This week we chatted with Rebecca Hoffman, of Good Egg Concepts. She shared with us that she has started writing a column for a local newspaper about small businesses. She talks with us about no matter the age, everyone's got a story to tell. She and Ray discussed her part of Ray's new book coming out mid-March to mid-April. She shares with us about conserving her family history along with some fascinating details about her grandmother. They discuss how podcasting is a great way to tell your story and create a family legacy. You don't want to miss this episode!
Transcription:
Kris Parsons00:01
Welcome to changing the rules, a weekly podcast about people who are living their best life and how you can figure out how to do it too! Join us with your lively host, Ray Loewe, better known as the luckiest guy in the world.
Ray Loewe00:16
I love that song, but it gets in the way sometimes. Good morning, everybody! Thanks for joining us on changing the rules. We have a great guest today, I'll introduce in a minute, but a quick comment on Changing the Rules. We're given rules all through our life. And I think it was Steve Jobs that came on and said, "If you're living your life under somebody else's rules, you're not living your own life". We have somebody here today with us, who lives her own life. Rebecca Hoffman, say, Hi, Rebecca. Hi, Ray. Rebecca has been on our show before, more than once; she is a really important part of my life, my career because she got me into thinking in terms of stories. So let me tell you, first of all, a couple of things: number one, we have a new book coming out, but our target date is about 60 days, somewhere around mid-March, or mid-April. We were hoping for the Ides of March, but we're not going to make the Ides of March, we're gonna get the Ides of April, or whatever it is. Rebecca is a chapter in our book. She has a chapter in our book because she exemplifies so much of what the luckiest people in the world are. It's the way she lives her life, the way she runs her business, and from talking to her, it's the way she runs her family too. Although, I think sometimes she thinks her family runs her. There are four things that I think about when I think about Rebecca and when they relate to the luckiest people in the world. Number one, she's really good with rules; she makes them work for her. Rules are part of her life. She's accepted those pieces of the good ones that she wants to take with her, but she bends them to make her life work the way she wants to. We can talk about all the things she did during COVID, that you if you really obeyed the rules, you wouldn't do. But she did and she did them with positive results. She also is really good at finding positive solutions to things. She doesn't put up with just saying "there isn't a solution". She digs until she finds what she wants, and she does this not only for families, but she does this for business clients too. I think that's the biggest reason that they hire her. She's also great at following what's fascinating and motivating. We're going to see that a little bit today when we get into this conversation. The most important thing, as far as I'm concerned, is I came back from Africa and I was talking to her about my experience. She just came back and said, "Wow, you have some great stories, package them into stories, put morals on them and become parables". I'll tell you, ever since she did that to me, it's changed the way to think about things. So we're going to talk a lot today about storytelling and about maybe the way we're going to push our podcast in the future. So anyway, Hi Rebecca, say something erudite.
Rebecca Hoffman03:41
Something erudite, right? Isn't that like the age-old joke?
Ray Loewe03:45
Well, I have no idea.
Rebecca Hoffman03:49
Well, thank you for having me, in your midst to talk about storytelling and luck.
Ray Loewe03:56
Let's start out with, one of the things you do is you write a column for a newspaper.
Rebecca Hoffman04:03
Yep.
Ray Loewe04:04
I know because I heard this just before we went on air, that you wrote one on stories. So take a minute and talk about this column, you know, integrated into what you do for a living, and then tell us a little bit about this column. We'll use that to kind of bounce off the show.
Rebecca Hoffman04:24
The column runs in the Daily Herald newspaper, which is published in the Chicagoland area, and it's a popular newspaper; very well read by a really diverse audience, but they have a big interest in local business and that's how I ended up getting connected with them. I'm writing on the general area is small business, marketing, and communications. The truth of the matter is, and I say this all the time, a small business is like the lifeblood of every community; without it, you just have like mattress stores and cell phone stores, with all due respect to them. Small businesses are what made communities interesting. But small businesses need a lot of help because they don't have the budgets to do the kind of marketing that big companies do. So I write on topics related to small business so that they can be successful in their efforts. This week's column actually is about storytelling and business. The notion is that big fancy companies like Coca-Cola and lots of others tell stories, and then all of their marketing becomes memorable because of that. We see this with the Superbowl ads and we see this in a lot of places. When I write about things, I think I try to connect the dots. Storytelling is a human universal, I think that's what a cultural anthropologist would call it, means that people enjoy a story across all cultures, socio-economic groups, everything. And so, you know, you and I talk a lot about that, over the years, the notion of storytelling,
Ray Loewe06:01
And guess what, we're going to talk more about it today. So let me tell you a story. And I moved into a new community, it's an older-based community, it's a part of a continuing care facility. I have found it absolutely fascinating because the people that meet here, that live here, have incredible stories. Some of them have done incredible things like put spacecrafts on Mars, and been astronauts, and written novels and stuff like that; but even the ones that haven't done that have incredible stories. We interviewed, on a recent podcast, a young gentleman, he must be 91. I'm going to recap it real quickly. He was given a system from his uncle, who got it from a colonel when he left World War One, as a soldier. The "ABCs of Your Career" have driven this guy through a successful career at DuPont, where he became senior executives and ran a number of companies. What he's thinking about now is, he's got great-grandchildren, ages one and two, that he wants this story to be part of their lives. He's not sure that he's going to be here to do that. The podcasting world allows him to tell his story now. So let's build on that.
