Cultivate Agility in Uncertainty

Anita Brick: Hi, this is Anita Brick and welcome to CareerCast at Chicago Booth, to help you advance in your career. Today we're delighted, actually, way more than delighted to be speaking with Justin Bookey. He is an award-winning content creator, marketing strategist, and global ping-pong player whose diverse career has been shaped by a really surprisingly wonderful configuration of experiences. With a background in law and communication, he has collaborated with industry giants like Disney, Sony, and Honda. After practicing communications law in Washington D.C, he transitioned to content development, earning Emmy nominations for documentaries and multiple awards for innovative marketing campaigns. Growing up in Seattle, Justin honed his ping-pong skills in the family basement starting at six, which is pretty amazing. Later training with Olympian Wei Wang in Los Angeles. His dedication led him to win medals at the US Open and National Championship. A passionate traveler. He has played on all seven continents. I want to hear about the one in Antarctica by the way, and founded PongFit, a nonprofit promoting fitness through ping-pong.

Justin, thank you for writing the book. His book is called Ping Pong Leadership, and it is quite amazing. I was reading it, I was thinking about freshman year when I went to Uchicago, where we studied gym related courses too, so I was studying physics and billiards. And when I started thinking about the ping-pong, it brought me back to those days and I can see there's so many things around ping-pong and for me with billiards that were pretty amazing. So thank you for making time. I know that you're a very busy person and I know that you give back tremendously, so I'm thrilled to be speaking with you today.

Justin Bookey: Thank you, Anita. It's quite the introduction, but I'm just happy to be here with you.

Anita Brick: Okay, great. I like to focus on questions that come in because it makes it real, and I know you do that throughout the book. I love the fact that at the end of each chapter you have questions to think about, and I personally started there and then read the chapter, which helped me absorb a lot. So here's the first question, and this is from an alum. "With so much uncertainty at work, I keep missing out on learning and growth opportunities because I'm spending all of my time helping leadership achieve their goals and mine get lost. What can someone like me do to get started and reclaim my agility and my career goals as a priority?" That's a tough one.

Justin Bookey: We all face uncertainty on so many levels. It usually can whack you on the side of the head when you're least expecting it. I guess that's the nature of uncertainty. In table tennis because that's kind of where I start any basic analysis where I start addressing any major obstacle throughout my life, in many ways. In table tennis, there's something we call ready position or I call ready position, and that's a way to optimize your stance and your anticipation. Whatever comes your way, you are ready without having to read the future because no one can do that, but you're able to optimize all the different paths you might have to take and execute your strokes with a maximum amount of impact and effectiveness.
When people say, "Oh, you react so quickly when you're playing table tennis and your reflexes are like a cat." That's maybe part of it, but if you learn to anticipate really well and you exercise those anticipation muscles and do drills over and over again, you're actually knowing ahead of time what may happen and you're able to respond in the moment and it looks very fluid and practiced and polished, but really you're just doing what you've done a thousand times before. So a lot of that is just in the preparation and the mindset of adopting that ready position, knees bent, weight forward on your toes.

Anita Brick: How does that translate into professional goals?

Justin Bookey: If you are being agile at work, look for synergies. If you are helping the leadership achieve their goals and perhaps you feel like yours are getting lost in the shuffle, look for synergies. There are possibly many overlaps in achieving the leadership goals that are actually helping you refine a lot of really important transferable skills. Are you finding yourself counseling them, unique ways for problem solving, strategic research, finding new resources, being resourceful in general. Without realizing it, you may well be polishing some essential skills that when you look back will have served you very well for your next challenge. So it's not all or nothing.

Anita Brick: Now it's having the courage really to carve out some dedicated time to work on your own goals.

Justin Bookey: And that's part of agility too. Finding the gaps. Whenever there's uncertainty, whenever there's chaos, there's actually opportunity because no one has a perfect plan forward. No one's going to come and say, "This is exactly what we need to do." That's where this fog of mystery and uncertainty can actually serve you because then if you're agile, you can find little cracks in the system and cracks in the schedule. Maybe have to be on your own time with your own resources, but you're going to learn to be hyper-efficient and maximizing those little slivers of opportunity. That in itself is very agile and really useful later on.

Anita Brick: I like that and I bet that with the amount of time this person is devoting to the leadership team, there may be a few challenges there or personality challenges. Those can actually be really useful transferable skills too, right?

