S1E12: Leading Yourself with Emi Nietfeld

Emi Nietfeld is the author of the memoir Acceptance. A former foster youth, she graduated from Harvard in 2015 and worked as a software engineer at Google and Facebook. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Vice, and Slate, as well as other publications. She lives in New York City with her family.

https://www.eminietfeld.com
https://www.instagram.com/eminietfeld/
https://twitter.com/eminietfeld
https://www.linkedin.com/in/emi-nietfeld/

In this episode, we talk about:

• adversity
• the power of writing
• goalsetting
• winning as an individual v. as a team

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Leadership Voyage
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voice: by Ayanna Gallant
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Transcript

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0:47

all right i am here for another episode of leadership voyage with the author of acceptance emmy neat feld it's great to see you emmy great to have me thank you so much yeah you bet so you wrote this book uh just a couple of months ago um called acceptance and it's a memoir focusing primarily on your high school and university years and what i was hoping to do is start off with a juxtaposition via storytelling for the listeners for those who have not read the book yet so here are a list of accomplishments for you uh you're accepted into college after only a couple of years of high school you opted not to go then but you were accepted you got an s.a.t score over 2100 you attended a prestigious arts boarding school in interlaken in michigan won a national writing competition uh attended harvard we're a collegiate rowing champion which i love and uh coming out of college you had the the challenge of deciding which uh tech company was going to pay you 200 000 so so just reading those accomplishments for a second i want to let everyone let that sink in and then here is the parallel story um from from your book you were sexually assaulted at 12. uh your parents separated and were divorced when you were pretty young your birth father came out as trans and uh became michelle michelle wasn't involved in your life really you were suicidal had a hoarding mother were in foster care kicked out of foster care many summers in your high school and college years you had nowhere to go you were homeless and in the summer after your senior year in high school you were raped in europe now i i bring all this up i'm not even sure why the two parallels matter but i found it really an interesting and dissonant description and what i was curious was um when you think of the arc of your life during those times what effect did adversity have on you that's a great question as you're asking it i feel this impulse right to turn to the narrative that is so familiar of like you know the adversity made me stronger it made me who i am it made all of the good things possible but as i write about an acceptance that's does not ring true to me really for my life and while there certainly were hardships that galvanized me there were a lot of other ones that i feel limited limited my potential and you know i feel very grateful that a lot of really great things happen for me um and[Music] yet that doesn't erase some of the bad things yeah thanks for that answer at least in america we're a big fan aren't we of the overcoming adversity story yeah unless go ahead oh yeah and i think that there's this almost knee-jerk reaction when you see someone who tells you you know these these things happen to me that we're not good that hurt me there's almost this knee-jerk reaction to give a silver lining right and i've had this at work you know with with people who really who cared about me who thought that i was talented and were mentoring me and something that i'm working a lot on is how do we acknowledge the impact that injustice has on someone's life and take that seriously without thinking about that individual as broken and how do we just sit with people who are going through hard things yeah thanks for that a lot of times we want to help or we want to as you're saying put the silver lining in but sometimes we just need to sit there and sit with them but thank you for saying that now on this podcast we we've been talking a lot about leadership and frankly a lot of these discussions really are specific to you know business community management and things like that i've been following you for a few years and and your tiny letter that you publish and um honestly i don't even remember exactly what the inciting incident was that that i learned about you but but um i wanted to talk a little bit about the process of writing the book before we kind of maybe pivot to some other things that maybe are a little more directly applicable for most of the listeners but regardless i don't care because i'm really interested in your story but i was thinking about you know if i understand correctly emmy you spent seven years or so writing this memoir and it made me thinking about the notion of experience versus memory we go through something at the time and then we look back on what our recollection is of it and and those aren't always the same so you do a great job at the end of the book detailing some of the processes that you went through to keep track of you know get as close as you can to being really really accurate and i'm wondering you know you have a voice when you are writing different voices perhaps while you're writing how did the two things compare the perspective of the the girl and woman who was going through this and the person writing the book later on looking at it and having it edited and things like that when i started writing the book just after i graduated college seven years ago i think it was much closer to my perspective at the time of the events i wrote it it was in past tense but it was very close to like what i had been thinking and experiencing and i would say the biggest difference there between that and the final product is kind of this context and so i you know i grew up in these