Environmental Professionals Radio (EPR)

The Environmental Defense Fund, Open Door Climate, and Career Advice with Daniel Hill

February 10, 2023 Daniel Hill Episode 105
Environmental Professionals Radio (EPR)
The Environmental Defense Fund, Open Door Climate, and Career Advice with Daniel Hill
Show Notes Transcript Chapter Markers

Welcome back to Environmental Professionals Radio, Connecting the Environmental Professionals Community Through Conversation, with your hosts Laura Thorne and Nic Frederick! 

On today’s episode, we talk with Daniel Hill, Senior Manager of Innovation at Environmental Defense Fund and Creator of #OpenDoorClimate about The Environmental Defense Fund, Open Door Climate, and Career Advice.  Read his full bio below.

Help us continue to create great content! If you’d like to sponsor a future episode hit the support podcast button or visit www.environmentalprofessionalsradio.com/sponsor-form

Showtimes:
2:50  Nic & Laura discuss airplane movies
9:24  Interview with Daniel Hill starts
9:35  The Environmental Defense Fund
16:43  Career Advice
21:45  Open Door Climate
27:28  Field Notes

Please be sure to ✔️subscribe, ⭐rate and ✍review.

This podcast is produced by the National Association of Environmental Professions (NAEP). Check out all the NAEP has to offer at NAEP.org.

Connect with Daniel Hill at https://www.linkedin.com/in/hilldp/

Guest Full Bio:
Daniel Hill is currently a Senior Manager of Innovation at Environmental Defense Fund, where he created EDF’s Innovation Fund - an internal incubator to unleash creative solutions to protect the environment. Previously, he led corporate partnerships and an entrepreneurship initiative for EDF's Climate Corps fellowship program. Prior to EDF, Daniel cofounded Green Impact Campaign, a nonprofit that trained students to conduct energy assessments for small businesses. Daniel is an Echoing Green fellow, Halcyon Incubator fellow, Clean Energy Leadership Institute fellow, and recipient of the Alliance to Save Energy's Rising Star of Energy Efficiency Award and Net Impact's Force for Change Award.

Music Credits
Intro: Givin Me Eyes by Grace Mesa
Outro: Never Ending Soul Groove by Mattijs Muller

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Transcripts are auto-transcribed

[Intro]

Laura 
Hello, and welcome to NPR with your favorite environmental nerds Nick and Laura. On today's episode, Nick and I discuss airplane movies, and that is movies on airplanes, not the airplane movies. We talked to Daniel Hill about the Environmental Defense Fund Open Door climates and career advice. And finally, we're talking about energy a little bit today. So let's talk about lightning. A single lightning bolt unleashes five times more heat than the sun. Wow. Yeah. At least they superheat the air to almost 30,000 degrees centigrade. Wow. Yeah. Also

Nic
 
4000 Fahrenheit. So there you go. Just in case.

Laura 
On fact, I wouldn't be able to tell you how hot the sun is on our lease by lightning bolts is equivalent to detonating a ton of TNT. That's crazy.

Nic 
Yeah. Sometimes people survive. Getting hit by those

Laura 
people. That's really crazy. Yeah. All right, well, I know that music

Nic 
we are working with CRN Taliaferro over at the green obsidian to highlight a few of the individuals that she is highlighting for Black History Month. Today we're highlighting Dr. Tiara Moore, who is the founder of Black and marine science which is a nonprofit aimed to celebrate Black marine scientists spread environmental awareness and inspire the next generation of scientific thought leaders beams aims to promote diversity in the sciences that is imperative and necessary to ensure the next generation has a chance to participate and be included in climate and ocean justice for the future. Check out this and more at the green of city on Facebook or Linked In.

Laura 
Already folks. We are doing our own sponsorship today. So 30 seconds for Nick to finish. If he doesn't make it in 30 seconds he loses I don't know what. Ready, go.

Nic 
Laura, are you tired of locking yourself out of your house and not being able to get back in? Yes. Because the here we have a new solution for you today. It's called new house. And what happens is when you lock yourself out your house, you just use moving to a new one. It's yeah, it's absolutely no it's set up. It's got everything you need, including keys and when you get stuff like that we have new house too. So don't worry, there's always something for everyone in new house. You lose all your stuff. Yes, we take it

Laura 
wow, that was like 20 seconds

Nic 
incredibly I only have 30 seconds. Good thing I don't ever gone long. You should just say time

Laura 
out a loser today okay let's get to our segment.