Justin Bookey: Oh, yeah. There's your chance to prove your metal in the heat of battle. If there really are some serious challenges that your leadership is going through, you can make yourself invaluable and just find those unique skills that you excel at. There's your chance where other people may not even have that exposure, so you may feel like, oh, you're really under the gun, back to the wall. "I have no time to focus on my goals and what I want to work on." You may well discover a lot of great abilities you have that you can directly show to leadership in those heated moments. I mean, that's something some people work on for months and years just to get the exposure to leadership. Cherish that as a key opportunity. It's mindset rather than feel like I'm stuck here holding hands of the leadership, it's more like I am privileged to be here guiding them by the hand because they're going to see what kind of quality guide I am.

Anita Brick: Things usually circle back to, are you discounting or appreciating where you are? And you made it very clear. You make it very clear in the book a number of times. One of the things that wasn't so clear to me from what you said, and maybe I just didn't get it, is this came from an MBA student. His question I think will help us and me specifically understand more about this. So the MBA student, he said, "I know that my curiosity leads to greater agility in my work and life. That said, my bottleneck is not curiosity or ideas, but it's fear. What advice would you have to help me create more advancement by being a little bit bolder?"

Justin Bookey: Great topic. Call them Pong Principles. There's 18 chapters and there's 18 Pong Principles in the book. Pong Principle number eight, don't try to conquer fear, use it. And I've had to certainly address fear in my life many times, professionally and certainly in table tennis, because there's a lot of tense moments and they get very high stakes. When you're climbing up the brackets, going deeper and deeper into the playoff rounds, the stakes are higher. In the beginning, you're just fighting to survive in the early rounds, and then later you realize, Oh, the round of 16 and the quarterfinals one more win. I'm in the semis, and then that's the medal round essentially. The stakes are really high. It's hard to get there, a lot of fear, a lot of adrenaline. There's short-term, there's long-term situations.

I talked with Amy Wang who is an Olympian and has had national singles titles in the US in table tennis. She says she has a sweet spot of fear, meaning from zero to 10 when she starts a match, she really needs to be between a five and a seven. That's kind of her sweet spot. Obviously, if she's too amped up and freaked out, she's going to be jittery and tight. And same here. Of course, if you're too mellow, you're not going to take the situation seriously enough. And it can be self-correcting sometimes because if she's too tight and she starts losing points, she knows something's wrong and she just got to breathe certain ways and relax. Or if she's too relaxed and calm, she will also start to fail and then her adrenaline goes up like, "Oh, my ship is sinking here." A lot of it is self-awareness. Know your sweet spot, first of all.

And I have several steps that I go through about how to not try to eliminate fear, because that's just not going to happen. We need that. We are biologically programmed to have this cortisol and adrenaline surge through our bodies, right? To survive a saber tooth lion from 20,000 years ago when it's chasing after us, there's a reason for that. In law school, I remember my professor said, "You know what? Yeah, you guys are going to get pretty nervous when it comes to final exam time. Give yourself 30 seconds to freak out. When I put that exam on your table, give yourself a little freak-out time. Say, 'Ah, this is horrible. I'm not prepared. I'm inadequate. I'm going to flunk out of law school.' Just let your mind go crazy. Have your freak-out. Make sure you breathe. And then at the end of 30 seconds, you've used up a lot of those freak out chemicals in your body. Breathe, and now it's time to get to business. And then you'll still have plenty of adrenaline left over. Don't worry, and you can still write this exam for the next two hours."

And I like that. It's like, "Okay, look, it's going to happen anyway. Let me just get the freak-out over with." It's similar to another one, which is defang the fear, I call it. So preemptively tell the fear, "Okay, come on in. I'm waiting for you. I've been expecting you. Bring it on." Because that way it's not a surprise. It's not just like, oh, no. All of a sudden I'm clenched up and I'm nervous. Like, "Okay, where is it? I'm waiting for it." And then often it just doesn't even show up as much because it's like, "Oh, there's no more drama." You're expecting it.

And then there's switch modes. We have the primal fight or flight mode. The sympathetic nervous system causes our chest to breathe and we have the adrenaline rushing through us, and that's fight or flight. And sometimes you need that, but you can also switch. If that's really overwhelming you, switch to belly breathing consciously. Deep breaths, you're pulling out your belly button with a string, and that switches us into rest and digest mode, which is the parasympathetic nervous system, and that's where we are able to relax and not prepare for a fight, but really contemplate things and let the blood flow easier to different parts of our body.

