How are you spending your time? Is it aligned with what you genuinely care about? In 2018, Heidi Lim quit her role in enterprise software to solve climate change full-time. What steps did she take to identify a new, purpose-driven path and then land a role in carbon removal?
Heidi is the Chief of Staff at Opus 12, a company working to recycle CO2 into cost-competitive chemicals and fuels, and the author of two popular Medium articles, ‘We Need to Talk About Carbon Removal’ and ‘Chasing a Job with Purpose’. On this episode of Reversing Climate Change, Heidi joins Ross to walk us through her process for finding meaningful work, explaining what inspired her to pursue a role in the carbon removal space.
Heidi shares her strategies for figuring out what kind of purposeful work you want to pursue, challenging us to reach out to people on paths we’re interested in and embed ourselves in communities with likeminded individuals. Listen in for Heidi’s insight on turning content creation into career opportunities and learn how to plant the seeds that will lead to your dream role.
Resources:
‘Chasing a Job with Purpose’ by Heidi Lim
‘We Need to Talk About Carbon Removal’ by Heidi Lim
After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration by Holly Jean Buck
Holly Jean Buck on Reversing Climate Change EP103
Holly Jean Buck on Reversing Climate Change S2 Bonus Episode
We Are Climate Designers: The Podcast
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon. Today I am joined by Heidi Lim, Chief of Staff at Opus 12. Heidi, you wrote an article on Medium called Chasing a Job with Purpose about your career trajectory and working in climate. And I have been looking for a good way to have you on the show for so long and we finally found it. So welcome.
Heidi Lim: Thanks, Ross. Good to be here. And yeah, you finally found a good reason. I appreciate the persistence.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, we have tried for a long time. Our paths cross as they do in carbon removal circles, which are not nearly as big as they should be, which is part of the reason we’re talking today. But you have written a classic, a demi-classic medium post called We Need to Talk About Carbon Removal that we still send out to people sometimes as a nice little primer on carbon removal. And I know that thing is just evergreen and you’re still getting play off of it, aren’t you?
Heidi Lim: Yeah, I’m very grateful that the Air Miners group has it in their, like, it’s the number one thing to read on their reading list. So I do watch the stats and I get some trickled in new readers, people who are learning about carbon removal, which is awesome.
Ross Kenyon: I love that. And yeah, Air Miners, a little shout out to you guys over there too. And if you’re listening and you want to get involved in the carbon removal space professionally, Air Miners is a very good place to do so. So we’ll put the application up if you’d like to join that community. And there will be all sorts of great resources coming through today. So check those show notes because Heidi, you have written about your experience in going pro and the carbon removal, climate tech, carbon tech, whichever moniker you prefer for this industry that we share.
We should just dive in because you have tonnes and tonnes of advice to give people who want to make that leap. So thanks for writing it. Oh, thanks for reading it. And in advance, thanks for sharing it. Yeah, yeah, my pleasure. Well, Heidi, let’s just maybe work through it. I think you broke it down in a nice structured kind of way of how to think about joining this industry and how you did it and what you might recommend based upon what you’ve learned. So what might be the first couple steps of someone looking to start this process?
Heidi Lim: Yeah, first of all, I want to say how weird it is to be like in the podcast. It feels like I’ve entered some alternate reality that is like I’ve been spending a lot of time in the beginning of my own process when I was trying to figure out how to get into carbon removal. I actually spent every time I had, you know, my commutes and my walk to work, like anything that allowed me to listen to a podcast, I was listening to Reversing Climate Change. So, yeah, very cool.
I was like religiously listening to, I think, up to like I don’t know, episode 30 or something like that. So I’ve definitely clocked in my hours.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, that’s nice. I didn’t know that. Well, I’m happy to let you break the fourth wall as we are fond of saying. Actually, I’m going to take a step back even one step further here. Heidi, you can go personal with it. How did you end up at Opus 12 and what was your career path?
Heidi Lim: Yeah. So I am an environmental engineer by training. I studied that in college. I always wanted to, like when I went to school, I wanted to do something about the environment, something about climate. And I’ve had a whole evolution, as I think a lot of us do as an environmentalist, where during college, I thought, OK, I want to work in clean energy because that’s what everyone thinks about. But I actually found kind of a diversion away from that path when I graduated. I found a role to work at a software company in Silicon Valley.
Really awesome opportunity to work directly with the CEO. And then I ended up being a product manager, which is a pretty coveted role in tech. And so I did that for three years. And around like the last year of that time, I was realizing that, you know, when I go home, I would read about climate change. I would read about environmental justice, like all these things that were so counter to like how I was spending eight, nine, ten hours a day working on my day job.
And at some point it became kind of too much for me. To have that cognitive dissonance of like, this is what I really care about. And yet I’m spending so much time on something that I don’t feel as fulfilled by, even though everything about that job was awesome. Like I love my coworkers. It gave me really good opportunities to get experience. And so a lot of things were really awesome about that job. And even so it was like not fulfilling enough. And so I just knew that I really had to go work on climate full time, which I had always intended to do.