situations i was in a locked facility for troubled teenagers i was in foster care homeless for a while and one of the defining characteristics of those experiences was having no context feeling like i am the only person that this has ever happened to and it's happening because of me and something about myself and and i actually didn't even realize that that wasn't true until after i had written several drafts and was showing it to other people and so i think that um providing context is something that often like parents do teachers do um leaders in whatever ways they help situate the individual in side their world so that they can better understand what outside forces are affecting them yeah thank thanks for adding that yeah that um yeah you sure ex you you you bring a lot of information to the table in this book about your experience and and that is really interesting to hear you say that as you're experiencing it you're experiencing it without context do you think that was a do you think that was a common experience for the other kids that were going through some of the same things you were that you were exposed to definitely even when i was in environments that had other kids like the residential treatment center right there were 10 of us on this unit you know living together like in you know small white bedrooms with nothing in them we were pretty much prohibited from talking about it and that type of silence is one way that you can have control over people right by not you know you don't understand the larger environment and so like i had no idea that for example i had rights i write about this at the end of acceptance where i was like so startled to have this idea of like oh like i had rights like what were those rights like what is a right right um right right and um so i think that that's pretty i think that that's pretty standard but it's not something that people often think about right like you think because you have these visions in your head usually of like what is a foster child like what is a homeless person or an unhoused person going through and of course those stereotypes don't match up every person's life or even any one individual's life yeah of course yeah so from an early age you at least in the book which uh starts i think maybe where you're around 13 or so 14 somewhere in there right uh you're into writing you're really into writing uh i one of my favorite parts in the book was uh i might be wrong here so i apologize it's like november is national writing blah blah blah month and i'm going to write 50 000 words and i still i started thinking about how long it might take me to write 50 000 world words and uh it was a little mind-blowing so you're into writing um you have some other career uh tracks that you you end up on which we'll get to in a little bit but you say in the book that boy if i can if i can be a good writer or if my writing is red maybe some other people will actually take me seriously or listen to what i'm trying to say and i'm curious why is this medium why is writing powerful in europe in your mind i think writing is powerful because it comes from that same place of communication that all relationships stem from and so for me it wasn't even about writing as a particular art form compared to other art forms as much as just the only way of communicating that felt really accessible to me and so i wrote about how you know i was taken to these doctors by my mom when i was 11 12 13 14 and i tried to tell them like this is what's going on at home my mom was a hoarder we had piles of stuff covering every surface waist high with just narrow paths between them rodents often no hot water or shower and they were not listening to me and i think i sensed that they weren't listening to me because my mom was white college-educated she owned a home and had full custody of me and she was really like believable and i was like a dirty kid who had mental health problems so like they weren't going to trust me and i sensed that writing was my way to convince people that they should listen to me even when what i had to say was inconvenient or unflattering to the adults in power and i think that's the reason so many people are writing or communicating like we just want to be heard and have our reality heard because there's a there are a lot of reasons why we go through the process of writing something now of course this book is a deeply personal uh recollection but but but you know in business we use chat and direct message all the time because it's efficient right uh you can lose certain things in that without having tone without having um hearing the words and things like that but it's interesting um as someone who has been writing uh you know for a long long time in you um it's really interesting to hear the the emphasis on a way to be heard i kind of like that i'm imagining this like oh yeah well you don't like what i what i'm saying you're just for covering your ears well well here it is it's on paper it's not going away right it's right here it's this you can't make you're going to rip it up i'm going to write it again it's real right um it's really interesting um you become an engineer software engineer and and of course you're an author and and uh whatever other labels i don't know that that we want to put on ourselves my question i'm curious as we go here is the first guest i had on on this podcast is someone who has done a lot of different things he has played in he was a unicycling trombonist in a broadway show um and uh he's an author and all these other things he said in that discussion you know you can be more than one thing i'm wondering if you have any thoughts on that a lot of times we have labels for each other or for ourselves and you're someone here who is participating in multiple activities out there and i'm curious do you have thoughts on you can be more than one thing or that mindset yeah i love that mindset and[Music] i definitely struggled with this as a writer and then author because i do think we live in a culture where we really value people who give 100 to one thing and it's like if