Episode 71: Finding Purpose through the Highs and Lows with Jordan Gross ’16, ’17 MBA
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Transcript:
JORDAN GROSS: Use your network and not be afraid to take some initiative and reach out to somebody who you may think you have no business talking to.
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HELEN KIM: Welcome to Northwestern Intersections, where we talk to alumni about how key intersections of experience have got them to where they are today. I'm your host, Helen. And today, we're speaking with Jordan Gross.
Jordan is a Weinberg and Kellogg School of Management graduate, a writer, a leadership coach, and a tech speaker. Having experience positioned in large banks, like Merrill Lynch, to small startup companies like Chowbus. He's a trailblazer for positive change and has written bestselling books, including Getting COMFY-- Your Morning Guide to Daily Happiness and Journey to Cloud Nine. Hey, Jordan, thank you so much for joining us today.
JORDAN GROSS: Hey, Helen. Thank you so much for having me on. I do a lot of podcasts, but this is probably one of the greatest honors to be on Northwestern's podcast as an alumni who's only a couple years out of school.
I'm so grateful to be here chatting about my career journey and hopefully, sharing some knowledge and wisdom and just stories about the zigzagged path that I've had in only the few short years since I left Northwestern. So thank you so much for having me on. I think it's going to be really fun to talk to you.
HELEN KIM: Yeah, good. Well, we're excited to have you here. We're honored to have you just share with us your career journey. And you mentioned the word zigzag, and that's intriguing because I am super excited to hear just all the twists and turns that you had to take in your career path to graduation. So to start off, can you briefly guide us through your career path-- let's see, from the beginning of your Northwestern experience to now?
JORDAN GROSS: Yes. I don't know how brief this is going to be, but here it goes. Also it's important to first mention to preface that I was an economics major. I was an economics major, a web minor, and I did a certificate in civic engagement. I would say none of that comes into my day to day now, but maybe a little bit of VIP.
And civic engagement is like the mindset that I have. But anyway, there's definitely no econ. But I digress.
So my career, I would say, started with my first internship freshman year summer. I did sales, and I did not take it seriously whatsoever. It was an absolutely nothing summer internship where I was just trying to put something on the resume and have something occupy me during our summer break.
So that was the first summer, and then we'll fast forward to junior year when I decided that I was going to try to get into investment banking. And I interned at Merrill Lynch in private wealth. I ended up not doing investment banking, but I ended up switching to a consulting internship that summer. So the junior summer, I did a consulting internship at a boutique firm called Accelerated Growth Advisors, and that was what I thought I was going to do for my career.
So then I did consulting recruiting in the fall, and I really like worked my butt off to get a consulting offer. And I did not. So that dream did not come to fruition-- all for good reason-- because at the same time, I was running a student organization at Northwestern called They Forget, We Remember, which was an Alzheimer's awareness and fundraising group.
And I decided that I really wanted to continue to pursue that. It was something that I built, and I grew on my own. And it was something that was very entrepreneurial, something very meaningful to me. So I decided that I wanted to sort of take it to the next level.
So I decided to apply for Northwestern's as MS-MS program. I don't even know if that still exists now. But it's the Masters of Science in management studies. It was a one-year Kellogg program where we did the core classes of the MBA program.
So after school, after graduating in 2016, that's the program that I decided to do, and that was when I really decided to dive into the personal development world and figure out what I wanted to do after the master's program, which was something related to passion. This word passion kept running through all the people I was listening to, the books that I was reading, and whatnot.
So I came up with the fact that I wanted to be different than everybody else. I didn't want to do consulting. I didn't want to do investment banking. I didn't want to do marketing.
I wanted to do something that I can truly call my own. I could truly build a career, and I could truly be passionate about. So I decided to go into the restaurant industry because I asked myself a couple of questions.
Some of those questions are, when I read articles, like what puts my face closer to the computer screen-- something about food and beverage in restaurants. When I think about what I could talk about for 30 minutes without anybody interrupting me, restaurants. So in answering these two pretty simple questions, I was like, OK, I think I can create some sort of career in this world. So I did my research, and I found out that Hillstone Restaurant Group has this program at Northwestern that actually comes to the career fair. It's a very prestigious program.
