Themes discussed in this episode

• IQ doesn’t equal EQ
• Poor listening = poor leadership
• Overworking yourself hurts your career more than it helps it
• Increasing your failure tolerance
• Tenacious leaders see more success

Episode Highlights

Timestamped inflection points from the show

7:30 – IQ is not the same as EQ: Elon has a genius-level IQ, but his emotional intelligence is basically non-existent. His emotional reactions, defensiveness, arguments with employees in public and firings of anyone who disagrees with him are clear examples of his lack of EQ.
8:40 – Good leaders listen: Refusing to listen to your people is the mark of poor leadership because they often know much more about the inner workings of the company than you do.
11:30 – Overworking yourself can be detrimental: If you overwork yourself like Elon does, your brain will start to shut down. You won’t function well cognitively when you’re not well rested.
12:20 – Increase your failure tolerance: If you’re more fearless and more willing to take risks, you’ll inevitably increase your failure tolerance. With a high failure tolerance, you’ll be more innovative and ask for things you want because you’re less afraid of a no.
16:00 – Tenacious leaders see more success: Tenacious people don’t give up, they’re persistent, and they don’t take no for an answer.

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Top Quotes

5:40 – Emotional intelligence means you know how to be in positive, connected relationships with other people. You know how to predict what might happen. You know how to consider everyone’s emotions and feelings in a situation. You know how to communicate. 

8:10 – He basically publicly outed himself as someone who likes to snap back at people, who likes to attack, and who’s very defensive, and that doesn’t present an intelligent position. It doesn’t present an intelligent leader. 

11:40 – You will not be as calm and able to handle your emotions as you would be if you gave yourself enough time to rest, relax, and then get back to work.

13:30 – Feel the fear and do it anyway.

17:30 – “When you are that person that is tenacious and persistent and doesn’t take no for an answer, you’ll get more yeses than nos because sometimes what it takes to really get to that level of success is to ask.”

18:00 – “If you’re fearless, you have a high failure tolerance, and you focus on tenacity, never giving up with those three things, you will move faster down the career path than anybody else because most people give up easily.”

Links

Check out our LinkedIn episode for more ways to effectively grow your network and get that next opportunity.

Connect with me on LinkedIn. Order my book!

Transcript

00;00;00;00 – 00;00;12;13
Announcer
Welcome to work, Mom says. Don’t be an idiot. And now here’s your host work. Mom.

00;00;12;15 – 00;00;42;21
Lori Jo Vest
Hello, everybody. I’m Lori Jo Vest Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of work. Mom says don’t be an idiot. I’m here to help you play the emotional content sport of business and learn how to experience more success and less drama. So let’s get started. Today, we are going to talk about Elon Musk. And my premise is that Elon Musk is not any smarter than you.

00;00;42;23 – 00;01;15;11
Lori Jo Vest
Matter of fact, he’s not any smarter than a whole lot of people. So I want to kind of hit on how our culture really elevates the wealthy and thinks that if you’re a wealthy businessperson, you must be really intelligent. And we’re seeing a lot of examples of that, a lot of examples of people in our country, in the U.S., being really impressed by really wealthy people and not realizing that maybe those people started out with a whole lot of money and maybe they aren’t as smart as we think they are.

00;01;15;11 – 00;01;52;14
Lori Jo Vest
And maybe if we didn’t think everyone else was smarter than we are, we might try harder and do more new things and innovate more often, etc., etc.. So a couple of things. I had to do a CEO article for one of our clients about Elon Musk and how high is Elon Musk’s IQ. And the reason that came up was because apparently that’s something that a lot of people search for and they wanted to get some Google juice from that question How high is Elon Musk’s IQ, if you know, how smart is he?

00;01;52;15 – 00;02;17;12
Lori Jo Vest
All those kind of questions. So I was given the opportunity to go out there and dig into Elon. Who is he? What does he do? Why do people love it so much or hate him so much? I guess he’s got like a personality that you either love him or hate him. And how smart is he, really? And what I came up with was that Elon is has an IQ of 155.

00;02;17;14 – 00;02;54;23
Lori Jo Vest
Yay, Elon. That is amazing. That’s a genius level IQ and the average person’s IQ is about 100. So that’s telling People think you have really smart. Elon is pretty smart. However, a couple of things to talk about. Elon started out with a whole lot of money. Elon comes from money. There’s money in the family, there’s emerald mines. A lot of the money he’s made has been through buyout purchases, investments in companies where people were already making great things happen, like, you know, PayPal, Tesla.

