like softball. I'll pull up the article, but yeah, it was ball based sports. Donna Serdula: Oh, ball. Okay. I heard baseball and I was thinking, there's not a lot of people that play baseball in this world. Isaiah Hankel: I think it's topical because of what has been going on with Google Gemini too. Donna Serdula: Oh, what's been going on with Google Gemini? Cause I was playing with it. I was not overly impressed. I still, I think my allegiance is still chat GPT. So what did, what have you heard? Cause I didn't hear anything about Gemini yet. Isaiah Hankel: They put a lot of corrections to go the opposite direction essentially. And so it massively overcorrected. And if you looked up. Yeah, mainly it was the images. If you looked up certain types of images or whatever, it was doing over corrections is the best way to say it. So you, so I think you got to be careful either way. And I, what do you do based on [00:05:00] the conversation is good because it talks about historical data, right? So it's using historical data, historical images or whatever. And do you correct for these historical things? Without getting political, I think that's the question. And do you want it to forecast where you would like things to go? Or do you want it to talk about what's done historically? Now, if we isolate it just from a company's perspective, I can see the value of saying, you know what? For the last 10 years, I have all this data on who I've hired and who's a high performer. Why would I not use that data quantitatively? There's always the quantitative and qualitative argument. Why would I not use that data quantitatively? See what's, what are some indicators? I think that's a good word. Indicators, not exact or who. But if there's an indicator here, we're like, okay, this person think about playing sports overall. I don't, I think it'd be hard to argue that somebody who played sports didn't have certain types of life lessons and those that didn't just as one example. It's always been that way for academics, whatever extracurriculars, let's use extracurriculars. [00:06:00] We'll broaden it even more. If somebody did extracurricular, if they volunteered, you're telling me now that's not an indicator of a certain type of person overall, even though there's outliers. Of course it is. So now just to sit. Now the question is how specific can you get? So I would want that data, but I got to be smart enough as a manager or a leader to say, okay, it can guide me and give me indicators, but I got to make rational decisions. So I want a human being at the top of this to be able to look at the qualitative factors too. Does that make sense? Because the things that the bots could miss, Donna Serdula: it makes sense. Now, I'm in my head, I'm thinking back to, I think it was my very last position as an employee before I set out on my own path. And the company that was, interested in having me work for them, had me take a psychological assessment. And I remember it to this [00:07:00] day, it felt very intrusive, the questions that it was asking and how I would answer question, like just the different thought processes and my mindset. It, it really delved in deep, but I remember answering it truthfully. And I must have passed because they did make me a, make me an offer, but I remember feeling, do they really need to go this in depth? Now, I understand, when you're hiring someone, you're taking on, that's a big risk and hiring right is important. But now I keep thinking of that, one In terms of resumes, how very few people put ball based sports or anything in terms of sports, maybe if you're coming out of college, we would see that, but I've worked with over 8, 000 professionals. Maybe multiply that by, 10, the amount of resumes that I've seen. So rarely do they put that level of [00:08:00] information. So is this something that they're then going to ask within their own application? Are they going to start doing psychological examinations for everybody? And what about those who just say, no, like that's a lot of hoops to jump through. Isaiah Hankel: Shouldn't they have to jump through? Hoops. I guess it depends on what kind of job you want and how competitive you want to be. Do you want to be? By nature. Like we've been talking a lot about the word leader by nature. Leader means you stand out, like you have to step up. And I, if I look at a resume and I see that they have hobbies or if they have. A sport just in general, by having that it's in part simply because most people don't have that, that I do separate them because they're smart enough to know that this shows a different side of them, that they're well rounded, that they've done a sport, they've done extracurricular. They're just going to have more life experiences than somebody who hasn't done that or who doesn't have enough self awareness to put it on there. Donna Serdula: I love the direction you're going. I really love this. Do you feel though, this is relatively [00:09:00] new? Or do you think maybe it's AI that's making it, you need to showcase your humanity. You need to showcase your personality more so than ever before. Isaiah Hankel: I think the only difference is if you really get down to it is really just the sample size, the end value. So before you do it on a case by case basis and you have enough knowledge base, like you said, you've seen 8, 000 resumes, whatever the number is, or 10 times that. And that gives you, you're able to intuit. You have a intuition almost, which is from a knowledge base. I'm not talking about, mystical stuff, but like really, cause you've seen so many, you can make these things are happening in your system. One part of your brain, Daniel Kahneman would say, from thinking fast and slow, like system wants it. Like you're able to make those snap judgments that are more likely to be right because you've seen so many resumes. Now they can load 8 million resumes into a system or a computer. And they can give you the data based on that. That's probably more accurate than we can intuit, which might be a little threatening, but this just, this [00:10:00] goes back to like big blue winning chess versus a human being. Donna