Good Life Project - How to Feel Significant (again?) | Seth Godin

Episode Date: May 22, 2023

We want to hear from YOU! Take our survey.Beyond money, what truly matters is meaning and purpose - feeling like your work and life make a difference. Studies show significance is key to satisfaction.Yet workplaces often keep us from these feelings. Seth Godin explores how to transform work into a source of fulfillment and purpose.Seth has inspired many through his insights on work culture, leadership and spreading ideas. His latest book, The Song of Significance serves as a manifesto for creating a more human-centric workplace.We discuss:Embracing change as the new normalReimagining the workplace to enroll, empower and trust everyoneHow the past few years have trained us to embrace changeThe importance of taking responsibility for meaningful workRediscovering the value of human connection at workThis is a must-listen for anyone seeking a more purpose-driven approach to work. Seth's book can help transform workplaces and create an environment where everyone can do their best work.You can find Seth at: Website | InstagramIf you LOVED this episode:You’ll also love my January episode, featuring the Sparketypes and how to better align your work with who you are, in order to experience more meaning, purpose, and possibility.Check out our offerings & partners: My New Book SparkedMy New Podcast SPARKEDVisit Our Sponsor Page For a Complete List of Vanity URLs & Discount Codes. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When we think about what makes something a good life, a lot of people got confused and came to the conclusion that the purpose of life is to enable business, not the other way around. It feels to me like this is either an amazing opportunity to reclaim humanity and significance and opportunity, or we should just pack it in and realize that we are cogs in the system irrevocably and there's no way up. So beyond money, perks and benefits, what really matters in work and in life? Well, it turns out when thousands of people were interviewed, meaning purpose, the feeling of significance,

like what I do and who I am truly matters is key. But at the same time, generations of workplace practices and systems and structures have kind of worked to keep us from these feelings a lot of the time. Well, what if it didn't have to be that way? What if significance could be a central part of your job, even if you thought it was impossible? Well, that's what we're diving into today with an old friend, Seth Godin, exploring how to transform the workplace into a source of fulfillment, purpose, and innovation so that it gives us that deeply yearned for feeling of significance. Seth is an entrepreneur, a many times New York bestselling

author, renowned speaker, known for a really insightful take on work-life culture, marketing, leadership, and the spread of ideas. And Seth has motivated and inspired really countless people around the world with an astonishing 20 bestselling books under his belt. He is a visionary idea planter and ruckus maker. And now he's back with his latest groundbreaking work, The Song of Significance. In today's conversation, we dive into things like embracing change as a new normal in an ever-evolving world, discovering the power of living in liminal spaces and how to thrive in uncertainty. We talk about re-imagining the workplace, a radical re-imagining, in fact, learning how to create a significance-centering organization that enrolls, in fact, learning how to create a significant centering organization that

enrolls, empowers, and trusts everyone no matter where they are and who they are, and how to navigate groundlessness. Seth shares his thoughts on how the past few years have trained us to expect and embrace change in a very different way. We talk about the importance of responsibility, diving into the idea of doing work that matters, even if it's scary, as long as it is generous, and exploring the human aspect of work, rediscovering the value of human connection and the potential for creating meaningful work experiences. This conversation is a must-listen for anyone who yearns for a more fulfilling, purpose-centered, and human-centric approach to work sets the song of significance. It serves as a timely manifesto for those seeking to transform the workplace and create an environment where everyone can deliver their best work and feel incredible doing it.

So excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch,

getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun.

January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight Risk. You and I have had a rolling conversation going on for so many years now about so many topics and through so many different seasons of work and life and exploration and change in our own patterns of work and life. Certainly over the last three years or

so, there have been profound changes at scale for everyone. Bruce Feiler coined this fantastic term that I love, lifequakes, which he described as a moment in your life that is such profound change that basically everything after that is different. And I wonder if you look at the world of work now, as we have this conversation, it feels like there have been a series of profound work quakes where things are just not ever going to be the same. What do you see in that context as if we could borrow from phrase, like borrow from Bruce and coin the phrase workquakes specific to that domain, what do you see as the really big, profound things that have made irrevocable change? You know, I love metaphors and semantics.