[Nic & Laura discuss airplane movies}

Nic 
okay. Now no one else watches the crappy movies. I'm the only one

Sam Bartleson
no some of the more crappy like when I went to down to Texas. They had the office on it. And so I'm like, Oh my god. So I watched the office. Everyone delta

Sam Bartleson 
delta united.

Laura 
Yeah, we just flew Delta to Hawaii and they had 157 movies. Yeah, just about all of them. Awesome. Or at least.

Nic 
Yeah, worth watching. I shouldn't say that. That bad. But there's like there's certain kinds of movie that's fantastic for airplanes, because it's hard to hear. So like, in my mind, it's like, oh, I can watch any action movie ever made. And I got it. Like I don't have to hear every single word. I can get distracted and come right back to it and there is no loss of plot. It's when you get to like the more serious ones where you have to pay attention the whole time. I'm out. I can't do this on a plane. I can't

Laura 
do the ones that might make me cry. I tried to watch up on an airplane one time. It was like It hadn't been out very long or something like that. I didn't know that. It was a sad movie and I'm just bawling on the airplane like okay, this is weird.

Nic 
I hear this theme song like the song at the beginning of that movie and I tear up like it is like who made that movie like that guy is just a person Excuse me? Jeez. Oh, brutal.

Laura 
I hate movies like that where they're like, We made this just to make you cry.

Nic 
Please, no, no, no. Can't do it. I swear like there was a there was a movie with a frickin what's his name? SpiderMan, Tom Holland. And there's like a dog that is just fine. It's totally fine and the dog is killed and like, why on earth? Are we doing this? It's just like, we have to kill the dog. It's like It's like they're like someone in Hollywood. Like we got a dog in the movie. Are we killing it? Well, of course. We wouldn't. We would kill every dog.

Laura 
It's best friend. You know like its owner. It's other friends like Fox in the hound like we're gonna just so

Nic  
what are we doing here folks? Come on. Let the dog live.

Laura  
I know I can't dogs I'm happy legs.

Nic 
This is for dogs. My goodness. The other one

Laura 
Warhorse that movie Good God, it was just like, Okay, get ready. Bring a whole box of tissues with you and you're gonna cry and then you're gonna pull together and they're gonna start crying again. It was terrible. Yeah, say it was like I feel you on that because Yeah, I

Sam Bartleson 
saw it in theaters. It's just like I need a box of tissues, ya know?

Laura 
Who made this?

Sam Bartleson 
I think it was World War One. And they had soldiers with the Calvary and so this dude pounded with his horse. Spoilers and then the horse like runs into barbed wire. It was awful.

Nic 
Oh my God, it was awful.

Laura 
Movie, this horse and you know the to the travesties. That this horse endured and then it's just

Nic 
oh my gosh, no, I am not watching that. I don't know. I just watched All Quiet on the Western Front on Netflix. And it's good. It's funny though, because I can still compare every war movie Saving Private Ryan. Nothing compares to that. Fair, but yeah, it's good but it's like two and a half hours long probably could have been two hours long. There's a lot of that happening in movies these days. It's just tighten up the story. The Batman another great example of it just a movie. It's way too long for no reason. It's like can we

Laura 
even try it? I watched for like five minutes. I was like No

Nic  
Yeah, I don't think I wouldn't be surprised

Laura  
at them. And I love

Nic 
love above. Robert Pattinson, Michael Keaton

Laura 
one I love the Dark Knight all that stuff. But this new one I was like, bored to tears before

Nic 

I was kind of neutral on it. I gotta love the chase scene, I thought was the space Colin Farrell as the penguin was great. That whole chasing with the cars was awesome. I love that. But yeah, it was just so long. Paul Danna was great, but it was long. It's very long. I'm like, why are we still doing this? Like, I don't even feel like you know, anyone wants to sit through the last half hour of the movie. You're like, why isn't it over? Yeah, just let it be over.

Laura 
I didn't want to sit for the first half hour.

Nic 
Yeah, I think it was.

Laura 
It was important to like have movies come out in the theater. Because once you're there, like, some people will walk out in the beginning, but mostly, you know, you're there. Yeah. Well, but now if your movie debuts on streaming, like you really got to hook people right away.