Serdula: And Isaiah Hankel: a human being hasn't won a chess match against a robot since I forget what the date was. It was like 2001 or something. So that, so what makes us uniquely human though, is that we can think, we can say, okay, I'm no longer playing chess. I'm going to play, I'm going to play 3d chess, or I'm going to play a different game. I'm going to invent a different thing. So I think there's that innovation component that may not come through, but that's what employers are trying to get at. They want, they're doing these psychological exams are looking for human factors and everything else because they want somebody who can't be replaced by AI. So how do you, how do you find that person? Yeah. What do you look for? I think you had, that's why, at least for now, you're going to have to, at the end of the day, you're going to have to meet with a person. Ideally, in person to really know because people will surprise you. Donna Serdula: Oh, yeah. Oh, did you see how that one woman put 10, 000 in a shoe box because she had gotten a phone call and [00:11:00] she believed that her daughter was being held hostage. Something had taken place. It was a lot of AI, a lot of deep fakery. Isaiah Hankel: Yeah. Donna Serdula: But I'm beginning to, I really am thinking, it's so funny, right? Because so much was in person for so long. We then see this huge, change where now suddenly, Zoom, video conferencing, work from home never see a person, only on the phone or whatnot. And now I think we're going to start to see a pivot again where, you might be introverted, but. Being in, being a human and showing up is going to become more and more important. Isaiah Hankel: I think so. I think you look at how people, it's an election year, so it's always, I always love that because it shows what does it really take really comes down to, in some cases, depending on what it is. Certainly if you're running for any sort [00:12:00] of office, but also if you're trying to, I would say expand your career, expand your company, whatever you got to get in front of as many people as possible and in human in face to face human, human is the best way to do that. So what do they do? If you look at like Iowa, they will. It's a classic thing for them to drive to all 99 counties in Iowa and meet as many people as they can, even if they're meeting with 5 to 10 people at a time. So you see people that start rock bands like this, that start their businesses out of their trunk of their car, this kind of thing. So that's always the human go to. If you can get in your car, drive around. I was reading a book by, I think it was Robert Greene, like one of his latest books, I forget. He's the guy that did the 48 Laws of Power, but he had like human, something human. Anyway. It was like Lyndon B. Johnson won this way because he was just driving to all the rural farms and meeting people as many as possible in per, so that human factor is going to be very important moving forward and your ability to control the technology and use it to your [00:13:00] advantage. We're not, I don't think I really don't, maybe I'm more of a hopeful person. I don't know, but I really don't think we're at any different time now. Then we've been in the past. People have had this conversation before when TV came out. They've had this conversation before when the first computers came into offices. I'm sure we Donna Serdula: had this conversation when the horse drawn carriages turned into cars. What happened to all the veterinarians that took care of the horses? Isaiah Hankel: All the noise of the cars, like different things, like it got, these buggies went 20 miles per hour. People are like, slow down. So I always, anyway, I think about that. And then it, whenever I think about that, I think of, okay. The best thing you can do, and this is why I think there's such a boom in like the biohacking space or whatever, is make sure, this kind of brings it full circle to us talking about coffee, make sure that your performance is peaking, making sure you, you have to, you basically have to take care of yourself now, like you're a high performance athlete. I really believe that cause if you want to be a leader in your career, if you want to be a leader, [00:14:00] You have to take care, for your mental acuity, everything else for you to have that vibration, that buzz, that presence the, the executive presence, if you want to call it that you got to train yourself like an athlete, you gotta know, you gotta be looking at, taking care of your sleep. You gotta be staying awake. You got to manage your energy between meetings. You have to make sure that. You're able to be sensitive to what the people around you need. You got to be creative. Creativity doesn't happen. Certainly when you're sleep deprived, you're less creative. There's less blood flow in your brain. Anyway. So I don't know for me, it's, Donna Serdula: I love that though. And in fact, Will Smith before The slap that was heard. He had said that I had seen a video of him and he said, if you want to change your life, if you want to up level, if you want to truly command the life that you want to lead, this is, it's not just a mental game. It's a physical game. And you have to totally take control of your, of the way you just, you have to [00:15:00] exercise. You have to work out. You have to lift weights. It's not just about what you're producing, but it's how you feel, how you present yourself. All of that feeds into success. Isaiah Hankel: Yeah, you got it. You have to exude it. And there's a lot of people out there. I can tell you, I work with a lot of academics that give zero F's about how they look at all because they got, on the ivory tower. It's okay, a good day is you wear a belt, right? I don't know. That's it's just normal. But but I think there's something to learn from that. And there are studies that show this. If you wear like a white coat, a lab coat, a doctor coat, there are studies that show that Not only will people listen to you more, right? But you'll perform better on a test. If you carry a, the one study I read, if you carry a thick like not a briefcase, but if a thing of documents, like