The idea of a cataclysm happens and then things go back to the way they were, except a little broken. I think this is different than that in the sense that what we are encountering is going to keep happening more and more and more. It's not, oh, that's over. This is the new normal. And the world we live in today is as normal as it's ever going to be again. We got a whole bunch of toys and treats started rolling out 30 or 40 years ago when it came to what we got to do for a living. We didn't have to use a shovel. We didn't have to work outside and get a sunburn, and we didn't have to pull our muscles. We got to use a keyboard, connect with people instantly anywhere in the world, earn permission to talk to them, build virtual institutions at scale at incredibly rapid speed. But now a lot of that is coming home to roost. And when we think about what makes something a good life, a lot of people got confused and came to the conclusion that the

purpose of life is to enable business, not the other way around. And so I think that a worldwide pandemic woke up a lot of people. Combine that with the way that the internet transcends time and space, add to that the end game of industrialists who are pushing to race to the bottom as fast as they can, and our need for convenience in the face of the changing climate, plus baby boomers getting older. We've always made it about us since we were 12 years old. And now a lot of baby boomers are making it about the final chapter, which is why there's so much gloom and doom, because the narrators of the media make a living making us feel gloom and doom. So when I add all of that up, it feels to me like this is either an amazing opportunity to reclaim humanity and significance and opportunity,

or we should just pack it in and realize that we are cogs in the system irrevocably, and there's no way out. Which I'm guessing you're not a fan of the latter. It's interesting because your recent book's name is The Song of Significance, which is fantastic. And that word significance is something that has been in my consciousness increasingly. And maybe it's a factor of age. Maybe it's a factor of the last couple of years and how it's reacquainted me with not you know, not just my humanity, but like how delicate it is and the notion of wanting to wake up and actually feel something and beyond just taking care of myself. And it feels like we're in this moment where there's a chasm between sort of an old guard

of leadership who has come up in industry with a certain set of assumptions that they thought was, quote, fair. And they have done their time according to those rules. And now they've, quote, earned a certain right to live a certain way and expect certain things from the generation below them. And then there's the generation below them and then below them. And before the pandemic, the chasm was like people talking about ambition is gone. And like, how do we, this isn't the rules. This isn't the way it works. But now I feel like even those senior leaders are questioning everything. Yeah. I mean, when we come face to face with mortality and you have done such a brilliant job of narrating the quiet in our head if we want to sit with it together with

the idea of seasons, right? That Milton Friedman was fundamentally mistaken when he announced that the only purpose of a corporation was to maximize shareholder value. But what it did was give senior leadership a license to loot and pillage and to justify all of their actions. And what it gave the rest of us was the comfort of knowing the boundaries were very clear. Why we are here, follow instructions, it's for somebody else. And so we don't have to put ourselves on the hook. And folks who went out on a limb and started a podcast or wrote a book or decided to lead were outliers, that most people had a regular job seeking a career that would last a long time as they incrementally followed instructions. And this isn't natural. It's just common for 80 years,

but those 80 years are up and we're going to shift now enabled by this distributed asynchronous world of work to create value for other people horizontally instead of vertically and to do it in a way we can point to and say, I made that and I'm proud of it. You point to an interesting exploration where a whole bunch of folks were asked, think about the best job you've ever had or the qualities of that job. 10,000 or so people shared their insight. Walk me through some of the big awakenings there. Well, I think the biggest awakening is just the idea that it could be the best job you ever had. Let's start with that. No one would ask that question in 1936 or 1954, that you went to work to feed your family and you were naive if you thought you were going to feel