Rebecca Hoffman07:44
Well, that's very interesting and important because I think that gets at what psychotherapists talk about as generativity: the idea that we all have valuable information and experiences to share so that future generations can learn from it. Podcasting is a great way to impart wisdom and have it remain part of kind of a searchable, discoverable database. This fellow you mentioned, it's really wise to do that because whatever he knows, his great-grandchildren would surely benefit from. Beyond that, even we would, or other people. Whenever I hear about, you know, informal or formal systems that people have to achieve something, I want to know about it because I personally subscribe to this idea that I don't know everything. I always asked my friends and people I meet to tell me what I don't know. And I love that. I discover all kinds of things, you know, tell me what I don't know how to do. There's so much, just, I don't even want to waste time trying to figure it out. Just tell me and I'll go do it. Any topic.
Ray Loewe08:47
So tell me about your great, great grandparents.
Rebecca Hoffman08:52
I don't know a lot because my family was immigrants like so many. I have some information. I actually am in the process of conserving it and getting that material to a few different museums, and a research library that has an interest in this. My great grandparents were simple people who came here and didn't have much. But the next generation, they became scientists on one side of my family, and they were chemists. So they were early pharmacists when pharmacy was complex. Because my great grandparents were interested in the success of their children, as all people are, they saw to it that my grandmother in the 1920s was the valedictorian of her class at Columbia University; when women were barely even going to college and she was studying chemistry and became a chemist.
Ray Loewe09:44
What do you want your great-grandchildren to know by you?
Rebecca Hoffman09:47
Well, I think I would like them to know about life being complex and not that easy. I think this new generation, and one's beyond, presume that everything should be entertaining, and fun, and if it's not, it must be boring. Boring is scary to younger people. I think some of the most boring moments in my life are when I've had more interesting ideas, or futz around until something happened that was interesting. You have to be sort of comfortable in that space. So I think that you know, if I would be speaking to my great-grandchildren right now, I would say, embrace boredom, because that's where a lot of interesting things can happen.
Ray Loewe10:26
Okay, so that's what you're gonna say, that's what you would say now. And that's going to change over time.
Rebecca Hoffman10:32
Yeah, for sure.
Ray Loewe10:33
But how are you going to do that? Let's think ahead. What I'm getting at here is kind of a guideline for other people to think about. Okay, so you didn't know much about your great-grandparents? You want to know something about them, so let's assume that your great-grandchildren are gonna want to know something about you. What do we do differently here? How do we do this?
Rebecca Hoffman10:58
Well, I think it's all about documentation. Right? So podcasting is a form of documentation. Writing is a form of documentation. And I think, in a perfect world, we would all write down our wisdom, our experiences, because when you say what would I want them to know? Well, I would want them to know some broad constructs. But I also think there's some pretty good stories that they should know, too, that might be inspiring for them. Reaching back in time from me and even behind me. I think the hardest part is the discipline of documentation, which we all struggle with.
Ray Loewe11:31
Okay, so tell us one of those stories that you think would be great for your grandchildren. I'm really putting you on the spot now.
Rebecca Hoffman11:40
Probably the most basic aspect of my family history is that people can be very simple and have a really good life. It's a contrast. Right? We have a pretty deluxe life right now; we have everything we could ever want, to the point where if I'd like to buy somebody a birthday present, I sometimes struggle with it, because everyone I know has everything they ever needed. The act of honoring somebody, for a birthday, or an anniversary is challenging. When I look back on my family, I see people who worked hard, who they got lucky. You talk a lot about luck in your work, they got lucky, they had the wherewithal to leave Europe before World War Two, and come here. When they did, one half of my family settled in Chicago and the other half settled in New York City. These two families took root like all immigrant families kind of do and worked hard. The people were not necessarily super highly educated the way we think of it now; but I think the thing that I would say is there was a lot of adversity, there was a lot of decision-making being made. Out of that has come generations of people who are highly educated, successful, who find life really interesting. I would say I hope that my kids and their kids and so forth, don't become so blase, that they don't find life interesting, which is always the risk.
