Ryan Serhant: How to Manage Your Time for Happiness

BRIAN KENNY: In the words of Benjamin Franklin, “Time is money.” And coming from a person who juggled being an inventor, entrepreneur, discoverer, foreign diplomat, and founding father, he ought to know a thing or two about the value of time. But with all due respect, Benjamin Franklin lived in simpler times. He never had to deal with traffic on the way to work, never had to drop off and pick up for gymnastics or soccer. He never had to wade through a mountain of emails or dive deep into a TikTok wormhole. Let’s face it, time management is a universal challenge. And despite the fact that there are dozens of apps for that, it always feels like a losing battle. And it makes you wonder, what would it take to ruthlessly manage every minute of every day? So let’s get started. There’s no time to waste. Today on Cold Call, we welcome Professor Ashley Whillans and her co-author, Hawken Lord to discuss the case, “Ryan Serhant: Time Management for Repeatable Success.” I’m your host, Brian Kenny, and you’re listening to Cold Call on the HBR Podcast Network. Ashley Whillans’ research investigates how individual decision-making and organizational policies about time and money shape employee motivation and well-being. Hawken Lord is about to graduate from Harvard Business School with his MBA and he is the co-author in this case. And the first time we’ve had an MBA student ever on Cold Call. Hawken, welcome.

HAWKEN LORD: Thank you, Brian.

BRIAN KENNY: Ashley, great to have you on the show again.

ASHLEY WHILLANS: Thank you for having me back.

BRIAN KENNY: I think this case is really interesting and I admit I did not know anything about Ryan before I read the case, but everybody that I talked to seems to know who he is. So I’m clearly behind the curve on that one. But I think people will really be interested in hearing how he goes about managing his time. And I’m going to guess it’s not without controversy when you talk about this case in the class. So, Ashley, I want to start with you and ask you to tell us what the central issue is in the case and what your cold call is when you start the discussion in class.

ASHLEY WHILLANS: The case is set during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Prior to March 2020, Ryan Serhant led the Serhant real estate team in New York, which was ranked the number one residential sales team. When COVID-19 struck, Ryan found himself at an inflection point in his career like so many of us. And so the central issue in the case is whether Ryan should wait for a better time to start something new and continue working under someone else’s brokerage or whether he should branch out on his own and set up his own business. Ryan was already very busy, hence all the time management strategies, and his wife had just given birth to their first daughter. There were also financial and legal implications to consider. My cold call asks students what they would do if they were Ryan. Would they leave to start their own brokerage now or wait for a better time when the world was less uncertain? Would they dial up or dial down their career in this stressful moment of uncertainty? In follow-up questioning, I push students to consider what factors would influence their decision in that moment if they were Ryan and if they did decide to open their own brokerage and make themselves even more busy and stressed, what new systems, if any, would they need to put into place to ensure continued personal and professional success? So the core issue in the case is something that we all struggle with. As ambitious people, do we strive to climb that next mountain, or do we stop and pause and reconsider and maybe lean into our family life instead?

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah, I was stressed just reading the case, so I can tell you where I would end up on that scale. But let me ask you how you heard about Ryan. How did the case come to be? Why did you decide it was an important case to write?

HAWKEN LORD: Yeah, so I actually came up with the idea to write the case. In your first year at HBS, you have to take a leadership course called LEAD, and my professor, Emily Truelove, which I believe she’s been on this show before.

BRIAN KENNY: Yes. Yeah.

HAWKEN LORD: We were talking about leadership, and it’s specifically in the context of when I was starting my consulting firm, which I’m growing right now. And Ryan Serhant came up because I had just finished reading his book, Sell It Like Serhant. And so I was thinking about leads and stuff like that, but also more importantly, how was I going to balance being a student and being the CEO of a new company. And she gave me the idea of, maybe you should have Ryan as a protagonist for a time management case. And she put me in touch with Professor Ashley, I still call her professor because I haven’t graduated yet, and that’s part of her research. And so we got to talk and we thought it was a good fit. And from there we reached out to Ryan and Ryan was interested in getting his own name published in a Harvard Business School case. And the rest is history.

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. Was it kind of crazy… you’ve been reading cases for the last two years, we’ve said on this show before that MBA students at Harvard read between four and 500 cases in the two years that they’re here and they get pretty good at understanding how a case shapes up. But what was it like being sort of on the other side of the pen?

