The Worst Advice I Ever Got - LIVE!

[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hey, everybody. Welcome to the first ever live audience taping of the worst advice I ever got. We'll have three guests for you today, each with their own unique take on the worst advice they ever got. And yes, you heard me right. It's a live audience taping. In order to remain true to the format that you've become accustomed to hearing from us, we won't go as deep with each of our three guests. However, they're going to bring a ton of great thought for you to consider. So without further ado, let's hear from our first guest, Corey Cicchetti. Hi, everyone. I'm Sean Taylor, and welcome to another episode of the worst advice I ever got. On this show, we bring in guests from all over with various backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives to talk not about the best advice they ever got, but the worst advice they ever got. Today, our guest is Corey Cecchite. Good morning, Corey. [00:01:01] Speaker B: Good morning. [00:01:02] Speaker A: Corey is the professor of business ethics and legal studies at the University of Denver, a nationally recognized speaker and author of Inspire Integrity, chase an authentic Life. He's been a great success and has certainly heard his fair share of advice as he advanced in his career. Thanks again for joining us this morning, Corey. Happy to be here. [00:01:23] Speaker B: No tax questions, right? [00:01:25] Speaker A: No. No tax questions. Corey, can you share with me what's the worst advice you ever got? [00:01:31] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a great question. Mine is sort of a wolf dressed in sheep's clothing. I was a young professor when I first started. I think I was 25 years old, so my students were older than I was sometimes. And I had a couple mentor figures there, and they looked at me and said, if you want to get promoted, if you want to get tenure, you need to do it the way we tell you. Right? You have to do the tried and true old professor way. And as I started to teach, I mean, I listened to them at first because they were my mentors and I started to teach, and I thought, I'm not very good at that. I'm better at other things. And so I said, I gotta, I want to try to go my own way. And as I started to do that, they tried to push me back into their mold and the mold of a typical professor. And, you know, I started to notice that they might not have had my best interests at heart because they didn't really know what I was good at. [00:02:14] Speaker A: You're talking about being molded by others that you look up to. Right. And we all have some of that when that happened to you and you started to go down a path and they were trying to redirect you. What were some of the emotions that you felt about having to maybe go against what some of your mentors were telling you? [00:02:29] Speaker B: Well, and that's why I think it's such an important thing, because these were people. They were my mentors, my friends, and I didn't want to let them down, and so I was scared and I was kind of frustrated that I was letting them down. And, you know, that's kind of the worst part about it, right. Is sometimes your mentor doesn't always, you know, a good mentor is someone who, when you don't do exactly what they say, they're still your mentor. [00:02:50] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a great point. When did you start to realize that that advice, you know, maybe wasn't best for you? [00:02:59] Speaker B: Probably a year or two in. And that's right. When you're a college professor. That's right. When you're, you know, in the middle of your tenure process. Right. It's the scariest time to sort of deviate from the plan. But I was doing a lot of speaking like this, and my goal was to have impact in the community. Right. The professor out there in the community, not just in the classroom, and they didn't appreciate that as much as I thought they would. Yeah. [00:03:19] Speaker A: Yeah. It's very interesting. And as you were going down that path, what made you realize it wasn't good for you? Was there just immediate conflict or did it happen over a period of time? What led you to think, gosh, maybe this isn't the right path for me, you know? [00:03:34] Speaker B: Well, the professor path was right for me, just not the tried and true way of getting up there with a PowerPoint lecture, you know? And I realized that pretty quickly. Like, I tried it their way, and my students just kind of stare. Stared at me like they stare at all their teachers, right. And I'm thinking, are they going to remember this five minutes after they leave this class? And I would go home and think about, like, what's a better way to do this? So I would do an oral final or whatever. Right. They'd have to sit in front of me at my desk for 15 minutes, and we talk about the constitution. It's constitutional law class. Right. Well, my other professors friends would never do that. Right. Because how do you grade them? We've never done that before. I think it's easy to grade someone when they're right in front of you talking to you for 15 minutes. It's almost easier than a scantron test. And so stuff like that, they didn't understand I don't assign a textbook. I'll just give them supreme court cases. I'll just have them print them out. They always have textbooks and so stuff like that, and then the speaking stuff they didn't understand. [00:04:25] Speaker A: So