Ray Loewe13:07
So I find that's a really good example of something that, you know, it's not concrete, in a sense. And yet, it's a story that you want to tell. This goes out to people who sit there and say, I don't have a story to tell. Right? And you and I know they do.
Rebecca Hoffman13:29
Every single person does. I always tell my clients when I'm working, and I even say this, beyond that to friends, keep everything at the level of a cocktail party. When you go to a cocktail party, you don't talk about spreadsheets usually, you don't talk about calculations unless you're doing something really interesting in science. You talk about stories. Like when I get together with my friends, we end up laughing a lot, because we tell so many stories to each other, almost at our insistence, and it is so much fun. I mean, the stories that people tell are just spectacular. And I think that you know, the everyday person doesn't realize that necessarily; but the everyday person is also a person who if you give them paper and pencils and say draw something, they'll say I don't know how to draw. The truth is we all do. It's just kind of like a muscle that needs to be worked and storytelling is the same.
Ray Loewe14:21
We talked about podcasting is one way to do this, but I want to get into some of the others. The podcast is easy in one sense because you're just having a conversation with somebody, and it's being recorded, and then it's gonna sit in an archive somewhere; technically forever, although who knows what that means. Well, what are some of the other things that people can do if they're sitting there and saying, if you think about what you wanted to know about your grandparents, maybe that's the first guide as to what you want to tell the next generation.
Rebecca Hoffman15:02
It's a little bit like, and this is a hard thought to have, but like, what would you rescue from a fire? If you had 60 seconds to get out of a building and your things were in that building a house or an office? What would you say? Most people say photos, certain books, obviously the humans and the animals in their life; but I think engaging the senses is the way we can record memory and share that forward. Some people are watchers, some people are listeners, some people are readers. So the podcast gets it the listening; a video, or a short movie, or short films, get at the watching. Then there's reading; we write books, or essays and file them away, and maybe by extension into museums or research library, so it's discoverable through life. I have an uncle, he's since passed away, he had a beautiful life with my aunt. When he was, well, some years ago, he made a series of films about their life together. They are some of the most interesting documents of my entire family, they're on DVD. They had a really rich and beautiful life together that involved a lot of travel, and art, and some interesting adventures. He made these movies so that it was his way of making sure nobody would forget. As a result of that, nobody will forget and people will be educated. So I think, you know, a person can write their stories, and you can use workshops to write the stories. You can do audio like this, which I think is really fantastic, or you can make short videos to the extent that you have the resources to do it. I think it's a great thing to do. Well, you can do that with an iPad today. You don't need anything more than that. You really don't. If you need prompts, you know there's people who need prompts, and I'm not alone. It helps us have a discipline; you can look at Gotham Writers Workshop, you can look at StoryCorps. There's another one called Story Worth, which helps people write memoirs. These are really easy, very accessible platforms for storytelling of one kind or another, very engaging, and easy to use. If you feel that just having an a tablet or an iPhone is too vast, that helps people focus.
Ray Loewe17:28
Okay, there are a couple things that I want to bring up here and then I will invite your comments; because you'll shoot me down and tell me they're wrong. The first thing is, don't think that your family won't read them, or watch them, or listen to them. I heard a story a while ago about a young lady who wrote her father's memoir. He was dying. Years later, she walked into her son's room, her son was I think nine years old at the time, and found her son reading the book about his grandfather.
Rebecca Hoffman18:08
Absolutely.
Ray Loewe18:09
So it doesn't get lost. It may get pushed around for a long time and sit on a shelf and collect dust, but there's a day when people are going to come out and read it. I think the other thing that we got to be careful about, this is on the technical side, is a lot of the media that we have goes obsolete. So for example, I remember the floppy disk drive, right? Yeah, I had a whole bunch of photos on those. I can't open them for anything anymore.
Rebecca Hoffman 18:38
I know.
Ray Loewe18:40
I think the other thing, and then I'll let you talk here, is people come up with photos of trips. They don't think about what the photos say. They throw them in a box and think somebody's gonna pick up the photos and understand what it is. But I think you do have to organize this a little bit for people. So now that I made these silly comments, Rebecca, talk to me.
