Erika Ayers Badan
Appearances
Chief Change Officer
#182 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part One
I'd love to teach. Yeah, that's what in the, what are my future plans? I would love to teach. I think Principles is an incredible book. It's also really dense. You have to be awake when you're reading it. And I hope for this book was that it was more conversational and in some ways lighter and more digestible. But I love, I too love Principles. I thought it was a really powerful way to think about
Chief Change Officer
#182 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part One
building yourself and building a company.
Chief Change Officer
#182 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part One
Oh, I think this book is quite different for a bunch of reasons. Before I wrote it, I went to the bookstore and I went on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and I went and looked at all... I went and looked at the business book article aisle and... I really found two things. The first was a lot of books written by people who were professing to be perfect.
Chief Change Officer
#182 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part One
So their heads were on the cover and it was all about me and my perfect career. What I've accomplished, aren't I so great? And the second majority of the books I found were that they were much thinner, much smaller, and much more prescriptive where you're supposed to do a very small set of things to unlock yourself and unlock your career.
Chief Change Officer
#182 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part One
And I left the aisle thinking, well, I'm not perfect and I don't have a three step habit that is going to unlock everything for anybody, including myself and my career. What I do have is the receipts where I'm a CEO. I'm in the middle of my career. I have made every mistake in the book. I have learned an incredible amount. I have tried and endeavored to do a whole lot.
Chief Change Officer
#182 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part One
And I wanted to speak to people that what I would call in the mid chapter. So it's not people who don't know where to get started. And it's not people who've made it all the way to the end or the top. It's really for the people who are getting up on a Monday morning or a Wednesday morning and they're trying to make the most of their life and they're trying to make the most of their work.
Chief Change Officer
#182 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part One
And for me, work changed my life. And I really think work is where we spend the vast majority of our time and effort and energy today. And I wanted to write a book like a conversation with someone who is still going through it, who has messed up a whole lot, who has done a whole lot and who is kind enough to shake you, but also to give you a hug and say, you can do this.
Chief Change Officer
#182 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part One
So it's like a friend talking to you? I think so. I think it's written honestly. It's told from my experience, but it also leaves it to the reader to make their own conclusion about what path they want to take and what course they want to choose.
Chief Change Officer
#182 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part One
That's great. Yeah, I want it to be... Just very direct. I'm a direct person and I wanted to be direct about not only the things that I feel like have done well and that I've done well, but really also the things that I've been insecure about and the things I haven't done well and the lessons I've had to learn the hard way.
Chief Change Officer
#182 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part One
And I really wanted it to be a good read, but also a book that makes you think about what would you do? And how do you think about things? And how do you feel about things? I think to the point of nobody cares about your career, I think a lot of times people get into a job because it's what they're supposed to do. I talked to someone recently, a college senior, and he goes to Princeton.
Chief Change Officer
#182 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part One
And so I said, hey, James, what are you going to do? What do you want to do after college? And James said, I go to Princeton, so I have to go work in finance. And I was like, why do you think that? Just because you went to Princeton doesn't mean you have to go work in finance.
Chief Change Officer
#182 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part One
But I think a lot of times people get caught up in what everyone else thinks they should do or what everyone else thinks they should be. And the reality is that nobody's really thinking about you that much. And you should do what makes you happy and tell everyone else to jump off a cliff. So the book is hopefully motivating to get people to do that.
Chief Change Officer
#182 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part One
Sure. So let's start with caring, right? It's so simple. The idea that you should care and that it's important to find something to care about in your day, whether you're at home, whether you're raising kids, whether you're a career person, whether you're a bus driver, like you, you gotta find a reason to care. And I think that, The people who care at work are the best people at work.
Chief Change Officer
#182 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part One
And it's not about how intelligent you are. It's not about how pedigreed you are. It's not about how experienced you are. The sheer
Chief Change Officer
#182 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part One
act of caring about something can change everything so I really start there as if you don't care people will see through it in a nanosecond and it will prompt other people not to care about you so I often think that the things that can make us most successful or hold us be most detrimental in holding us back come down to really simple things caring being one of them
Chief Change Officer
#182 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part One
So I can't overstate that enough. I think the other four, it's really about just making the most of your every day. And I know that also sounds simple, but I talk a lot in the book about having a vision and for having a vision.
Chief Change Officer
#182 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part One
an idea in your head and your heart about who you want to be or what you want to accomplish or where you want to go that gets you out of getting lost in all the minutia or the office gossip or the problems at work. One of the things I talk a lot about in the book is your job isn't perfect and neither are you, but you both can be great. And I spend a lot of time thinking about that.