anything when you were on the assembly line. The phrase getting jerked around comes from Henry Ford and the assembly line and the stopwatch. And that's what you did. You showed up and they jerked you around. It's only in the fast company era that we even started talking about the idea of the best job you ever had. So I gave people in 90 countries a list of 14 things they could choose from. And I picked obvious ones like I got paid a lot of money. I didn't get fired. I didn't have to work that hard, which is what industrialists think are the big three. And then I picked some things like I accomplished more than I thought I could. I got to work independently. I did work that I was proud of. And what I found is it didn't matter what country people came from. The answers were off the charts about significance. That right at

the bottom was I got paid a lot and I didn't have to work very hard. But at the top, we're doing work that mattered with people who care. Being a human, exceeding your own expectations by working with a team of people who had your back. And if this is so clear that we all believe that this lights us up, makes our life better, then why aren't we building our jobs like that? Why is that an exception and not the rule? Because it turns out this isn't about asking bosses to be soft and settle for less. It turns out this is actually how you build a great organization, how you make great products, how you please your customers. This is what customers want. They want employees who are serving them to be glad they're there. And so we have this system that is relentlessly depersonalizing, sticking phone trees in between us and humans, putting

in policies and scripts, but that's not making anybody happy and it's not building a good organization, a great organization. So I felt like this was a moment to speak up and scripts, but that's not making anybody happy. And it's not building a good organization, a great organization. So I felt like this was a moment to speak up and say, the best job you ever had is within reach, but you have to do it with intent. You know, and at the same time, I'm wondering what led, you know, you described, okay, so those other factors, getting paid a certain amount of money, not having to work too hard is what management quote thought were the most important things probably for a couple of generations. Do you feel like they still think that? Management is freaking out and is lost. Harvard booked me to do a talk and they asked me to write down what I was going to talk about.

And then they rewrote it from creating significant work to creating an environment where people think they are significant, that it's still manipulation. It's still, these people are resources. That's why they call it human resources, which means they're machines. How do we buy the machines as cheap as we can and keep them functioning? Oh, M&Ms, free snacks, that's cheap. Let's do that. But when it's a veneer, I don't know if you ever spent any time in Vegas, but the old Stardust Hotel where I used to stay when I went to the Consumer Electronics Show was basically a rundown Holiday Inn motel with a big facade in front with neon lights on it. And as soon as you

walk through, you could step in and you could feel yourself entering this cheap hotel. The facade doesn't work if you're staying in the hotel. And a friend of mine who worked at Bloomberg still reports about how it made her feel that every keystroke was measured, every bathroom break was recorded, that the badge you wore surveilled you. And it didn't matter that Bloomberg had aquariums and free snacks. Sooner or later, the industrialist wants to control you. And what I am arguing is now the industrialist is just an entity that creates change. They don't own the factory anymore. They've outsourced all the stuff that can be outsourced. So if what you're left with is the fact that what you make is decisions, the way you make decisions is by empowering people to make decisions, not by tricking them

into thinking that they're doing something that they want to do. What do you think is behind then the notion that folks thought they needed to quote trick people into this mode. Because if you look at somebody who's risen up in an organization, a whole leadership culture has risen up in an organization over a period of a couple of decades in their mind, they've got to be feeling, well, this, this quote worked for me and the company is still here. It's still showing up in the black every year. So that's the way that, you know, that is quote the, you know, like that's the formula, right? It's I'm okay. I can pay my rent. Like my mortgage is good and I'm going to retire at that ripe age. And I think company seems to be

chugging on and chugging on what needs to happen. I want to talk about the individual experience, but what needs to happen to create that quake in those who are in a position to actually redefine, like from the top down, reimagine, redefine culture to acknowledge significance, not as lip service or manipulation, but as an actual core part of what people do. What level of shaking and how needs to happen for people to actually say, this isn't just the right thing to do for human beings. It's actually the better thing to do for the organization and for me.