a portfolio yeah. You will perform better. The thicker and heavier it is, the better you perform on a test. Oh, how insane. If you hold a warm cup of coffee when you're at a networking event or a warm beverage you will be more warm to people than if [00:16:00] you're holding a cold beverage. But there are a lot of these that have been done repeatedly that show this. If you wear a suit, if you dress up to an interview, you will carry yourself at a different level and perform better. People will. Naturally follow you as if you're a leader. And I know we try to get away from this stuff, but I really think there is a physical component that connects with the psychological component, and I think all of it has to do with human performance. Donna Serdula: Tony Robbins talks about priming. And I think a lot of what you talked about also relates to that concept, which is you wake up in the morning and you get out of your bed and you put your feet into a pair of slippers and there's a hole in one of them. And you go down to make your coffee. We're talking about coffee and your mug. Is chipped and you go to, and you can feel that chip in the mug and everything is a little less, right? It's a little shabby. You're internalizing that and it's just starts your morning with a lower, I don't know if it's a lower level of [00:17:00] acceptance or what, but he had said, Make sure you have a really nice pair of slippers. Make sure that when you go down, you're drinking out of a beautiful mug, and you're drinking good coffee and just something. And it doesn't cost a lot, really. It's just making sure you have something nice and relatively new, but it aids you. I agree. Through the day. And it's priming yourself for that level of success through just normal everyday objects. Isaiah Hankel: I love that. And I also, I always love, both going in both directions because at the same time, you should be the most interesting thing in your life and the most powerful. So if I realize that I chip, my mug and I drank it and I'm like, okay, I'm not letting that prime me. I'm doing a correction right now because I'm self aware. And I'm going to have a, I'm going to, I'm going to have a very strong day. Despite this, so whereas somebody else is ambivalent, doesn't understand this, have never has never read something like this and all these little things get them to start questioning. They feel [00:18:00] uneasy on the inside. Somebody says you don't look well. That makes it worse. Whereas somebody else is okay, no, I'm going to turn it up a notch and I'm going to power. It's if everybody wakes up with a bad day. Yeah. And most of the time we can score it now, right? Like I, if you wear a whoop or a Fitbit or whatever, and you're like, Oh my gosh, I'm in the red if you're on a whoop or I didn't get a good sleep score, whatever, Aura ring. You can be like today's just going to be a bad day. And so I, and I've noticed that if I have a day where my scores are down for whatever reason. Like you have to say, you know what? No, I'm going to have a good day despite this and not be at the whim of whatever circumstance. So Donna Serdula: here's a question. Do you have a reset? Do you maybe that's the idea. What is the reset button? Yeah, I didn't sleep well last night. My coffee has a chip, coffee mugs got that chip going to throw that thing out. But like things have just started and it doesn't feel good. What is the reset button? Is it going out for a run? Is it taking a walk? Is it just saying, you know what? I'm going to take a shower. I already took one earlier, but I'm going to take it again because just the act [00:19:00] of washing will remove the bad mojo. Like what could that reset button look like? Isaiah Hankel: I'm glad you brought this up. I was just looking at this book that I recently read. It's called the power of full engagement by Jim Lohr. And he has this famous. Olympic trainer and he talks, but he's gone on into business to train for this stuff and he's had a couple of books and some articles, at least written on a book and like the Harvard business review, et cetera. That's all about this. How do you reset? So he talks about tennis players. If you look at tennis players some of them that, that, including those that he's trained in between sets, they all have a very small routine that give them a reset. No matter what happened, some of them, I might be picking the. The fibers on the tennis racket, right? You see them do that, or they might tap it on their knee twice, or they might bounce the ball a certain number of times. That's always exact and intentional between everything as an automatic reset that they train on ad nauseum, that little thing. And so if you're and then he talks about business professionals have the same thing for some of them. It's [00:20:00] like you get done with a meeting. You have 10 meetings back to back. You get done with the meeting you go, you walk up and down the stairs look outside real quick. Take a 2nd, come back up a little thing like that. Lots of data shows that can give you that refresh and just a reset after. Whether it was good or bad, it resets it and you start over and it acts as like a psychological anchor. Donna Serdula: I love that. I love that. I always, to me, sometimes it's a simple act of washing your hands. Sometimes it's just the simple act of, like you said, walking into a new room. You know how, like you'll, sometimes you'll walk into a new room and you're like, wait, what was I was looking for something. Why did I walk in here? It's the same idea. It's almost like walking into a new room just resets everything. What can those things be? I've, you've given me some ideas, because I think a lot of times for people. You get into the zone, right? And you're working and you're in front of that computer and you're plowing through work and you do have to stop and get [00:21:00] up and do something a little different. And in a way it can refresh you, but it can also reset your brain. And maybe allow you for more innovation. Isaiah Hankel: And I think that's the conundrum for a lot of high level professionals is that too, in order to grow into scale, we have to be