HAWKEN LORD: I would not have been able to do this without Ashley’s guidance. And what was interesting is, what were the themes that we wanted to hit? And we discussed that first and then we started going back from there in terms of understanding what would be a good inflection point to have a conversation in the classroom. And once we determined the inflection point, we were able to write out an entire outline and go from there and use that outline as a way to interview Ryan. And we already had the idea of the case, and then it was Ryan’s interview, which he gave us two hours, which is-

BRIAN KENNY: Wow.

HAWKEN LORD: A big chunk of his time.

BRIAN KENNY: Okay, listeners, you’re going to hear why that’s a big deal as we get further into the conversation.

HAWKEN LORD: Yes. And then we were able to run with it after that and it shaped up from there. And so we gather a lot of feedback along the way, but I’m pretty proud of where it ended up.

BRIAN KENNY: For the other person in the world like me who doesn’t know who Ryan Serhant is, could you please tell us a little bit about him? What’s his background?

HAWKEN LORD: Absolutely. Ryan is a New York City real estate broker, and now he’s the CEO of Serhant, his own brokerage company that he started three years ago in September of 2020. If selling billions of dollars of real estate weren’t enough, he’s also the star of Bravo’s Million Dollar Listing New York, and he’s written two books. He’s a speaker that goes and gives motivational speaker speeches all over the world. And he has his own multimedia company that’s under Serhant. And so as you can tell, he is a very busy guy.

BRIAN KENNY: And he’s doing lots of different things. How did he end up in doing real estate in New York, which is one of the most difficult places in the world to do real estate?

HAWKEN LORD: So real estate was not his passion to start. He wanted to become an actor and he studied acting in undergrad and decided to move to New York City to pursue his dream. He got a couple of minor roles. He was in a soap opera for a season or two before he got killed off during the writer’s strike. And he did hand modeling for a bit too in order-

BRIAN KENNY: So, hold on to that one for a moment. I did read that in the case and it was like a throwaway line, and I know that there’s been spoofs on hand models. I didn’t know there were actually real hand models out there.

HAWKEN LORD: So, his hand I think was on AT&T billboards everywhere. They painted his hand in different artistic ways while he held the phone, and that’s really what paid his bills at the time. But his acting career didn’t work out the way he was thinking, and there was an inflection point in his life that he remembers and it’s ingrained in his brain. And this was the moment where his money was running out and he went to buy yogurt, a $3 purchase, and his credit card was denied. And he vowed that from that moment on, he was going to work as hard as he could to get away from that. He calls it his wall. A friend at the time around the same time told him he should get into real estate because it would give him the flexibility to provide for himself in New York City, which is not a cheap place to live, and also have the flexibility to go to casting calls. And so he dove into real estate and over time he started shifting his focus from acting to real estate and acting to just real estate.

BRIAN KENNY: Wow. What’s it like being a real estate broker in Manhattan?

HAWKEN LORD: It’s extremely competitive. There are about two to three real estate brokers for every apartment that gets sold in New York City, and the sales are not evenly distributed either. You’ll have top producers, top salespeople that get most of the listings, and then the rest trickled down to everyone that’s starting out in their careers. So there’s a lot of people entering the brokerage business, a broker business in New York, and at the same time a lot of people leaving because they can’t cut it. At the same time, you have to work as a broker, you have to work for a brokerage firm, and the brokerage firm will provide you back office services such as leads and accounting–services like that. But in order to receive those services, you have to split your commission with them, and the split can be between 30 to 70%. All depends on where you are in your real estate career and what you can negotiate.

BRIAN KENNY: So you’re a little bit like an independent contractor working under the umbrella of the firm itself and the firm’s taking its share of your…

HAWKEN LORD: Exactly.

BRIAN KENNY: Let’s talk about Ryan’s personal life a little bit. What’s his personal life these days?

ASHLEY WHILLANS: As the case was set in 2020, Ryan had a very busy personal and professional life even then, and it was only getting busier. He has a wife and a young daughter, although he admits he’s not the easiest person to date, right?

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah.

ASHLEY WHILLANS: His schedule doesn’t allow for a lot of spontaneity. And of course, he has a hugely successful real estate career, even during the time of 2020, COVID slowed it all down, but he was already building out educational platforms. He was doing keynote talks, virtual talks. He had a diversified revenue stream for himself and his businesses, and of course, he is and was very ambitious. So he wanted to continue writing books, giving paid talks, growing his business. From Ryan’s perspective to manage his multiple competing demands and accomplish all of his goals in life. Careful time prioritization was essential. So his personal life was full, and I think he spends more time on his business than his personal life. But if we’re going to talk about… That’s intentional. That’s by design.