no textbooks and an oral final. It's a hard. Yeah, okay. All right. No, absolutely. Well, it's interesting. You're talking about really sort of the road less traveled or the path less traveled. Right. And that's not really what's always offered when someone's giving you advice, they're saying, repeat the path that I traveled. So what kind of advice do you give people now that you went through. [00:04:51] Speaker B: This, if you're a mentor? What I would say is get to know your mentee. Like, really know their strengths and weaknesses and give them a chance to go their own way a little bit, you know? I don't think these people knew me that well, though I do believe they had my best interests at heart. I really think they wanted me to get promoted, and they actually thought if I didn't do it their way, I wouldn't, and I. But they didn't know me, and they didn't know my skills. [00:05:11] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. Have you ever given a piece of advice that you look back on and thought, ooh, that wasn't good advice for them? I mean, we're talking about receiving bad advice, but we're all subject to potentially giving bad advice. [00:05:23] Speaker B: Yeah, no, I do. I do the same thing to my students. They want to go to law school or whatever, and I'll say, okay, you need to go to this law school, or you don't need to take this gap year. It's not going to look good on your resume. And what I've learned to do is talk to them. Why? Why do you want this gap? You're like, justify it to me. You know, if you're gonna go here for law school, justify it to me. [00:05:39] Speaker A: What's a piece of advice you'd like to leave for our guests as we conclude our time together? [00:05:44] Speaker B: I'll take this to my grave as the most important thing you'll hear from anyone. Don't put your job ahead of your family. [00:05:49] Speaker A: I think that's a great piece of advice, and we really appreciate you helping kick off our podcast. I think it's a wonderful thing to have you here, and we're really honored that you would be with us today. [00:06:01] Speaker B: Excited to be here. Yeah. Thank you. [00:06:02] Speaker A: Absolutely. Well, JB, that was certainly brave of Corey to do our first live audience taping of the worst advice I ever got. Sure. Was I really love what he had to say about mentorship. [00:06:20] Speaker C: Oh, yeah, I love that too. You really, you have to know the person before you give them advice. [00:06:25] Speaker A: Yeah, I totally agree. These episodes that we've put together, they have some themes to them, and one of them is get to know the person better. And Corey's basically saying it's not negotiable. [00:06:39] Speaker C: Nope, not at all. [00:06:40] Speaker A: Well, let's welcome to the stage the chief financial officer of the Mount Vernon school, Courtney Stillwagon. Hi, Courtney. [00:06:53] Speaker D: Good morning. [00:06:53] Speaker A: Thanks for being here. [00:06:54] Speaker D: Happy to be here. [00:06:55] Speaker A: As you know, on this podcast, we want to know what's the worst advice you ever got? [00:07:00] Speaker D: Love, love, love this question. So as I was thinking about this, I mean, I think we can all probably think of a lot of, you know, worst advice that we've gotten, but I thought of the first worst advice I've ever gotten. So a little background on me. I'm from a very small town, one high school. I went to the big university of Georgia, right? So I'm there over the summer for our orientation session and one of the things we had to do was meet with our academic advisor for the first time. So I'm sitting with this person who I've never met, who's never met me, and we're talking about my future, right? I've just graduated high school. I don't know what my future is. But I did know that I thought I wanted to be an accountant. My mom was a bookkeeper. I spent a lot of summers, a lot of time helping her. And I thought, this is something I like and it seems like a pretty solid career. So I shared with her. I said, I'm going to be an accountant. And she said, oh, you're not going to like that. I think you really need to make sure that you set yourself up to be pre med and you should take this chemistry class that's sort of foundational to that path in college. And I thought, okay, sure, yeah, let's do that. So I took the chemistry class, thinking, oh, well, I did great in high school, chemistry in my small town, and I very nearly failed out of that class. It was traumatic, to say the least. I remember sitting in my dorm hallway on the phone with my parents crying, I'm gonna fail out of college. Oh, goodness, I'm gonna lose the hope scholarship. It was clearly not the path for me and I definitely had to learn that the hard way, for sure. [00:08:39] Speaker A: Well, it's very interesting because you're at a very formative time, right? I would imagine you were about 18 years old, somewhere in that area, and you're looking to someone whose job it is, like, literally in their title, it is advisor. They are professional advice givers. Here's someone who said, don't follow what you think. Follow what I think. [00:09:00] Speaker D: Yeah, I mean, I think there were multiple lessons in this. I immediately started to question, should I be taking this? But sort of trusted in the fact that this is her job. Right. But the other lesson I learned through this is I was so stubborn during the drop ad period when I could have dropped it, I already knew