The Five Thieves of Career Success

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 to be speaking with Doctor John Izzo. He is a bestselling author of six books, including the one we're going to actually chat about today. Amazing book, The Five Steves of Happiness. Over the last 20 years, he has spoken to over a million people, taught at two major universities, and advised organizations like DuPont, RBC, Kansas Airlines, and the Mayo Clinic.

John is frequently featured in Fast Company, The Wall Street Journal, and CNN. John is a Distinguished Fellow at the East-West Institute, a nonpartisan think tank working on international security issues, including food, water and energy security.

John Izzo: Great to be here with you having this conversation.

Anita Brick: To kick us off as a weekend student. I think this is a really interesting question. And I thought about it myself, actually, when I was reading the book. In the book, you talk about thieves as filters that shape our perspective. My filters tend to decrease my confidence and increase my self-doubt in achieving a really big career goal. What can I do to shift these filters to my advantage?

John Izzo: It's a really good question. The whole book is really about these filters, the way that we see the world. And one of the things I talk about, you know, a thief can only rob you if you don't recognize it. So one of the first things is when you realize that these self-doubts are not your friend. And it may sound like a silly thing to say, but the first thing is, when you have any thought pattern in your life that is subversive to your happiness or success, it's very important to recognize it for what it is.

And then you have to make a decision. Am I going to indulge that thought? Am I going to allow that thought to kind of take up residence in my mind, in my house of my life and realize that you have the power to stop it? So if I have those self-doubting ideas, I ask, is this thought, my friend?

And the answer, of course, is no. The second thing is, do I have the power to stop it? Yes, of course I do. And then the third thing is, what am I going to replace it with? So you have to have at the ready a different thought pattern. What's the thought pattern that I want to actually embrace? That would replace this one that I know is not my friend in terms of my happiness and success.

This is true with all of these filters. All of these mindsets are realizing. First, we have to recognize them. Second, we have to stop them, and then we have to replace them with something that is a more hopeful filter for us to.

Anita Brick: Very, very good point. One of the evening students shifted responsibility in a way toward others, rather than it being an internal change, which I think is very common. He said, how do we prevent others from getting in the way of taking our happiness and.

John Izzo: Success so easy to shift responsibility outside of ourselves? And you know, my book before this one, Stepping Up. The subtitle was How Taking Responsibility Changes Everything. I talked about this whole body of research that shows that when people take personal responsibility, when we really focus on what we can do in any situation, we are in fact more successful for being happier, less stressed, more admired, and have better relationships.

Sometimes the themes of our success are in fact other people. And this is why it's so important that in our careers and in our lives, that we're very careful about the people that we spend time with. So I think it's actually a good question. Are these people that I'm spending a significant amount of time with, or are they the friends of my happiness and success, or are they getting in the way of it, or are they robbing it?

In some ways, we ought to spend time with others who make us happier and more successful. The personal responsibility piece comes in just like the Internal Thieves. I can make a decision not to let that person impact me, either by not spending time with them, or even by saying, I'm not going to let that person impact my happiness. I'm going to focus on what I can do. This place of self responsibility puts you back into what can I do about whatever's in front of me, instead of what others need to do, which you can't control anyway.

Anita Brick: This goes along with a question I can be a student asked, and he said, I respect that you believe that a change in an organization or even in society, starts with a change in the individual. How does this work in practical and measurable terms?

John Izzo: You're the one person you have control over, so start there time and time again. In my career, you know, I've worked with about 500 companies all over the world. I've gotten the privilege to see the impact that one person can have, or a few people can have in a company, and that can happen because they spoke up in a constructive way.

It can happen because they ask the right question at the right time. The other thing, the most admired people at work, or what I call the constructive irritants and the research supports that. So not the yes people, but the people who constructively speak up and challenge things. You know, one of the most practical things we can do is to speak up in a constructive way to be the sand in the oyster, if you will. Those people are often not only quite successful, but they wind up changing the system.

Anita Brick: It's a very good point. I think it takes a lot of courage to stand up against the tide of how things are normally done.

John Izzo: It does take courage at times. In the book Stepping Up, I interviewed a lot of CEOs, and one of the things they said to me is, these people who speak up and challenge things that are a real pain in the butt, but they add so much value to the organization that I can't ignore them. It's a really important point, right?