Chief Change Officer
#182 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part One
Every company has problems. Every person has problems. Every company has things that it's overcome or trying to overcome. Every person has things that they've overcome or trying to overcome. Every company has that thing deep down inside that's broken and it needs to fix. People are the same way. So...
Chief Change Officer
#182 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part One
I really do believe that just by getting started and by doing something and having a commitment to yourself of a place you want to get to or something you want to be, that can make all of the difference in how successful you are or not.
Chief Change Officer
#182 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part One
Our childhood, if I had to describe it, was you could read, you could play sports, you could hang out with your friends, but you'd have to go find something to do with yourself. You could stack wood or do chores and play. That was pretty much it. So my brother and I shared, we didn't have a TV for a long time and then we got a TV and my brother and I shared an hour of TV a week between us.
Chief Change Officer
#182 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part One
And I always say that's where I learned how to negotiate because my brother and I really had to duke it out to figure out what we were watching. And ultimately we had to learn that if we both compromised to watch something we both wanted, instead of getting a half hour each, we could get a full hour of television. I also learned my mother used to block MTV, which MTV was huge when I was a kid.
Chief Change Officer
#182 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part One
So I would just call the cable company every month and say that I was my mother so that I could get the MTV turned back on.
Chief Change Officer
#182 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part One
Okay, great, Vince. So I'm Erica. I live right around New York City. I work in New York City. I worked in New York City for, I don't know, 15 years, almost 20 years. I grew up in a really small town in New England. I was born in Colorado, and I'm best known for my last job, which I spent a decade building a company called Barstool Sports, which in the American market is one of, if not the most
Chief Change Officer
#182 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part One
wild, fast-growing, creative, dynamic, disruptive companies in sports and media and entertainment in the past two to three decades. So I'm most known for my time at Barstool Sports. Prior to that, I worked at a lot of really big companies like Microsoft and Yahoo and AOL. I worked at a bunch of startups in the fashion space, in the music space.
Chief Change Officer
#182 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part One
In the entertainment space, I started my career thinking I wanted to be a lawyer, and I didn't. I had been laid off. I was a receptionist. I had a bunch of career changes. I had a very meandering career path. I worked at a bunch of ad agencies. I've worked all over the world. So I've had, I would say, a really unique career in that I've really tried a lot of different things.
Chief Change Officer
#182 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part One
I've worked at a lot of different places. I've learned from a lot of different types of people, all in pursuit of really becoming a better person and a better leader and a better executive and a more interested whole being. And I don't know if that works, Vince, but that's how I would describe it.
Chief Change Officer
#182 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part One
Yes, I had gotten an internship. I went to a liberal arts college in Maine in the U.S. and I had gotten an internship in Boston. And most of my family are teachers and my parents were teachers and educators. My dad was my principal when I was in middle school, which is probably a story for later. And I felt my parents really sacrificed so that my brother and I could go to very good schools.
Chief Change Officer
#182 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part One
And I felt a very significant sense of obligation to do something with that. I feel that my parents had sacrificed everything. themselves to give us opportunity, and I felt a very big debt of gratitude on that. And when I had gotten this internship, it was at Fidelity Investments. It was in Boston, Massachusetts, and I loved it. And I got this bug to work in a corporate environment.
Chief Change Officer
#182 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part One
No one else in my extended family works in a corporate environment, but I got the bug. And it made me think, oh, I want to go to law school and I'd like to get a business degree. I never ended up doing either of those things. But what I did do is set out to be very successful in the corporate world and to do it the best way I could, which was really learning on the job and as an apprenticeship.
Chief Change Officer
#182 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part One
So Nobody Cares About Your Career is something someone told me once, Vince, probably 15 years ago, and it always stuck in my head. And when I was writing the book, it was the title of one of the chapters. And to be honest with you, I never thought about it as the title for the book. But I did feel very strongly about it as the core of the book, which is that Nobody's coming to help you.
Chief Change Officer
#182 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part One
You need to get over your insecurity and your ego and put yourself into what you're doing every day. And that work is tuition that you get paid for. And it's up to you to save yourself, grow yourself, push yourself, teach yourself. And so it becoming the title of the book really happened towards the end. I was honestly quite stuck about what the title should be.