00;02;54;26 – 00;03;28;15
Lori Jo Vest
He hasn’t invented anything, I guess you could say. So when you think of Elon Musk, don’t think of him as being like somebody who’s really innovating. He works really, really hard and he’s obviously smart, but he’s not necessarily that much smarter than the average C-level executive. And so let’s talk about what they mean that means to you. Most of you, if you’ve listened to this podcast before, you know, I have a 24 year old son named Kyle, who is a graduate from the University of Michigan to graduate in 2020.

00;03;28;17 – 00;03;53;14
Lori Jo Vest
He’s out there making a really happy life for himself. Very proud of me. He’s very happy. And he went to some really high performing schools when he was starting out in third grade. And that’s great. I love being surrounded by high performers, so I really kind of wanted my son to be surround by high performers because that gets you in the mindset of becoming a high performer.

00;03;53;17 – 00;04;19;27
Lori Jo Vest
And Kyle always felt like through the magnet school we went to from 38 at the high school, he went to International Academy. He always felt like he was going to school with people that were really, really smart, and that meant that he wasn’t quite as smart because he wasn’t the fastest kid and the math whizzes and he wasn’t the he had to plan along and do some work to get things to to reach certain goals.

00;04;19;29 – 00;04;42;26
Lori Jo Vest
As he watched some of his fellow students that just zipped on through everything. And yeah, they studied, but they just naturally seem to have this habit or this ability to to succeed. So he came out of college a little concerned, like, you know, we went to University of Michigan, other high performing school mom, you know, I just don’t know what it’s going to be like up in the work world because I am not that high performer.

00;04;42;29 – 00;05;04;23
Lori Jo Vest
And I had to bite my tongue during a lot of conversations because it came up a lot and he was really worried. And I just basically told him, Hon, you have no idea that when you get out in the real world, you’re not necessarily working with a ton of high performers, maybe one in ten or one in 20, but the average person that you run into at the office is not Elon Musk.

00;05;04;25 – 00;05;29;04
Lori Jo Vest
They’re not as committed, they’re not as passionate. They may not be as intellectually smart. They may not have really high IQs, which is your emotional intelligence. So the people that you run into at work are not going to be Elon Musk level people. Plus, there is some evidence out there that Elon might not be as smart in areas that you can work on.

00;05;29;07 – 00;05;53;04
Lori Jo Vest
There’s several types of intelligence. One of them is emotional intelligence and that’s what we focus on here in this podcast, is emotional intelligence means, you know how to be in positive, connected relationships with other people. You know, how to predict what might happen, you know, how to consider everyone’s emotions and feelings and situation. You know, how to communicate, you know how to re communicate.

00;05;53;06 – 00;06;34;01
Lori Jo Vest
You know how to hold your own emotions in check so that what you’re doing is is really positive when you’re in a business situation, even when things get hard. So emotional intelligence is really, really important. And one of the things that I wrote down here is that Elon hasn’t exhibited a whole lot of emotional intelligence. And I’m recording this on the 4th of July holiday in the U.S. And we just had a weekend where Twitter was basically throttled and people were getting a message that they had exceeded their use for for the day to come back another day come back another time.

00;06;34;03 – 00;06;56;25
Lori Jo Vest
That paid verified post would get more views. You know, if you were a paid person and somebody who was paying to get that little blue checkmark, I think it’s, I don’t know, $8 a month or something. Then you could see more content in any given day and it just kept going and going. And then there was all this gossip about he’s not paying Google for the cloud space for Twitter.

00;06;56;25 – 00;07;29;18
Lori Jo Vest
I mean, who knows if that’s true? Nobody knows. But it was this big conversation about how Elon kind of made an investment in Twitter of $44 billion and quickly came in and put his own lack of emotional intelligence on display. And that is something I would like to present in this podcast as a learning opportunity. It is a teachable moment to take a look at what he was doing and figure out how you can avoid doing those kinds of things in the future.

00;07;29;18 – 00;08;02;20
Lori Jo Vest
So so let’s go through it real quick. One of the things that that Elon did when he first came into Twitter was, you know, bring a kitchen sink, create some drama, let go of a whole bunch of people, argue with the employees in the public square on Twitter, fire people that had a conflicting view of what he thought, just argue and basically publicly out himself as someone who who likes to snap back at people, who likes to attack and who’s very defensive.