You can reverse that too. If you're too relaxed and I do this sometimes I'm not pumped up enough. Start breathing with your chest and adopt a more battle ready stance, and that really can up your readiness. Create your own reset switch, have a mantra or a ritual. I realized I was doing something funny before a Zoom call sometimes, let's say I had garlic bread for lunch. I would give myself a breath mint before a Zoom call. I knew like, "Oh, this is funny. I'm talking with someone in Florida and I'm in LA. I don't think they can smell my breath." And yet it got me into a mindset because I felt that minty fresh breath in my mouth, and it just assured me like, "Oh, yes, I'm very presentable now." And I do that sometimes just as a ritual that clicks my mindset into a different mode.
Anita Brick: Mode. I like that. I do things like that as well. Sometimes it's go for a walk and I walk as fast as I possibly can that gets things slowing and also dissipates the nervous energy, and I like that a lot. Here's another aspect of fear that came up with another MBA student. Person said, "I have a passion for a specific topic." She said, "I get charged up and jump into action." Mobilizing all of those good chemicals we've been talking about. "Then I begin to think that maybe this area of pursuit isn't all that important. Any ideas on how to positively own my passion, which I believe could have great value to many others except I think it's fear, but I default into, it's not important enough. Thanks, Justin."

Justin Bookey: Sometimes passions and lead to big things, and sometimes they can't necessarily. Again, self-awareness. Maybe it's a matter of categorizing, is this passion something I can indulge in for an hour on Sunday afternoons, not have it even infuse itself into my work week or any of my professional sphere? Or is it something that is really a major part of my life, if I don't incorporate it into my professional life, I'm going to feel constricted forever? How much should I let this passion really grow? How important it is to my core? Find a north star company or a north star individual that's achieved something really positive with this similar, very same passion. Is it realistic? Is it really a stair step? Is it a stairway to what you are looking for with your goals? And then research the history and work backward from what this person or organization achieved tapping into that passion and try to replicate whatever relevant steps are there.

So then you're not just indulging yourself in the fun part of the passion or maybe it's avoidance. Maybe this passion isn't really something you're drawn to. Maybe it's a convenient escape from something you're avoiding. You can stress test it. Look for examples out there of someone else who's actually really turned this into positive gains using this passion. If you have trouble finding anything out there and it's really seeming like a isolated random pursuit, maybe it is just a flavor of the moment and you can find something else.

Anita Brick: It's a good point. I think that, like you said, the mindset is where are you coming from? Are you coming from a place of purpose and faith in yourself and so on? Or is this a pattern? We don't know, right? Is this a pattern where the person was like, "Oh, I love this. Oh, I'm scared. I'm going to find something else." And I think that going back to what you said earlier about awareness, but I also really like because especially with our audience, we need to have the analytical piece too. So if you go out and find someone who has done something either directly or adjacent, that can give you some evidence. And sometimes you're the first one, and that can be scary. But I do think, as you said, going back and making sure that you're coming from a place of believing in yourself and not discounting and moving on just because it's scary.

Justin Bookey: Absolutely. If you really go all in and then Pong Principle number nine, embrace your quirks. There are a lot of things that we are embarrassed about or we discount because they're not prevalent in our workplace or our relationships. It doesn't mean they're not worthwhile. In fact, they can be the very thing that vaults us ahead of the others. And in that chapter, I actually interview Valerie Kondos Field, who was voted then the Pac-10 athletic coach of the century. She took UCLA women's gymnastics to seven national titles. I don't think they had ever gotten any before that, and she took a job there initially as an assistant coach. She had never and still has, never competed a day in her life as a gymnast. She never trained as a gymnast a day in her life. She was a dancer. She came from the ballerina school and this lack of immersion in gymnastics haunted her even as she took the head coaching job. And she tried to emulate other coaches and failed, and she tried to adopt these other personas in the gymnastics coaching world and failed.

Only when she decided, look, I'm a dancer. I'm a performer. I know how to connect with judges and audiences. I know how to wow them. I know the importance of commanding the stage as soon as you step foot out there, eye contact, smile, glitter, presence. And she imparted all these values and perspectives on the women on her team. Obviously something clicked because seven national championships later, she really proved her point. It's an amazing case of where she could have just ran away with her tail between her legs after several years of mediocre results, but nope, she finally decided to adopt her major quirk, which was, I don't have any experience in gymnastics, really.