I heard it was the Goldman Sachs of the restaurant industry. And I think even with all that I was learning in personal development about not following the money and not following the prestige and doing things because you really love it, I was very attracted to that title of the Goldman Sachs at the restaurant industry, especially because I was coming from Northwestern and Kellogg, bringing these two degrees. And I figured, why not go into the best of whatever I was going to do next? So I ended up choosing that for the wrong reasons.
And in July 2017, I started in New York City at Hillstone. It was this rotational management program, but it was very hands-on. It was like 12 hours in the restaurant managing, learning every single position from dishwasher to manager, and it was an additional two hours every day of leadership and management responsibilities.
So here I was doing these 14, 15 hour days about six days a week because the schedule was weird. It was like Wednesday to Wednesday, and the days off were always varied. So I was getting really, really exhausted both physically and mentally, especially because what I realized in that position was that there was a total lack of cultural fit. We always want to figure out a position where we fit within the people the way that it's run, whatever our style is.
I am somebody who's very innovative and creative, and I thought that's what the restaurant industry was going to be. But it turned out that Hillstone is this steadfast privately owned traditional organization since the 1970s. So I guess I didn't do my due diligence before going into this position.
But anyway, come November 2017, which was only four months into this program, I had this moment-- this moment where I just came out of the meat freezer, and I'm in my suit and tie. And I'm counting meat. I had rubber gloves on, and I'm freezing cold.
It's like 4:00 in the morning. I can barely see anymore or stand anymore. And all I had to do was go enter in the meat inventory into this spreadsheet in the office, and then I could leave.
But when I walked over to the office, I tried to fidget out the doorknob, and it was locked. And I was like, oh my goodness. I looked into the window, and the key was on the desk. The only place I needed to be, I was locked out of.
And maybe it was because I was so tired. Maybe it was because I just knew at that point enough was enough.
But then there I sat on the ground and just put my head in my hands and started laughing because what was I doing in this position? I just came out of a meat closet. I was about to go type in the meat inventory, and I was about to write about customer complaints that their signature cocktails were too expensive or too dry or whatever it was. But that wasn't what I wanted to be doing.
It didn't make an impact, and I was always somebody, even thinking about the little things-- like I did a certificate in civic engagement. I started this Alzheimer's awareness group. I was always somebody who wanted to create, give back, and make some sort of change in other people's lives. And I wasn't changing anybody's life, in this way at least. I wasn't changing the types of lives that I wanted to.
So then in there, I decided I was going to come back the next day, whenever that was going to be-- get my couple hours of sleep in, get back, and then quit. So I did. I quit the next day, and then I had to figure out what I was going to do after that.
And one thing that was keeping me sane during this four months of restaurant experience where-- I kid you not-- some of the people who went into the program with me would leave almost every day in tears. It was that intense. What was keeping me positive and upbeat and optimistic was my morning routine. I had this morning routine, no matter what time I had to get into the restaurant, where I would focus on calling myself down, so I wasn't too stressed at work.
And then I would focus on sort of like journaling or opening myself up so that I wasn't too anxious. And then I would focus on some sort of movement so that I was just physically and mentally prepared for the rest of the day. And then I focused on something funny so that I was smiling and laughing and being happy before getting into the work.
And then I focused on something that I could call my own, a hobby, for lack of a better term. And that hobby happened to be writing, and I was writing very basic reflections of all the podcasts that I was listening to. I was writing down my own stories based off of what I was doing before work, and I had like 100 pages of notes about my morning routine. So I decided that I was going to turn that into a book. And my first job and what I am now, I guess, is an author.
So I self-published my first book in January of 2018. I just fully immerse myself in that world. That's what I've had to do for the last two years is just whatever I decide, choose to just fully go all in. And I needed to figure out how I was going to make a business for myself out of writing.
So from writing, you could do more writing. You could get featured in articles. You can get there are different platforms where you can make money based on how good your writing does. You can sell more books, but you could also do speaking.
You can get paid for speaking engagements, and then you could also do coaching. You can help people one-on-one with the teachings that you're doing. So that's what I started to do.
In September of 2018, I got certified in Marshall Goldsmith stakeholder-centered coaching. So I started working with startup founders on behavior leadership change, while implementing morning routines for them. And then in November 2018, I started my next book concept, and that was all about positive psychology and living your life on cloud nine, like I call it, this sort of wonderful, ideal dream life.