Nic  
Right away. Yeah. That is true. And it's because I did see it in theaters so I couldn't walk Yeah. I mean, because it's like you can't walk out because that's like you paid money for this

Laura 
$120 For your to get your popcorn to get in there so you're gonna stay

Nic 
there's also this like, I love it when you when you watch a bad movie, and I can think of a few off the top of my head like worst movies the wrestling ring to for example, a horror movie where people literally the entire theater laughed at a scene. That was supposed to be scary. Everyone's laughing. And you know, it's a bad idea. That's when things have gone horribly wrong. But then like afterwards, you're trying to justify the fact that you thought it would be good. You're like, well, you know, yeah, it wasn't so bad. You know, it's not it's not. It could be worse. You know, I mean, like, you know, the activity was fine, you know? It's not bad, you know, but if you didn't pay for it was free. Like that movie sucked is what you would say. It's just Hello. Can we do that?

Laura 
Yeah. Well, it's a tie back to the airplane movies. So we did watch one movie called menari on the airplane. And I love to just make a little plug for this. Movie because it is adorable. It's kind of environmental. It's about Korean family that moved to I forget what state it is somewhere in the plains by this farm. And so they're like, you know, farming and there's some land stuff and then some environmental disasters and things happen, but it's a movie where not a whole lot of things. But the relationship between the people in the family so like this crass grandmother moves in with them and the little kid is just like, I hate her. I don't like her. And it's just it's very endearing. Highly worth watching but

Nic 
she was definitely give us money.

Laura 
Yeah, but I think we've jammed on about movies long enough.

Nic 
Yeah, I think so. Let's get to our interview then.

[Interview with Daniel Hill starts]

Nic
Hello, welcome back to EPR. Today we have Daniel Hills Senior Manager of innovation fund with the Environmental Defense Fund on the show. Welcome Daniel.

Daniel Hill 

Thank you so much happening.

Nic 

So the work that you do is at the intersection of climate change and innovation and entrepreneurship is really cool. And I also love that the open door climate initiative you have been talking about that. But first, what is the Environmental Defense Fund

[The Environmental Defense Fund]

Daniel Hill 
the Environmental Defense Fund is a global environmental nonprofit that's been around for 50 plus years now. And they do with just a range of advocacy on behalf of the environment. So science policy, corporate partnerships, kind of the spectrum of ways that we can advocate on behalf of the environment. And we've been operating in multiple regions now for quite some time and really kind of in the past couple of years really taking more of a people focus to the work which I think is an exciting direction that I think a lot of folks need to

Nic 
go okay. So what do you mean by people focus?

Daniel Hill  
Yeah. So, you know, I think it's really easy sometimes to get caught up in the policies and the technologies and the science and sometimes lose a little bit of sight of like the people that are either affected by those things or driving those things. So the work has started to shift a little bit more towards you know, what can we do more with community groups? What can we do more on equity and justice that these policies that we're talking about really bringing voices to the table early on in the process, so a bigger focus on not only how does this affect people, but also how can people get more involved throughout the process?

Nic  
And that's great. And how did you get there? How did you find the fun and then get a job? So

Daniel Hill 
I started a nonprofit years and years ago called Green impact campaign and it just kind of came out of my own personal frustration. I went to school to study energy. I did not feel like I knew what that meant when I got out of college, like what does a job in energy look like? And on my first internship, I learned how to do an energy audit for a commercial building. And I remember the first couple weeks I was like, this is very important to know and like these are real skills. And then in the same breath, I asked my manager at the time, like what about small businesses, like there's a bunch of those out there that could be a huge collective impact and kind of laughed in my face, and, you know, it hurt. It hurt, but no, it was it was like a really important kind of step for me to look more into small businesses. Anyway, fast forward, and I started this nonprofit that train students to do energy audits for small businesses specifically. So kind of like this experiential learning opportunity for students that can't afford to take the time to afford internship aren't studying energy necessarily, just like a really simple way for them to learn how to do an audit and actually do one. So the larger goal is really kind of, can we empower the next generation of Climate Leaders that might not necessarily be on that track yet? And it turned out that some of the students going through my program, were also going on to the Environmental Defense funds climate corps Fellowship, which embeds graduate students in large companies to work on sustainability projects. So we instantly became friends, obviously, because we had very similar models. And then after five years of running green impact campaign, I was starting to look for my own kind of personal next steps for my career and it was just a very easy conversation to have because we were all kind of on the same page. So went and joined EDF to really kind of help grow and build out the corporate partnerships. side of the climate court fellowship.

Nic
 
Yeah. Okay. Well, yeah, that's really great. And I always love seeing how people get because it's always doing right, you know. So what do you do? Actually, I want us to take a step back actually, so what goes into the purpose of it like when you get the report, what are you hoping to gain from it?