consistent. Which means doing things repetitively to achieve some sort of greatness or whatever. However, you create a rut, and you do that same thing. And it's almost like anti creativity. So you have to also make time to be creative, where you're just thinking of ideas. You get, very often you get triggered by a new location. Like for me, it's if I travel. If I'm traveling on a plane, like it's a whole new environment, triggers a very novel mindset for me where I have my best ideas when I do that, because I've gotten out of the office away from the screen, you're seeing new things and it just makes create, plus you're moving and you're going somewhere. So it creates that creative space. And I don't know, I think the key is, if you get high enough up, [00:22:00] you're doing a lot more of the latter. Like you're doing a lot more of the creativeness meeting with people. We talk about like transferable skills, the two at the top. Yeah. Our relationship building and deal making, which is really just relationships. So it really is about being, getting around people and when you are being on and being like, leave it. So they're like, Oh my God. I got to be around that person more often, like there's a certain kind of energy or whatever with that vibrational energy. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. I love the phrase executive presence just because it sounds professional, but that's what you see a lot in the, the HBRs or whatever else, but whatever you want, there's a lot of different factors and they break it down into the quantitative, right? They'll even say okay, how many times you move your face, the mannerisms, the intonation of your voice, they can measure this, but there's also qualitative things that there's just something about the energy. Of being around a person being within a certain amount. I'm not gonna, again, I'm not gonna get into this is not mysticism, but even there's a certain field around you that they've been able to [00:23:00] detect in terms of a magnetic field from a person. And so if somebody is, feeling angry or grateful or whatever, we've all felt that you walk into a room and you feel something, a certain kind of, like they were just talking about something good or bad, or you walk into it or somebody else walks into a room and you can feel their. Presence or joy or anger, frustration. So there's things like that. And I think controlling that is going to be the separator as more and more administrative work and professional work gets done by AI Donna Serdula: how to grab that charisma and make it work for you. Isaiah Hankel: Is there, this, people go to their final interviews. It's a make or break moment, and there's nothing worse than going to a final interview where you're in person, getting rejected after an in person final interview, very different than getting rejected after a phone screen or a resume because, there's a certain level of energy or something you didn't bring. And I think you've, you, we've all done this too, where you meet with someone. In person, and you're like, Oh, my God, this is [00:24:00] great way better than I thought on paper and or the reverse of no, this is not at all what I thought and there's just a weirdness or something doesn't sit right, which is fine. But that's, that's the human part that I don't think can be replicated, no matter how well AI writes about you on a resume. Donna Serdula: Yeah. Isaiah Hankel: What do you think? Donna Serdula: I hear you. I just, I, in my head, I'm going, is there a way of getting enough data points that AI we'd be able to tap into that energy? I don't know. I don't think so. I hope not. I hope not. Isaiah Hankel: Can AI ever be as powerful as the human brain? Can AI ever have consciousness? This is all, people have entire platforms just talking about this one thing, and I think there are things that make us uniquely human that. Allow us to create in a way that as of now is just not possible. Like we can set the paths for AI, the machine learning, all this stuff. But, like you said [00:25:00] I think you shouldn't be reduced to whether or not you played a sport, but I think you for sure should be cognizant if you want to be a leader of indicators of leadership. You want to get into a higher level executive role. What are the indicators, success leads clues. What are, what is your employer looking for? What are the people in the C suite looking for to get you into that VI VP position? They've likely seen, what is the past executives? What do they have in common? The stuff you can actually control. Not the biases, et cetera, but the stuff that you can control. Did they all take this certain type of class? Did they all do this? Did they all go and hang out with these people in the C suite during certain events that you're not going to on and on. Donna Serdula: And let me say this, we have LinkedIn as a great database. To do this research to say, these are the people that have been where I wanted to be and how are they defining themselves and how, what are the things they've done and what are the certifications that they've earned and where have they gone to [00:26:00] school? It's not like this stuff is undercover somewhere. It's very easy to do that research and find it. Isaiah Hankel: Yeah. Okay, here's the, I think that's great. I love that you went there, right? Here's 10 people that are at my company or at the company I want to get into that are in that role. What top voices are they following? What LinkedIn groups are they in? What things are they listing? Just even that is there any sort of common, oh, they're all following these four top voices. They're all following, they're actually all following their company and posting on their company page, or they're all doing this. Whatever it is you would know more indicators of that. Right? Microsoft owns OpenAI now and LinkedIn. I don't think there's gonna be less AI on LinkedIn or less insights in terms of data or analytics, just more. Donna Serdula: Isaiah, this was awesome. Isaiah Hankel: Yeah, great conversation. Donna Serdula: I love having these conversations with you. Thank you so much. Isaiah Hankel: You're welcome. You