And I did my research the last year for that, and now my niche is writing fiction. The book is an allegory about positive psychology and personal development where I've been able to trailblaze a new path for people to think about personal development by using-- I call it imagitivitation. It's imagination plus creativity, interpretation, and implementation.
So that's where we're at now. And then I've just really been able to, like I said, just go all-in in each thing that I have decided to pursue. And the reason that I've been able to do that is because of the people who have tried to interact with-- following the right guides and connecting with the right people and trying to emulate their processes and make them my own-- so yeah, very, very roundabout and long, long, long answer.
HELEN KIM: I mean, I feel like I just went on a roller coaster ride of memorable events that happened that really impacted your career, and I don't think you could have gotten to where you are now if you didn't take those chances throughout these years. So it sounds like you didn't follow the traditional career path that an economics major would have taken. But you definitely took a big risk. How did that feel, and do you remember having a specific plan?
JORDAN GROSS: Mm-hmm. So the way that I view my life is, how can I tell the superhero story when I am a father or grandfather to my kids or grandkids? And I always think in terms of, do I want to tell this story where I studied economics and took the traditional route to get an internship in finance and then have this investment banking career and stay in finance and work my way up the corporate ladder and just sort of do the same thing over and over and over again? Sure, make a lot of money probably and meet some cool people. I'm not knocking any of my friends because that's what almost all of them do, consulting and investment banking and things like that. But I don't think, for me, it's always about interpreting for yourself.
For me, that wasn't going to be the superhero story that I want to tell years down the road. So for me, the superhero story is exactly what you said, it's this roller coaster. It's this truly turbulent journey of, I tried this for a little bit, and then I explored that for a little bit. And then I discovered that I really love this for a little bit, and then I found this overarching theme that I love helping people. So what I ultimately wanted to do with my life was something involved with helping people.
So then I explored writing, and then I explored coaching. And ultimately, I decided that my life's purpose is to inspire people to confront their past and redefine their future through creative storytelling. [INAUDIBLE].
HELEN KIM: Right. Right. And it's all about figuring out what makes sense for you during that time. And I think that's where trying out different things, exploring your career options is a key to figuring out what is your purpose in life? Like what do you want to do?
JORDAN GROSS: That's right. Two things there-- one just to piggyback on that-- exploring so many different things, for me, what it did was show me what I didn't want to do, and that's very obvious. But what it also showed me was what I didn't want to feel when I was doing these things. So if you think about it that way, it's like, OK, if you do an internship in sales and you don't want to do sales, take it one step further. Like why don't you want to do sales? Because you don't want to feel like a pest or a nuisance when you get on the phone with somebody.
So you know that the next experience, it's not that you just don't want to do sales. It's that you don't want to do a position where you can feel like you are back in that sales role, feeling like you're annoying somebody. So that's something I would definitely urge people to think about.
It's not just like learning what you don't want to do. It's learning how you don't want to feel when you're doing what you don't want to do. That's the first point that I think people don't often hear.
The second point I wanted to make is that, just again to go off of that, it's based on how you feel. You have to have that sense of self-awareness. You have to be very reflective and cognizant of how you are feeling throughout each of your experiences.
It very much translates over to why I'm writing these personal development books in a fictional format, as opposed to the traditional self-help model, because I think too often, maybe when we want advice or we want self-help, we just read these books, or we listen to these mentors. And we just take the advice straight on. And even if they're trying to put themselves in our shoes as much as possible, unfortunately, they can't literally put themselves in our shoes.
So what we need to do is interpret for ourselves. We need to really think and try in our own lives the advice. So that's why it's fiction because I want to show you. Again, it comes down to feeling. I want to show you what your life could look like, as opposed to tell you what your life should look like.
HELEN KIM: Yeah. And I wanted to mention that Journey to Cloud Nine is a fiction book. Like the traditional self-help book is usually your nonfiction. So it's really interesting to hear that you wrote the story to help people figure out what makes sense for them.
JORDAN GROSS: Yeah, and I mean, but it does come from the traditional model. I interviewed hundreds of people throughout the last year, talking to them about their own interpretations of cloud nine. And what I did was try to integrate as many patterns and stories that I kept hearing over and over again about what makes people feel like they're on cloud nine. So there are a certain number of themes, and there are a certain number of momentous life occasions that come up through the book that are based on this extensive research. But I believe that there's a different language to get through to everybody.