And I think I just kind of lost track of that. And I think a lot of people may do that where you’re like, okay, well, I know I’m interested in something, but I’m not really sure how to get there. We get very comfortable in the, in the lives that we already live and our jobs get comfortable. Certainly in Silicon Valley with all these perks, you know, things get really comfortable. And then you just kind of don’t keep in mind that, oh, like there was a path that I really care about.
Like, when am I going to take that leap? And for me, it just ended up being so clear that I needed to, so. So after three and a half years in that job, during that time, I was kind of like towards the end of it, I was reading all of these articles about climate change and trying to understand, okay, if I go back into this job market and I go work on climate, I want to make the biggest impact that I can. And so there was this emerging topic that kept coming up in things that I was reading that like, oh, we not only need to reduce the emissions that are going up in the atmosphere, we also need to draw down those emissions.
And reverse emissions, which is under the umbrella of carbon removal. And the reason being is that we have 40 billion tonnes of CO2 that we emit every year as humanity. And CO2 has a lifetime of hundreds or thousands of years. So 40% of all the CO2 we’ve ever emitted since the Industrial Revolution is still in the atmosphere. That’s crazy. I think people think about CO2 as like, oh, it goes up there. It just dissipates, you know, because you can’t see it. It just disappears.
But really, it’s not like that. It’s like if we slow down how much we’re putting up there, there’s still a lot of cleanup that has to be done. And it happens super slowly. So to me, it was like, oh, I was seeing that there was like, I don’t know, a couple hundred people in the world. Even in the clean tech space, it wasn’t well known that this is something we need to do. And just seeing that, I really wanted to be part of that group of people who were starting to really focus on it.
So that’s how I found this podcast. I would go and find different articles and I found all these people on Twitter. And I just made like a giant spreadsheet and I talked about this in the article. I made a giant spreadsheet of all these names every time I was reading an article and some new name popped up. I would put it in my spreadsheet. I made this list of all the companies that were popping up. It seemed interesting. And I just reached out to all of them.
I was trying to figure out who is doing the real work, who is a company that would be interesting to work with. Because of course, I’m not just looking for any company to work with. I still care about You know, having a good job, having a good culture in that workplace, having, you know, some level of work-life balance that I care about, like optimizing for all of these, what I call job values. And I ranked them. I had, you know, like this list, like multiple iterations of the list of the companies that I found to be very interesting and tried to talk to everyone I could.
So actually, Opus 12 was one of the top companies on that list. And I took a long time to actually get in touch with them. They didn’t have any job positions open that were relevant to my experience, which is kind of on the business development side. And so I did What I could, which is to find somebody, any connection to Opus 12, I reached out to them on their info, inbox, didn’t get a response. And then I tried to find people who were connected on LinkedIn.
And I made a couple of contacts before I finally found a friend who knew a friend who knew the CEO. And so after many months, I got in contact and I talked to him. We had a great call. And then he told me he wasn’t looking for a business person for another year. So this was June of 2018. And I went back to my spreadsheet and I crossed them off because I couldn’t wait a year to find it, you know, to work with them. But then a few months later, I wrote this article that you alluded to.
And I could talk about why I did that. There were lots of reasons why I wrote that article. One of them was to be able to go back and touch base with these companies that I was talking to before. And one of them was Opus 12. I sent the CEO a note and said, oh, I mentioned you guys in this article. Great to talk to you. I hope you guys are doing well. He said he’d read it and he actually came back and told me that he actually needed somebody a little sooner than he thought.
And so that’s how I got the job at Opus 12.
Ross Kenyon: What? I didn’t know that. Wow. This article is responsible for so much in your life, it seems, Heidi.
Heidi Lim: Yeah, it is. I mean, it feels like a little thing when I wrote it, but it has been the gift that keeps on giving. That’s unbelievable. And for our audience, you may not know, what is Opus 12 and what are you doing over there? Yes, I’m not going to reveal too much because I think we’re going to have to be on here for an official episode. So Opus 12 technology is a CO2 recycling technology. So it’s a device that recycles CO2 into chemical building blocks for chemicals, materials, and fuels that are today typically made from fossil fuels.
So it’s a way essentially to Recycle CO2 into a lot of the things that we use all the time that we don’t have good options to switch away from by just purely electrifying the grid.
Ross Kenyon: And chief of staff there, basically you’re keeping the lights on, you’re keeping everyone doing what they should be doing, things like that.
Heidi Lim: Yeah, it’s a pretty interesting biz dev role because... Chief of Staff can mean a lot of different things, but for my role, ends up being that we have only a couple, a few people on the team who do kind of non-technical, not in the lab every day working on the technology, but rather going and finding customers and partners. And so I get to work directly with our CEO and get a lot of hands-on experience actually figuring out like how to work, how to like invent this new economy, which is the carbon economy based on CO2, which is really awesome.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that’s fantastic. Okay. I think you’ve given us the nice little base layer here that we need to build on. Do you think now is an appropriate time to start working through the very logical steps in this article? Sure. Let’s do it. All right. Let’s start at the very, well, you have a roadmap here. So let’s lay out what exactly this roadmap has in store for the listeners throughout this episode.