you know your work is supposed to be your passion you know your job where you make money is supposed to be your passion and if you're not somehow monetizing what you love like you're a failure and and i also think some of this comes from classism right where especially in the writing world where there's this idea of like the poor artist who who like usually isn't actually poor but is living below their family's standard of living and and so i really felt like okay can i be a real writer if i'm working at google instead of like living in a house with a bunch of roommates in iowa like attending graduate school right yeah yeah yeah assuming you know and so i i think that that's something that i definitely struggled with to give myself that legitimacy right of not just like i can dabble in multiple things but i can be good at multiple things and really be a full writer while i was also a full software engineer yeah love it and you know i'm going to go on a limb and say that doing both of those things probably enhances he enhances that each other one not saying that very well definitely uh the guy i referred to the first guest on this show he was a manager at the apple store okay and uh the the long the since departed john hughes of uh breakfast club and and other films walked into the apple store and and they talked about writing and and the guest i had he told john hughes i want to be a writer and so john hughes said we'll do you right and of course he said i yes he said then you're a writer you're right there are these like artificial goal posts or or you can only be one thing that's that's really interesting yeah now in the first two thirds of this book emmy you are looking at getting into um columbia and then gale and then harvard and you do succeed right uh you get into harvard and you are really really focused from a young age on meeting this goal of whichever the institution it is you need to get into um adults around you are saying hey chill like have some fun right uh and you're focused you're focused on this goal and later on you're at harvard and you're focused on if i read it correctly i i need to get a high-paying job there's this i'm unlocking you know there's a key here that that this this will unlock the door and that's your goal coming out of college now if i understand your perspective correctly from the book during a lot of these these times um reaching these goals is really the element in your mind that is necessary like it's sometimes binary my life is over or it's going to going to go really well right i am i'm wondering in the general sense what you know what do you think about goal setting you know how important is goal setting to someone should should it be excuse me to someone in your estimation that's a great question and i think the particular answer to that does depend a lot on the specific circumstances of someone's life and so for me these were goals and they were also fantasies and so people you know my foster parents they loved to tell me like you know why don't you just watch tv with us why are you so preoccupied with like getting a's in school and i was like do you really expect me to be having a fun time here in foster care like watching deal or no deal with these strangers like i was like i was like it's it was more enjoyable for me to go into my head and to be on this path like the yellow brick road like out of minnesota to new york city um nothing against minnesota of course no nothing nothing i appreciate it now right when it smells like garbage here so um so for me it was for me it was absolutely vital and i think for a lot of young people who have you know almost all kids they have limited control over their lives um and so i looking back the thing that i wish is that adults had taken those goals and dreams a lot more seriously because i think it they you know it can be destructive to set too many goals or to rely too much on the future without looking at the present and a goal can also be an organizing principle in somebody's life and so when adults were talking about you know mental health stuff they only thought about it in terms of like okay what is emmy doing today like is emmy hurting herself is that me throwing up and when i thought about mental health stuff i was thinking about okay what is my life going to look like what is my future going to look like am i going to be in an environment where i feel like i can be myself and be happy and have the resources that i need and so for me like reaching those goals was synonymous in some way with mental health okay yeah thanks for that explanation yeah and i mean as you said earlier on a lot of kids in the situations that you were in without don't have the context and i think not similar at all but but context for your goals i think of course is really important right but this idea of weighing the future against what you're currently experiencing uh that really resonates um okay let's get to the uh uh to the rowing portion of the discussion uh now actually if you don't mind emmy could you give us um tell us the story around how you got involved in rowing i think people might i don't know how in depth you'll get but i you might they might get a kick out of how you first got involved in in collegiate rowing yeah so i grew up very unathletic both of my parents were older and had health issues and so i was you know the least athletic person you would probably ever meet um and so when i got to college i i was suddenly surrounded by all these like people who exercised i was like what's that um and so i did i started jogging and stuff like that um but i was really intrigued by the rowers and so next to harvard is the charles river and just this picturesque you know bridges and stuff over it and boats boats and in these boats there were these like grunting tall people led by like a really small yelling person hey i can be a i can be a grunting tall person you're thinking right yeah i was well yeah a little bit and i i i both thought okay i could be a grunting tall person i'm i'm 5 10. and i thought you know i could never do that because it's for