Chief Change Officer
#182 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part One
I thought about the title of get comfortable being uncomfortable, or you can be yourself and be successful. And there was a really interesting woman at the publisher who said we're on a conference call trying to figure out the title of the book and
Chief Change Officer
#182 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part One
she said why don't you just go look at your chapters like maybe the book has a lot of punchy chapter titles i think and she was like why don't you go look in the chapter list and see if there's a title and i looked to the chapter list and it was obvious that was going to be the title yeah i read this chapter specifically we'll come back to this in a minute the book what inspired you to write it in the very first place
Chief Change Officer
#182 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part One
Oh, a lot. One is I've always been that person at work that just feel too much about work. I actually hate this about myself, but I'm deeply emotional about work. I think about work all the time. I think about how things could be better or different or what I could change or what I could do differently or better. And
Chief Change Officer
#182 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part One
I remember working at AOL a long time ago, probably 15 years ago at this point, and a coworker saying to me, I used to send these really long emails. And then my coworker was like, why do you do that? What a stupid waste of your time. Everybody's out partying after a workday and you're on your phone writing emails about what we did the day before. And so I've always really felt
Chief Change Officer
#182 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part One
the need to share how i feel emotionally about work it's very motivating to me to lay it out and hopefully it's motivating or interesting or compelling to others and i was at a point i had been at barstool sports for about eight years almost nine years and we had sold the company to a new company that was much bigger than ours, that was publicly traded, that was heavily regulated.
Chief Change Officer
#182 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part One
And I felt my creativity at work, Vince, just totally get zapped. I had been running this wild, creative business amorphous, freewheeling, fast growth company. And all of a sudden the brakes got pumped and I was trying to do daily financial reporting and daily forecasting and re-forecasting. And I was feeling my creativity just go to the wayside.
Chief Change Officer
#182 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part One
And so I started to write the book on my commute because I felt like it brought me back to the things that I had loved about Barstool Sports that were so creative. And then the second piece is over the pandemic, I had created a podcast when I was the CEO of Barstool Sports because at Barstool, we had never worked remote. We didn't have a remote working culture before the pandemic.
Chief Change Officer
#182 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part One
Everyone was in the office every day, all the time. We didn't have any need for technology because everybody worked together in person. When the pandemic hit, it was very alienating for me and it was very alienating for our company. And so I started emailing everyone in the company every week. And there were 250 people in the company at the time and I was sending 250 emails.
Chief Change Officer
#182 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part One
I would go through the A's and then the B's and then the C's. And what I realized was that was impossible because I was just getting flooded with email and I was flooding email right back and it seems silly. So I started a pod, a daily 10 minute podcast where I talked about what we were doing at Barstool Sports and I used it as a way to connect with people who I worked with.
Chief Change Officer
#182 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part One
And then it became interesting to people who worked outside of, or what were well beyond Barstool Sports. And so. What I gravitated towards was I was getting all sorts of Q&A questions from people about their careers. And it built over time where I get probably 200 questions a week at this point. So I'm getting a massive amount of work questions and
Chief Change Officer
#182 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part One
In the same way I felt making a podcast was a better way to talk to a 250-people employee base, I felt that writing a book was perhaps a more thoughtful, complete way to respond to people's work questions.
Chief Change Officer
#182 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part One
A far more succinct way to do it, Vince, for sure.
Chief Change Officer
#313 Erika Ayers-Baden: No One Cares About Your Career—So Build One That Works for You
I'd love to teach. Yeah, that's what in the, what are my future plans? I would love to teach. I think Principles is an incredible book. It's also really dense. You have to be awake when you're reading it. And I hope for this book was that it was more conversational and in some ways lighter and more digestible. But I love, I too love Principles. I thought it was a really powerful way to think about
Chief Change Officer
#313 Erika Ayers-Baden: No One Cares About Your Career—So Build One That Works for You
building yourself and building a company.
Chief Change Officer
#313 Erika Ayers-Baden: No One Cares About Your Career—So Build One That Works for You
Oh, I think this book is quite different for a bunch of reasons. Before I wrote it, I went to the bookstore and I went on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and I went and looked at all... I went and looked at the business book article aisle and... I really found two things. The first was a lot of books written by people who were professing to be perfect.
Chief Change Officer
#313 Erika Ayers-Baden: No One Cares About Your Career—So Build One That Works for You
So their heads were on the cover and it was all about me and my perfect career. What I've accomplished, aren't I so great? And the second majority of the books I found were that they were much thinner, much smaller, and much more prescriptive where you're supposed to do a very small set of things to unlock yourself and unlock your career.
Chief Change Officer
#313 Erika Ayers-Baden: No One Cares About Your Career—So Build One That Works for You
And I left the aisle thinking, well, I'm not perfect and I don't have a three step habit that is going to unlock everything for anybody, including myself and my career. What I do have is the receipts where I'm a CEO. I'm in the middle of my career. I have made every mistake in the book. I have learned an incredible amount. I have tried and endeavored to do a whole lot.
Chief Change Officer
#313 Erika Ayers-Baden: No One Cares About Your Career—So Build One That Works for You
And I wanted to speak to people that what I would call in the mid chapter. So it's not people who don't know where to get started. And it's not people who've made it all the way to the end or the top. It's really for the people who are getting up on a Monday morning or a Wednesday morning and they're trying to make the most of their life and they're trying to make the most of their work.