Some positive psychologists and some self-help people like to go the numbers route, where they have a lot of stats and figures. Some people like to go the-- hey, I did all these interviews, and this is what the interview said kind of route. You can go the psychology route where you can get really scientific.
But for me, the route that I wanted to go, the language that I wanted to get to speak to people in was through storytelling so they could actually feel escape from reality for a little bit and imagine what their lives could really look like. So that's why it's fiction.
HELEN KIM: Yeah, that's amazing. I actually wanted to go back a little bit about the time you said you quit your corporate job.
JORDAN GROSS: Yeah, of course.
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JORDAN GROSS: --corporate in air quotes-- yeah. It's restaurant program, yeah.
HELEN KIM: Yeah, oh, this restaurant program and that comes with a decrease in salary, and that's a scary feeling. But Did you have any plan in sight, or how did you navigate during that time?
JORDAN GROSS: I want to take this question in two directions. And again, it comes down to the overarching theme of you have to know yourself. For me, I know that I am always going to be, OK, that's just my positive mentality. That's my optimistic mindset, and it's also knowing that I have people in my life who love and support me no matter what I do.
So when I quit that job, I actually had no plan whatsoever, but I was willing to go through the process of finding out what was next. I think it would be very different if I had a different type of mentality and work ethic and saying, oh, I quit my job. I'm just going to sit around for a while. But that wasn't it at all. My plan was to actively seek out a plan. Does that make sense?
HELEN KIM: Mm-hmm.
JORDAN GROSS: So it's like my plan when I quit was I'm going to work as hard as humanly possible to figure out what exact, perfect thing I should be doing next in my life. And that took me months. I didn't know the book was going to be what I ultimately wanted to do. I didn't know personal development and helping people is going to be what I wanted to do.
But I had this mindset that my plan is going to be to figure out what I could do for the long haul. It wasn't this set plan of, OK, I have this much money, and I have to allocate this much to this much. I happen to be in a position where I started a startup company when I was doing my master's program. I made some money doing the corporate program. I had some money saved up, so I was fine for a little while.
So with that mindset, I guess there was a little bit of a plan like, OK, I know I'm OK. It's like I treated myself like a startup-- like I had a burnout rate of a couple of years to live in New York City and to pursue what I wanted to pursue and to continue to live the life that I want to live outside of professional. But in terms of the specifics, like, no, there was no specific plan.
If I could go back and do it all again-- again, like I got here, so I wouldn't change anything-- but if I were to give advice to somebody who is a little bit different than myself, I would say don't impulsively quit right then and there-- maybe figure out, OK, the book is going to take this long to write, and then the book is going to lead to this amount of dollars coming in. And then I can create this after that being a little bit more-- having a little bit more of a structure before going into it as opposed to just doing it on the fly like I'm very much go, go, go, go, go, as opposed to plan. And that's just knowing your personality.
HELEN KIM: Yeah and a follow-up question to that would be what are your thoughts on side hustles? And did you have any while you were going through this process?
JORDAN GROSS: Yeah. So to me, I don't want to say everyone, but I think almost everybody should have some sort of side hustle. Whether that's a business or a hobby, it doesn't matter.
But I do think that we need to have some sort of release outside of our majority of mental capacity that we're spending during our week. So outside of our jobs, we need something else. We need something to look forward to. We need something to reflect upon because that's going to take us out of the daily norms that leads to this stress and anxiety of doing the same thing day after day after day, not feeling like it's purposeful or meaningful or fulfilling.
So side hustles are actually tremendously advantageous. And when I work with people, I almost always end up recommending that they start some sort of thing on the side, whether it is literally a business or just kicking a soccer ball around for 30 minutes a day just to get their mind off things.
There has to be something else. There has to be a play. There has to be a sense of responsibility for something other than your core functionality. You asked for me, did I have any side hustles? I'm a personal trainer also.
HELEN KIM: Oh, I didn't know that.
JORDAN GROSS: Yes, so I do personal training. Right when I wake up, I go to the gym, and then by 6:00 AM, I have my first personal training client. And then I'm done with personal training by 8:00. So that's when I start all this stuff. Yeah, so two hours a day, I do personal training.
HELEN KIM: Wow.
JORDAN GROSS: Yeah.
