PODCAST: Why It's All About Your 'How'

Listen to the full episode here:

While Kara DeFrias was still early in her career she was given a piece of feedback that stuck out and stayed with her long after that job: "I really like your 'how.'" As she points out in Episode 52 of The Limit Does Not Exist, your "what" is the results you achieve. Your "how" is how you actually achieve those results. "If you burn everyone on the way to the results no one wants to work with you ,"  DeFrias rightfully notes.

It's safe to say DeFrias' "how" is pretty spectacular given her career arc from theater and event production at Superbowl and the Oscars, to working in tech at Intuit, then shifting to public service via a Presidential Innovation Fellowship in the Obama administration and being asked to join Vice President Biden's "Cancer Moonshot" as a User Experience (UX) expert. Along the way she followed her personal mantra of "always say yes" to make sure she was in "the room where it happens," even if that meant taking an entry level job as part of the transition. (Sidebar: this mantra reminds us of Sheryl Sandberg's great advice that "when you're offered a seat on a rocket ship, don't ask what seat. Just get on.")

We sat down with DeFrias to discuss how her background in theater, English, and instructional design led to a career in UX design and what advice she'd give to Human Venn Diagrams who are just starting out in their careers and aren't sure how to combine their interdisciplinary interests and their personal missions. We also discuss her response to those who have criticized her for not being "technical" enough because she doesn't code. (Her story about getting invited, then disinvited from speaking at a tech conference for not being technical enough is epic. You'll want to listen to the episode just to hear how she responded.)

Plus we talk about how her last five jobs were all roles that didn't exist until she had them, and how that presented both opportunities and challenges for her. "The key thing as a founder, a leader, a never-been-done-er is to always have a tribe around you. I call it assembling my avengers.”

We also discuss Alan Alda's new book If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face? My Adventures in the Art and Science of Relating and Communicating and the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at SUNY Stony Brook.

As always, Broke for Free and C-Doc (here and here) provided the tracks for our show.

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