This is how leaders tend to see people who do that. You know, it doesn't have to be a negative thing in any way. I think of interface carpeting. Ray Anderson, who became one of the most socially responsible CEOs in the modern era, had a big impact on not only his industry but on many CEOs across the world in terms of sustainability.

But the interesting thing is his own journey to sustainability began because a few salespeople in the organization noticed that customers were starting to ask questions about the sustainability of their products, and they took the initiative and went to Ray Anderson and said, Ray, I think we need to form a task force to look at how we can become a more sustainable company and respond to these questions that people are asking us.

And because they made that request, Ray Anderson went on his own quest to learn about sustainability because he hadn't even, frankly, ever given it a thought. And he warned of having a massive conversion that influenced hundreds of companies all over the world, including, of course, his own. But it began with a few salespeople making a suggestion. So it's not always even challenging in a negative way. It's just being the person willing to bring the idea to disturb the status quo of it.

Anita Brick: Well, it's a good point. And he created a much larger company as a result. He's a really extraordinary leader. I mean, and anyone listening, if you're interested in sustainability, he was an amazing example of how to grow big and become even more sustainable.

John Izzo: In the five years after Anderson had that conversion again, rooted in some people within his company and much lower levels who influenced him, the stock grew 500% to continue on this journey. That again began with a few individuals and continues to be one of the sustainability leaders in the world.

Anita Brick: To shift gears a little bit, but kind of stale along the same point. And Ellen had a question about a work environment where questioning is not really valued. And he said at work, safety is valued more than experimentation. Comfort. These that you talk about are alive and well at my company. How can I chase it away without creating fear and anxiety on my team?

John Izzo: Yeah, well, let's talk about the comfort seat first and the comforts. This is the part of us that gets wedded to routines that maybe worked for us at one time, but no longer work. And that can be as simple as one I share in the book in terms of my own life in high school, I had, you know, very bad acne, and I was in a school full of jocks, and I was kind of the smart kid, and I learned to play it safe long after that pattern was no longer necessary in my life, but I still played it safe for years.

This happens in companies as well. You know, most of the patterns that exist in a company exist because at one time it helped the company be successful. But as the world changes around it, just like the world changed around me, those patterns now become a robber of our success, even though at one time they enabled it first. This is something that happens naturally.

We get led to patterns and then they no longer serve us. I think one of the most powerful things you can do is to ask good questions, because questions are less confrontational, and also to ask for a chance to experiment. So look, I know we tend to do things this way around here. I wonder if we could try this in this small area.

Could we pilot something? Often companies that get in this play, it's safe mode. You have to try it in small ways. Suggest an experiment, ask a question rather than saying, you know, I don't think this works for us. Has anybody wondered what might happen if we did this? The other answer is that if the company is so wed to its old patterns, maybe you should find another company. You know, that is open to ideas.

Anita Brick: Right.

John Izzo: So we got a grant that that old is an option. But ask good questions, challenge the pattern. Also just try to demonstrate a different way of doing things. If one leader can demonstrate that something's working in a different way of doing things, it often gathers attention in the company. So action often is more powerful than direct confrontation.

Anita Brick: I agree there were two questions related to the idea of being wedded to accomplishments and alumni, and I connect success to what I am able to do and accomplish in your book. You seem to say this approach can actually derail a person. What advice would you have on how to unbundle success and accomplishment?

John Izzo: Do you know one of the thieves that you know? I talk about The Thief of Control? We have like a little online survey. People can take it at Five Thieves book.com. 51% of the people. Their biggest thief is the thief of control. And the control is the belief in the desire that we can control all the outcomes of our life.

It's not that having intentions or goals is not good, so that should be a relief for all the Type-A people. Okay, to have intentions. It's okay to have desires. It's good to have goals. But when we believe that achieving those outcomes is the source of our happiness, or when we believe that we can control everything so that the exact outcome we want winds up happening, that's when we become disappointed.

That's when we become unhappy. For example, So I might have the desire to get a certain position in a company. I obsess that I will only be happy if I get this particular position, then someone else gets chosen and that door is now closed. If I've wed my happiness to that outcome, which I couldn't control, I did everything I could.

I interviewed, I networked, I built relationships in the company. But that outcome didn't happen. Now the question is, can I embrace what's happening and say, what should I do now? Instead of saying, oh well, I can't be happy unless I get that position, this obsession with particular outcomes is really what gets people becoming unhappy rather than having intentions and desires. Happiness is not wed to the outcome. This is the secret.