it wasn't for me, but I was like, I'm not a quitter. I'm not going to stop doing this. Dropping a class is quitting. I'm going to persevere through this. And I probably shouldn't have, but, yeah, I think I knew immediately that it was probably not the path for me. [00:09:31] Speaker A: How did learning from that really impact now? When you focus on new things or try new things and people are advising you one way, but your gut tells you a little bit different, how has it impacted you, how you approach that in new decisions you make? [00:09:45] Speaker D: Yeah, I think it's learning to trust yourself. I think it's, you know, it's perfectly fine and wonderful to be challenged by something that someone says, but to be completely influenced by it is a different thing. I always try to keep an open mind about any decision, but there's a difference in just blindly following what somebody says because you think and assume they know better than you than realizing that I know myself as well, and maybe I should keep that in mind as I go through my path. You know, that maybe there's a tinge of truth to what they're saying, but knowing that, no, I can be confident in knowing that this is the right path for me. [00:10:23] Speaker A: What led to finding your way out? [00:10:25] Speaker D: I think I was lucky that that was because it was my first semester. You know, I wasn't, you know, committed to anything at that point. So I had the ability to still quickly, you know, get. Get all the courses that I needed. The other piece of this is, you know, I was a first generation college student, so my parents didn't have, you know, ability to give me advice on kind of where they had been and, you know, oh, well, you know, I was in the same situation. I didn't know who to turn to for advice outside of that advisor and my peers who also didn't know what they were doing right now, one thing. [00:10:55] Speaker A: We try to do on this podcast is protect the innocent. Right? So we don't want to out this advisor. Right. Whoever this person might be. [00:11:03] Speaker D: But, and I'm sure she was a wonderful advisor. [00:11:05] Speaker A: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. If she hit 99 out of 100. Right. She's doing a good job. Right. But look, how have you seen the different impact of when you were successful with something and when you weren't successful with something? [00:11:18] Speaker D: Yeah, well, I think honestly, taking that course, though, it was, you know, traumatizing in a certain way, was also super helpful for me. I was not academically challenged in high school, and that's not a reflection on my, you know, smarts or anything. It was more the school I was in. It was. It was just, you know, not super challenging to me, but I had to learn how to really study, and that actually set me up for success in the accounting program that I went into. So at the end of the day, it was a really good thing for me, though. It wasn't the path that I needed to be taking. I learned a whole lot from that experience, for sure. [00:11:56] Speaker A: I think that's great. Thank you, Courtney, for being on the show. Thank you. [00:12:05] Speaker C: Man. Getting advice from an advisor when you're 18 years old, which turns out to be the worst advice you ever got, has got to be tough because no one knows what they're doing at 18. [00:12:15] Speaker A: No, I didn't have a clue what I was doing at 18. And you're right. I'm pretty sure that's why she said she followed the advice for as long as she did because she was only hearing from one person with her parents unable to weigh in, and this was that person's job. So why wouldn't she follow that advice? It should be great. [00:12:35] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:12:35] Speaker C: Be careful with your statuses when you're giving advice, people. [00:12:38] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. That's some good advice here on the worst advice I ever got. Next, we have our third and final guest on part one of our first ever live audience podcast teaser. Look out for part two next week, but focusing here on part one, we end with Jamie Tiernan. Jamie is the CFO and original leadership team member for Gas South, a $2 billion natural gas marketer serving hundreds of thousands of customers. Let's welcome Jamie to the stage. Jamie, thanks again for joining us. [00:13:18] Speaker E: Thanks for having me. [00:13:19] Speaker A: Please tell us about the worst advice you ever got. [00:13:22] Speaker E: This is a wonderful question, Sean. I had to pull some colleagues because it just drove so many great conversations. My first reaction when I heard the question was, I thought golf was going to be at the center of every business, relationship or networking event I ever formed. I didn't have a preference or a desire to learn golf, so I avoided it. So I kind of dispensed with that advice. But as I started to speak more to my colleagues about the worst advice they had ever gotten, I landed on a really good one that I had not thought of initially, and that was at some point I got a message or pressure to preference work obligations over family, and I learned a lot of lessons from that. [00:14:08] Speaker A: Yeah, there's a lot of pressure on young people to do all the things that work asks for. Work always asks for something, though, right? I mean, yes, you found in your career. I mean, you've been growing this organization rapidly since day