preppy people people with upper body strength and so um my junior year i was i was selected to be a teaching assistant for the introductory introduction to computer science class but the people who did this they had to work a lot the pay wasn't very good um and at the same time i learned that a rowing boat costs like fifty thousand dollars and if you were a varsity athlete you could use it for free okay and i was like that sounds like a better deal to me than this teaching assistant stuff so i as a junior walked down to the rowing team and i found that i actually was pretty good at it because i believed that i could suffer more than just about anyone believed you could suffer more than just about anyone what a fascinating thing to say and and you're you end up in some in this in the book you end up in some type of match against uh yale and you you win um some type of championship i apologize i don't remember what specifically it was um i found it a little uh ironic too or poignant maybe just because you're beating yale which is where you really wanted to go before harvard but nonetheless this is one of the most beautifully crafted scenes i've read in a long time you're you're everybody go out there and get acceptance please because they're you're a part of a team here and you're recounting recounting this scene where the uh is it [ __ ] swain is that the right way to say it coxon cox which doesn't make any sense it's a coxswain yeah well it's it's it's for preppy people so it has to be hard so the coxswain uh is is guiding the rest of the rowers and your crew right and and it's and it's like they're yelling out the name of each person on the team you know give me five rows for whoever and give me seven for emmy and and you're you're enduring you're suffering i mean you can barely see if i recall at this point and your team perseveres and wins the match and and i wrote the note here to you but i i i was in tears at this point in the book it it was just a spectacular uh way to recount situation and i and i adored it what i am really interested in is so much of of the focus we've talked about on your goal setting and and elsewhere is about you unlocking a future for you what's the difference between winning something for yourself and going through an experience like this where you're part of a team that's a great question i write about in acceptance how after i got into harvard i actually was pretty depressed and i had a few other things that spring like when i won this national writing contest and i found out and i just reacted with tears and not necessarily tears of joy but i was like i'm supposed to feel happier than i do today and now i know that post-achievement depression is a real thing and is very common but i was i was 17 i had no idea i thought that i was just going to be miserable for the rest of my life and so my experience of individual success has involved a lot of loneliness and i think when it's just you after the goal is achieved for me it's always been like uh so then what right and because my life has been so driven by these like big giant goals that has been a lot of like big letdowns um and so for me being on this team was really wonderful in part because i could experience how sometimes it's easier to push yourself for someone else than for you and i felt like my life had kind of forced me to be selfish in certain ways and i don't mean that to dunk on myself but i was so preoccupied with my own survival and my own upward mobility that i had never really gotten to have that where like i want to do a good job for this other person right and for us as a team and so that's definitely something that i i now value so much having a team that i care about whether it was at google i really loved the people i was working with and my manager and i wanted i wanted our projects to succeed for us yeah um and now with with the publishing process you know i have a an amazing relationship with my editor and you know when when things haven't gone exactly how i've wanted i feel like i feel more like i wish i could have done this for my editor than even about myself um and i think for me that's it's a huge relief to be able to like think that way interesting evolution yeah yeah and thanks for those examples too i really do like the one where your editor you know your those of us who have never published a book which is probably most most of us listening you know it's like the thought of the editor as your teammate i guess i just wouldn't have naturally thought of that and i guess i would have thought of it more as a gatekeeper so that's really cool to hear um wanting success and wanting things for that teammate um also as a reader of the book going to harvard and and and or elsewhere interlaken in michigan a very prestigious arts high school boarding school um you were looking to be long right and a team team obviously can help with with belonging or it should help with belonging and it seems that you reached that and you have reached that in different contexts you do get the job at google and some of the early descriptions you provide of being exposed to the culture at google it seems like you're really overcome in a positive way that wow people are thinking about all the different things in my life that i might need they're anticipating how they can support me as an employee it's almost like this job or the company it's like a family or something in that sense and yet i don't want to bring the conversation down but but here's the reality is a year ago uh you ended up penning an opinion piece in the new york times um and the title is after working at google i'll never let myself love a job again now i don't really feel the need to pry on details or find juicy tidbits here the the the point is you chronicle some basic points about going through uh harassment uh at google and what the experience was like for you as an employee um and you worked there for four years what i am really interested in hearing from you and i'm sure others will find interested as well is how should the relationship between an employee and a company