Anita Brick: Quirk has positive and negative connotations, and I still like it because I think of myself as pretty on the quirky side. I remember reading that and thinking, wow, it took courage and a belief in herself to step into who she already was. It's kind of funny because when we do that, no one else can be who we are. I know that sounds really cliche, but no one can be who we are, and when we step in, we often find that, like she did, that all of that ballet training and all that she did prior to coaching was perfect. Kind of like what you said at the very beginning, a person who was like, "Oh, I'm kind of stuck because I am helping leadership and not helping myself." Once that person owns who they are, they're going to be much more successful. And she was amazing. People didn't welcome her with open arms either. From what I read in the book.

Justin Bookey: Throughout the gymnastics world, there were highly raised eyebrows, "UCLA, really? What are you doing?"

Anita Brick: And especially when she became the head coach, it was one thing to be the assistant coach, and maybe that's an interesting way to look at our lives and our professional lives. That we're really here, however you define this, to be the head coach, at least in terms of directing our careers and not everybody's going to like us for who we are.

Justin Bookey: Oh yeah. Once you truly step into yourself and make a bold step forward onto the stage, whatever that may be, you are never going to satisfy or please everybody. And that may hold some people back. That's just kind of the reality of life and work and art. Why not show the world? And then you'll attract the people that you want to attract and the others, eh, that's not going to derail you anymore. I start the chapter with the Oscar Wilde quote, "Be yourself, everybody else has already taken".

Anita Brick: That's right-

Justin Bookey: Which I love.

Anita Brick: The other thing that can be challenging is that the default that many people have is, "All right, it's really not my fault. I think that Justin needs to change." And Abuci wrote something around that. "I am all about taking action that leads to positive change. It's very easy to theoretically look and say, all change starts from inside when it would look so much easier if the other person changed. I want to make my default going in first." What is it that you do? Because you clearly take lots of responsibility in things that you share in your book. Maybe you can share the secret. What do you do to start there?

Justin Bookey: Oh, I remind myself, one of my mantras is all I can do is my best. That's the number one defensible position of all time for me is okay, I'm going to give you my best. I'm going to respond to criticism. I'm going to respond to guidance and my own instincts. I'm going to give it my absolute best. And if that's not good enough, then I can't feel bad and you shouldn't feel bad either. You shouldn't come down on me, especially if I'm willing to come back after a loss or a stumble and learn from that and then have a new best because I've learned from that. So that's number one. Give yourself permission to not be perfect. In raising two boys I made sure, I tried to make sure along with my wife, that they play team sports and individual sports because I think they're both great character builders.

Soccer is fluid and it's ultimate teamwork. It's a beautiful game, different positions, different responsibilities, but it's all one big flow and when executed right, wow, gorgeous, and you realize it's not about you. Otherwise though, whether it's table tennis or golf or even baseball in some ways, very individual. When you're at bat, you get all the glory, but you get all the responsibility and accountability when you strike out. To me, it's about all in and accepting the consequences, but not taking it personally because sometimes you're simply not good enough that day, and that happens to everybody. And sometimes you're not up to your boss's standards or the company standards or the sales quotas. That happens to virtually everybody, and that doesn't mean it's the end of anything though. You learn more from your losses than your wins. That's another Pong Principle.

Anita Brick: You're absolutely right. Okay, so here's something that goes along with that. You talk about reaching for excellence, not results, and this Boothie said, "I'm concerned that if I approach things your way, I'll lose my focus and I won't be as accomplished. Please help me understand how to apply this to my career goals. Thanks, Justin."

Justin Bookey: Pong Principle number 14, reach for excellence, not results. In a table tennis match, at any given point in a rally, you are playing the ball, not your opponent. What does that mean? Hopefully you've studied your opponent strategy wise, you know their weaknesses, their strengths, setup shots they want, the ones that they're uncomfortable. All that goes out the window when there's a ball flying at you at 30 or 70 miles an hour with a side top spin deep to your back end. You need to address what that ball needs in the moment. You can't override it with these lofty higher goals. You need to hit the ball with a certain spin and angle on your paddle just to get it back on the table in the right way. That's just an excellent shot. The result, you don't know if you're going to win the rally point or the match.