HELEN KIM: But yeah, I think it is important to have side hustles, even when you do feel like you have a solid full-time job, because I think it also sparks creativity in you and in parts of your life you never thought you would excel in. Or yeah, I think it's important to keep that going so you have something to look forward to outside of your main job-- I mean, occupation.
JORDAN GROSS: Right. But one of my favorite activities to do-- it was taught to me by one of my mentors, a guy named Jeff Hoffman. He's a really cool guy. He founded priceline.com a couple of years ago or 20, 30 years ago. He created-- I don't know if he created it.
But he I think he may have coined the term info sponging, and it reminds me of what you said in that side hustles can spark creativity. Because what he does during info sponging is, let's say, he was working in the travel industry for Priceline. Obviously, everything he was doing on a day-to-day basis had to do with travel.
But what he did for 15, 20 minutes a day was read articles on anything but travel. And in reading those articles, he would get ideas about how he could bring over different theories, methodologies, activities, skills that were being used in these other industries into the travel industry. So it's just like you're saying with side hustles, it's like what you're learning or what you're feeling when you're doing a side hustle, you can bring that into whatever it is that you're doing for more hours of your day.
HELEN KIM: Yeah, well, thank you for sharing that. And speaking of mentors, did you have any or do you have anyone that you could think of-- in addition to Jeff-- that really helped you push you forward into the career path that you are basically right now?
JORDAN GROSS: Yes, totally. And I really want to stress the beauty of the Northwestern alumni network here. Anybody who I wanted to reach out to in the Northwestern alumni network, I feel like I could have. But I wanted to choose.
I really wanted to choose like the epitome of who I wanted to become, and I think somebody who's had a career somewhat similar to mine-- obviously, they're different roundabouts and parts of the coaster where we differ. But there's a guy, Daniel Pink. Daniel Pink is now a five-time New York Times bestselling author and he-- yeah, did you interview him?
HELEN KIM: Yeah, we interviewed him.
JORDAN GROSS: You did?
HELEN KIM: A couple months ago-- yeah.
JORDAN GROSS: I love that guy. Yeah, he went to Northwestern, and then he went to law school. And he was a big-time lawyer. And all of a sudden, he started writing books about human performance, and he started studying human performance.
And he immersed himself in that world. And his books little by little became bestsellers, and then he's on Oprah. And then all of a sudden, he's this amazing voice in the world of personal growth.
So I read his books, and I listened to him on podcasts. And very simply, by going into the Northwestern directory and finding his email, I sent them an email, and now he just endorsed my book and probably email once every other month. I just wished him happy holidays, and he is just such a great person. And it just shows the power of this little connection that we had of going to the same college.
We started talking about our Northwestern experiences, and that just strengthened the connection. And because the connection was strong to begin with, he felt more comfortable sort of helping guide me down a path of what he did. And he was actually the person to tell me like, you got to dial down on one thing.
What's the one thing you're going to be? Is it going to be a writer? Is it going to be a coach? Is it going to be focusing on learning routines? Is it can be focusing on cloud nine? What's it going to be?
I ultimately chose cloud nine and using fiction to write about [INAUDIBLE] on them. But yeah, he really gave me that idea. So that's just one beautiful example of how important it is to use your network and then, two, not be afraid to take some initiative and reach out to somebody who you may think you have no business talking to.
HELEN KIM: And it's amazing how one simple ask could lead to something so big.
JORDAN GROSS: Yeah, that's right.
HELEN KIM: Yeah, that's amazing. Well, you've definitely shared so many great stories and shared some inspirational insights on what your career path looked like and how we can learn from that. And then do you have any other advice that you would like to share with our alumni network?
JORDAN GROSS: Yeah, I think my main piece of advice based off of my story is that you don't always have to go through the motions, and you don't always have to do what you're expected to be doing. So I think based off of if I were to have followed expectations for me, it would have been this steady trajectory of stability and comfort and money and things like that.
But if that's not how you're feeling-- if you're, at any point, thinking that this is not the life that you're supposed to be living, I would say to be totally unafraid to be more scared to keep doing what you're doing than you are to go ahead and make a change. Be more scared and fear the what if I stay in this and then 10 years down the road, I'm still doing this. Be more scared of who that person becomes than who you can become by making the change and going through a process that is different than everybody else. So that's what I definitely say. It's always fear that what-if more than the actual what.
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