Heidi Lim: Yeah, so I essentially talk about the steps to leave your job and find a job that’s more meaningful. But I think a lot of it starts with actually figuring out what you want and what matters to you before you jump into something. And the title of the article is Chasing a Job with Purpose. And Ross, I hope you caught the double meaning there. And I think I didn’t even realize it had a double meaning until I wrote it. I’m like, I’m desperately trying to figure out, is it because you felt like Job in writing it?
Oh, okay. So not at all biblical, but that is actually, I’ll have to think about that. That was dumb, but what’s the double meaning here? I’m not sure I see it. So the double meaning is chasing a job with purpose, like a job where there’s like some mission behind it. So that’s like the obvious one. But really what this article is about is about chasing the act of chasing with a purpose, like chasing a job purposefully and actually finding a thing on purpose instead of just responding to recruiters that come to your door.
Which I think is super common and it makes a lot of sense. Recruiters, they exist for a reason to go and poach people who seem interesting. And then of course, it makes it a lot easier for us to go from job to job if somebody comes to you with a job. But the issue is if you have you, Ross, and your awesome team at Nori, you’re not hiring a whole farm of recruiters to go and do that to all these people. And go and poach all these people who have never thought about Nori, right?
And so we have this issue where if you are an emerging company or you’re in an emerging space that has less recruiting power than a Google or something like this, it’s going to be more difficult to pull talent. And so on the flip side of that, a lot of people... Rightfully so, you know, we’re really busy. We want to kind of follow the path that feels most familiar. Or, you know, if we happen to use an app that we know, oh, I’m going to use go to Facebook because like I use it.
You know, I like it. Seems like a fun place to work. But are you really going to do the steps that it takes to go find that job that’s going to be most fulfilling? It’s harder to do that. And so I wanted to make it as easy as possible for people to actually think about what you care about. And actually think about what you want in your job. Like it doesn’t have to be like, oh, I want to work on climate change. It might be like, oh, I want to travel for my work or I want to spend a lot of time with my family or something like that in the job that I’m in and actually go and purposely find a role that fits what you want.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, that’s clever. Although you sort of out-clevered yourself by not realizing you were actually doing that when you wrote that title. Yeah, there’s something subconscious that worked out pretty well. Yeah, blame it on that. That’s cool. A lot of this does seem like just generally good advice for seeking a job independent of the field. I don’t know. Do you agree with that? Do you think this is very specific to the industry that we’re in?
Heidi Lim: Yeah, so I wanted to make it broader than just climate change. Obviously, I do put a plug in there about why I devote a whole paragraph to why, you know, climate change is the thing I picked and why it’s so important in general because it touches everything. If you care about health, you have to care about climate change, for instance. But I wanted to make it more universal than that because I recognize that it’s not going to take that form for everyone. And I also didn’t want to make it seem like, oh, if you’re not working on climate change, You’re wasting your career.
There’s so many, there’s so many valuable ways to, you know, spend your time and valuable causes, especially in the light of COVID, the pandemic and Black Lives Matter coming, you know, all the, all these things coming to the floor. I think it’s like right now it’s extremely topical or top of mind for people to be thinking about what things they care about and seeing if there’s the way that they spend their time is aligned with what they want to be doing. So that’s why I made it more broad.
Ross Kenyon: Got it. Yeah. Well, some of this advice here is about knowing yourself, knowing what you care about. What are you spending your free time learning about? I think that’s a great heuristic for trying to figure out what you actually want to spend your time doing. And you have this about job values. Yeah. Being an entrepreneur, there’s plenty of stress additional to a normal salaried or wage earning job. Beyond it, do you actually want that? Great advice too. And one of the things here I really like is your speed dating for careers or it seems like you tried to speak with as many people as you could and you have this very detailed spreadsheet.
It sounds like you just wanted to talk to as many people as possible in this field to try to sniff out where you might be a good fit for you and a future employer. Is that kind of how you see it?
Heidi Lim: Yeah. I don’t have statistics to back this, but in this modern day, It’s not just about dropping your resume as many places as you can go. Unfortunately, it also means reaching out to people on LinkedIn and asking your friends, finding out who knows who and going and finding a connection or reaching out and trying to meet somebody. And actually, just like with the LinkedIn reaching out, it’s not just about like, oh, I want to work for you. There’s so much value in going and Looking around at people who have a pathway that you find admirable or you’re like, oh, you switch from the food service industry and then you’re working on these robots that sort trash or something like that.
That person probably works out there somewhere. But that is such a cool path. I want to go learn from you. How did you do that? And I talk about how to reach out to somebody on LinkedIn and How to offer a 20-minute call. I think people underestimate how much people like to be asked for their advice. It’s really validating when somebody reaches out to you and is like, I really like what you do. I want to be you. You’re really inspiring. Like don’t fear the rejection of sending out that email request.
Actually you Ross and Kristoff, you guys were a couple of the people who actually did respond to me on LinkedIn in 2018 when I was like, Nori’s awesome. Can I talk to you? And I like love your podcast. It’s really scary. It’s kind of vulnerable. You’re putting yourself out there and sending a note about yourself and just saying like, I don’t know if you have time to talk to me, but I’m going to send you this note anyway. And if you get something back, like that’s just like, It’s like it makes your day.