Daniel Hill 

It's a wide range, right? So there's like home energy audits, there's small business energy audits, there's larger commercial, all of them have the same goal of identifying ways to save energy, and then understanding what's the cost associated what's the savings associated with that payback. So it's like an assessment of where you're losing energy in cost standpoint for a lot of businesses, and then ways to actually improve your energy efficiency. So what I used to do consulting and work on these larger commercial buildings, you know, there would be 10s and dozens of pages of reports that I'm convinced no one read like there's no way there's no way anyone read those. But they would flip to the one page that showed like the breakdown of the savings they would pick a couple of bank great let's go with those. Yes. But for people with with home energy audits usually it's a little more simple, where it's like, you know, you got these light bulbs, you can change out, put this filter on, upgrade your thermostat to this and you might save, you know, 10% on your next bill.

Nic
 
Right. Yeah. Which you know, is still impactful for families and absolutely absolute, especially,

Daniel Hill 
especially small businesses too. I mean, that was the big thing. We were seeing, on average, small businesses saving 20% And that's huge for a small business.

Nic 

100% Yeah, because it's already a challenge, like owning a small business is hard. Yeah, anything you can do to help that. Yeah, that's great. So so you're not the EDF now. And you're working with the Innovation Fund. So what's your role there and what is

Daniel Hill 
yeah, the Innovation Fund is very near and dear. So I actually helped create the Innovation Fund and built it. A lot of it came from my own experience as a social entrepreneur and being part of different incubators but the main idea behind it was, you know, corporations have internal innovation labs, right. Can we find new products, new services, new ways to kind of have improvements in our business line? So we basically took that concept and translated it inside of an environmental nonprofit. So like can we find creative new ways to advocate on behalf the environment in more effective ways or more kind of cutting edge ways? So there's kind of two sides of it. One is we do quite a bit of just kind of capacity building. So training people on design thinking and prototyping and just new ways of brainstorming ideas and new ways of testing them. And then we also run an actual lab where we're giving out some funding so that people can pilot projects. They can kind of give them support throughout, but it's been really incredible to see you know, I think over the past three years, we've had somewhere around 100 new ideas that got generated, and around 40% of those have advanced to some kind of pilot, which is awesome to see. But it's just interesting to see kind of the range of how people take that right. So sometimes it's a new way to do communications or marketing. Sometimes it's more like boots on the ground like can be a community training program. Sometimes it's just taking existing science and translating more into a commercial setting and testing that out. So it's been exciting to kind of see these ideas just kind of grow out of nothing, and then just the staff just take over

[Career Advice]

Nic 
which is awesome. Yeah, and truthfully, it's great. You're in a place that encourages that because that can be a really daunting thing to try to pitch a new idea to your company, because sometimes, you know, initiative innovation that can be scary. So what suggestions would you have for people trying to do that exact thing pitching a new idea, and then we'll get into some more of that innovation. You get sparked by that, but how do you get the courage to do that?

Daniel Hill 
Yeah, I'm gonna lead with a book recommendation. Actually, there's a book called start within that does a great job of kind of talking about how to take a idea and kind of move it through your organization to get it to get it realize and a lot of what I've learned was from that, but I think a lot of it is understanding, okay, what are the priorities for the organization? And how can I align whatever idea I have to one of those so that it's not necessarily a new idea and a new goal for the organization, but it's just here's a new way to advance a goal that we're already working towards. I think if that's not there, I do really hard to push something through. The second thing I always say is, the best thing you can do is kind of make it extremely challenging for someone to say no to an idea, and the best way to do that is to show them more than tell them right so like do anything you can do like test things out or talk to potential stakeholders and hear feedback directly from them. I built a an entrepreneurship workshop for Climate Corp. And one of the things I did was just held like a really quick and easy webinar to just gauge you know how many people are interested in this what topics are they interested in? And that's what I kind of took and built a bit of a case around was, you know, clearly there's demand here. Clearly, there's an interest in these topics, we can really benefit from doing this. And that's a lot more effective get someone to agree to something instead of just, hey, I have this idea. I think we could do this. I think we could do that. So really just kind of showing wherever possible. But I mean, those are the two big ones. I think just aligning it and then showing as much as you can.

Nic  
Yeah, and I think it's a really great point you made too, because it's just making it harder to say no doesn't mean you can't say no does mean you won't get to know. Yeah, you know, planning it is a lot better than just winging it and be like, Hey, guys, guess what innovation, right?