Rebecca Hoffman19:04
Well, I think you're absolutely right. I think that that's why museums are interesting. When we go visiting in London, or New York, or Chicago, and you go to the art museums or the anthropology museums; I think of the Victoria and Albert Museum, The Great Bed of Ware, and all this portraiture of people from centuries past. The reason why it's interesting is because somebody is bothering to conserve history; and then they make some sense of it so that when you stroll those halls, you learned from it, or discover things that you couldn't even have imagined. And that's really interesting. Yeah, we can't just have boxes of stuff because I don't think it's fair to ask future generations to carry around cardboard boxes of stuff. I've experienced that myself with things that my parents have that are not organized, and it's super challenging to look at 100 and 150-year-old documents and have no idea how to string it together. You can sort of get an idea, tt's kind difficult. So yes, we do have to provide a context. And so you're right, the biggest challenge is the medium because the technology keeps shifting. And I'm told, you know, like, if you put things in the cloud that's going to be better; but that's even a big question mark. I mean, I think you probably need some blend of like print material and digitized material, and then you probably have to keep converting it to formats that people can use.
Ray Loewe20:23
The future generation, if they want to, will find a way to get it. If they need to. Let's talk for a minute about keeping this simple, because we're getting near the end of our time, unfortunately, which we always do while we're having fun. Writing your life story is a monumental challenge and I'm not sure that anybody really cares about the whole life story. I mean, I think they do in a way, but you talk about you go to your cocktail parties, and you get these snippets, and maybe the idea is an accumulation of snippets.
Rebecca Hoffman21:06
I think so, you have to play the role of curator of your information because it's true. You can't just have like a running feed of everything you did every day, although I do think that would even be kind of interesting if we could possibly conserve that. But we don't have that. So in terms of what to save, it's like, what are the big moments? What are the interesting experiences? What can we learn from bigger moments in our lives? There's some documentary filmmakers who, I see how their processes, they're like obsessive-compulsive about documenting everything; and then when it comes time to make the film, they make a lot of decisions about what goes into the film. And so, you know, there is this notion of the cutting room floor. I think every person, even the most amateur storyteller, or documentarian, about a family history, has to make those decisions. I think the probably you think about the births, the deaths, the big moments, who fought in what war. Tell that story. What was your family business like? What were the challenges or struggles your family overcame to be who they are? What are the great stories that, you know, a child would want to hear? That's the story to tell. Even when they're hard.
Ray Loewe22:21
We have to do this again because you just woke me up with a whole series of things I want to ask you about, we don't have time. The hint is, Sandy and I, we had to give a presentation here and talk a little bit about our travels. The thing that I found most interesting about our travels was who I met along the way and why they were important, why they stock. There's a whole litany of things that kind of raised questions about why I gravitate towards certain people, and what do I really want to know about my heirs. And it's not necessarily what their jobs were. That's important. But I want to know the character, I want to know who did what, and why they were funny, and stuff like that. Let's do this again and let's get into how you craft a story maybe? And what are the things to think about, but I think that the message I'd like to leave with people right now is that, just like you want to know about your relatives in the past, your kids and great-grandchildren are going to want to know about you. And they're not going to be able to find out if you don't put the data somewhere.
Rebecca Hoffman23:33
Correct. But it's, it's lost to history if you don't.
Ray Loewe23:39
So the idea here is to sit down and start to figure out how you can leave a legacy for your kids and start out simply. Small, right? I get that from you all the time. You always start small.
Rebecca Hoffman23:54
You have to. I had a teacher in high school who used to say, when you don't know what to do, do the first thing. And optimistic number one, number one, tell one story. Then you get momentum from those experiences.
Ray Loewe24:10
Let's continue on this later. Rebecca is a chapter in our book and is on storytelling, really; it's on the importance of storytelling, and the craft of doing it, and I'll tell you, she's so much enriched my wife that she's become kind of a significant mentor here today. I want everybody to have the chance to read about it and think about it because I think she can do in a few words of wisdom here for you, what she did for me. And we're all gonna become storytellers. Raka and you're the leader.
Rebecca Hoffman24:51
I think we have that as a native skill that's hardwired into all people. And the trick is not to be afraid to take a chance and tell a story in a more formal way.
Ray Loewe25:03
Cool. Taylor, we're at the end of our time. Sign us off. We'll be back next week with another great guest.
Kris Parsons25:12
Thank you for listening to Changing the Rules, a weekly podcast about people who are living their best life, and you can figure out how to do that too! Join us with your lively host, Ray Loewe, better known as the luckiest guy in the world.