 You see, because everybody, despite being successful, even well-known, have another side beneath them. And indeed, whether it's Facebook or our persona that we meet when we meet people, it's always upbeat, everything is fine, fine, fine, perky, perky, everything is good, Facebook profile, there you are on the beach, smiling with the love of your life, everything is perfect. But of course, all of us are not quite like that. And so, this show, Odd Man Out, is about to speak my truth. I will not exaggerate a damn thing. I will not tell any lies. I will tell, and I'm not here to hype myself. I'm here to tell you the real side that is beneath all of us, but you're going to hear my truth. Forward is worth. I need to say this. It's the truth. You will never hear a better singer. I have played for hundreds of Broadway quality singers. You will never, ever hear a better singer. The performance was magnificent. First lesson number one for life. Most singers on Broadway sing much worse than her. The one thing she lacks, she's not very ambitious. She's not driven. And unfortunately in this world, talent is not enough. She is awesome. She really is. So, you know, sometimes if you're having issues in your career or in your life, sometimes what's missing is forcing yourself to dig deep and make that extra effort. Anyway, Ruthie tells me, what? There is this secret university in Manhattan that's called the Rockefeller University. It's got the highest concentration of Nobel Prize winners in the world. So, next time I ride again, I'm doing the night shift. I'm at Queen's College during the day. I'm riding in the cab. So, I'm driving around in the evening. I'm driving around Rockefeller University. 66th in New York, Manhattan. Nobody's there to pick me up. Second time I ride around the block, nobody picks me up third time. A very distinguished looking gentleman hails me down. Gets in the cab. And I say, of course, we're worried. Thank you, et cetera. And I say, by any chance do you work at the Rockefeller? May I ask what you do there? I'm a professor. May I ask what you're a professor? What do I know? I'm a kid. Anyway, he says, I'm a professor of physiological psychology. Really? I'm taking a course right now in physiological psychology. May I ask what your name is? Neil Miller. I say, I'm not letting you out in this cab until you give me a job. He's the guy who proved the biofeedback. And I really said, fortunately he had a sense of humor. He knew I wasn't serious. Anybody with a nerdy face like me, I was not exactly going to be, you know, too tough. Anyway, so he says, write me a letter of inquiry. Midnight, end of my shift, drop my cab, go back home. This was back in the day as a typewriter, Smith Corona, I don't remember what it was. And I go and I type out this letter. And I go write that in the mail before I go to sleep. I go to the mail box and I stick it in here. And guess what? I get to work there at the Rockefeller University as his research assistant. And the person learned chutzpah, a little bit of, as long as you're not hurting anybody, ask. And if somebody says no, ask somebody else. Important lesson. You won't lose a right kidney by asking. The worst thing they can do is say no. Be nice, behave well. Oh, I like the way you're sitting. Oh, very good. Please be nice. You're being too nice. Son, would you step outside, please? You need a new career. That actually happened except you were good. They were dancing and twerking. They were doing a whole deal, right? They were getting up on the table. I couldn't control them. I really couldn't. And the superintendent comes in and says, son, you need a career. Now what? I say, well, maybe I need more education. But I decided I'm going to do it big time. And I'm actually going to tell you the story. I delivered it. I wasn't supposed to, but I'm going to. Because it has a really good lesson in it. It's a little long-winded, but I think it's worth it. I ended up getting into the PhD program at UC Berkeley on a full ride. But the question is how? I told you I worked at the Rockefeller University with that famous guy? I'm still a student at Queens College at the time. And I decided, you know, I hate school. I want to try to get some credit for this Rockefeller stuff. So I go to the chairman of the psychology department and I ask them. I say, you know, I've worked for six months at the Rockefeller University. I'm wondering if I might be able to get some course credit. But walking down the hall, the Remington Hall of Queens College, and he asked me, he says, what did you learn there? And the thing that popped into my head was I learned that even at the Rockefeller University everyone is fallible. Even they make mistakes. He said, that's worth two semesters of A. And I swear that's exactly what happened. Now we get to the punch line. How did I get to UC Berkeley? Full ride. PhD program. My grades, I had a 33 GPA from Queens College. I was not some superstar. I had quite good SATs, but they were not off the charts. I had applied to 10 graduate schools. Seven of them reject me. One of them put me on a waiting list. And Berkeley gives me a free ride. Why? For some, for cock the reason. Thank you for laughing at that. They only counted your last semester's grades. My last semester where those two grades, the two semesters of A that I simply got from that one line, everybody makes mistakes. So the lesson there, my dear people, sometimes luck matters more than we want to admit. I never in a million