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. Can you describe what a typical day is for Ryan?

ASHLEY WHILLANS: I absolutely can. I think this is where you’re going to feel those feelings of stress and Brian, that you were talking about at the beginning of the conversation, that reading the case made you feel like it might have been an intervention to make you feel more time stressed.

BRIAN KENNY: Absolutely.

ASHLEY WHILLANS: All right. So he does meticulously count every hour, every moment of his day, as you might expect. He gets up at 04:30 AM, he works out, he does the hardest workout money can buy, he gets dressed, he goes to the office. He works at the office from about 07:30 to 09:00 PM and around 09:00, he makes it home for his wife. And around 10:30, he works from home, cleans up emails, and gets ready to do it all over again tomorrow.

BRIAN KENNY: What’s his approach to time management?

ASHLEY WHILLANS: He really thinks about making time your partner. From his perspective he says, “When you make time your partner, you’re working together to be productive and successful.” So he puts his time to work for him.

BRIAN KENNY: Okay.

ASHLEY WHILLANS: He’s very deliberate about how he spends his time and energy each day. So as I mentioned, he makes his early morning workouts very difficult to make the rest of his day feel easier. He believes in eating the frog first and doing the hardest professional tasks at the very beginning of the day, and he believes that time is at least, if not more, important than money, and he makes his decisions accordingly. So he has all of his food delivered in the morning, so he doesn’t have to spend any time during the day thinking about what to eat. He hires a personal driver. He has multiple personal assistants, one that just focuses on email. He’s all about maximizing the time in his day to its highest and best use.

BRIAN KENNY: It’s interesting. We had a faculty member here years ago who wrote his own piece on time management. One of the things that he said that he did was he wore the exact same outfit every day of the week because it took out that out of the equation. He didn’t have to think about what he was going to wear. He didn’t have to match colors or anything, and it was a pretty drab outfit. I’m just going to say it was a white shirt and gray pants and black shoes, but that’s what he wore every single day. So you just reminded me of that. So, I guess what I would ask then, there’s certainly a lot of people these days that are talking about balance and how do you balance your lifestyle and how important it is to your health and getting enough sleep and all of that kind of stuff, is what Ryan is doing here sustainable? Is it healthy and good for you?

ASHLEY WHILLANS: So, I want to talk a little bit before answering this question around a couple of the strategies that he puts into practice. I think we can think about what Ryan does at a high level as matching how he spends time on an everyday basis with how he personally wants to be spending his time in his ideal version of his life.

BRIAN KENNY: Okay.

ASHLEY WHILLANS: Is that ideal going to be the same for me and Ryan? No, Hawken and I had many conversations around, “Could we do that schedule every day?” Sometimes our schedules are like that. Sometimes we get up at four to work out and work until 11:00.

BRIAN KENNY: Okay. I never do that.

ASHLEY WHILLANS: Every day though. Could we really do Ryan’s life every day? I think for Ryan, it works for him because it is tailored to his personal goals, dreams, and aspirations. So, he first became interested in time management based on this idea of a time audit. So I’m a time and happiness researcher, and research often points to the idea of being intentional about time, to feel in control of our time and live a happier life. He became interested in auditing his time when he was new in the business and trying to sell clients from living in New Jersey to moving into the city. So his clients would often ask him, “Why should I spend $2,000 more per month on rent?” And he was always trying to sell them that they really wanted to rent and buy in the city because that’s where he was doing a lot of his business. So in response to his clients, he calculated the cost of their commute, which was often two hours of each day, and depending on the client, could cost them upwards of $3,000 of time. So he was helping his clients realize that they were losing money by not living in the city and wasting a lot of time commuting. Those conversations made him realize that he was wasting a lot of time in his life too, on unproductive, unfulfilling, and mundane tasks like commuting or doing emails all day every day.

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. Okay.

ASHLEY WHILLANS: So these conversations got him really interested in doing a time audit of his own time. So Ryan initially started keeping a time diary, which is like a food diary, but for seconds, not calories. And he took a week not during travel or while on vacation, and wrote down everything he did from the moment he woke up to the moment he went to bed. He color-coded every single activity and assessed whether he was spending an optimal amount of time in certain areas that he cared about. So he created three buckets of time that he tried to prioritize: business, personal, and family. Using this approach, he set goals for his time across each of these buckets, and then he proceeded to make decisions that enabled him to live his days, weeks, months, sales quarters, years more in alignment with these goals. So Ryan’s time, his day is by design.