Daniel Hill 

Yeah. And I also think timing is huge, right? Like, understanding when your budget cycle is understanding when new projects might even be heard. And you know, a lot of people I think you're like, Oh, well, we've tried that before but didn't work out. But like asking like okay, well, why didn't it work out? And then understanding like, what's different about this? So, yeah, it's it is a little bit of an art in a sense, I would say more than more than a science a lot.

Nic  
Yeah, but you know, I'm glad that we're talking about it because it's, it's actually really cool. And you say like, what 40% of the ideas you get have had been pushed forward. So yeah. How do you decide you know what to go with? And kind of maybe going back to the drawing?

Daniel Hill 
Yeah, I talked about the Innovation Fund is a way to democratize innovation within the organization, right? Like it's getting beyond just that typical kind of chain of command of this person. I say yes, then this person and this person, and part of that is our entire review committee is actually comprised of staff from across the organization that are not at the higher levels. So it's much more cross cutting a lot of representation, both in terms of levels of staff, but also just areas of work. And then we just go through multiple rounds of kind of evaluating the ideas. There's a rubric that scored against and I would say, you know, nine out of 10 times it's been the top ideas that have come out of that process are the ones that have received funding and those that haven't, it's just because you know, there was a issue that happened since the application to the actual decision. So a lot of it is trying to use that also as a way to kind of train up and give staff opportunity to evaluate new ideas and see other ideas that are going on and really kind of making it more of that so that it's, it's not just the same old hierarchy, you know.

Nic 
And so that, I guess that in my mind is an act of giving ownership to junior staff to give them the opportunity to show you what they can do. Is that been kind of what you've seen with the program?

Daniel Hill 

Yeah, I think so. You know, we've been hearing really cool stories of people that have, you know, even slightly switched roles or even gotten promotions because of, you know, they could prove, hey, I led this project I, you know, had a great idea. I followed it through and had great results. So I think that side of it is really working you know, the staff empowerment side is really exciting. And then we also just hear a lot of people say, even if they lightly interact with the funding, they submit an idea but they don't get accepted that in itself. We've heard from more junior staff like I understand of the framework to present my idea now I got it on paper for the first time like I'm not as afraid to talk to my manager about a new idea. There's just a lot of kind of softer skills in a way I think that are coming out that were almost unexpected when we started this.

[Open Door Climate]

Nic  
Yeah. And you know, your desire to connect with people is really, really cool. And you're just reading through your bio and seeing what you're working on. Um, so I have to give you the floor to talk about Open Door climate as I think it's really, really needed. So what is that and how did that come about? Yeah, thanks.

Daniel Hill
 
I've been working in the climate space for 10 years now. And just over the years I I get a lot of kind of cold requests on LinkedIn saying, I'm thinking about working in this space. I would love to just have a coffee chat with you just understand, like, what it's like and what you do and what the day looks like. And I think at some point, I said, you know, like, this is a little passive in a sense, and I'm sure there's more people out there that are wanting to have these conversations. So I just posted like an open door policy on LinkedIn one day, and just got flooded with request of people saying like, Yeah, I'll take you up on it. And I think I might have spoken to 50 people in three weeks and it was just, wow. I mean, I was emotionally exhausted, I would say. But I really learned a ton and it was so interesting to hear people, what they were struggling with. And one of the top things they kept saying was I'm just struggling to find people in the space to talk to right like you know, if you think about it as let's say, I wanted to get in the education field or the health care field. I'm sure I would do a bunch of googling. I'm sure I'd listen to podcasts. I would do a lot of research on my own. But ultimately, I'm gonna want to talk to like a teacher. I'm gonna want to talk to a nurse to understand like, just tell me what it's like, how did you get in there? That personal story is really impactful for someone trying to get into a new space. So that was kind of the idea was, you know, can I tap other sustainability and climate professionals to do the same? Can they just have an open door policy? Because there's all these people, whether it be tech layoffs, or just people that have crippling climate anxiety at this point that want to work on it, and we keep saying we need, we need everyone, we need everyone, but I think there's this challenge, I think for people that really kind of expand their network, so yeah, it's been a couple a couple of months now. I think around 100 Climate professionals have have volunteered open their door, and it's just kind of been this really cool growing movement on LinkedIn of people being willing to talk and a lot of people taking them up on it. And you just hear stories of people getting interviews, people getting jobs, to show like that human connection I think is really needed in that transition.