Anita Brick: That is very interesting. And there was a weekend student, she said. I'm transitioning into product management from a technical role. I have three specific companies in mind, and I feel that I will have failed if I don't receive an offer from one of them. How can I expand my perspective without losing focus on the specifics of my goal?

It sounds like in part, happiness is tied or success is tied to those specific companies, but I'm happy to hear that she wants to figure out how to expand that perspective. So how can someone expand their perspective without losing the focus on the specifics of the goal?

John Izzo: Great example to really talk about this seat of control retention without attachment, attention without tension. It's okay to have identified these three companies. I tell young people all the time, who you work for is as important as what you do. So I'd rather work for a great company in a role that wasn't exactly what I want to do and navigate to a role I want to do within a great company, then go work for a crappy company that I don't want to work for in a role that somehow seems ideal to me.

This person's instincts are very good. What I would suggest is don't get obsessed about those three companies because you can't completely control that, you know? So if you're going to tie your entire happiness to I'm going to have to work for those three companies, maybe it's not in the cards. A way to expand their thinking is to think, what are the qualities of the company that I would like to be a part of?

And then to think about it? There may be many companies that have many of those qualities, and they may not have all of them, but if I know what the qualities are I'm looking for, then if an opportunity shows up, that's not on my radar screen. And I have a couple of examples in my own career where the detour became the main road.

So here's my point. If I'm thinking about the qualities of the companies I want, then let's say another company comes up where there's an opportunity. Not one of those three companies. I've then got the screen to look at, well, you know, eight of the ten qualities I want that company has. So I'm not wed to those three companies.

I guarantee there are more than three companies that have the qualities that person is looking for. They just found these three companies. So the more clear I am on the qualities, the more when the detour shows up. I'll be able to know whether it's the path I want to take.

Anita Brick: That makes sense. There was an exact MBA student. This is a really interesting question, he said. I've been taught to understand my priorities and position before entering any negotiation. What would you recommend that I do to expand my perspective on what a win looks like, and how to get past the fear of embarrassing myself and my company. I would really appreciate your insight.

John Izzo: This gets at a couple of important things. You know, one of the other thieves is the thief of coveting, and this is the thief that really wants us to believe that life is a contest. And he wants us to constantly compare ourselves with others and use others as the reference point for our happiness. One of our fears of failure relates to how we might be seen by others, and how we might compare with others, so it's safer not to take any risk because at least you're a winner.

One of the things I've discovered is people don't regret their failures. When I wrote a book called The Five Secrets You Must Discover Before You Die, I interviewed all these people from 60 to 106 who had been identified as the happiest, older person someone knew, and there was a PBS and Biography Channel TV series we did. But one of the interesting things that I found in interviewing these people with 18,000 years of life experience was that almost no one regretted their failures.

Almost no one regretted their embarrassment. Almost all the regrets had to do with not trying things. So one thing I would say to this student is stop worrying about regretting your failures. Stop worrying about embarrassment, which is comparison fear. Start thinking it's better to stretch myself and make some mistakes and to learn from those mistakes than it is to play it safe. Far more people will regret playing it safe and not taking a risk than the opposite. I found it very freeing to know that people didn't regret their failures.

Anita Brick: And you could do it incrementally. I mean, you can choose to stretch yourself and even have a setback or failure in a small way, in a lower risk way. So you're not putting everything on the table and creating your first big failure, which flattens you.

John Izzo: Yeah. You know, one of the fascinating things about research about successful entrepreneurs, we think successful entrepreneurs are massive risk takers. But it turns out most successful entrepreneurs are actually calculated risk takers. They take risks they know they can recover from, and they're not actually usually taking massive risks all at once. So I think this point about increments is really important.

Anita Brick: This is something that I think few people talk about. And yet many people feel and it's this combination of envy and resentment. This weekend, a student says, I feel that envy and resentment are near and not so dear in my heart. What advice would you have for me? I really want to celebrate a colleague's success, but I feel a promotion should have been mine.

John Izzo: Yeah, you know this. Is that so? Such a really important thing. And I again, in the book I talk about in The Thief of Coveting, pretty extensive around this thing we have to do is practice gratitude for things we might covet or be envious of, and it's actually something you should practice every day. So you come into work and someone does a good presentation.