00;08;02;20 – 00;08;30;21
Lori Jo Vest
And that doesn’t present an intelligent position. It doesn’t present an intelligent leader when you’re doing the kinds of things that even a high school kid may know better than to do a snap back at something in the public square. Don’t do it. It’s not you know, it’s an emotional reaction. It shows a lack of emotional intelligence. So ditch the woman, number one from Elon’s behavior.

00;08;30;24 – 00;08;53;03
Lori Jo Vest
There’s a lot of things coming out lately about the Tesla and how the self-driving capability of the vehicle. I don’t know the technical details about it, but how his engineers were coming back to him and saying, Elon, you know, the auto self-driving is not ready yet. That future is not ready to go. We don’t want to release it until it has a particular visual component.

00;08;53;05 – 00;09;31;05
Lori Jo Vest
And Elon said we’re going anyway. And now there’s all these problems with the Teslas and their self-driving capabilities. And in spite of the fact that they continue to tell people a self-driving car still requires monitoring, you’ve got people that are, you know, I don’t know if you’ve seen the videos on Twitter, YouTube, wherever, but there are people who are basically driving down the freeway in the driver’s seat with their head low back, taking a nap, and, you know, the police cars going up beside him, trying to get him to wake up and, you know, the siren doing all kinds of things to get them to wake up.

00;09;31;07 – 00;09;59;15
Lori Jo Vest
And Elon, self-driving cars are not ready yet for that level of self-driving. So, yeah, you start if you dig in a little bit, you can find some stuff there that he just decided not to listen to his people. And in business, not listening to your people is a really huge sign of poor leadership and listening to your people and letting them tell you what they know because they’re often like boots on the ground into the details.

00;09;59;15 – 00;10;22;01
Lori Jo Vest
Situations that you as a CEO may be missing or you as a coworker, even if you’re not in a leadership position yet, listening to the people around you is what will make you informed and will contribute to your success. So listening is a huge component of IQ that Elon’s not exhibiting. A couple other things at sea. Overworked and escapism.

00;10;22;01 – 00;10;53;22
Lori Jo Vest
Let’s talk about that. Okay. This is a teachable moment. That’s what I like to call a teachable moment. A teachable moment here, people. Time for another teachable moment. I just read last week that Elon gives himself 7 hours a day to sleep, shower, do everything else besides work. So he has a 17 hour a day worker. He wants all his people back in the offices, back in the plant.

00;10;53;24 – 00;11;24;15
Lori Jo Vest
And he is, you know, committed and passionate and he sleeps at work. You know, I think most professional psychologists and medical professionals will tell you that if you don’t give yourself a break, your brain is not performing at the level that it needs to for you to be successful. Maybe Elon 155 IQ only denigrates down to 240 when he hasn’t slept or he’s not giving himself any downtime.

00;11;24;18 – 00;11;41;00
Lori Jo Vest
But if you’ve ever gone through a really extended busy time, maybe while you were studying for finals or you have a huge presentation to do at the office and you are just pounding on the keyboard, getting things done, but you’re up till three in the morning and then up the next morning at seven and you just keep going.

00;11;41;02 – 00;12;04;26
Lori Jo Vest
Your brain will start to shut down and your physicality may even start to shut down. You will not be as healthy as you will not function as well cognitively, you will not be as well rested. You will not be as calm and able to handle your emotions as you would be if you gave yourself enough time to rest, relax, and then get back to work.

00;12;04;29 – 00;12;34;25
Lori Jo Vest
Because it’s really important. It’s important for your success in the office, It’s important for success in life. So couple more things. Let’s see some of the things that I think are really interesting that he does really well. Again, more teachable moments. This podcast is just loaded up with teachable moments. Mr. Elon is incredibly fearless, and when you’re fearless in business settings, you will take more risks.

00;12;34;27 – 00;12;58;19
Lori Jo Vest
You will ask for more because you won’t be afraid of the no, you will just take more chances. You’ll be more innovative. You’ll have those difficult conversations, You’ll ask for things you want, that you’re not sure if the other person’s going to say yes. Being fearless is something that Elon obviously does really, really well and it’s something that you can cultivate.