Chief Change Officer
#313 Erika Ayers-Baden: No One Cares About Your Career—So Build One That Works for You
And for me, work changed my life. And I really think work is where we spend the vast majority of our time and effort and energy today. And I wanted to write a book like a conversation with someone who is still going through it, who has messed up a whole lot, who has done a whole lot and who is kind enough to shake you, but also to give you a hug and say, you can do this.
Chief Change Officer
#313 Erika Ayers-Baden: No One Cares About Your Career—So Build One That Works for You
So it's like a friend talking to you? I think so. I think it's written honestly. It's told from my experience, but it also leaves it to the reader to make their own conclusion about what path they want to take and what course they want to choose.
Chief Change Officer
#313 Erika Ayers-Baden: No One Cares About Your Career—So Build One That Works for You
That's great. Yeah, I want it to be... Just very direct. I'm a direct person and I wanted to be direct about not only the things that I feel like have done well and that I've done well, but really also the things that I've been insecure about and the things I haven't done well and the lessons I've had to learn the hard way.
Chief Change Officer
#313 Erika Ayers-Baden: No One Cares About Your Career—So Build One That Works for You
And I really wanted it to be a good read, but also a book that makes you think about what would you do? And how do you think about things? And how do you feel about things? I think to the point of nobody cares about your career, I think a lot of times people get into a job because it's what they're supposed to do. I talked to someone recently, a college senior, and he goes to Princeton.
Chief Change Officer
#313 Erika Ayers-Baden: No One Cares About Your Career—So Build One That Works for You
And so I said, hey, James, what are you going to do? What do you want to do after college? And James said, I go to Princeton, so I have to go work in finance. And I was like, why do you think that? Just because you went to Princeton doesn't mean you have to go work in finance.
Chief Change Officer
#313 Erika Ayers-Baden: No One Cares About Your Career—So Build One That Works for You
But I think a lot of times people get caught up in what everyone else thinks they should do or what everyone else thinks they should be. And the reality is that nobody's really thinking about you that much. And you should do what makes you happy and tell everyone else to jump off a cliff. So the book is hopefully motivating to get people to do that.
Chief Change Officer
#313 Erika Ayers-Baden: No One Cares About Your Career—So Build One That Works for You
Sure. So let's start with caring, right? It's so simple. The idea that you should care and that it's important to find something to care about in your day, whether you're at home, whether you're raising kids, whether you're a career person, whether you're a bus driver, like you, you gotta find a reason to care. And I think that, The people who care at work are the best people at work.
Chief Change Officer
#313 Erika Ayers-Baden: No One Cares About Your Career—So Build One That Works for You
And it's not about how intelligent you are. It's not about how pedigreed you are. It's not about how experienced you are. The sheer
Chief Change Officer
#313 Erika Ayers-Baden: No One Cares About Your Career—So Build One That Works for You
act of caring about something can change everything so I really start there as if you don't care people will see through it in a nanosecond and it will prompt other people not to care about you so I often think that the things that can make us most successful or hold us be most detrimental in holding us back come down to really simple things caring being one of them
Chief Change Officer
#313 Erika Ayers-Baden: No One Cares About Your Career—So Build One That Works for You
So I can't overstate that enough. I think the other four, it's really about just making the most of your every day. And I know that also sounds simple, but I talk a lot in the book about having a vision and for having a vision.
Chief Change Officer
#313 Erika Ayers-Baden: No One Cares About Your Career—So Build One That Works for You
an idea in your head and your heart about who you want to be or what you want to accomplish or where you want to go that gets you out of getting lost in all the minutia or the office gossip or the problems at work. One of the things I talk a lot about in the book is your job isn't perfect and neither are you, but you both can be great. And I spend a lot of time thinking about that.
Chief Change Officer
#313 Erika Ayers-Baden: No One Cares About Your Career—So Build One That Works for You
Every company has problems. Every person has problems. Every company has things that it's overcome or trying to overcome. Every person has things that they've overcome or trying to overcome. Every company has that thing deep down inside that's broken and it needs to fix. People are the same way. So...
Chief Change Officer
#313 Erika Ayers-Baden: No One Cares About Your Career—So Build One That Works for You
I really do believe that just by getting started and by doing something and having a commitment to yourself of a place you want to get to or something you want to be, that can make all of the difference in how successful you are or not.
Chief Change Officer
#313 Erika Ayers-Baden: No One Cares About Your Career—So Build One That Works for You
Our childhood, if I had to describe it, was you could read, you could play sports, you could hang out with your friends, but you'd have to go find something to do with yourself. You could stack wood or do chores and play. That was pretty much it. So my brother and I shared, we didn't have a TV for a long time and then we got a TV and my brother and I shared an hour of TV a week between us.