You do a good presentation, they get a compliment. You don't go out of your way to practice being grateful and celebrating the success of others. Now there's two reasons to do this. The first is because you will in fact become a more grateful person. The second thing is you will actually be more admired and liked by others. It'll actually grow your career because we want to be around people who celebrate the success of others.

Now, in the case I don't get a promotion, there is a very practical thing I have to do as well, which is remember the control thief? I can't control the outcomes. There's lots of things that happen outside of my control. They can ask, what can I learn that's within my control from the fact that this person got the promotion instead of me.

So instead of going to a place of resentment, go to a place of learning. It's a very different place to go to. I'm going to celebrate this person's success. Still, my intention is for me to have gotten that promotion. So I'm going to try and not be in a place of resentment or a place where I feel slighted to say that they chose that person.

What can I learn from that? What can I learn about who they are, how they behave, what their brand is in the company? I'm back in a place of gratitude and learning rather than resentment and covetousness, which will not help you. You won't learn anything and you won't be liked. So now you have a double whammy and you'll be unhappy.

Right now you got a trifecta. I'm unhappy. I'm not liked and I didn't learn anything versus I'm going to be like, I celebrate their success. I'm going to feel better because I'm in a place of gratitude. And third, I'm going to learn something. So which would you rather do?

Anita Brick: Well, yeah, it is fascinating. There's a professor here, Ron Burt, and he talks a lot about brokerage. And so when we are in a position where we can broker, we have access to way more knowledge, opportunities, support and so on. If we fall into this I'm going to be unhappy. I am not going to express gratitude. And it's certainly not me.

So I'm not going to learn. There's nothing to learn here. It's the other person. You get shut out of that brokerage role, and when you get shut out, it makes the person even more resentful. I totally agree, the research I've done is when you actually express gratitude to others in ways that you mentioned, and probably in other ways as well.

You feel better neurologically, you feel better, and others around you, you want to be around you. And so more opportunities usually arise from that. I like how you put that in a moment. It feels really bad and it's easy to go to that envy resentment place, but it only causes more damage. You just have to do it a little bit. It's not an all or nothing thing.

John Izzo: You have to train your mind for happiness, and I think you have to train your mind for success. To take gratitude as an example. It is painful at first to be grateful when you'd like to be covetous, to be grateful on the days when you might not have a lot to be grateful for. But I'm still going to write down those three things I'm grateful for.

To be in a place of learning instead of resentment. Just like going to the gym, you have to work through that time when it feels awkward. All learning is that way. A time when you are consciously competent or consciously incompetent before the unconscious competence comes in and it just becomes a habit or a way of life. But many people quit before they train themselves for this, and then you get stuck in almost this loop of a pattern that is neither productive nor a source of happiness for you.

This idea of having to train yourself for happiness, train yourself in these patterns of success, and therefore working through the uncomfortable period where you don't want to go to the gym, where you don't want to write down what you're grateful for, you don't want to celebrate the success of that other person. You've got to do it even if you don't feel like doing it. That's how you train yourself.

Anita Brick: Got it? Do you have time for a couple more questions?

John Izzo: Yeah, yeah.

Anita Brick: Of course. Okay, cool. I think this is a training question as well. So there is an exact MBA student who said, what do you say to those of us who deal with guilt for trying to balance success and happiness? For example, we feel like we have to sacrifice our personal happiness in order to be successful.

John Izzo: Yeah, all of us have to know what happiness is for us. I mean, one of the most important things in anyone's life is to know what happiness means for you. At the end of your life, you know you're going to be more concerned about whether you were happy than whether you were successful. I'm pretty sure about that. But everything in life is about balance.

It's about balancing choices. Someone said to me years ago, nobody has a time problem. They just have a priorities problem. And at the time, I kind of resisted it. But then I thought, well, there's a lot of truth to that. It's an artificial duality to think we have to choose between happiness and success. But all things being equal, happiness is going to be more important to you than success.

Success is often about this comparison. Trying to achieve something to prove something to someone else. Here's the real kicker. It turns out that the research in positive psychology is pretty clear now that happy people are more successful than unhappy people. But success is not a good predictor of happiness. This is a really important piece of research for everyone to remember.

