275. 8 Questions for New Grads- Danielle Robay

This week we are sharing advice for graduates from some of our friends. Danielle Robay, a journalist and host of the podcasts PRETTYSMART and The Bright Side shares eight questions young people can ask themselves to better learn what they want from life. She calls it working on your personal resume. 

Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.

Danielle Robay: Hello grads, I’m Danielle Robay. I’m a TV host, journalist, creator of the podcast Pretty Smart, which I call a love letter to women with something to say,  and the question everything card game.  I graduated from UW Madison in 2013, and I graduated from New Trier High School in Chicago in 2008, so I know a little bit about being a grad. 

Since I graduated, not much has changed. I mean, TikTok arrived, but other than that, not much. I still have a really clear memory of everything that you are thinking and feeling and anticipating.  Now navigating this next step, navigating your 20s,  you know, my mom warned me. She said, your 20s are your hardest decade.

They’re just so full of constant transition.  I’m 33 now and so far I think she’s right. Your 20s are so full of fears and firsts and frustration  and research tells us that 80 percent of life’s most defining moments happen to us by 35.  So, they’re not just hard. These years are important.  How can you find your purpose, make money, meet new friends, move to a new city, fall in love a few times, maybe get your heart broken, learn how to do your taxes, get health insurance, lease a car, I’m stressed out listing all these things,  but you’re graduates, so it goes without saying that you have enjoyed a certain amount of success already,  and as you move into the workplace, you you’re going to be able to achieve that same success. 

But the rules of the game change a little bit. It’s no longer enough to be smart or hardworking. The skills required to deal with people well, negotiate, absorb feedback are among the new criteria for success.  Now, one of the things I’ve noticed as a journalist is  our society is really focused on the outer resume to succeed.

GPA extracurriculars,  and it’s not focused enough on the inner resume that we really have to develop to succeed.  I wish I would’ve worked on mine earlier, but I didn’t know.  I didn’t start looking inward until my whole life felt like it was falling apart.  I was unemployed, I was heartbroken, I was depressed,  and I started turning inward. 

I realized that I asked questions for a living, and I never asked myself one question.  Once I did,  everything changed. Questions are such a game changer.  They’re really a superpower, so I wanted to give you eight questions that you can start asking yourself to really focus in on your inner resume, that inner scorecard. 

The first is, who do I admire, and who’s doing it best?  I remember not knowing where to start in my career, and the best place to start is to work backwards. Find someone’s career you really admire, or even just a person you admire.  Study their blueprint, apply it, and adapt it to 2024. Number two.  What do you want to be a student of?

What do you not mind spending an exorbitant amount of time honing in on, working through, dealing with problems about?  There’s a quote I love, we’re not meant for work, work was meant for us. Humans really need to work, but we’re not meant to hate it.  I’m not saying go follow your every whim or every passion.

It’s true, you have to dig deep and think about the hard and soft skills that you actually possess and find something commensurate. You must be rooted in reality.  Reality is meant to be amazing.  Three. Now this is one that I really wish someone had told me to think about. Who are your people? Who do you feel energized and ignited by?

Who do you enjoy being around the most?  If you don’t know what you want to do, figure out who you like to be around. Imagine yourself at a 20 or 30 person dinner. Who do you want to be sitting next to? A group of engineers? Is it a group of fashion designers? For me, I’m so happy around journalists.  And if I would have had that imagery in my mind years ago, I think I would have known that a lot quicker. 

Number four, what drives me? Am I driven by money? Am I driven by impact, by process and organization or socialization and camaraderie? Am I a team builder? Do I like solo work better?  Some of this is difficult to determine theoretically, and there will be some trial and error in practice, but I think it’s really important to think about it before applying for jobs.

What are you driven by?  Number five, what are you curious about?  I started doing something when I moved to LA when I was 22 called curiosity meetings. And I would reach out people to like, reach out cold on LinkedIn or email and set up meetings with people in different industries. And it helped me build a network early on.

But it also gave me insight into so many different professions. If you did theater in high school, you’ll understand this. They usually make you crew, which means build sets and costumes. And I hated it. All I wanted to do was act, but later I realized what it did for me.  People in the theater department wanted everybody to have an understanding and value every aspect of the production. 

Oftentimes, we can’t fully value what we don’t know about. So talking to all of these different people allowed me to have reverence for people in every field, in every walk of life.  Number six. What are your four pillars?  So I’m a TV host and journalist, obviously, and I learned very early on how important it was to brand myself.

But no matter what line of work that you go into, I really think it’s crucial. If you’re going to be an attorney, what will people come to you for? It’s not specific enough to be a bankruptcy attorney. Why will a firm want you? Why will clients choose you?  In my mind, the same goes for an engineer, a computer scientist, quite literally any profession. 

If you don’t know what you want your pillars to be, send five people an email and ask them to reply to three to five questions that you pose. Like, what do you think are my three best qualities or skills? In what environments do you see me shining in  mine as a journalist are connections, books,  feminism, or women’s issues  and sports. 

In tangent with this, the next question is, who do you want to be in the world? People are going to constantly ask you what you want to do, and sometimes that’s a really hard question to answer.  But you’ve known who you’ve wanted to be since you were two years old. It’s in your core.  Write those qualities down and keep those.

It’s almost like a personal mission statement. So no matter where you go, what you end up doing, you always know who you want to be and who you are.  And number eight, what would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail?  So much of what holds us back in life is fear. So ask yourself that. What would you do right now if you knew you could not fail? 

And don’t forget, you can always fail at plan B, C, D, E, so you might as well go for a plan A.  And lastly, Gloria Steinem says, I’ve been using my torch to light other people’s torches because the whole idea that there’s only one torch is part of the reason why we were all so messed up. Everybody needs a torch.

And I had several amazing women pass me the torch. So today I am passing it to you. You are the torch bearers.  Congratulations, and go get them.