00;12;58;21 – 00;13;17;26
Lori Jo Vest
One of the mantras I have a steal the fear and do it anyway. Feel the fear and do it anyway. One more time. Feel the fear and do it anyway, because things will come up that will scare you. But if you don’t try, how do you know that you will have succeeded? And the only way to succeed is to take risks.

00;13;17;27 – 00;13;47;10
Lori Jo Vest
Risk is really important to business success. So a couple more things. Elon has a really high failure tolerance. Obviously they just shot off a rocket, SpaceX X shot off a rocket I think a month or so ago, and it went up in the air and exploded. And they were like, Yeah, And look, one of the things we learned and they didn’t complain or come out with any negative press really about the failed launch.

00;13;47;13 – 00;14;08;22
Lori Jo Vest
They were very optimistic and said, Hey, we got it off the ground. We got it up to a certain height, and now we go back and figure out why it crashed or why it burned out. So having a high fail top failure tolerance is really important. I have a really great friend that put out an event a couple of weeks ago and very few people showed up.

00;14;08;25 – 00;14;36;27
Lori Jo Vest
I mean, she got a venue, she had food, very few people showed up. The people that showed up were very important people. And so when we talked about her event the next day, there were three or four of us on our accountability call in the morning. And what I suggested is she’s building her failure tolerance. She had an event and two people came and it’s all downhill from there, meaning it will only get better.

00;14;36;27 – 00;14;57;01
Lori Jo Vest
What did she learn? And we talked about unpacking it and looking at why that might have been. A lot of times when you do online registration for events, people don’t take it seriously. If you don’t charge for the event, people may not feel bad about canceling at the last minute. It was in the summer, in the evening. Is there a better time to have it?

00;14;57;03 – 00;15;19;24
Lori Jo Vest
Are people more used to those kinds of events being on Zoom? So we kind of unpacked it and basically what she learned was how do we increase her failure tolerance? And that’s important to success. It’s also very important to IQ because when you take a chance and you ask for something, you make it a no. Or when you try something new, you may or may fail spectacularly.

00;15;19;27 – 00;15;39;26
Lori Jo Vest
You may fail in such a big way that you lose a lot of money. It happens, but you don’t know how successful you could be if you never try. So the last thing I want to talk about, about Iran and the last teachable opportunity we have here is he’s got incredible tenacity. Okay? This is a teachable moment. That’s what I like to call a teachable moment.

00;15;39;26 – 00;16;10;24
Lori Jo Vest
A teachable moment here. We’ve got time for another teachable moment. Tenacity is a skill or a skill or a talent or a mindset, but it basically means you never give up. You keep going, you stick to it, you go hard. You have people around you to keep you on track and you just don’t stop. And that is tenacity.

00;16;10;24 – 00;16;29;08
Lori Jo Vest
And I remember back when I was in television production, that’s a ten years now, but I spent a good chunk of my career in television production, and we were always trying to do things that had never been done before. The client comes to you with the script. They say, We have this idea, let’s do this, and you try to do it.

00;16;29;14 – 00;16;57;17
Lori Jo Vest
And sometimes you fail and sometimes the client needs something on a certain day and you can’t find the piece of equipment that you need. And maybe this time you’re just you just don’t you can’t fail. So you head out and call everybody. You know, you go to other markets, you call every single person that you know in the production business and you ask and you find what is needed for your client.

00;16;57;20 – 00;17;24;14
Lori Jo Vest
And when I was in production, I was known as that person that if you couldn’t find a turntable, call Lorie. She’ll figure it out. If you can’t find an experienced script supervisor, you can’t find a caterer for your shoot color biracial. Figure it out. The reason was I was so incredibly tenacious. I was not giving up. I was going after things like, you know, like, like a terrier, you know, like they say a pit bull on a pork chop.

00;17;24;16 – 00;17;51;27
Lori Jo Vest
And when you are that person that is tenacious and persistent and doesn’t take no for an answer, you’ll get more yeses, the no’s, because that’s sometimes what it takes to really get to that level of success is to ask. And when you fail, keep going. And when you fail again, be persistent, then keep going. It’s the kind of thing that will take you into a higher realm.

00;17;51;29 – 00;18;24;19
Lori Jo Vest
If you’re fearless, you have a high failure tolerance and you focus on tenacity. Never giving up with those three things. You will move faster down the career path than anybody else because most people give up easy. They let fear rule their lives. They don’t stick to things. If they fail, they they struggle and suffer. There’s a lot you can do by focusing on those three particular things that Elon Musk has loads of.