years would have been admitted to Berkeley if it wasn't for two semesters of A because of one line. But it took a certain amount of chutzpah to go and ask for the credit and talk to the chair of the department. As long as it's ethical, please ask. The worst thing they can do is say no. But it's really true. You'll learn, I know there's this whole thing about modesty that's going to be too willful. But ultimately, as long as it's ethical, it's wise to ask, it's critical. And to not get despondent when you get rejected or get a no. As I think you're hearing, I have been rejected a lot. And you'll hear more of it. I still say eff it. I can't say it for the camera, but I say eff it, I'm going to try again. Try smarter maybe, try different maybe, but that's it. And off we go. We're going to bakeries. We're going to tide pools. We're going to all this great stuff. And then Mr. Nemko, do you have any idea of the liability you have exposed this school to? Do you have any idea how we could be sued that you took children out without permission slips? Son, you need a new career. True story. Odd man out to the end. You'll see. Okay, so now what the hell am I going to do? You know, I wasn't going to actually get a great letter of recommendation from this principal. Well, I saw it in my values. What do I care about? I really care about work. Why? Partly because I've always been a hard worker, but partly my father who was a Holocaust survivor, work was his healer. It enabled him to not dwell in the past all the time. And it also enabled him to support my mom and my sister and me. And so I figured if it was such a healer for even somebody who went through the Holocaust, helping people find their right livelihood, finding their right work was a worthy way to live my life. So I became a career counselor, and that's what I still am now. And, but I always, you know, if it's one thing that's getting the picture, if it's one thing that's giving me any success, it's that. So I said, how the hell can I incorporate piano playing into career counseling? Not exactly a natural fit. But I figured out a way. And that's another takeaway, my dear little people. If you have a passion that ain't going to make you any money, or you know, even if it is, there's always a way to wind it in, whether you're a photographer, take pictures of your coworkers, if you're an artist or pick whatever, find a way to weave it in. So what I do is, very often in our sessions, we get to a point where it requires some reflection and thought. So I'm going to play, I'm going to demo that, I'm going to pretend you're my client right now. I want you all to think of one thing that is missing in your life. It could be good job, it could be having the guts to tell your boss or coworker off, it could be a lack of love in your life, it could be lacking the guts to try to work on your relationship more, it could be the lack of a creative outlet, it could be a lack of spiritual meaning in your life, whatever it is, a hobby thing. Right now, I want you to think of the one thing that you're missing in your life that maybe it's time to get sick and tired of being sick and tired and changing. So I'm going to do that, but what I do is I play soft music in the background to get people out of their headspace so that it's more of a visceral, organic feeling. Who would like to tell us what is the one thing you would like to change in your life? Yeah, I'm looking for a new therapist and I've been looking for months and months and I'm trying not to feel discouraged. And what would be the one, if you were really trusting the Goddess within yourself, what is the most important attribute ultimately in that therapist? Safety. Okay, here's to your finding a safe therapist. And one more person. What is one thing you have not accomplished yet in your life or one hole in your life that you would like to fill? Yes. Let's wait for Donya to come by and she'll pass the microphone since you're in the middle. She'll pass it over to you. Letting go of imposter syndrome because I am creating my own career freelancing and consulting. I want to talk about that a little bit. As you can tell, even though I do have a PhD from Berkeley in Evaluation of Education and she's a superintendent of schools, she's a deeply critical of higher ed for the terrible job they do of creating people who are prepared to enter the workforce and so so many people do have the imposter syndrome. I'm not asking you to just say love yourself you're good enough as is. You may or may not be, I don't know you. But I am a huge fan of instead of stating you, let alone private you, considering what I call you, you, Y-O-U-U where you find the best mentors because we learn much more from interaction, the best hands-on experience, the best supervision, the best YouTube videos, the best articles, the articles are the most underrated resource because it's still the wisdom of somebody that you get in just two or three minutes for free from a Google search, webinars, or if necessary courses in person or online. There are free or near free online courses that are huge numbers that lead to user reviews on Udemy, Coursera, edX, Udacity. That's the cure for the imposter syndrome and then go forth and you will cure that disease. Okay, let's hear it for it. I've had over 5,000 clients at this point but one really stands out above all the rest with lessons to be embedded and so I'm going to tell you her story. I have all my clients in advance of coming in