Hello and welcome to The Upgrade, the podcast from the team at LifeHacker, where we help you improve your life one week at a time.

I'm Melissa Kirsch, editor-in-chief of LifeHacker.

And I'm Alice Bradley, Deputy Editor of Lifehacker. And I'm Alice Bradley, deputy editor of

lifehacker. And today we're talking about careers, how to figure out what you want to do with

your life, whether you're just starting out or you're in a job, you're ready to ditch. What's

your calling? How do you answer it? What if you can't even hear it? That's what we're going to find out from our guest, Mike Stive.

Mike is the CEO of XO Group, the parent company of websites like The Not and the Bump.

Mike's been an exec at companies like Google and NBC. Several years ago, Mike took all his wisdom

about goal setting and networking and finding the right career path and put it in a

Google Doc that quickly went viral. He's now expanded that roadmap into a new book called

The Career Manifesto, Discover Your Calling and Create an Extraordinary Life. So Mike, welcome to the

upgrade. Thank you for having me. I love your show. I'm looking forward to this. Thank you.

Oh, cool.

So let's start.

Tell us about the original Google doc.

When I worked at Google, I would hold office hours to be helpful to the team with whatever

was interesting to them.

I thought it would often be like how to solve some business or client problem.

Generally speaking, people would come to my office hours and want to talk about their

careers.

And the more we had those conversations, the more other people came to my office hours and it started to become a significant portion of my Thursdays.

So I tried to capture everything I had heard from people and what we talked about, what's

...