one, and there's always something else, isn't there? [00:14:25] Speaker E: For me, it's been, I think, just setting new boundaries that I didn't probably have the maturity and confidence to set earlier in my career. You know, around what time I'm going to stop, what I'm going to prioritize for the day, what I'm going to leave for tomorrow, but I'm going to leave for next week. And really, to be sure, I'm focusing on the most important things to bring work forward, but also just to be there and just to have the time, you know, with a family. You know, kids grow up and they leave, and you suddenly realize, gosh, go so fast. All those troops tropes are true. [00:14:54] Speaker A: Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And I found over the years that the concept of work life balance might be a misnomer. It might be more appropriate to call it work life integration. So how have you integrated those two things and really to make them into one just way of living your life? [00:15:15] Speaker E: It's a great question. I think hybrid work has been a really critical component of that. You know, allowing, you know, our employees to use teams from wherever they may be, whether it be remote or in the office. I think there's a lot of flexibility. Certainly employees value it. They really will go the extra mile because they've been able to get away, but then potentially spend some time getting work done, potentially on that trip. So using some of the tools that are available to get the work done and then also flexibly be where you want to be with your family or even potentially in another city spending some time away. [00:15:54] Speaker A: Yeah, it's interesting, too. I think when we were coming up, we looked at work as being what you do during this time of day or in this pocket of our lives. And this is when you do family, and this is when you do everything else. But you can work any part of the day. You can do personal any time of the day. You can volunteer any time of the day. Right. So we've adapted that over the years, certainly. [00:16:20] Speaker E: And then, you know, the notion of remote work, you know, I could be home for the bus and the breakfast and then just knock out a bunch of work that would otherwise be used spending commute time. Right. It could be repurposed into something productive. So I think the ability to work from home has been a very impactful change for our employees with families, and we know with folks that they're having to care for at home. [00:16:44] Speaker A: How do you, as a leader in your organization, demonstrate the importance of this model? [00:16:51] Speaker E: The way, you know, there's a pay time off program. I think it's important that senior leaders use it. And then when they're out on PTO, they're not on email, they're not popping up in meetings, they're actually away, you know, doing what it is that they want to do in their personal time. I think showing that to your employees is really important. It teaches them how to behave when they have that their turn. [00:17:11] Speaker A: This is so. It's so amazing that this is what you brought up is the worst advice you ever got, because this is very near and dear to my heart. And what we always try to do at Smith and Howard is make sure everyone can visibly see our calendars. Sean's going to a baseball game at 02:00 in the afternoon on a Tuesday. Why is he doing that? Because we want to promote healthy integration of work and life. [00:17:35] Speaker E: That's a great one. [00:17:36] Speaker A: Well, Jamie, I think this has been a great example for our audience. Before you leave us, do you mind sharing a piece of advice with our audience? [00:17:44] Speaker E: I would say stick to your values. You know yourself better than anyone. And so when you get advice, you need to, I think, use your own filter. [00:17:54] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that's great. We. We try to live our values each and every day as a company and as, you know, individuals. And I think that if you deviate from your values, if you drift from your mission, I think you're only sitting on a course that leads for failure. Thank you, Jamie, very much. Really appreciate you being here. [00:18:10] Speaker E: Thank you. [00:18:16] Speaker C: Oh, man. We really should have pushed him on that golf thing. That would have been funny to talk about. [00:18:20] Speaker A: Yeah, I would have been, how should I say this? Rather unhelpful talking about golf. That's not my game. [00:18:27] Speaker C: Yeah, me neither. I did like how his advice was kind of, like, solved by the quick adoption to hybrid work. Me neither. No way. I did like how the worst advice that he ever got kind of got solved by the need for the quick adoption of hybrid work. We got to his, like, why, it wasn't that bad anymore. Real quick. [00:18:47] Speaker A: Yeah. I wonder if his life would have been much different had that not been an option. [00:18:53] Speaker C: For sure, this one would have been interesting to, to dive in more, try to keep him in that negative longer. But, you know, we had the time crunch. [00:18:59] Speaker A: Absolutely. Well, that wraps up our first ever live audience recording of the worst advice I ever got. If you like what you're hearing, give us that five star rating and hit that subscribe button. We have tons more content coming your way. Tune in next week for part two of our live audience recording of the worst advice I ever got.