BRIAN KENNY: Okay. And the case also alludes to what he’s doing. But what’s the “1000 Minute Rule?” Can you describe a little bit of that?

ASHLEY WHILLANS: Yeah. So the “1000 Minute Rule” is something that he came up with after he conducted his first-time audit and he realized how he was spending and wasting time. So this rule is something that he consistently keeps in his mind. The basic premise of the rule is that we have the same number of minutes as everyone else in the world and we can use them however we choose. The math is simple. 24 hours in a day multiplied by 60 minutes gives every person about 1,440 minutes. If you leave reasonable amount of time for sleeping and eating you’re left with about 1000 minutes. This “1000 Minute Rule” is Ryan’s time budget for the day. So to him, he feels like time is really expensive because he’s like, “Wow, I only have 1000 of these minutes each day.” And so he advocates as a result of this rule of spending his time as carefully as money. He hires personal assistants, leases a car, chooses probably the same outfit every day, outsources just about everything. Out of this idea that time is really scarce and precious. And unlike money, you can’t earn more of it. That thousand minutes is all you’re going to get, and then it goes away when the next day starts.

HAWKEN LORD: An important point that he makes on this “1000 Minute Rule” is, if you treat your minutes like dollars and you have a client that yells at you for five minutes. Let’s say you lose $5, would you throw away the rest of the money for the day? Because some people get in bad moods then let that affect the rest of their day, and then you’re wasting the rest of the day. But he’s saying, would you ever throw away that money just because you lost $5? No. So he takes that five minutes yelling from a client, and he doesn’t let it affect the other 995 minutes.

BRIAN KENNY: So even with 1000 minutes and with this ruthless time management that he’s doing, you still have to prioritize what you’re going to do in the course of a day. How does he triage what the things are that he’s going to focus on?

ASHLEY WHILLANS: Yeah, so he has a task triage system, which he created to divide his work-related tasks into three different categories based on urgency and importance. Category one is spend your minutes here, now. So this category’s for deciding where he should be spending most of his precious time each day, like returning top client calls. You can think of this as the task in a day that you uniquely provide value to. So him as a business owner, he needs to be taking top client calls, and those are the most important thing to drive his profit. So he really wants to focus all of his energy and attention on category one and leave a lot of his other tasks to other people. Category two is spend zero minutes here. So again, this category consists of tasks where Ryan’s adding no unique value, like bookkeeping and zero-minute tasks should be done by somebody else. It’s so interesting that I have a lot of conversations with leaders and in my work on time management, and I think this takes a lot of discipline to do. Because sometimes these low level tasks like email or saying yes to a meeting that you’re not adding any value, you’re being a bystander, kind of feels good in the moment. You feel like you’re getting a sense of accomplishment, but you’re not actually moving the needle on anything important. So he really minimizes the amount of time he spends in these no-value-add activities. Finally, category three is spend your bonus minutes later. So as Ryan sees it, if you have a scheduled meeting that ends 10 minutes early, you’ve just been given 10 bonus minutes of time from that initial 1,440-minute allotment. Ryan uses these minutes to get more done. So he keeps a list of tasks to receive bonus when he receives bonus minutes, like calling clients that they like their new apartment, so he never wastes his spare moment in the day. I really like this idea, and it’s something I talk a lot about in my writing too, keeping a time off to-do list. I’m not always saying you should fill those bonus minutes with productive work like Ryan, just keeping it a list to be intentional with the moments that we find ourselves with during the day can be an effective time management strategy.

BRIAN KENNY: You probably shouldn’t launch TikTok when you get those 10 bonus minutes because that everybody knows that turns into two hours. So let’s talk a little bit about his wife, Amelia, and their new daughter. How does he factor them into his time management?