Nic 
Yeah, absolutely. And just a friendly reminder to all of our listeners, you can reach out, you can go check out the open door climate, it's there for you. Okay, so if you're interested in that, please do check it out. It's really, really cool. So I had to get that plug in there for you. But what are your hopes for that in the future? You know, you've got the things you've got to set up now to kind of start doing this. Where do you hope it goes?

Daniel Hill  
I mean, I'll give you the honest answer. I have no idea. I don't think I never I never set out to build this. So it's been just such a cool experience to see this community grow. Out of nothing. I shouldn't be surprised, you know, the climate space. It's, it's different from other industries where you know, if if this person gets a sale, maybe that person won't get a sale. When you talk to people work in the environmental space. They want as many people joining in as possible. So the community of professionals that have just like volunteered and taken their own free time to talk. It's been so cool. And I think right now, it's just kind of continuing to grow that community continue to have more of those conversations and see what comes out of it. I don't think I have concrete plans for what's going to happen next, but each day when I you know, log on to LinkedIn and just see the random person that's, that's posting it. It's been a really cool experience.

Nic 
That's really, really awesome. So, you know, a lot of what we talked about is really kind of how to be how to do well on this career path. And there's a lot of good advice. Throughout so but you know, focusing on that specifically, like what key pieces of advice would you give for someone who's looking to get into climate, climate or environmental careers?

Daniel Hill 
I think part of it is understanding and maybe this isn't just specific to climate, but I think it's understanding what what you're really strong at or what you're really good at and, and what you're really interested in and not shying away from that. I think there's a little bit of a misinterpretation that if you're going to work in climate or sustainability, it has to be a technical role and you have to be a climate scientist that knows you know, how carbon sinks work and how it gets released. But the reality is, there's just so many jobs that are like we're just looking for a really good project manager, we're looking for a really good communication specialists, and those skills that are just happened to be applied. To climate are what's really needed. So I think for those that are transitioning in, it's not so much how do I learn the technical side of the environmental space? It's more of how can I use what I do know and what I'm really good at and apply that at, you know, a company that maybe it's a climate tech startup that's just looking for a really good comms person. And I think that can can go a long way. I by no means want to minimize how challenging it is to break into a new industry. I know that's a struggle and I've talked to enough people understand that it is really, really tricky, but I think it's more of not letting the technical side of the barrier to at least looking into it.

[Field Notes]

Nic  
Exactly. And there's there's always room for growth to even if that's where you start. That's not where you want to be. You can't find your way over there. So yeah, it's great, great advice. And so now it's time for the product, shall we call field notes, which is where we talk to our guests about memorable memorable moments they have doing their jobs, and we are encouraging our listeners to share their stories using the hashtag field notes so we can read them on air, but I have to tell you, yours is so great. I love I love this story, because I think you and I share a really good lens on you know, everybody is just a person, right? Everyone, everybody is human, no matter who they are what they are. So you had an action with a CEO that went kind of a unique way so why don't you Why don't you tell us?

Daniel Hill 

You know, and I when I was putting that in, I was like Don't tell that story. Don't tell the story. Of course. I couldn't I couldn't resist. Yeah, so my first job out of college was at a green building startup. I was I think I was just like really nervous. Like, oh, man, this is a professional setting. Like, I want to do a really good job. I don't want to say anything stupid. I don't want to like mess up and my boss happened to be this just super old school guy like he came out of retirement to take this role. And he like, had a very, very strict viewpoint on like whether people should have facial hair in the office like always tucked in shirts like pretty by the book. In that way. So me being like this brand new person and in the workforce. It was very intimidating in a way and like I just didn't trust a lot of a lot of my own thoughts at times. So we were we were having like a one on one meeting in his office because he was he was my direct boss at the time. And we were talking about like utility rates or utility, something involving meters, and I'm sitting across the desk from him. And he has this whiteboard across his room so he gets up from his chair to go to the whiteboard, and just rips just a very large part. Just like a very sustained from the chair to the white board. And it's one of those things and he just doesn't acknowledge it. Right like there's no acknowledgement of it. And then the rest of them he I don't know what he's had after that. I can't I can tell you after that, because the rest of the meeting I just sat there being like did it actually happen today? Imagine that like, right, because it's not saying anything. Yeah, he's not saying anything. There's no way that that's just happening, you just know. And, you know, it was it was it was a lot
__________________________________
Nic 
Ah, yeah. Right because he's not saying anything. Yeah,