Chief Change Officer
#313 Erika Ayers-Baden: No One Cares About Your Career—So Build One That Works for You
And I always say that's where I learned how to negotiate because my brother and I really had to duke it out to figure out what we were watching. And ultimately we had to learn that if we both compromised to watch something we both wanted, instead of getting a half hour each, we could get a full hour of television. I also learned my mother used to block MTV, which MTV was huge when I was a kid.
Chief Change Officer
#313 Erika Ayers-Baden: No One Cares About Your Career—So Build One That Works for You
So I would just call the cable company every month and say that I was my mother so that I could get the MTV turned back on.
Chief Change Officer
#313 Erika Ayers-Baden: No One Cares About Your Career—So Build One That Works for You
Okay, great, Vince. So I'm Erica. I live right around New York City. I work in New York City. I worked in New York City for, I don't know, 15 years, almost 20 years. I grew up in a really small town in New England. I was born in Colorado, and I'm best known for my last job, which I spent a decade building a company called Barstool Sports, which in the American market is one of, if not the most
Chief Change Officer
#313 Erika Ayers-Baden: No One Cares About Your Career—So Build One That Works for You
wild, fast-growing, creative, dynamic, disruptive companies in sports and media and entertainment in the past two to three decades. So I'm most known for my time at Barstool Sports. Prior to that, I worked at a lot of really big companies like Microsoft and Yahoo and AOL. I worked at a bunch of startups in the fashion space, in the music space.
Chief Change Officer
#313 Erika Ayers-Baden: No One Cares About Your Career—So Build One That Works for You
In the entertainment space, I started my career thinking I wanted to be a lawyer, and I didn't. I had been laid off. I was a receptionist. I had a bunch of career changes. I had a very meandering career path. I worked at a bunch of ad agencies. I've worked all over the world. So I've had, I would say, a really unique career in that I've really tried a lot of different things.
Chief Change Officer
#313 Erika Ayers-Baden: No One Cares About Your Career—So Build One That Works for You
I've worked at a lot of different places. I've learned from a lot of different types of people, all in pursuit of really becoming a better person and a better leader and a better executive and a more interested whole being. And I don't know if that works, Vince, but that's how I would describe it.
Chief Change Officer
#313 Erika Ayers-Baden: No One Cares About Your Career—So Build One That Works for You
Yes, I had gotten an internship. I went to a liberal arts college in Maine in the U.S. and I had gotten an internship in Boston. And most of my family are teachers and my parents were teachers and educators. My dad was my principal when I was in middle school, which is probably a story for later. And I felt my parents really sacrificed so that my brother and I could go to very good schools.
Chief Change Officer
#313 Erika Ayers-Baden: No One Cares About Your Career—So Build One That Works for You
And I felt a very significant sense of obligation to do something with that. I feel that my parents had sacrificed everything. themselves to give us opportunity, and I felt a very big debt of gratitude on that. And when I had gotten this internship, it was at Fidelity Investments. It was in Boston, Massachusetts, and I loved it. And I got this bug to work in a corporate environment.
Chief Change Officer
#313 Erika Ayers-Baden: No One Cares About Your Career—So Build One That Works for You
No one else in my extended family works in a corporate environment, but I got the bug. And it made me think, oh, I want to go to law school and I'd like to get a business degree. I never ended up doing either of those things. But what I did do is set out to be very successful in the corporate world and to do it the best way I could, which was really learning on the job and as an apprenticeship.
Chief Change Officer
#313 Erika Ayers-Baden: No One Cares About Your Career—So Build One That Works for You
So Nobody Cares About Your Career is something someone told me once, Vince, probably 15 years ago, and it always stuck in my head. And when I was writing the book, it was the title of one of the chapters. And to be honest with you, I never thought about it as the title for the book. But I did feel very strongly about it as the core of the book, which is that Nobody's coming to help you.
Chief Change Officer
#313 Erika Ayers-Baden: No One Cares About Your Career—So Build One That Works for You
You need to get over your insecurity and your ego and put yourself into what you're doing every day. And that work is tuition that you get paid for. And it's up to you to save yourself, grow yourself, push yourself, teach yourself. And so it becoming the title of the book really happened towards the end. I was honestly quite stuck about what the title should be.