It’s like something very special about feeling like I hustled, like I made that happen. Even if it’s the smallest thing, like getting somebody to respond to your email, it was just like so motivating to do that.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, that’s nice. Oh, yeah, sure. Warm fuzzies. That’s great. I try to always accept those, especially if they seem genuine. I get plenty of notes that are not, I’m like, I do have things to do. I can’t just say yes to But if someone seems like they have genuinely engaged and I don’t know, it’s like such a small cost and sometimes you’ll make friends or future colleagues of yourselves or maybe you can or if you want to be really self-interested about it, I’m sure there’s ways.
They can help you and you can help them. And there’s mutual back scratching involved. But I don’t know. It seems like very low cost. I hope someone out there listening, say yes to someone doing that. And then think about when you were starting out about how much that could have helped you. I hope you’re saying yes to those. Right, Heidi? I think you probably are.
Heidi Lim: Yeah, totally. And I’m like, oh man, I’m really backlogged right now. I’m thinking about a bunch of messages that came to me after I posted. I’m trying to catch up because I’ve gotten a lot more attention than I thought I would have in this article, which has been great. But I’m a little backlogged of responding to people because I really do feel like that is so important. Like you could give somebody a tiny piece of advice that could help them start their company or something.
You never know what’s going to lead to.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, yeah. And we definitely need all that we can get, really. Anyone who has a sincere desire to work in carbon removal, I’m usually supportive. And if I am able to stick my neck out on their behalf and see Oh, yeah, we’re the best. We are the best. You also have this piece of advice in here about embedding yourself into relevant spaces and communities. We’ve mentioned Air Miners. My Climate Journey also has a lot of good resources in it, too. You mentioned one over here, too, that you worked with in the Bay Area.
Maybe you could tell us a bit about that. The APIENC.
Heidi Lim: Yeah, shout out to APINC. So APINC is specifically, it’s an Asian Pacific Islander queer trans group and their mandate is, they don’t do like only climate stuff, but then there was a small contingent of us who decided to start an environmental justice, climate justice group. So we call ourselves now the Environmental Justice League. And so that’s just another way that I, yeah, I get involved on the climate, more environmental justice side, which I don’t, Always get in the carbon removal side. And I know, Ross, I did mention this to you, so I’m going to lead into it.
But I do make a call out in the article that I think we need more diversity in all of these spaces, including carbon removal. And so I particularly want people who are women of color or We’re trans people or black, Latina, Latinx, indigenous people. I want those folks to come on board and like just get started. Maybe it’s like, you know, send them a message. I would love to talk to you. I don’t know what it is, but it’s even in carbon removal, but certainly in clean tech, it’s still a very white male dominated space.
And so, but I think we need more diversity to take a lens of, you know, How is this going to impact this type of community? We don’t want just like a homogenous table. We really need more people who are from different perspectives to bring to that more diverse table. So what I do with APAC is more of that, and I would love for it to not feel like these parts of what I care about are kind of more separate.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I can understand that. What’s your experience been of carbon removal since you began? Because it was such a small, we both sort of started at a similar time and it was much smaller then, but it seems like it is evolving and growing. And there is a lot more talk of environmental justice than at least that I can remember from where I started, or maybe I’m revealing my lack of engagement with it back then. But it seems like those conversations are more prominent now, or am I, I don’t know.
Is that just the zeitgeist that we’re in?
Heidi Lim: I don’t know, but you’re also like in Seattle, right? So I think maybe it’s like regional also that might make a difference. But yeah, I was recently, I don’t know how I never came across Holly Buck before this, but I went to one of Holly’s presentations at LL&L. And this is the first time I heard somebody talk about environmental justice plus carbon removal. In such an in-depth fashion, I was like fascinated. It was like one of the most interesting talks that I’ve been to like for years.
I’m still trying to read her book, but yeah, I mean, that’s the kind of work that I feel like more people need to be thinking about. Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t think it’s really part of the conversations that I’ve seen, but I also have to admit, I’m not as embedded in the community now as after starting at Opus 12 and getting kind of deeper into the space just like through the work that I do for work. But we are thinking about in the air miners community, we’re going to be doing some environmental justice events.
So look out for that because we want to open up that conversation and help facilitate more of that discussion.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I definitely do too. I don’t want to... I don’t know. I don’t want to have to make excuses for nori or carbon removal either as being like, oh, we didn’t prioritize this thing because it wasn’t super convenient to us at the time or we had other priorities. And I don’t know. I think the time for that has, if there ever was an appropriate time, which there probably was not, but it’s certainly closed now, or at least I hope that it is. There is.
Heidi Lim: Yeah. I think there needs to be discussion in between because it’s like, There are, rightfully so, there are aspects of carbon removal that people are somewhat allergic to in environmental justice spaces. Like, carbon capture, a lot of people associated with clean coal and, you know, the coal industry trying to, like, keep themselves alive, which, yeah, a lot of, I think, carbon capture, like, was related to that before. And so, like, that conversation has changed, but I don’t think all of the discussions have been updated in the same way.
Like, we need to be having, like, dialogue and actually, like, Coming together and trying to figure out, okay, what is today? What is real now?