That's a great question. You know, your boss has a boss who may have a boss and these pivot people in the middle are freaking out as they come higher in their career that they won't please that boss. The indoctrination runs deep. The question, will this be on the test? How do I get an A? How do I get picked? It started a really long time ago. So what kind of quake is it going to take? Well, if we think about the company Automatic, Matt has 2000 employees and no central office, and they power 40% of the internet. So if you were trying to compete with them, you lost. And sooner or later, as these institutions start to arise that defeat

the old ones, the boss's boss is going to start to realize they're doing something different. That the same thing happened when spam was on the rise. If you're going to strip mine attention, then spam more people. So when someone like me shows up and says, well, permission marketing is what we need and you need to earn the trust of people you email, some people say, no, let's just send more spam. And then other people see that they can do better by being human and interacting with others, and they start to win. And when they start to win, others who don't want to be innovators will copy them. And I think that that is what we're seeing here. There's a whole

generation of new organizations coming up that have equity and diversity and opportunity and humanity at their center. And it's not a fad, and it's not a facade. That's actually what they want to build. Now, they can't scale to 10,000 employees. I don't think it can be done easily, but they don't need to because WhatsApp had 19 employees. You can change an industry with far fewer people than you needed before. And so the way always culture changes is a little bit at a time. Women didn't enter the workforce at every company, at a few companies. And when it started to work, the other companies copied them. What we have to do, because it's happening so fast, is rewire our own expectations as to what the real proxies are and what the false ones are. And I'll give you a little aside,

a story I've been thinking about. If you've ever had Ben and Jerry's brownie ice cream, Ben and Jerry's number one ice cream in the United States, brownie is arguably, even in the non-dairy flavor, the best flavor. And the brownies are made four miles from here, halfway between where you used to live and where I am right now at Greyston Bakery. They make all of the brownies for Ben and Jerry's. Greyston was started by Bernie Glassman and they have an open hiring policy. And the way it works is if you want to work there, you put your name on a list. And when a job opens up, the next person gets it. It doesn't matter if you have served time. It doesn't matter if you used to have a drug problem. It doesn't matter if you're a single mom. It doesn't matter if you're a PhD. The next person gets the job. And Bernie created

an environment where people were trained and supported. If you couldn't do the work, you couldn't stay. And now Greyston has taught lots of companies how to do open hiring. So for example, Body Shop adopted open hiring a couple of years ago and retention went up 60% and productivity went up 13%. So here's the question, why isn't every company doing this? And the answer is because people like the illusion of control. They like to believe that they have such good taste that they can hire the right people and reject the wrong ones. Even though all the data shows that if it's a job where you don't need years of training, you can teach people to do the job. And yet we hesitate to say, no matter what, I'm going to hire the next person who walks in the

door. Because industrialism and control go together. And when the body shop runs circles around a competitor because they had the guts to do the other thing, sooner or later, the competitors are going to get the message. So here's what's going through my mind as you share that. Half of me is nodding along saying, yes, it makes perfect sense. The other half is looking at the body shop. It's looking at what Yvon Chouinard do with Patagonia. It's looking at companies like that where they've been doing this for decades already. And they have been capturing substantial market share, wildly successful.

So the example is out there. You don't need a new exemplar. And yet we're still not seeing people pile on and say, ooh, this isn't just better for humanity. This is actually the way to run a company. Everyone is still kind of bit like, well, they're the radical outliers. It's non-replicable. So we're going to keep on doing what we're doing because we're making our 5% a year and we don't want to risk. We don't want to risk both success and failure. It feels like there needs to be, it's not just

that there are people out there doing it. You need to reach a tipping point of enough people. I'm thinking about Gene Sharp's work on nonviolent revolution. And he had this, you know, he talks about how nonviolent revolution is actually affected. And it was crystal clear, like the goal is never to topple the oppressor. The goal is to build something that is solving all the problems of oppression that is so appealing that it moves all the pillars of support away from the source of oppression and it just crumbles under its own weight. And that's kind of what, if I'm hearing right, you're suggesting here. But we've seen that built a number of times over now and it seems like the pillars are