The excellence is at that very moment you've got to do the best you possibly can. That just means hitting the ball with the right force and the right angle. And so on a larger picture in leadership and business KPIs are critical. You've got to look out for the bottom line and you've got to measure progress in your role and in any industry. So it's not about ignoring results in this principle, it's about not letting the results be the first thing you aim for on a daily, weekly, or even quarterly basis, maybe. X amount of sales or customer satisfaction ratings, that's not a strategy. So if you only aim to satisfy that numerical benchmark, you'll probably be able to find creative ways of gaming the system, and that'll ultimately undermine the whole point of the number itself. That's what Seth Godin calls that speedometer confusion. It's like, "Wow, look at the speedometer. We're going 80 miles an hour." "Yeah, but we're going in a circle."
Anita Brick: You're absolutely right. Yeah.

Justin Bookey: And that's why I start that chapter with a quote, "Aim for the target, then you'll hit the target and the bullseye that gets you the trophy. Aim for the trophy and you'll miss the target. And that gets you nothing" Because the results are not a strategy. Winning is not a strategy. Winning will happen when you focus on excellence first.

Anita Brick: Victory is not the strategy. You're absolutely right. Okay, so here's an alum. She wants to up the game, but having a little bit of a challenge with that. "I'm all about taking action, but I tend to focus on incremental change. My mentor suggested that my next move needs to be a big, bold one. How would you advise someone to be bold without being reckless?"

Justin Bookey: It's critical off the bat not to confuse bold with sudden and risky and impulsive or reckless. A bold move that is well executed will require planning and strategy and highly focused execution, which is very different than just a reckless maneuver. So if you research it and you plan it enough, you can really pull off a stunning, bold move that's very effective. It may not even be that risky in the end, and maybe it's unprecedented. Maybe it's seen as out of character for you or your team or your organization. But you can put a lot of careful deliberate planning in that so it doesn't go off the rails and feel like it was just someone's spur of the moment decision.

Anita Brick: Yeah, that's why we like data plus boldness.

Justin Bookey: Yes.

Anita Brick: Yep. I think that that is a theme that runs through how you operate. Any great athlete we need to practice, and whether that is in a sport or whether it is in the field that we're in, we need to keep doing the basics and then some.

Justin Bookey: Oh, yes. It's just that routine and the practice that is so ingrained. Like my coach, Wei Wang, who's an Olympian, former national champion, singles and doubles in the US, she's amazing. She's also like a philosopher. We go very deep into what it means to win and put pressure on herself, what it means to lose where you want to be, what makes you comfortable or not. She grew up in China and was selected a very young age with the permission of her parents to go on this very intensive program for six or eight years. Six hours a day, six days a week.

And she has this database in her mind of different trajectories of the ball, literally probably millions different balls that have hit at her and she's responded to. And so she knows just instinctively when someone hits a ball before it even crosses over the net, she kind of knows where it's going to land, how fast it's going to spin, or how fast it is spinning and where her paddle needs to be. Most mere mortals, they wait for the ball to bounce and maybe react and then try to get a good shot. That's where practice comes in. You just load up your database of experience in anything. It frees up your mind to not worry about the reaction. It's already automatic. It frees up your mind to go to much higher levels. Oh, what happens after I hit this ball? And what happens after that? That's why they called table tennis, chess at 80 miles an hour.

Anita Brick: That's what I was just thinking. It is very funny. I don't know about you, but when I learned to drive it was 10 and two. That didn't last for very long, once I got those basics. And the same thing is true, whether you're an investment banker or you are in consulting or tech or whatever it happens be, those basics are there. And I think the people who falter lose some of that, people call beginner's mind. They keep thinking that they've got it, they're done. I've had people say that to me, "Well, I don't need to learn anymore. I've been doing this for a long time." It doesn't happen so much at Booth. People don't say that, but we all need to keep learning and the basics are our foundation. I really like what you had to say. Justin, do you have time for one more question?

Justin Bookey: Absolutely. And if I could give a quick addendum to that?

Anita Brick: Absolutely. Go for it.

Justin Bookey: Often learning is in a different direction that we would've imagined that can really help us. So Pong Principle number 13, and I talked to Neil deGrasse Tyson for this one, know the physics of what you're building, playing, or promoting. So as a table tennis player, there's a lot of physics. You played pool, there's a lot of physics, velocity, weight, spin, friction, everything. We all know that intrinsically the more we play the game, but you can also learn it explicitly, physics, and it can even help even more. So my first national championships, I was playing in Las Vegas, and my coach was like, "Oh, hey, just remember... ", her last words to me before I took off, "... first match or two, give some really fast topspin serves right down the middle."