Ross Kenyon: That’s a fair way to say it. Yeah, there’s a lot of leadership coming out of Carbon 180 on this. They do quite a lot. Yeah, Carbon 180 is phenomenal work. And Holly, I do love Holly’s writing and I try to get her on whenever I can because I think what she’s doing is so novel and unique too. But I think the fact that we only had a couple of examples at hand means maybe it’s not nearly as common as it should be. So yeah, we could do better, I think is where we’re ending up here.
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, let’s go away from the article. I think you asked me a question about the roadmap and then I totally derailed it. No. And then I kept, I just started working through the article. And then obviously we had to, cause you, you make a point of discussing this in your article about like racial and gender issues with regard to carbon removal and climate tech. So it was going to come up naturally. And I thought that was the most natural point.
Do you disagree? No, I’m happy with it. Yeah. You’re happy with it. Cool. Well, we can keep going through if you’re liking the way that we’re doing it. I’m at find a mentor and the poke around section.
Heidi Lim: Yeah. Okay. I’ll just like center us where I think we left off. So I was spending a lot of time talking about like finding what matters to you. And I think, so the reason I bring this up in the beginning, so the four steps that I talk about are finding out what matters to you and what you can offer. Leaving your current job if it’s right for you. Obviously, there’s a lot of considerations there, certainly now, but I wanted to write it to be kind of perennial.
I think that’s the right term. I wanted it to last longer than just during the pandemic. And then the third step, and they’re not necessarily in order, but this is the order that I took, was giving yourself space to reset and figure things out. I took some time to travel, and this was in 2018, and was fortunate to have the ability to take some time to really find the thing that I really cared about, Having a job and had the ability to do that. So that’s great if you can, but it’s definitely not necessary to switch to a new, good, better role.
And then the last step is to actually go purposefully find that next role. So the first step I talk about Yeah. Like you mentioned, Ross, observing yourself. I think a lot of people, we as humans, sometimes we don’t take a pause to like think about like, oh, what do I care about? And just thinking about like people I’ve reached out to on LinkedIn who actually like their words resonated with me. I reached out to a pretty big corporation in Silicon Valley and she did a 30 minute call with me.
But one thing that stuck with me and I really think you only need like one thing to stick with you in these calls for it to be super weird. And she told me to make a list of the things that I want to do or I want in my next role and things that I don’t want. And it’s as simple as like, I like working with people. I really like working with teams. I like to be external facing. I don’t want to be just spending all my time at my desk.
Like these kinds of things I wrote down and they ended up being what I consider to be like my job values. Like it helped me to have a compass for And like a framework to like figure out, okay, does this role look like it suits me? And on top of that, of course, like I wanted something that was in carbon removal or climate change. So just like writing those down and knowing what you want, or like observing yourself and figuring like, oh, I don’t like when this happens at work.
I don’t want to do that again. Like it’s so simple. And it’s, I think it’s really helpful just to start figuring out what to do next.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I think that’s quite sensible, actually. Well, cool. That makes sense here. I also like your little bit about make sure you’re running to something rather than running away from something. I think that’s also probably just good life advice for many scenarios. And then you have another section here about taking some time off. After leaving, a little pause, as you mentioned, trying to figure out what exactly you want to do, what you value. I think that’s good if you’re able to do that.
I’m moving kind of quickly so we can keep going. Is that okay with you, Heidi? Am I skipping over anything important?
Heidi Lim: I can just talk very briefly about why I decided to leave and why I think it’s helpful. Okay, even if you can’t leave, it is very helpful, even if it’s like a Small pause in between your jobs or something like that. It can be very helpful to just like have some time to kind of recenter. I think a lot of us, you kind of jump from place to place and it’s very easy to do that. But if you have the opportunity to like Pick up a new skill or, you know, gain a new hobby or something and just get perspective and maybe build some habits that will be helpful for you the rest of your life.
Like I picked up meditation during this time. That can be really valuable. So that’s part of the reason why I made the choice to leave without having a next job lined up when I did in 2018, which was the right, you know, the right time for that for me. But I found it super valuable to just have that time to Think about myself as a human separately from my job, basically. And it was really nice.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Well, in this last section here about purposefully finding your next role, one of the pieces of advice in here that I quite like is about content creation. And I, of course, have strong thoughts on this because I do a lot of this. And as we’ve referenced, your content creation has been a pathway to many opportunities that would not have been nearly as accessible to you had you not done this. Was that your intention or was this just a fact of happenstance that blessed you?
Heidi Lim: It’s both. So the situation I was in was that I had been out of the clean tech space for all that time, like a few years when I was working in Silicon Valley. And I just, I kind of wasn’t sure if someone would look at my resume and be like, oh, she’s still relevant or she has the skills to fit into the team or whatever it was. So part of it was like, I wanted to Show that I knew a lot in a very public way. I also wanted to do it to educate other people.
Like that’s the same reason I wrote this article about finding a job with purpose is I just feel like there’s so many things that like, I think I’m fairly good at explaining things. And so I wanted to make it more accessible for people to understand. And carbon removal to me was like, I read like a hundred, couple hundred articles before I really wrap my head around like what’s going on. There’s so many things happening. And so I wanted like a carbon removal 101. Like I want someone to just tell me like, how do I think about this?
