 From Phoenix, Arizona, the Cube at Catalyst Conference. Here's your host, Jeff Frick. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with the Cube. We are in Phoenix, Arizona at the Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference. It's funny, it seems something about Phoenix that this is where all the great women in tech conferences are. We were two years ago for our first grace hopper, and it's really fun to return now to this one, the Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference, which a little bit smaller, about 400 people, their fourth year. But again, it's all about empowering girls, empowering women to think differently, to take charge, and to be more successful. So we're really excited for our next guest, Jim McCarthy, brought in to motivate the troops. So first off, welcome. Thank you. Thanks, Jeff. Your keynote was all about a career without regret, have great impact on what you care about. That is so topical right now, and especially as people talk about the millennials and kind of the younger generation coming up. They want to do things that they care about. Yeah, I think all the research indicates millennials more than maybe prior generations really are looking for work that has impact and has meaning. Is it because they can? You know, things are a little bit easier than they're not necessarily suffering to get by. Why do you think there's the change? And then once you've made that decision, how do you implement that in kind of your day to day life? Well, I'm not sure I could explain how the millennials are perhaps different. Maybe they just see some of the challenges in our world, like climate change, for example, and realize, wow, there's some very serious challenges we face. That might be why they're looking for more of an impact. But in terms of what to do to find more meaning in life, I always encourage people to do work that they really love, that they're passionate about. And in this conference, a lot of the women have talked about passion and what you're good at and really doing that, because that's what you're gonna be the most successful at. Right. That's a really common theme, right? I've heard that forever, colors your parachute. If you can find something that you get paid well and you're passionate about, but oftentimes there's a conflict, right? Sometimes it's just hard or people get stuck in something that they're not happy with, but they're not really willing to make the change. They're not really willing to make the investment or take the chance. So what are some of the things you tell people that are specific, actionable, that will help them make those changes to get someplace where they're feeling better about what they're working on? Well, so for me, part of my talk was, I talked about how I had a career in Silicon Valley, an early employee at Yahoo, and different internet companies. And then about three and a half years ago I was diagnosed with cancer. And that was a big wakeup call for me. And even though my health seems to be okay right now, it really sort of helped me realize that, wow, I'm not gonna live forever. And by embracing my immortality, I've started living much more fully. And I decided, okay, if I wanted to be a motivational speaker, I always wanted to and never had the courage to do it. I thought, okay, I'm not gonna live forever. I might as well dive into it, have the courage to try, even if I fail, but at least I'll be happy and I'm not living a life with regrets. So that was part of my workshop yesterday. So that's really interesting and a powerful story. I mean, we often hear when there's these, you know, kind of life-changing events, these big moments, that that is the catalyst. Does it take that to make the change? Can people do it without the change? I mean, we can't hardly get anyone to lift up their face out of email. I mean, it's, how do we do it without that? Or does it really take that? I mean, is that really what happens, whether it's yourself or a loved one or someone you care about? I mean, it's interesting, because that's powerful catalyst. Yeah, so I think for some people, it does take getting hit with a ton of bricks like that in order to really realize what they need to do and have the courage to do it and just realize, you know, I may not work out, but I'm just gonna go for it. In part of my workshops, I try to help people think about the mortality, think about if you were to die today, how do you feel about your relationships? If you were to die today, how do you feel about the work that you've done? And then I always have them write out action plans for, okay, based on what I wrote, based on what we discussed, what do you wanna change in your life and what's a deadline to do it? So that's kind of the process that I use in my workshops. So it's not just nice story and inspiration, but it's really, okay, how can we bring this back to, what am I gonna do with my career? What am I gonna do with my relationships? And there's also very practical things that people can do that I think will help them a lot. One is mindfulness to reduce their stress. One is affirmations in which you can actually train your brain to be much more positive thinking. And there's a lot of neuroscience behind that today which shows that you can actually sculpt your brain to have a much more positive attitude. So those are, and then the goal setting is important too. So these are, and then gratitude, I'm sorry, is another practice. So these are very, this is not just nice ideas, but actually daily practices you could do. Mindfulness and meditation, gratitude, and affirmations. These are all things that can really have a daily impact in a very positive way. Right, and I'm sure people say, Jim, that sounds great. I have, I printed it out, it's on my fridge, but geez, I wake up, I have 472 unread emails. The boss is calling me, how do I really actually do it? I wanna do it, but I'm just, I'm drowning in email. Whoever underneath email is a problematic, I'm glad the young kids don't use it, it's gonna die soon. But practically, what do you tell folks? What I tell people is if you meditated 10 minutes a day, that's about 1% of your waking hours. And that 1% would improve the other 99% of your waking hours. And just in the light, meditation used to be very weird and funky and new agey. And now you see more and more people saying, no, actually 10 minutes of mindfulness or meditation or breathing or whatever can make a huge positive impact on your health, both physically and mentally. There's all sorts of very serious