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#313 Erika Ayers-Baden: No One Cares About Your Career—So Build One That Works for You
I thought about the title of get comfortable being uncomfortable, or you can be yourself and be successful. And there was a really interesting woman at the publisher who said we're on a conference call trying to figure out the title of the book and
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#313 Erika Ayers-Baden: No One Cares About Your Career—So Build One That Works for You
she said why don't you just go look at your chapters like maybe the book has a lot of punchy chapter titles i think and she was like why don't you go look in the chapter list and see if there's a title and i looked to the chapter list and it was obvious that was going to be the title yeah i read this chapter specifically we'll come back to this in a minute the book what inspired you to write it in the very first place
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#313 Erika Ayers-Baden: No One Cares About Your Career—So Build One That Works for You
Oh, a lot. One is I've always been that person at work that just feel too much about work. I actually hate this about myself, but I'm deeply emotional about work. I think about work all the time. I think about how things could be better or different or what I could change or what I could do differently or better. And
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#313 Erika Ayers-Baden: No One Cares About Your Career—So Build One That Works for You
I remember working at AOL a long time ago, probably 15 years ago at this point, and a coworker saying to me, I used to send these really long emails. And then my coworker was like, why do you do that? What a stupid waste of your time. Everybody's out partying after a workday and you're on your phone writing emails about what we did the day before. And so I've always really felt
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#313 Erika Ayers-Baden: No One Cares About Your Career—So Build One That Works for You
the need to share how i feel emotionally about work it's very motivating to me to lay it out and hopefully it's motivating or interesting or compelling to others and i was at a point i had been at barstool sports for about eight years almost nine years and we had sold the company to a new company that was much bigger than ours, that was publicly traded, that was heavily regulated.
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#313 Erika Ayers-Baden: No One Cares About Your Career—So Build One That Works for You
And I felt my creativity at work, Vince, just totally get zapped. I had been running this wild, creative business amorphous, freewheeling, fast growth company. And all of a sudden the brakes got pumped and I was trying to do daily financial reporting and daily forecasting and re-forecasting. And I was feeling my creativity just go to the wayside.
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#313 Erika Ayers-Baden: No One Cares About Your Career—So Build One That Works for You
And so I started to write the book on my commute because I felt like it brought me back to the things that I had loved about Barstool Sports that were so creative. And then the second piece is over the pandemic, I had created a podcast when I was the CEO of Barstool Sports because at Barstool, we had never worked remote. We didn't have a remote working culture before the pandemic.
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#313 Erika Ayers-Baden: No One Cares About Your Career—So Build One That Works for You
Everyone was in the office every day, all the time. We didn't have any need for technology because everybody worked together in person. When the pandemic hit, it was very alienating for me and it was very alienating for our company. And so I started emailing everyone in the company every week. And there were 250 people in the company at the time and I was sending 250 emails.
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#313 Erika Ayers-Baden: No One Cares About Your Career—So Build One That Works for You
I would go through the A's and then the B's and then the C's. And what I realized was that was impossible because I was just getting flooded with email and I was flooding email right back and it seems silly. So I started a pod, a daily 10 minute podcast where I talked about what we were doing at Barstool Sports and I used it as a way to connect with people who I worked with.
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#313 Erika Ayers-Baden: No One Cares About Your Career—So Build One That Works for You
And then it became interesting to people who worked outside of, or what were well beyond Barstool Sports. And so. What I gravitated towards was I was getting all sorts of Q&A questions from people about their careers. And it built over time where I get probably 200 questions a week at this point. So I'm getting a massive amount of work questions and
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#313 Erika Ayers-Baden: No One Cares About Your Career—So Build One That Works for You
In the same way I felt making a podcast was a better way to talk to a 250-people employee base, I felt that writing a book was perhaps a more thoughtful, complete way to respond to people's work questions.
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#313 Erika Ayers-Baden: No One Cares About Your Career—So Build One That Works for You
A far more succinct way to do it, Vince, for sure.
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#183 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part Two
I think I'm a leader now. who gets her hands dirty. Like I don't believe in, a lot of times when people get to the executive space, they seem above doing the little jobs. Like I love the little jobs. So I also am a person who will dig and get into the trenches with everybody else to make something happen.
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#183 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part Two
And I think that's important because I think that's critical to having people trust your leadership and buy into your leadership. and want to be a part of your leadership.
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#183 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part Two
Yeah, I am allergic to complaining, office gossip, just inertia. It makes me crazy at work. I don't like cultures like that. I don't like to be part of culture like that. I think environments are relentless. And if you spend your time at work next to people who just complain or who are apathetic or who are bored or too busy gossiping or tificating to do anything, I think that rubs off on you.
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#183 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part Two
So... I think the biggest thing I would say is I think it's important to really be choosy about the environment you put yourself in. And if you are in an environment that is like that, then and you don't like it, you've got to find a way to either protect yourself from the environment or get out of that environment.
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#183 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part Two
I also think people, if Gen X is the figure it out group, I don't know what the millennials and the post-millennials are, but I do think people throw the term toxic workplace around a lot. And a lot of times I'm not sure what it means anymore.