Like what are all the parts and make it easy and accessible so it’s not so hard for the next 10 people to learn about it. It shouldn’t be that hard. And so that’s another reason I wrote it. And then the third one, as I mentioned, was to be able to have an excuse to go back to all these companies and people I talk to and say, all right, I wrote the article, I just want to let you know, and then just like have a second touch point and something to offer, even though I wasn’t, you know, officially working with them.
Yeah, that last step is very sneaky, but also very smart, I have to say. I’m pretty certain I reached out to you guys too. I was like, hey Nori, you’re in there. You guys are definitely in there.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think that’s a very good way to go too. And I guess one thing I would add to this is that you don’t necessarily need to have it all figured out to start doing this. There are, I mean, I certainly don’t. I don’t know. Do I consider myself an expert on carbon removal? Not really. Or climate change? No. I think my strength is being genuinely curious about lots of things. And if someone were to write an article, I wouldn’t expect them to have all the answers.
I think engaging with what is out there in the content and the companies and the perspectives is valuable. But I wouldn’t tell someone, hey, don’t write anything unless you have the final word on it. Do you, do you agree with that? Or do you think they should have something comprehensive?
Heidi Lim: Oh my gosh. Well, I mean, this is not going to be a surprise to you, but like, I feel like at least half of the information I put into my article, I found out while I was writing the article. Like there’s just so much stuff as you, I mean, this is also like, right. It’s one of the best ways to learn when you’re teaching somebody else. It’s like, oh, I didn’t think about like how to visualize, like what does even a ton of CO2 look like?
That’s a question. That other people have answered that I had to go find out. And there’s some really cool resources online. If you want to know what that looks like, go and check out the article. There’s some visuals on there. But yeah, these are all things that they just came up. And it’s like the journey. I’m amazed that you don’t think you’re an expert on these things because you definitely know way more than 99% of the people in this space, I think. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: I guess so. But if you put me up with, I don’t know, who’s someone like David Keith or Julio Friedman or some of these, you’re like, I don’t belong on a panel with any of them. It would be humiliating in that way where I’m like, I just try to ask decent questions and be engaged. You’re just a guy. Just trying to learn about climate change. Yeah, yeah. And I think, let me know if you’re listening and you think this is wrong, but I think if you engage with this show, it’s because you like that type of engagement.
But this is also, you only get mail when someone loves what you’re doing or they hate what you’re doing. So I don’t know. I’d be curious to know if someone’s listening who can tell me why they are listening in that kind of way. But okay, navel gazing. I’m going to... Close that for a moment so we can keep working our way through. You also have great advice here about planting seeds. So it sounds like you had a bit of a shotgun approach here, which you’ve alluded to earlier with your spreadsheet.
Why don’t you keep walking us through that process?
Heidi Lim: Yes. So I talk about planting seeds and what that means is... Is really what we’re just talking about, which is like just being on the path like you don’t have to know where the end of the road is. You don’t have to have like gotten that job and like everything happens and then life is great and everything’s done. It’s like just the act of like sending out some LinkedIn emails or just like setting up your job alerts, reading articles like one article a week about a thing that you’re interested in or just.
Even subscribe to a bunch of newsletters that are relevant to what you’re interested in. These are all examples of planting seeds, which is just like, essentially, I guess, I’ve never read the book, but I think what it is, is it’s designing your life to push you in the right direction and to keep you on a path that is moving you towards a thing that You think is out there. Maybe it’s like really fuzzy, but you’re like, oh, I feel like I gravitate towards this. Let me just make it easier for me to see what kind of jobs are out there by letting the alerts come into my inbox passively or reaching out to a founder on LinkedIn and like talking to them, buying them coffee and, you know, just like getting on a Zoom call with them and just like picking their brain for a little bit.
Like I’m the perfect example of like how planting seeds is something Useful where I like as I was saying I tried really hard to get in touch with anyone at Opus 12 for months and finally when I did they didn’t have any openings for me but I like kind of without annoying them necessarily I was just around and like kind of just being kind of being just there. And like in the Airminers community, I was trying to do as much as I could, like, you know, helping to organize things, like being visible on the Slack and like talking to new people all the time.
I actually had an awesome opportunity to work with Carboculture, which is a biochar company. And I did a short kind of like a stint with them as kind of a primer of like my first taste of working in the space. Loved it. I love working with agriculture and kind of the more farming side of things. And So I did that because I walked, I saw Henrietta, who’s the CEO, founder of Carboculture. I saw her at an Airminers event and I recognized her from Twitter. And I like went up to her and I was like, hey, I love what Carboculture does.
Like, here’s what I, who I am. Like, I would love to work with you guys. And I had an opportunity to do that. Anyway, I just think like the journey is hard enough and it feels like when you’re not moving and you’re like, oh, I haven’t gotten the job yet. I think it’s worth celebrating when you can like that. You planted a seed that you got one, you know, these responses on LinkedIn or that you, you know, you’re going to these events and just trust in the process.
Like I actually ended up being at the very end of Like I spent way more time than I thought I would finding the right job. And I’m very lucky, like, Obis 12 came in, in, into, you know, my life at the time that it did, but it really did teach me that like, it is really difficult, but in a lot of cases, like just knowing that you’re on the right path or that you set up your environment to support you in the direction you want to go, that is like super valuable.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Very good advice. And being visible. And God, that fine line between being persistent and being annoying. I think everyone knows exactly the line that we’re talking about there.