still keeping the old guard up. I had no preparation before I came that I would be talking to a pessimist. I'm actually a total optimist. I'm like, how do we get past this? So my friend Tom Peters retired a couple of weeks ago. And if you ever saw Tom at work, he was frustrated to the point of being in a lather on stage. He wrote In Search of Excellence in the mid-80s, and he laid it all out. And he used countless examples, big companies and small. And yet, it didn't happen right away. But at the same time, child labor is way down. Fewer people lose limbs around the world at work sliced off. The chances that someone's going to fall into a vat of molten

steel at a foundry has gone down almost to zero, when it used to be fairly common. That the world isn't perfect, but it is surprisingly less violent than it used to be. And the world of work around the world has moved to the point where gender bias is lower, still not low enough, where diversity in certain places is increasing, but not enough, and where people aren't being belittled and bullied the way they used to be, but still not enough. So these things are happening. They're just happening slower than we're used to, but faster than they have ever happened in history. And so the wheels are turning. And when AI shows up and when other sorts of programming show up, what's going to happen is the make work kind of work will go from costing $10 an hour to zero. So an example, I was back when I used to travel for work, I woke up at five o'clock in the

morning as I usually do at a hotel. And I called, hit zero at the Marriott. And I, person answers the phone. I said, what time does the gym open? Because I don't want to go all the way down to the gym and be frustrated that it is not open. And the person says, where are you staying? And I'm thinking, wait, I hit zero. Don't you know where I'm staying? Aren't you here? Turned out they were at a Marriott, you know, 400 miles away. So I told them where I was staying. And then they typed four keys and read to me out loud what showed up on the screen. And I thought to myself, this person has to know that they are weeks away from being replaced by a simple computer that I would just type in where

I was staying or it would know, and it would just read to me what this person read to me. So once the jobs where people read a script are replaced by computers that read a script, companies that compete on this cannot differentiate themselves from each other. And then the internet will be really clear about which one's cheaper and there'll be a race to the bottom. And once someone loses the race to the bottom, they either have to suffer in the basement or they can take a deep breath the way Patagonia did and say, no, our stuff cannot be compared to that stuff right next to it on the shelf, which costs half as much. Don't even bother because we do something different around here.

And people of privilege who have the money to make a choice and not just buy the cheapest one, which includes people who make $5 a day and live someplace far from here, but have a cell phone, are making choices. And their choices have to do with, did this brand, this company, this supplier make me feel better? And the organizations that do that are growing in market share. At the very same time, others race to the bottom. I have no idea what company made the air fryer in my house. They made the cheapest possible air fryer. Amazon sold me the cheapest possible air fryer. The person in the warehouse had a horrible job delivering the cheapest possible air fire.

I am guilty. I participated in that cycle of the race to the bottom. But there are lots of things that people are doing with their time and their money, their race to the top. Yeah. Makes a lot of sense to me. And by the way, I think the last three years, if I was a bit of a pessimist before that, I think the moment that we're in right now has actually turned me into profound optimist. Because I do think that the shaking that's happened, the speed of it, the intensity of it has set in motion something that everybody who is resisting up until this point, I think as we have this conversation, we're

in the middle of it. Oh, yeah. We're not even in act two of the three acts, I think. And the acts are going to unfold so much faster. It's ever happened in the past. I am ridiculously excited to see what happens when we head into act three of this play. Because I agree with you. I think the stagnation was caused largely by people thinking

that living differently and working differently was not actually possible. And now it's turned from not possible to, oh, this must be. And whether leadership or organizations do respond to this positively from just a place of goodwill or they get dread kicking and screaming, those who resist aren't going to be around. And those who actually say like, let's elevate humanity, they're going to be the winners and the leaders and not just the survivors, but the thrivers. I think it's such an interesting moment for us to be having conversation around the shift to significance. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes.

The Apple Watch Series X, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday, we've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg.

You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. One of the things, and you've spoken about this in the past, you write about this. You look at Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right?