complete a very probing new client questionnaire so that instead of having my asking them 50 questions that cost them all that money, they're doing it on their own time, they can reflect it, it doesn't cost them anything. So, and I'm always the, you know, while they're downstairs in the waiting room in the half hour before, I'm reviewing their questionnaire. So I'm looking at this woman's questionnaire and she's interested in nothing. She's got a degree from Berkeley but she has no interest, no nothing except for singing and she had applied for 600 straight jobs and did not get one. And when I come downstairs into my living room, which is my waiting room, I'm looking at her and I'm not exaggerating it, I told you I would never exaggerate nothing. This is what she looked like when I came down and I was like, hi, Jeff. I'll just leave out her name. She looked exactly like this. Maybe I think I'm wrong about the tone. She just wouldn't look me in the eye. She would have liked this one. That was more like it. I could see why she applied for 600 jobs and didn't get any. I also could see she was, it sounded like she was really angry at me already for some reason. I figured the only way we're going to bond is the music thing. There's not one tinge of event. You won't believe the story. There's not a tinge of exaggeration. She sings somewhere from West Side Story. Her voice was in like a C. Like not 1,000. Like she said. And her posture, there were cadavers that were less stiff than her. I realized even when she's singing if she's like that, she ain't getting no job. So I say, okay, come on to my office. I have a computer at my office and I play YouTube video of Queen Latifah singing the same song, performing the same song and Barbara Streisand performing the same song. And they're owning the stage. They're all over the place. And I said, I want you, I have a room downstairs with a full-length mirror. I want you to go down there and I want you to pretend you're not you. You are them. I want you to perform. And I want you to practice by yourself. I'll do some paperwork while you're, you know, don't take your time, no rush. And when you're done, show me what you can do. 15 minutes later she calls me up and says, I'm ready. And again, no exaggeration. She wasn't great. She was a little better. Performing was a little better. Still kind of sucky. Now we're at the end of the session and I say, you know, it's getting dark. It's only two minutes drive from me. I'll drive you, no problem. She gets in my car and a block before the block station, if I ever had an inspiration, it was this. I turn around. She's, where are you going? What station's there? I said, you'll see. And I drive her up into the Oakland Hills. She's, what's going to happen? Are you going to cut me up into little pieces? I'm going to end up on the six o'clock news. You'll see. We're in the forest of the, up in Oakland Hills. And I said, get out of the car. She gets out of the car. We take a few steps and what do we see? In the clearing, we are looking down upon a 2,000 seat amphitheater called Woodminster, Summer Musicals Amphitheater. The stage is as big as a football field. And I say to her, part line, part, I don't know, just an inspiration. I knew she needed hope about everything. I said, you're going to perform on this stage someday. She looked at me like I'm crazy. But as it happens, a week later there's auditions and I had planted a seat. She goes auditions. She gets cast in the chorus. Now, it's a sport I have to tell you. She's African American. What was she cast in? She was cast as a Scottish villager in Brigadoon. And she likes to quip only in Oakland. What was the next role she was cast in? A Jewish villager in Fiddler on the Roof. She has been now in 15 shows. She is star. She's in rehearsal right now for the lead role. She's playing Snoopy in your Goodman Charlie Brown. Opening up. But the punchline is a lot of people who work as singers and musicians make no money. But that gave her the confidence to get a day job. She's making a solid middle-class living as a fundraising researcher for Children's Hospital. After a while, much as I like being a career counselor, I have this need to self-express, as you can see. And so, I started writing. I'm always in a rush. I'm a type A guy who's always intense. So I said, how in the hell can I reduce the whole career counseling process into a checklist? And I wrote something like the world's fastest career counseling approach or whatever it was. And I sent it to the Chronicle. A little checklist of skills and interest or whatever. I published it. And again, sometimes it's better to be lucky because the advertising people decided that they were going to have a section in the Chronicle called Career Search. And they didn't know who career writers were. So they said, okay, how about you? And so when you got your Sunday Chronicle, if you got it, the way it was wrapped, again, look, the first thing you saw was my picture. This picture. The Nazis use this picture in the posters. And for six years, I wrote this little column that appeared right in the front page of a section of the Sunday Chronicle. And then I had a client one time. I'm always using my client's source material. And a client comes in and he says, you know, I just had this interview with this woman and she was wearing these lovely shoes. And so I said, I shoes. And that kicked everything off and everything was great. So I decided I'd write it in my column. I