So if happy people are more successful, then focusing on what makes me happy is a pretty good source of being successful. But achieving something will not necessarily bring me happiness. And again, the evidence is pretty clear on that.

Anita Brick: Got it. I want to just clarify something because you talked about balance, and I personally don't believe in balance. And I don't think an exact MBA student who is in this very intense program and in a very busy job and often with a family, can find balance, at least during that time. But I do like what you said about priorities.

So if we can replace balance with priorities, the priorities may change. They may change moment to moment. They may change from one month to the next. Then you can find a new equilibrium, which I think is maybe a better way of talking about finding the happiness success configuration rather than balance, because I don't actually believe that balance exists.

John Izzo: I completely agree, it's really about values. Alignment. It's about the way I'm living my life right now, in alignment with my values and what's important to me and what makes me happy. And there are times, of course, that those will shift in one direction or another in terms of where I'm putting my priorities, and sometimes I'm sacrificing in the short term one value for the attainment of another value that matters to me.

And I think the most important thing is just staying current with yourself. You know, the other thing I discovered when I interviewed those people for the Five Secrets book was that about 90% of the happiest people people knew had one activity hardwired into their life every day, which was reflection, which was just asking, is this working for me this last week, this day?

What do I want to do today and this idea that I think rather than trying to find the perfect balance, what we have to do is continually check in with ourselves so that we wind up being in alignment, because it's ultimately about alignment. This is why also this thief of coveting is so dangerous, because if we're not careful, we can live someone else's definition of success.

I remember years ago being on an airplane and meeting this other speaker, who was an acquaintance, and he had told me he had done 110 events that year. And like, suddenly my competitive thing came in, right? Like, oh my God, I'm not doing 110 events here. And then like I thought, well, I don't want to do 110 events a year.

There's all these other things that matter to me. I was happy for him. For him, his definition of success was doing more events than anyone else. But for me, that wasn't my definition of success. So it is very important to know what your definition of success is. Only way to do that is to stay current with yourself. Keep checking in. Does this feel right? Is it working for me and the alignment issues will emerge on their own? If you're asking that question.

Anita Brick: Excellent point, and you've given us a lot of things to think about and I think in a very fresh way. Thank you for that. If someone wanted to create greater career success and happiness, what are three things they could do starting right now?

John Izzo: First ask, how can I help others? What do I want to serve outside of myself? I talk in the book about the thief of conceit, believing the world is built around you. The oppositional energy to conceit is service. Consistently. I've seen in my career those who aim to serve others, those who have a purpose beyond just personal success, but actually have something they want to impact and want to serve others consistently do better in their careers, and are happier. The second thing is challenge patterns that are in the way of your success, whether it's your inability to deal with conflict because you grew up in a family where conflict wasn't okay, or whether it's playing it safe, continue to challenge patterns that are in the way and listen to feedback that others give you. Third thing is stop judging your success by comparison.

Instead, ask, is this who I am and celebrate the success of others? Rather than believing that life or career is a zero sum game. And finally, forget the idea that one particular outcome is where you're supposed to end up in your career. And if I've learned anything in my career, I mean, I had three careers I considered doing when I was in university.

I've not been in any of those three careers. I've wound up in an interesting way, marrying all the careers in the work that I do now. And I often think if I had become obsessed with achieving one of those particular career patterns, I would have missed out on so much richness in my own life. So don't get wed to some particular outcome.

Instead just ask, what are the qualities I want in my work life? What are the things I want to impact? What do I love to do, and where can I do those things and navigate towards those things? So those are some things I think people can do that would really have an impact for them.

Anita Brick: This is great. You are clearly both an innovator and a pioneer, but it's very, very clear that all of this is authentic for you and that gives it even greater impact and credibility. Thanks for mashing those three things together and creating a really authentic career in life.

John Izzo: Well, thank you and thanks to the good work you're doing. And I do hope, you know, if people get the five themes of happiness, they will find stuff not only for their career, but that will make them happy and therefore ultimately more successful. It's a great path if you can just navigate across it and just keep in mind what you want to do.

Anita Brick: Great, John. Thanks again.

John Izzo: You're welcome. Thank you.

Anita Brick: You know, if you are looking for some additional information about what John is doing, his great website is DoctorJohnis.com. And thank you all for listening. This is Anita Brick with CareerCast at Chicago Booth. Keep advancing.