00;18;24;19 – 00;18;43;29
Lori Jo Vest
He is built for that kind of work. Everybody doesn’t like him, but you can’t say that he’s not doing amazing things out in the world. Now I’m a little upset about what he’s doing over Twitter, but that’s a whole nother conversation. And all you have to do to find out what I think about Twitter is see me on Twitter.

00;18;44;01 – 00;19;06;11
Lori Jo Vest
There’s a lot of work to be done there to get it back to what it was before he took on and made some crazy changes that impacted us all. So anyway, that’s all I’ve got for you for today. A couple of things to talk about before I wrap up completely. My new book is on the shelves at Amazon and Barnes and Noble Online.

00;19;06;11 – 00;19;24;25
Lori Jo Vest
It’s called Work. Mom says don’t be an idiot. 38 Lessons You Don’t Want to Learn the hard way. Seriously, You don’t want to learn these lessons the hard way. I share all the lessons I learned in my twenties and thirties and hopefully save you the trouble of doing some of the things that I did that weren’t quite appropriate, did serve my career.

00;19;24;25 – 00;19;42;24
Lori Jo Vest
Success didn’t really help me get where I wanted to go. So second thing work. Mom says dot com has a contact form. I would love to hear from you. Please share what you’d like me to talk about. Do you have a guest you’d like to suggest? Would you like to be on the show? Would you like to sponsor the show work?

00;19;42;24 – 00;20;10;11
Lori Jo Vest
Mom says dot com has a contact form there for you to put that information in. Comes right to my inbox and I’ll get back to you. So. And besides that, please, if you’re listening on Spotify, Apple Music, iTunes or any of those other platforms, please leave me some stars. Reviews make the world go round as podcasters, and I would love to grow this podcast into something a little bigger than it is.

00;20;10;13 – 00;20;37;00
Lori Jo Vest
And only you can help me do that. So that’s it for this episode. See again soon. Thanks for listening to work. Mom says don’t be an idiot. For more information, you can email work mom at l0ri work Mom says account. That’s Laurie at work. Mom says com and remember, don’t be an idiot.

Who is our ideal listener?

This podcast is for young professionals, so they can learn to play the emotional context sport of business and experience less drama and more success.

The ideal listener is anyone struggling on an emotional level in the workplace. Work Mom Says it helps you learn to be strategic at work. This means you can look at the big picture without getting lost in the weeds. How can you be more logical and less emotional? Be strategic, and Work Mom Says can help you.

“I tell people to back up, put down the magnifying glass, and look at the big picture when you’re responding to something,” said Lori Jo Vest, Work Mom. “In doing this, you will understand that what’s really upsetting you right now will be something you don’t even remember next week.”

 

What value can people get from listening to this podcast?

Listening to Work Mom Says can help you grow your mood management skills, grow your ability to reframe situations, and look at things from a strategic point of view. This makes it easier to go into a work situation and get the most positive results.

On Work Mom Says, we also offer tips and tricks for creating connected positive relationships that last over time. People will want you on the team if you can create connected positive relationships and work environments. You become an asset, and you will be more successful when you’re an asset.

“I also like to talk about developing traits like optimism, persistence, tenacity, stick-to-itiveness, sticking with things, and approaching every project with a curious mind instead of a fearful mind,” said Lori Jo Vest, Work Mom

                                                                                                     

Why do I do this? A few more words from Work Mom

I do this because I naturally fell into the Work Mom role when I worked in the ad agency business and had so much fun with it. I also realized I had made just about every mistake there was to make. I don’t hold myself as a stellar example of truth and how you should be. I hold myself out there as someone who has been bruised, battered, and beaten up and learned some important lessons. I’d love to share these lessons with young people, so they don’t have to make those same mistakes or be the idiot I was.

I also want to help young professionals realize that many things our culture prioritizes aren’t really important. We talk a lot about what should be important and how to present your best face at the office so that you can succeed.

I’ve learned so much throughout my career, and it’s gratifying to share that with young professionals and help them avoid some of those mistakes and get to that success sooner.

Episode 26 – “The Origin of Work Mom Says (Plus a Sneak Peek at My Upcoming Book)” appeared first on Work Mom Says.