scientific research, neuroscience, which underscores that. So if you invest 10 minutes of your day in being at peace, reducing stress, focusing on your breathing, then the other 99% of your day is gonna be calmer, you're not gonna be freaking out so much. You get an email in your inbox that you may not like, but you can say, okay, let me breathe, okay, let me think about this, okay, I don't have to do an immediate flame mail response. And then you're doing a lot less damage control in your life and you're being much more focused on how do I wanna spend my day. And so that is one way to reduce your stress and yet still get stuff done, the most important stuff done. It's interesting, I have an unwritten book that I always wanted to write kind of some of the things you said before about, don't forget your death bed, because at some point you're gonna be laying on your death bed. That would be the title of your book? You're gonna have those questions, yeah. Did I do what I wanna do? Did I spend too much time at the office or too much time at the beach or too much time with the kids or not? Well, if I can say there's a woman who wrote a book named The Top Five Regrets of the Dying. And regret number two was, I wish I had worked less. And every single man in her survey that she talked to said I wish I had worked less. And these are men on their death beds. But it applies to a lot of women as well. So I wanna shift gears a little bit back to your tech days. Looking at your background, obviously, some of our homework and you did a summer at McKenzie, you're kind of at the leading edge of business and smart people and you decided- You're too kind, Jeff. No, and then you decided I haven't finished a story yet. And then you go to San Jose Mercury News to work in Classifieds. Actually do marketing. To do marketing, but you're involved in Classifieds and I only bring up the Classifieds because it's interesting because then you left and went to Yahoo right at the main, I mean, really a pivotal time in the transformation of Classifieds moving from the newspaper to online. So you live kind of this digital transformation long before Uber and some of the other examples that are so often cited. So just love to get kind of your perspective on kind of digital transformation, it happened. This is 97, so what, 20 years ago? I can't believe it's 20 years ago. To now and then in the context of what you're doing now. So I graduated from business school in 1996 and went to the San Jose Mercury News and was doing marketing things. But right when I was graduating, I was like, oh geez, this internet thing is gonna be huge. And after a few months at the Mercury News, I said, look, I really wanna do something with internet. And they said, sorry, can't do that. Keep helping us sell papers. And I said, well screw this. And so I went to Yahoo in July of 1997 and I was employee number 258. And I was hired to be product manager for Yahoo Classifieds. So realizing, cause I remember sitting in the Mercury News at my computer and looking at, well, Yahoo has some like online classifies for autos and careers and this is way better than the newspaper. I can have long descriptions here and you can even see pictures of things. So I went to Yahoo Classifieds and out of that we created Yahoo Autos, Yahoo Careers, Yahoo Personal, Yahoo Real Estate. And yes, this absolutely, and then later there was the category killers whether it's match.com, whether it was Monster or Monster Board and on down the line. Remember Monster Park, one of the first sponsored stadiums back in the day after 3Com, excuse me, I'm sorry. No, so it's okay. So it was an amazing transformation. And it was one of these things where the internet just does things so much better. And you could say it also sort of helped destroy an industry, right? I mean, and I'm certainly a big believer in the power of local newspapers and investigative journalism. And that's really been damaged a lot from in the last 20 years. But sometimes it's like this technological imperative where the web is so much better, people have to figure out different business models, different ways to fund their journalism, different revenue models that work. But I mean, it's just amazing to see what's going on with how Classified has developed, e-commerce has developed, I worked later on Yahoo auctions and shopping and we can talk about that more. Yeah, even a friend of mine works at the Yellow Pages. I was like, dude, you probably need to get a new job. Really? It's YP.com now. Well, it turns out they have a huge online business, which is good for that. No, it's still all like, come on, need to get out of that. So anyway, it's just interesting. The digital transformation that we're under now has happened over and over again. We just happen to be kind of in the current iteration. Sometimes people forget that there was a time before Google. It's called Alta Vista or Webcrawler, if you want to go back even further. Anyway, we regressed. Jim, what are you working on now? What are you looking forward to the next six months? Any special projects? You just travel in the country and spreading good words? I travel the country and I travel internationally doing my workshops. So basically they're workshops where I teach companies how to build happy, high performance teams. Awesome. And in the workshops, some of them are a little bit more, much more sort of inspirational and about mortality and what you want to do for life purpose. I have a workshop called Happiness Workshop, Keep Calm and Get Stuff Done. And then there's, so there's ones that which are much more goal-setting, which are inspirational. And yeah, and I travel and teach companies how to, whether it's an hour workshop or a six hour workshop, that's what I do. Well, Jim, thanks for stopping by. It's a great story and I think it's just so important. You know, there's a lot of great inspirational stories out there, but really, you know, how do you help people give them actionable things that they can put on the fridge, put on their calendar. And have it in their daily routine. Right, and do it, right? And change behavior, because it's hard to change attitude. It's really hard. The way you do it is you change behavior, that you can actually change. Thanks for spending a few minutes with us. Thank you, Jeff, very kind of you. Absolutely, Jim. Thank you. Jim McCarthy, I'm Jeff Frick. We are in Phoenix, Arizona at the Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference. You're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching.