Ep. 30 - Blow It All Up: Mallory Contois on Quitting, Reinventing, and Finding Your People

I always kick it off with one question, though.

What is something that you know now that you wish you would have known earlier in your career?

For me, I think the biggest learning in my 30s especially has been to be like, like basically, fuck the plan.

You know, I, I think often when we come out of school, and especially our generation who grew up with parents or with guiding figures who had a very structured career, there was a, supposed to be a plan.

[laughs] Like, you were supposed to have a plan and execute on the plan and grow through that plan, and I wish I had known sooner that plans basically are almost irrelevant and actually can hold you back.

I think once I started to realize that if you can start to sort of succumb to forward momentum and follow the forward momentum in your life versus following a plan, you're gonna accelerate much, much faster, because you're working with tailwinds instead of headwinds.

So that's a lot of the advice that I give people now that I wish I had known in my, like, early to mid-20s.

I love this advice.

I actually wanna zoom into it a little bit more, because I feel like for a lot of people, they might not even hear that calling, basically.

That sounds really deep straight away, but, like, they're so stuck in the plan that it's like, are you kind of unhappy? Do you have any advice for people that are going through that?

Yes.

I'm actually writing an essay on this as we speak, so I have many thoughts.

I think the key is to start doing low-stakes experiments.

So for me, once I started finding ways to do low-stakes experiments that didn't require me changing jobs, upending my career, like doing a pivot, taking some big risk, instead I was running these tiny behind-the-scenes experiments to find out what I was actually good at, what I actually enjoyed, and really being open to a bunch of different versions of that.

That can start to give you some of that signal, and then you also simultaneously have to be open to that signal.

So I think it's hard when you're in a role, maybe you've been in a role for three, four, or five years, and you're like, "This is fine.

I'm getting paid well.

I'm not lit up about it, but everything is good," it's very hard to sort of pick your head up out of that and look for other signals.

But even within that role, there are probably pieces of it that when you do it, it feels really easy, or something is easier for you than it is for everybody else, or you genuinely look forward to doing a part of your role, or maybe you help another team and every time you work with that team you're like, "Oh, this is, like, so fun." Even those tiny signals of just in your heart being like, "Oh my God, this is cool," like that, "This is cool," is such a signal, and I don't think we put enough emphasis on it.

And as soon as you start really pattern matching and paying attention to those moments where you're like, "Oh, this is cool.

This is fun.

This was easy," then you can start to develop more of a thesis and build up your confidence to take a bigger bet in that direction.

But what I don't advise, and I think the advice a lot of people hear is, like, oh, if you think you're gonna be good at something, you have to blow up your life.

And I know blowing it all up is gonna come up later, because I also tell people that, but you don't have to blow it all up right away, you know?

I love that that's the option, too, 'cause I feel like I often say as well, "Yeah, just blow it up and do it and go for it," right?