Daniel Hill 
he's not saying anything. There's no way that that's just happening you just know. And, you know, it was it was, it was a lot to reflect on after the meeting, but I kind of had this realization after it that like, Oh, he's just he's just some guy like he's just a person. He's human to like, I'm not working with professionals. I'm working with humans like this. Everyone is just kind of getting by and being being a person. And I think for some reason that like really broke down a wall for me where I didn't feel quite as like tense and I felt a little bit more relaxed. And I kind of noticed my personality started coming out a little bit more and I used to, I would trust my own opinions a little bit more. That also helped that, you know, I came to found out that he had no idea what he was talking about, because he was coming just coming from a completely different space and trying to fake it for longer than he should have. I think so. It was it was like a really. I'm shocked that it was such a learning opportunity. But it was it was a big, big turning point that early in my career to be like, okay, maybe I know more than I think or maybe I should trust myself a little more than I thought.

Nic 

Yeah. And it's me. It's a brilliant point. I mean, you know, I've worked with people all over the place and I've never had any there's a guy I worked with who was really, really just, you know, easygoing, charming. The second the CEO showed up, just ghost White. I'm like, What are you doing? Go talk to him. He's like, he's like, Well, I can't I'm like, Okay, well, I will go talk to him. Because he's just a person, right? It doesn't matter. You can connect with people in so many different ways. So I love that messaging.

Daniel Hill 
I'm glad that guys fart can bring you

Nic 
Yeah, that's great. Fardeen to save the world. There we go. So one of the things I thought was really interesting, you're not a journalist, but you are a tracker and true science is a scientific forum. you've tracked what makes you happy for over two years, and that seems like so wild. So how did that work? And what did you learn?

Daniel Hill 

Yeah, it was a really great experiment to do. Yeah, as you said, I'm not a journaler. I've heard the benefits of journaling for years and years, and I always tried to do it, but I just couldn't get myself to do it. And then I got in this habit of doing these like 30 Day goals where you know, you would pick something up for 30 days and at the end of 30 days, you would decide kind of keep that or or not keep it to like, you know, walk to work or not eat candy or whatever it was, but it still felt kind of like, one off. I didn't really understand if if it was helping or not in certain ways, or if I really liked things. So I was curious to actually understand like, okay, these these like smaller habit changes that I'm doing, like, what's actually making me happier and what's actually just me feeling a sense of accomplishment for doing something. Right. So I built like a really basic Google form that at the end of the night, I would always fill out you know, it just knows, like, 30 or so habits that I would do every day, you know, hanging out with friends, I work out did I read whatever it is, and then I would just rate how my happiness level was for that day between one and 10. And then after a couple of months, I started to be able to see correlations of like, okay, this habit contributed, you know, 6.2% towards my happiness. And that was that was really interesting. And I've talked to people about it, and they got really in the weeds about like, the calculus of it like, right, like, how are you sure? Yeah, the point was less of like, okay, the exact number might not be true, obviously, because it's so subjective, but like, it really did give me a good idea of, I need to prioritize these activities each day. Or I'm an introvert. For me a big one was like, What is my balance of socializing? That kind of brings me happiness. So like, as an introvert, you kind of get that pressure like, you shouldn't be hanging out with more people, you should be going to more functions, but like through this tracking, you'll learn like actually, there's a sweet spot, like if I go hang out with friends, you know, two or three times a week, it's great if I do more than that, I actually have kind of some diminishing returns, so to speak. So there's just a really good way to kind of like self reflect, learn. A little bit more about myself. There's so many top 10 You know, habits to be happier out there. And I think what I learned was like, No, it doesn't work that way. It's just it's the self reflection. Like that's how you understand what's going to affect you and what you need to prioritize. Yeah. 100%

Nic 
And you know, it's you're an individual right, you are not the same as everybody there are there can be trends that are true, but you are your own person. And we've talked a little bit about, you know, introvert extrovert type person. And it's funny, we love to put things in boxes right here, either this or that. And the reality is exactly what you said right, like, two or three times a week for you to hang out with friends. You know, maybe your love to somebody or not nearly enough to someone else. So were there any other things like that that you learned along this process?