And that's unusual because usually at higher levels you do short serves because they're harder to attack. It's like, "Oh, okay, that's interesting. All right." I didn't really think about too much, but I did try that and it worked. I got some very awkward returns. One or two sailed over the edge of the table for an easy point. I realized, oh, okay. Las Vegas is 2000 plus feet above sea level. LA is essentially sea level. The balls fly higher or fly further in the thinner atmosphere. So that's physics that I would not have thought about at all. Wherever I travel now, oh, is it humid? Is there air conditioning on? Anything that can affect this little 2.7 gram ball. Physics there, but also physics could be supply chain just in a general sense. Physics could be tax rates, physics could be fuel costs in whatever industry you're in. If you understand those and the mechanisms that affect it, you'll have perhaps a leg up on the competition who's only thinking about the immediate visible aspects of the industry and the job.

Anita Brick: I like that a lot. And I would add to that, that sometimes the physics is what's happening in the world that day. Are people focused? Are they distracted? It could be from supply chain to-

Justin Bookey: Weather, politics, a sudden death of a world leader, and there's so many things.

Anita Brick: Speaking of which, do you have time for one more question?

Justin Bookey: Absolutely.

Anita Brick: Okay. The way I like to bring things together is to get your best of, so when you think about creating agility, especially when there are a lot of things that are uncertain, what are three things you would advise someone to do to not just succeed, but to thrive?

Justin Bookey: Number one, establish your optimal ready position. We touched on that. In your career, short, medium, and long-term, ready position for tomorrow or next quarter for next decade. What do you need to be aware of for yourself, your team, for your organization? What is going to make you ready so you can anticipate and use agility to respond to all these different shifting circumstances. And do that not in the heat of necessity where, "Oh, we need to do something right now." Yeah, that can spur to action, but do it when you don't need to do it, and that way you can really be more deliberate about it. So that's number one, ready position.

Number two, challenge your internal scripts. So we all have our internal scripts about how things are going to play out. "Oh, so-and-so from accounting's coming over. They have an appointment with our department. I think they're going to have some issues with our travel expenses." You don't know that necessarily. Leave that slate clean until you have a little more data. There's organizational scripts, there's industry-wide scripts. If you get locked into any of these scripts prematurely, you're really cutting short your opportunities to have vision, short-term and long-term vision.
Number three, look for rhythms. Pong Principle number two, it's a rhythm game. There's obviously so much rhythm in table tennis. You have to know your own rhythm. Also, when to break it to gain a competitive advantage. In our own lives, the way we brush our teeth, the way we talk and walk and email and text, there's a rhythm there. So look for the rhythms and they will emerge. Even in chaos, rhythms will emerge, and then you can adapt them to rhythms you've seen before. There's commonalities there, and it makes it easier once you realize, oh, you know what? There's going to be a lot of familiar rhythms reappearing here we can tap into. So it's not just starting from scratch in a crazy new situation.
Anita Brick: Bottom line, they're all practical and actionable, and we're all about being practical and actionable. Anything else? I don't want to constrain you to three. If you have another one, you're like, "Yeah, I really need to say this." Go for it. And if not, that's good too.

Justin Bookey: Those three, I think are good representatives of some practical Pong Principles that we could talk about all day. But those are three good ones. I think that does it.

Anita Brick: Okay, good. Well, thank you for doing this. I know that you're very busy. You have multiple lives going on simultaneously, and so thanks for making time for us and really sharing your insight and wisdom with us.

Justin Bookey: Oh, it's been fun. And I would leave you with this as a cap off. We all have tables in life. Mine happens to be a table tennis table. It was an attorney's desk, and then a marketing tablet. Just make sure you identify the table you are playing at and the sub-table and the sub-table, because it can shift. And once you really are certain of the table you're playing at, you'll realize that those systems and those lessons that you're mastering and tools they can apply to almost everything else in your life and your business and your relationships. So identify the table and then gain control of it, feel comfortable with it, and it can help you with all different aspects of your life.

Anita Brick: I agree. Thank you so much. I am glad that we were able to do this today, and I know that listeners will learn and gain a lot from you.

Justin Bookey: Thank you so much for having me on, Anita.

Anita Brick: Thank you all for listening. This is Anita Brick with CareerCast at Chicago Booth. Keep advancing.