Heidi Lim: Well, Ross, you’re on the persistent side and not the annoying side because I’m here. We talked about it many times. You’re very good at that.
Ross Kenyon: Everyone’s checking in being like, yo, how about this? Not quite. Okay. Okay. I’ll keep that in mind three months later. Hey, Heidi. Yeah, at some point, maybe it’ll work out or maybe not. But having a strong network like that and adding value to it by writing about it, by engaging with it, by volunteering your time, like you said, with air miners, working on some of their conferences and get togethers. I think that’s a great way of just becoming a part of the club, becoming a part of the community.
And when people are looking for applicants, I’m sure they will think of you if you’re a person that might be a good fit. At least that’s how I think about it. It sounds like maybe you are similar.
Heidi Lim: Yeah. I mean, and there’s also the added benefit of just like osmosis. Like you learn so much more if you’re like around like-minded people or people who are, you know, kind of on the same path. Like it can be like, I’m very fortunate that I didn’t, I had people in my life who supported my decisions to, you know, find a, just like take time off and like move into a totally different space than I was previously working in. And part of that was just like finding friends in the air miners community and carbon removal and feeling supported like, oh, it’s not crazy that I’m doing this.
Like there are other people doing it too. And oh, they’re also like figuring out how to do it. And then having that community is just like, it’s really valuable.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. And it’s still actually a surprisingly small community. I think of Nori alone, I think we probably have connections with Most people that work in the carbon removal space, I feel like anyone inside of carbon removal, I could get to within two leaps. Do you feel that way too?
Heidi Lim: Yeah, probably. And I don’t think that’s a good thing. Like, you know, we need, like, I would love for us to be like, we’re having a hard time finding like five degrees of separation of this person, you know? Like, if we just, yeah, can you imagine if it’s like everyone, I mean, this is kind of what I was thinking in this article is like, I think Like what we need is like a real workforce shift to meaningful work. Like everyone, even if you are a, whether you’re the person who is like, you know, I don’t know, sweeping the floors or you’re building the plants or you’re, you know, whatever it is, like no matter what, instead of you sweeping the floors of an oil like factory, you’re sweeping the floors of like a manufacturing plant for solar and wind.
You know, it’s like all across the workforce board. Like if we just need a massive shift of just like people who are, everyone is working with some level of purpose towards something that’s better for humanity. That’d be amazing.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that would be amazing. I have a question about a younger version of myself because you have an engineering background. Many of the people who come from the My Climate Journey side of things tend to be software finance people from my experience and what I’ve seen. I’m a failed screenwriter and functionally a PhD dropout. And so how I walked into this career is baffling to me. I’m so grateful. But what would you say to someone who has a weird humanities background? Is there a future or am I just, did I get the one job in the space?
Heidi Lim: Absolutely. There’s a future for everyone. And I think like, I mean, you know, we’ve built so many industries that With like everyone. I mean, there’s, there’s so many, if you’re, if you’re a person who’s willing to work and you’re like willing to learn and, and you’re capable, like there’s a lot to be done and everyone has a place. And I think that is a great message that you carrying this identity and your past is, is really awesome because like, we don’t just need more engineers to be doing this.
Like, yeah, we need like everyone should know that they, no matter where they come from, Yeah, some paths are going to be harder to go down, but I really hope that we figure out a way to include everyone and allow everyone in the community to contribute. Because really, it impacts everyone. And so we should be able to have a say in how we build the community instead of how we’re impacted by these negative effects.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Well, fair enough. I think the thing that I say to myself as I’m laying in bed at night, I don’t actually do that, but being a generalist is a good thing. It’s a sought after thing. A lot of people have tended towards being very Very specialized. And there are opportunities for people who are, quote unquote, more well-rounded to have influence because they may be able to see more of the big picture, communicate about it, lead in that kind of space too. So if you’re listening and you have some wacky, non-science, non-tech code is scary to you, you could probably still find a role out there.
For you, there’s hope for people like you and there’s hope for people like me. Heidi, I think people like you are probably going to be more okay though. We really need people who you’re like, you’re working in hardware now, which is by the way, is somewhat rare, especially in Silicon Valley, I imagine. But yeah, I think that’s a more common path. Do you need more Rosses? I’m not sure that you do, but go ahead.
Heidi Lim: We do, especially because you’re using, like, obviously, you’re using your storytelling skills, right? Like, you’re a communicator. And, like, that is one of the biggest challenges with climate change is, like, we just have a communications issue, you know? That’s, like, a huge part of it. And you’re so good at educating people and storytelling. Like, that is so clear, like, how your background is... It is so important. And just the last point on this about, like, if you don’t know if you have a fit, like, what...
You can do is go and talk to people who are in the space and just let people know who you are and see if like, oh, I’m a designer. There’s a whole bunch of climate designers out there right now. There’s a whole group of them. And by the way, I think it was organized by The Determined, who are a really cool group of people. So it is just like, you never know what you don’t know, especially when you’re going into a new space. So like, You know, go and go and talk to somebody who’s in a space and just like say, I do this random thing or I do, you know, this is my background.