wrote it like a parody about women in shoes. I have a Melvin Nemko here who also loves shoes, but I had the misfortune that there was a new editor of the newspaper. Patricia F. White. You know a column about women in shoes is extremely offensive. Do you think we have nothing on our minds except shoes? I cannot believe you wrote that column. Although I really do like these. They were on sale. But we do not write columns about women in shoes. Son, you need a new job. True story. After six years quite popular column. All it took was dare, offend on that Mason gender third rail. I was gone. And you think I would learn about short memory. Two years later I now, you know, I got another important lesson. When you get let go try to give the finger by going higher. So when I got let go from the Chronicle, what I did was I sent my clips to all these national publications. I said show you Chronicle fire me I'll work for and the Atlantic hired me as a columnist. But there is one more story I have to tell you. Because it may have the most important lesson that I've tried to and what I've said so far. And everything I've done here before is really special for just this show but there is this story I have told that every single one of the probably literally a thousand talks that I've given in my life. Because it is so powerful and important in its lesson. The year is 1939. The town is Sheriff's Poland. My father was living in the small you call it town with his parents. Nobody locked the door. And one day there was a knock on the door and it was two Nazis in black boots. And unlike in the movies they didn't yell. One was silent and the other whispered you will be out of your house but only but you can carry on your back by noon tomorrow or else. And the next day there were not two Nazis. There were 12. And my father's parents were put in one truck in the other. And my father never saw his parents again. And he and 11 men escaped from a tunnel. They built the tunnel escaped and lived in the black forest for a year thanks to the good Christians who helped him. Then he was dumped on a cargo boat and dropped in the Bronx without a penny to his name no money, no English no education not that that was so much good. Anyway nothing but the scars of the Holocaust tortures. What did he do? He took any job he could get no job was beneath him. He took a job sewing shirts in a factory in Harlem and what did he do at night? Did he say I'm exhausted. I'm a Holocaust survivor. I'm going to get drunk. He went to Roosevelt High School night school to learn English because he knew that if he just spoke his broken English and Polish he would always make minimum wage and that's where he met my mom who was an Auschwitz survivor as well doing the same thing and what did he do on Saturdays? Did he say hey time for Saturday morning football? No? He went to the owner of the factory and said can I take these shirts can I buy these shirts that I sewed for you during the week and sell them out of a cardboard box on the streets and he bought them for a buck and sold them for a buck fifty. What did he do with the money? He said I deserve a little pleasure I'm going to go and buy myself some cool stuff. No. He wanted to move my mom and my sister and me away from the real tenement that we lived on Evergreen Avenue in the Bronx under the elevated train 247 and the only thing he could afford for the first and last month's rent was the worst possible store in New York in the most dangerous neighborhood in Williamsburg it was 105 Moore Street even now even though Williamsburg is gentrified you look at the Google maps that you'll see on once it was tied 200 foot in the clothing store on one side there was a Puerto Rican deli fried pork intestines and on the other side was a live chicken market and the smell of the live chicken blood with the chicharones in my father's clothing store the store was so small that he couldn't store most of the merchandise inside so he had to store them on folding tables outside but on Saturdays the kids were out of school and they would come by and they would steal whole boxes of shirts and stuff but he couldn't afford a security guard so guess who was the security guard and if you think I look nerdy now you should have seen me then and the most memorable moment of my life was a day at that store when I was there and business was slow and there was a parking meter and I remember my elbow being on one side of the parking meter and my dad on the other side of the parking meter and I asked my dad I said daddy how come you so rarely talk about the holocaust and he stiffened which is something he rarely did and he said Martin the Nazis took five years for my life I won't give them one minute more he said Martin never look back always take the next step forward and all of us have had crap happen to us probably not the holocaust but you've had crap happen to you but I have as I said I've had the privilege of being career counselor to 5,000 people and one of the biggest differentiators from those who succeed and those who fail is not that they haven't made mistakes I've tried to share with you half I've made a million more mistakes but one of the big differentiators from the ones that are successful versus not I don't mean just financially but in the life well led one of the biggest differentiators is that the successful ones follow my father's advice they never look back they always take the next step forward and I can leave you with no better advice