look in your mind whoa that's a big question you didn't you didn't put that in the list of things you were gonna send me you were gonna ask me oh man so in that piece i write about how when i came to google it felt like finding a home and i think i write about this in even more detail and acceptance about how i had been searching for this place that i was going to belong where i was going to find my people i was going to have safety and security and be taken care of and how so many of the benefits and amenities and even the culture at google really made me feel this sense of being in a family right which a lot of companies like to call themselves still do and when i experienced harassment from my mentor and ended up reporting it what was so devastating to me was that google was an institution just like these other institutions i had passed through and that the company was going to protect itself first and you know and i think i think a big part of what i explored in that article was was really the process of growing up where at first you know you're idealistic and you believe like that i don't know that a company can transcend all of the incentives that are kind of there from the law and business and money and um and i think that's part of why this this piece resonated with a lot of people because i think virtually everybody has walked into a situation like thinking it was going to be like heaven on earth and then crash down to reality yeah um i think for for me the the pieces that were damaging and avoidable were the parts that really felt like gaslighting of um of like where i experienced this and i know lots of other people experienced it because it was in the news that when people were reporting harassment and discrimination at least to a certain number of them google would suggest you know unique therapy and would refer them to the on-site counseling program which for some people ended up having its own issues um[Music] and so that was really you know i think that that was the part that was i think totally avoidable right and after i left google i went to another company where you know all of tech kind of has this problem of gender imbalance also racial imbalance for sure and but but they didn't have the same kind of like marketing of like oh we're better than everyone else i got there and i just kind of was like okay this is the way that it is and it actually felt better to me to be like nobody is nobody's like lying to me right so the almost the expectations of what you're arriving at or where you're starting to work is is almost setting it up in a way for yeah okay yeah and i think and i think that it's often engineered to be that way right and people say like you know they give you these benefits at these big tech companies because they want you to work like crazy hours and for me for like the people i saw at google there were not that many people working insane hours at least not compared to like banking or even being like a home health worker right or uber driver retail worker right like those people are working way more hours than any white collar professionals i saw at google but i do think that that um it those benefits really made it so that my life was tied up with this company and so that leaving meant not just leaving a job but leaving a whole lifestyle and a whole like community really yeah we're sitting here in september of 2022 and yeah i mean it's just kind of this ongoing discussion about what does an employee owe a company what does a company owe an employee the the catchphrase of the month has been quiet quitting you know i don't even we all agree on what that means um but but yeah i appreciate you sharing your your experience and your um just kind of your thoughts you know it's it's the systems that are in place right we can't ignore the systems right everybody has their individual experience but the systems are in place and there's a big factor in everybody's the dynamic that they have with work and with their company so definitely and i and i hope in acceptance that one of my big goals was to show how some of the fundamental institutions of american life like college admissions and the way that you know we think about children's rights parents rights how those all like affect our lives on a day to day like decision by decision like goal by goal level yeah yeah thank you my my question that i ask everybody uh near the end is you know what is something related to this or not our topics or not what's something that you've learned recently actually this morning i read a study that showed that living in poverty was equivalent like it had the equivalent like cognitive load of losing 13 iq points oh my gosh yeah and that really resonated with me with you know there's been a lot of talk about like learning loss with covid and how do we help kids like get back on track um but i also saw that in 2021 apparently the child poverty rate in the united states was cut in half yeah probably largely because of the um because of like cash payments to parents no kidding as part of covered relief yeah isn't that cool so it's like on one hand a lot was lost and on the other hand that was great great progress on the child poverty front wow well thanks for sharing that that's great yeah awesome so for those of you interested in um in the book or anything else that you want to share uh where should people go where would you like to direct them so you can find links to buy acceptance at memeatfeld.com my first name last name and i'm on social media twitter instagram linkedin at emmy needfeld as well okay and i have a newsletter which you'll find on my website which uh jason wick is already a fan of our host so yes i am i hope that other people will enjoy it too that's great well emmy thanks for uh putting some time aside today i really really enjoyed talking about all this with you and um your wisdom and experience your insights i know many people are going to benefit from from reading the book and from from hearing your thoughts so thanks for being gracious with your time thank you so much for having me jason you bet okay