ASHLEY WHILLANS: I also talk a lot about this in my writing and research. I think he’s done a good job in negotiating personal time. So he’s as intentional with his relationships as he is with his own personal time use. So he’s worked out a careful schedule with his wife about when he is going to be home and he sticks to the plan. So from our understanding, if he says he is going to be home, he’s home. Because he treats everything in his calendar as extremely important and he follows through on the plans he sets. So he comes home twice a week before the baby goes to bed at six or seven o’clock, on weekends he spends time with the family when they’re in New York. One night a week is a date night. Holidays are scheduled. So again, he doesn’t love spontaneity, but he’s with someone who embraces that about him. He admitted to us that he doesn’t always love unstructured unplanned social interactions because the opportunity cost of his time are running in the back of his head. And research suggests this. When we know how much value our time is worth when we bill by the hour, when we think of time as money like the Benjamin Franklin quote you started us off with, we have a harder time savoring leisure. And Ryan admitted he feels like this too. I think it’s partially why he has to plan his personal life because then he knows exactly what he’s doing with that time. It doesn’t feel unplanned, unscripted, and potentially a waste.

BRIAN KENNY: I couldn’t help but think as I was reading the case though, what about poor Zoe the baby is only seeing her dad a couple of times a week. That’s got to change at some point, right? Does this evolve over time?

ASHLEY WHILLANS: We’ll see. I don’t know. Hawken, if you have any thoughts on this when we talked to Ryan? My sense is that his family is really happy and supportive and they get the sense that he’s building this amazing business for them that’s going to support their family for generations. And when he came to class, he came to campus, we hosted him for an event. He did express some desire at some point to slow down, but right now he’s so focused on building this amazing company, this amazing business. He’s exhilarated by the idea, he’s very passionate about his work, that he’s really focused on climbing the next mountain, and he’s surrounded himself with people who are also excited about that vision. So I don’t think they see his work as getting in the way. Rather, I think he’s attracted a group of people around him that support and celebrate his ambition.

HAWKEN LORD: And as Professor Ashley has mentioned, he’s very focused. So when he’s focused on his work, that’s where his mind is at. But Saturday mornings until the early afternoons, he’s focused on his daughter. And so he’s trying to do the best he can in his tight schedule. And so he’s not letting work get in the way of his Saturday mornings with his daughter, but it’s definitely a compromise with the family.

BRIAN KENNY: Of course. Of course. So let’s talk a little bit about the consideration that he’s undergoing at the time the case is written about whether or not he should stay with the firm that he’s with or whether he should start his own brokerage, which I imagine he’s got a system in place right now that’s working well for his current situation that would throw everything into the air. But what are some of the things that he’s got to take into account as he’s thinking about starting his own brokerage firm?

ASHLEY WHILLANS: He was doing so well under this other brokerage. He had a big team. He was the number one in residential sales, and if he was going to leave to start his own company, he was going to have to build his client base from scratch. He was going to have to rebuild his entire team, start full marketing efforts from scratch. And he already had a social media platform that was garnering a lot of views. He was going to have to completely take that down, rebrand it. This could cost him hundreds of thousands of dollars per month. So it was very expensive decision from a client perspective. And of course his also financial risk. If he starts his own brokerage, he’s now going to be responsible for training new agents, providing leads, covering their expenses, and there’s a chance that he’s not going to break even. He might spend so much marketing these properties that it outweighs the cost, outweighs any profit that he could potentially take. So it was a big risk financially, especially because he was so successful already.

BRIAN KENNY: And in a post-COVID world, the whole real estate market, commercial residential is sort of up in the air at the moment. So that would imagine that factors into his thinking as well.

HAWKEN LORD: Yeah, it’s difficult. What he couldn’t predict at the time, everyone was saying, “New York is dead.” No one’s coming back to New York. No one wants to live on top of each other during a post-COVID era. But what we saw later is there was a huge pricing boom in the housing market, specifically in markets like Miami. And eventually, people started coming back to New York, and New York kind of revived. So he wasn’t the right time to start a new real new brokerage in order to take advantage of the pricing boom that was happening. Now there’s tight inventory that are keeping prices high, and so not a lot of things are trading and the high-interest rates that we’re seeing now are proving difficult as an affordability issue for many people. And so we’ll see where he goes from here, but he does have a very diversified revenue stream now. And so he’s able to keep his expenses, be able to pay that out and then live through the bust and boom cycles moving forward.

BRIAN KENNY: So as you look at the example that he has set in terms of how he manages his time and seems to find a way to create the balance that we all want to have with our family life and everything, what is there to learn between the extreme measures that he’s taken and happiness? Do those two things sort of reinforce each other?