Like, how do you think I can be helpful? And just like try some things and then you’ll figure it out. Yeah, I think just like taking those steps, the first steps is the most important part.
Ross Kenyon: Definitely. Yeah. And that podcast is called, or that series, We Are Climate Designers by The Determined. I like that. Very specialized. And they are nice. We should probably chat with them a bit more often than we do. Are there other resources beyond the ones that you’ve mentioned your article list? Many of them. Oh, and by the way, thank you for saying so many nice things about me. But where might you direct people who are, there are different communities and job posting sites, et cetera.
Anything? Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Heidi Lim: So yeah, for Climate Change specifically, a really cool resource is Climate Base. It used to be called Climate Careers, but they just rebranded and they essentially take the project drawdown categories of things that we can do, like the biggest things we can do to draw down CO2 and then pair them with job postings. And yeah, they were solving for it. And Evan, who’s like the founder, I talked to him when he was early making this website and They were solving for a problem that I had that they’re a little bit late building it by the time I had been done with my job search.
But essentially when you search for a job for climate, it’s very muddled. You can go onto a general job website like Indeed or something like that. And you type in climate, it’ll give you everything. It’ll give you tonnes and tonnes of posts from like, if you want to work for a conservation nonprofit, all the way to like, you know, you’re going to work on like hardware, clean tech. And like, it’s just, it’s huge. Like, it’s as broad as if you typed in, I’m going to go into business.
Like, it’s really broad. And so what they were doing is like, oh, okay, I want to make it easier for me to find something that’s a better fit for what I’m looking for. If I want to go work in carbon removal, I want to work on offshore wind or whatever it is like. It’d be easier if I could just go into a website and just like find it more specifically and like a dedicated space that’s about climate focused jobs. So that’s what they made. That’s an awesome resource.
Yeah, that’s a main link.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that’s a good one. I think that’s a great place to start at least. I know you’ve been reading a lot. I keep up with what you’re doing over there, mostly from Instagram. What are you reading about? I know you’ve been reading a lot of environmental justice books. What are some good places for people to start if they’re newer to that topic?
Heidi Lim: Oh, boy. I’m on Instagram a lot because I think there’s a lot of learning that can be done through Instagram. I actually think it’s incredible how How quickly, at least I learned about Black history in America, like in June and July, like when the Black Lives Matter movement became, you know, once again, really prominent. Everything I was reading on Instagram was like, like Instagram posts about, you know, like the history of police brutality against Black people in America or the history of housing discrimination in America. I learned more than I think I learned cramming for my AP history.
Exam in high school in that, you know, the first like month or so because the information was just so readily available. There were so many resources that were like this, this and this, go read them, go read these books, go read these podcasts, follow these people. And it was so succinct. I think we need that. I think there are some people out there doing that for climate and that’s what we need more of. We need more people doing that and just like using Instagram as an education source.
That doesn’t answer your question. The things I read, I’m not a huge reader, but I’ve been reading a lot about stuff that’s not necessarily related to climate. I did recently make a reference to reading Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma. That’s an awesome book. I never thought I’d learn so much about corn in my life, but you should read that book. Everyone should. Yeah, I’m huge on Instagram. If that’s your thing, go and find the right people to follow and just like fill your feed with quality content.
Ross Kenyon: That’s such an unexpectedly great recommendation because listeners to this show, I’m sure they’re already tired of writing down books they have to read. They’re like, ah, damn it. Really? I have to read another like 15 books out of this show? So I like that. You’re just like, yeah, just go look at it. It’s Instagram. There’s some great content on there. You can learn a lot. That’s a terrific piece of advice.
Heidi Lim: That’s me. Yeah. I’m still a millennial, Ross. I think that’s the thing I need to make clear. I live on the internet.
Ross Kenyon: You live on the internet. Yeah. Okay. I will associate that with you from now on. So it works for me. Well, thank you, Heidi, for being here. Links to all of your stuff is in the show notes, Twitter, blah, blah, blah. Instagram, I suppose. Is that a public thing or is that more personal?
Heidi Lim: Yeah, it’s public. I think more people should also look at my, I do have some aspiration of being somewhat famous on Instagram. I think that’s my medium, but I like, I do post a lot about climate stuff and my stories and I’m trying to make, trying to make information more accessible to people. So definitely that. And then I also have a, an Instagram about, I try a lot of vegan mates and I, Pretend to be a T-Rex that is vegetarian and I try to find meaty vegan meats.
So that’s a link on my Instagram as well. You can also link to that one separately if you want.
Ross Kenyon: Okay. Yeah. I think I’ve seen that. Okay. I’ll look that up. Heidi, I’m clearly out of touch here. Thanks for being here.
Heidi Lim: Thank you. Yeah. I’m glad we did it. I appreciate it. Thank you so much.
Ross Kenyon: We finally did. We’ll have to do an Opus 12 proper episode here too. And I’m sure that we will. Well, thanks for listening. If you like the show, please write us a review on Apple Podcasts or iTunes. It really helps a lot. It only takes a minute or two if you could pull it up on your phone real quick in your podcast app. And make that happen. Join us on Patreon. We have a bunch of cool benefits, book club, hanging out with authors.
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