Daniel Hill 
Yeah, I think that is gonna sound really small. But I learned that for me if you know, I think a big one is always reading right like everyone, everyone's New Year's resolution or something like I'd like to read more. I like to read more. But through this actually found out that especially when it comes to like nonfiction and learning, I'm much more enjoy learning and acquiring that from podcasts over reading. Maybe it's because I'm a slow reader. Maybe it's because I like like the transition of walking and listening. But like that was a really refreshing one for me because I hold pressure like you should like have a little voice and be like you should be reading more you shouldn't be reading kind of got a little bit more quiet because I was like, actually, I should keep listening to like more podcasts like that seems to be doing really well. So that's like a small one where, you know, again, like, you hear over and over like, this is a thing you should be doing. But you kind of got to understand like, Yeah, I'm not a great reader. Maybe that's a problem. Maybe I should just accept that and move on. But that was really interesting. I mean, I'll tell you to sleep was the biggest one like that is the biggest contributor to my happiness. If I don't get a good night's sleep. I like had no chance of having a good day in that way. Yeah. And then the only other thing I'll mention is, you know, I opened this up and let some other people try it. And I don't remember how many maybe it was between 50 and 100. And I was curious to look through, you know, what are their top habits and I don't think anyone had the same top three, like again, just to kind of reinforce like, it was really interesting that like everyone's was very different. And it was also very, very interesting to see like what people wanted to track. Things that I would just never thought about.

Nic 
Right, right. The number of times I deal with football that didn't make my way it's on yours. Yeah, no,

Daniel Hill 

I think my my favorite one of the most endearing one was like, did I hug whatever person's name today like specifically, did they give that person a hug that day, and really endearing and really sweet?

Nic 
Yeah, absolutely. That's great. Well, it's funny, we talked a little bit about this too. I want to ask you more directly. The negative voice that we have in our head right the ones that I have to read more you have to do this more. You found a few ways to kind of quiet that voice. Do you have any advice for someone who maybe doesn't want to do like the blog every day or any other tips for kind of, you know, letting go of that negative voice?

Daniel Hill 

Yeah, I wish I had something more poetic but I do think there's like that constant conversation between the voice in your head is not necessarily the truth. And I think it's really hard to sometimes distinguish between that. But I think that's where, you know, whatever your support is, whether that's your family or your friends or whatever, like understanding that not every time that you have a thought or that they have a thought or whatever it is, isn't going to necessarily be your truth and like really kind of giving yourself almost compassion towards that right like, I think that's another thing right? Like we try to do these goals and then we don't achieve them perfectly and then like we just feel even worse at the end. But I think having that compassion towards either if it's an external goal or just like kind of battling that voice sometimes. I think it's something that gets overlooked. It's just like being kinder to yourself when you're trying to work on self improvement, right? Like that's the irony like, you're trying to try to be happier. You're trying to do self improvement and instead like, you're just bad talking yourself sometimes.

Nic 
Yeah, come on, Nick. You're better than this. It's okay to be this good. I don't need to be better. But yeah, it's it's been really great. We are running out of time, which is just such a bummer. But is there anything else you'd like to talk about before we let you go?

Daniel Hill 
Maybe just getting back to the environmental and climate space? I you know, I talked a little bit about kind of the people side of things and I think that can't be stressed enough. I I don't spend much time thinking about the technologies or the science just because I don't have much fear that like, that's not the problem. We're going to be we have the things we need, we'll be able to get technologies but I think the biggest obstacle is just the people and like implementing things and getting things done. So like that's why I've dedicated a lot of my work towards working with people that then can enable the technologies and science and policies but I think it's just something to keep in mind for for anyone that is thinking about a career or already working in the space. It's just the importance that people actually play in getting climate change, mitigated and getting adaption. So maybe it's not so much a call to action, but maybe just my own personal motivator. And a lot of this is just how do we get people to do good things?

Nic 
And it's a great great point. And to that end, where can people get in touch with you?

Daniel Hill 
Yeah, I think LinkedIn is probably the best place. I'm not on other social media platforms. So LinkedIn is I guess, the only place so yeah, if people want to reach out to me happy to find time to have a chat or send some resources that way if they're interested in

Nic  
like, yeah, and one last plug, I'll give you for open door. climate.com Go check that out, too. So thank you so much, Daniel, for being here. I had a great time.

Daniel Hill 
Thanks so much. Really appreciate it.

[Outro]

Nic 
And that's our show. Thank you so much, Jana, for joining us today. Please be sure to check us out each and every Friday. Don't forget to subscribe, rate and review. See everybody.

Laura
Bye.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai


Nic & Laura discuss airplane movies
Interview with Daniel Hill starts
The Environmental Defense Fund
Career Advice
Open Door Climate
Field Notes