ASHLEY WHILLANS: Ryan has a quote that I love, which kind of summarizes to something like: hard goals, soft plans. And when I was working as an actor… I’m a failed actor like Ryan too. My acting teachers used to tell me to work really hard, preparing for my role, and then when I got on stage to throw the work away. And in the HBS classroom, a similar philosophy applies. As an instructor, you want to prepare a lot. Note every single case back, all of the footnotes. And then try to be present in the moment to facilitate a good discussion. In my research, people who value time and are deliberate with how they spend time on a regular basis do report greater happiness, but only if they can get to the point where they’re present in the moment that they’ve worked so hard to carefully plan. So in reflecting on Ryan’s story, he’s a great example of someone who’s very methodical, maybe more than any of us would want to be, but he’s also able to enjoy his life when the moment he has planned arrives. And that in and of itself is a great lesson. I think another theme that comes up in the case discussion when we’re chatting about these ideas in class, is to make sure that you’re spending time in accordance with what you personally value and care about. He does a great job of matching his ideal days to how he actually wants to spend time each day. His ideal life might not be yours, but it’s pretty hard to argue with the idea that Ryan is doing something wrong when you look at how he’s spending his time in relation to his own goals. And this is consistent with happiness research, which suggests we need to live in accordance with our own personal ideals, not what our peers are doing, not what we think we should be doing in order to live a happy, successful, and fulfilling life. So to me, Ryan’s a good example of someone who has very clear goals for each of those three buckets, personal, family, business, and schedules his time in accordance to his very clear vision of his ideal life. Now, I approve of this approach as a happiness researcher, and it’s really easier said than done because the first step is knowing what you truly care about and value.

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. And he’s given us a blueprint to follow, I guess. This has been a fabulous conversation. I’ve got one question left for each of you, and I’m going to start with you, Hawken, as you are about to set out into your next phase of life here. You look at Ryan’s example. Do you think you could do this? Are you planning to take some of what he’s done and apply it to your life?

HAWKEN LORD: I’ve been trying to do it over the last two years.

BRIAN KENNY: Okay.

HAWKEN LORD: Managing an MBA program and running and starting a company at the same time was not easy, and there were a lot of sacrifices involved. Part of the MBA program is the social aspect of it, and I had to make some sacrifices there. I did not make as many friends. I didn’t go to as many events and network as much as I wanted to, but I’m very proud of what I’ve done and I’m trying to become better at it. Do I wake up every morning at 5:00 AM and get my workout in and make it all the way through without burning out? No. But I’m working on it. And so Ryan is someone I want to emulate to a certain point, but I still have my own values that I want to put forward. I’m married, I have a baby on the way, and I think I’m going to put a little more of family time in my schedule than Ryan currently has allocated, but it definitely Ryan is someone I want to emulate in the business world.

BRIAN KENNY: As a father of three, I would encourage you to pursue what you think is the right instinct there. So we definitely have a phenomenon here, and I think this is true in many places of fear of missing out. And I think, I love the notion that you mentioned earlier, Ashley, of Ryan thinking about time as his partner because I think so often we think about it as the enemy. “I’m running out of time, I’m never going to finish this.” And that’s just an interesting mind shift. If you can do that, maybe it helps you feel less stressed and more in control. So that’s kind of cool. Ashley, I’m going to give you the last word and just ask you if there’s one thing you want people to remember about the Ryan Serhant case, what would it be?

ASHLEY WHILLANS: Well, you both know that I’m a time nerd, so I study time and happiness for a living. So something that I want everyone to keep in mind, and these are from Ryan’s words in the case. Time is something that we often take for granted. We need data to understand how we’re spending time in relation to our goals. As Ryan notes, it’s impossible to make changes in your life if you don’t have the data. So asking yourself what you truly want and then reflecting on whether you were living according to those goals and values is a great reminder for us all about living each moment each day, week, and year with intention.

BRIAN KENNY: Awesome. Ashley, Hawken, thank you for joining me on Cold Call.

HAWKEN LORD: Thank you.

ASHLEY WHILLANS: Thanks.

BRIAN KENNY: If you enjoy Cold Call, you might like our other podcasts, After Hours, Climate Rising, Deep Purpose, IdeaCast, Managing the Future of Work, Skydeck, and Women at Work. Find them on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen, and if you could take a minute to rate and review us, we’d be grateful. If you have any suggestions or just want to say hello, we want to hear from you. Email us at coldcall@hbs.edu. Thanks again for joining us. I’m your host, Brian Kenny, and you’ve been listening to Cold Call, an official podcast of Harvard Business School and part of the HBR Podcast Network.