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#183 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part Two
In some cases, toxic workplace can relate to just to people to having a bad boss and to a boss that is negative or a boss that is micromanaging or a boss that's inept. And when I'm at work anyways, I try to spend as much time as I can really getting to the heart of what someone is saying.
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#183 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part Two
If someone's saying, hey, I'm unhappy here because of X, Y, Z buzzword, I try to spend as much time as I can to say, all right, let's get specific. What's going on? Do you have a chance to grow and thrive here? Are you able to do your best work? Are there high expectations of you? Are you clear on what those expectations are? Are you a positive member of a unit or a team? Are you collaborative?
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#183 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part Two
And the same questions for people's bosses and the same questions for people who work for people. But really what I believe is that work is truly what you make it. And if you are punishing and punitive and negative at work, you're not going to get a whole lot out of it.
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#183 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part Two
In the same way that if you're a victim at work and you want to put the blame for everything going wrong in your career on someone else, that's not going to get you very far either.
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#183 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part Two
I think in one way, Vince, I would say I would answer it the same as I would for anybody else, which is I think my kids should apply themselves. I think they should be students. I think they should... It doesn't really matter what you do first, just so long as you do something and you apply yourself to it and you give yourself to it and you humble yourself to learn something.
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#183 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part Two
That's what's most important to me, that these kids have... a good work ethic, that they are resilient, that they are polite and show gratitude when someone offers to teach you something or someone gives you feedback. I think a lot of times it's very easy to reject feedback now.
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#183 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part Two
And just say I'm above feedback or I don't agree with the feedback versus saying, hey, someone's trying to teach me something. So on one part, I would say all those same things. On the other part, it's hard. I didn't grow up with a lot of the advantages that my kids have. And I spend a lot of time worrying that those advantages are actually disadvantages. I didn't get on an airplane successfully.
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#183 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part Two
for a long time until I was probably, I think, in high school. I didn't have the exposure to the things that my kids have. And in some ways, I think I'm a little bit soft as a parent, which I get on myself about. And in other ways,
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#183 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part Two
I think back to my childhood and the fact that we didn't have screens and we had to make the most of every day just with your brain and a little bit of mischievousness and you had to pass the time. How do I put my kids in environments where they have to figure things out for themselves and they are not coddled by me or coddled by a screen? And that's where my head is at right now.
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#183 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part Two
I think having middle schoolers are fun. It's an awesome, terrible age. And it's a really hard age. There's a lot happening. There's a lot of hormones. There's a lot of anxiety. And I feel the pressure of time because I also I really feel middle school is the end of the clay hardening. And these kids are going to be these kids pretty soon.
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#183 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part Two
And my the impact I can have or that their environment can have on them is pretty close to being baked. So I spend a lot of time thinking about that.
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#183 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part Two
Oh, I have so many goals and I have so much to learn and I don't even know what the future will hold. So I also love that, which is there's a great unknown. I feel this year was a big year for me where I took a new job after a decade. In my past job, I wrote a book, I launched a book.
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#183 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part Two
So I feel, to be honest, Vince, I'm still getting my sea legs of figuring out what this new place in life is like. I think for the future, I really did love the writing, so I would like to do more writing. I think that is something that I'm interested in. I don't know what that will look like yet. I'm very interested in Food 52 and Schoolhouse and Dansk and this company that I'm leading now.
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#183 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part Two
And I'm spending a lot of time thinking about what I could make this into and where this could go and what it could be. So I'm spending a lot of time thinking about that. future, I have a dream to go back to Africa and make a clothing company with a women's collective. I have this idea that I'm going to learn how to paint. I'd like to read more. So all sorts of things.
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#183 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part Two
I'd like to have a Maine coon cat. So very random, Vince, but there's all sorts of things I'd like to do.
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#183 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part Two
Oh gosh, I don't know about that.
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#183 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part Two
I think it's great.
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#183 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part Two
Ooh, okay. So I had, I was born in Colorado and my dad was a math teacher in Colorado. My mom made all of our food. My mom was very busy. She was also a teacher and she had stopped working to have my brother and I, my brother and I are a year apart in age. We moved back east when I was probably five or six, and both my parents went back to work.
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#183 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part Two
My dad became the principal of the school of the town I lived in, and my mom was a vocational teacher in the next town over. Our childhood, if I had to describe it, was you could read, you could play sports, you could hang out with your friends, but you'd have to go find something to do with yourself. You could stack wood or do chores and That was pretty much it.
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#183 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part Two
We didn't have a TV for a long time and then we got a TV and my brother and I shared an hour of TV a week between us. And I always say that's where I learned how to negotiate because my brother and I really had to duke it out to figure out what we were watching.
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#183 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part Two
And ultimately we had to learn that if we both compromised to watch something we both wanted, instead of getting a half hour each, we could get a full hour of television. I also learned my mother used to block MTV, which MTV was huge when I was a kid. So I would just call the cable company every month and say that I was my mother so that I could get the MTV turned back on.
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#183 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part Two
So I learned a lot of lessons, I think, just from how we were raised. I think when your parents are teachers, it's a selfless job and it's a super hard job, but it really is an incredibly generous job because you are trying to impart a love of knowledge and learning, and you're really trying to inspire growth in other people, which I think is just really admirable.
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#183 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part Two
Also, it's strange to have my dad be the principal. I can remember my first day of middle school, And someone scratching Erica Ayers is a blank, like horrible word. And so is her dad. They scratched it on the bathroom wall. So it also was in some ways sobering to have an authority figure in my school be my dad. I would say I learned a lot from both of those things or all of those things.
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#183 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part Two
I think I really love to teach. And I think my parents gave me that. I think I have... fairly strange relationship with authority. I think that also comes from my childhood. But I also have an incredible desire to learn. And I think that's also what my parents gave me.
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#183 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part Two
I don't really care about titles. Now, I think that I can say that now and it's a little bit hypocritical because a CEO is a great title. I did care a lot about titles in my formative years of my career and in the hustle years where I was really trying to advance. I think here's how I feel about titles. One is You should always be endeavoring to take on more than you had six months ago.
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#183 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part Two
One of the things I write about in the book is, are you doing the same exact thing you did six months ago without learning or growing or tripping on yourself or taking on something you didn't know exactly how to do? I think it's important to continue to grow in your career and in your purview. Do you have more problems that you're responsible for?
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#183 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part Two
Do you have more puzzles that you can't figure out? Do you have more poise? Do you have a bigger platform? I think that's way more important than title chasing. As I think about my career, yes, I definitely cared about titles. I care less about them now. I can remember going to Microsoft and Microsoft, to be a vice president at Microsoft, what meant you had to spend 30 years at Microsoft.
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#183 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part Two
To be a vice president at an ad agency, they gave those titles out like candy. So in a lot of ways, titling is different by industry, by company, by sector. But the sheer fact of what you oversee and what you are capable of doing stands irrespective of the title or regardless of a title. So I really feel the most important thing is that purview. It's that level of responsibility.
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#183 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part Two
It's your resilience. It's your capacity for impact. is far more important than any title. And I tend to care about that now in my job. But I also understand that as people look to grow, they want a title and a salary that's commensurate with the level of advancement and growth.
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#183 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part Two
Oh, I love failure. I call it fail always mode. And the reason I say I love failure is I don't like to fail at all. But if you feel like you are failing, It means a couple things if you can take a step back. One means that you care. If you feel something about what you're doing, you care about it.
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#183 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part Two
And two, it means you're trying something new or you're doing something that you don't exactly know how to do the right way or you haven't figured out the right way for you to do this thing. And I think that's a great way to feel because it means that you're pushing yourself. And what I really believe and value as a leader is people who push themselves. I value initiative.
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#183 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part Two
I value entrepreneurial thinking. I value people who endeavor to make something happen, even if it doesn't happen. I personally will always reward the person who tried versus the person who played it safe and didn't evolve or change anything. So I think one thing that's hard for people, and myself included, is that it stings if you don't get something right. It can hurt.
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#183 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part Two
It can make you feel ashamed. It can make you feel inferior or stupid. And it stinks to feel that way. But the more you push and try and explore, the more you can ultimately take on and the better you will get at doing those things. And when you look back over the course of time, it's the people who kept pushing and trying and experimenting and failing and learning.
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#183 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part Two
It's those people who ultimately become people more successful and who are able to stay successful because they have learned and tried a great deal more. And I think it's very dangerous to make your world really small and to only do things that you know 100% you will be perfect at doing. One, I think it's a little bit boring. And two, I think it doesn't change your world ever.
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#183 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part Two
I am a leader that wants growth. I'm a leader who embraces change. I am highly collaborative. I insist on collaboration. Want people who want to work with other people. I really value people who can perform and work independently, but who have a desire to play and win as a team. So I would say I'm tough. I have a high standard.
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#183 Erika Ayers Badan: Why “No One Cares About Your Career” Might Be the Best Advice Yet – Part Two
I have a high pain threshold and a tolerance for being uncomfortable, for trying things. And I think that can be hard for some folks, but I also think it can be incredibly invigorating for others. And a lot of being at a company, it's just alchemy. It's trying to find the right people who you work for as a boss and who work with you and push you and expect the same of you.