Significance is up towards the top of that. Safety, security, sustenance, down towards the bottom. Very real human needs also. And they're not going away. So how do we plant the seeds in people that says, you can have it, you can have both. You can actually have, like secure the base while pursuing that thing that is deeply meaningful and profound. So it's easy to listen to the two of us and think that we are proposing that organizations get soft, that they accept people for who they are. And if you're not feeling great, don't come in and whatever. We'll tell the customers to just

deal with it. And I'm not saying that, I'm saying the opposite, that what we have to do is raise our standards relentlessly, criticize the work relentlessly, just stop criticizing the worker, because that's not helpful. That when we say to people, we are here to make a change happen, because that's the definition of significance. I made a change happen. When we are clear about what that is, we can then say, is what we just did making a change happen? If not, how can we do it better? So I love the story of Aravind Eye Hospital. There are several in India. So think about the population of New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles put together, every person in those three cities. That's how many people Aravind has restored sight to. And what a gift, right? If you go to Aravind

for corneal surgery, you have two choices. It's $130 or it's zero. It's up to you. Totally optional which one you want to pay. You get treated exactly the same. You just get a nicer room to stay in if you pay $130. The magic of the Aravind High Hospital is that their standards are extraordinary. You are more likely to get an infection in London getting $5,000 corneal surgery than you are at Aravind because their standards don't stop. And the people who work there also have standards about how they treat their patients and they treat them the same whether they're free or $130. So here's this institution that taught the West how to restore eyesight. If you have an ophthalmologist, it's quite possible they did an internship at Aravind because they would be able to do more and better eye surgery there than anywhere else.

Well, if we can do it for eye surgery, I'm pretty sure we can do it for just about everything else. And so the intention that I am proposing here is not the intention of capitalism is evil, and everyone is entitled to do whatever they want and have all the treats they want. What I'm saying is the purpose of culture is not to enable capitalism. The purpose of capitalism is to enable culture, that we have this chance by raising our standards, by making big promises to change the people we serve, because that will make us feel terrific and engaged and elevate us and our customers. So 80% of my book is about the promises we make, not about the obligation of the boss to just be a nice person.

When you think about what goes into the formula for this, and you sort of like shouted out some of these things and the responses you got from folks in 90 different countries, like these are the things that matter. These are the things that add up in some way, shape, or form to that experience of significance. Where does belonging fall in all of this? Because we've seen just such profound disruption in the role that it plays in our lives, the way that we find and seek it, and the way that we're having to completely reimagine it. Belonging is such a complicated concept. I think we can start with culture,

because you might come up in a culture where belonging is expressed one way versus another. That if you're from the shtetl or the village, belonging means that there's 45 people who've got your back, but you don't know, the 1987 Silicon Valley mindset, if you were part of that tribe, and I'm standing in an airport holding one of the early Macs, and someone else sees me and they give me that little head shake because they're in the same group. Well, in that moment, I sort of felt some belonging as well. So this huge range, but what we tricked ourselves into believing is that the people in our company were our family. And I think we learned from COVID and we learned from lots of things before that. We learned from meta laying off 10,000 people at a time that that might not really be the way the stock market and bosses think about it. So I think that belonging is a critical human need, but it's hard to count on work giving us that feeling. I think we have to not just look to work

to do it. We have to join the community orchestra. We have to volunteer to clean up the dump on the edge of town with five other people. We have to start the community cricket league because when we do these things voluntarily, we are playing by a different set of rules. I feel like the last three years have challenged people with exactly what you're talking about to realize that belonging actually really matters to them and that the proxy that they thought they were getting from like the work environment, maybe for some it was legitimately working, but for a lot, it was actually similar to the way you sort of like we're talking about manufacturer significance.

It was manufactured belonging in the name of a profit driven metric. And now we've realized I actually kind of like hanging out with my neighbors. I love like whatever the equivalent of the Rotary Club is. They said we're volunteering to plant trees. And that actually matters to me. But I feel like we're seeing companies saying, well, how can we reimagine belonging to pull people back into the office? Because that's going to keep them there. I wonder if you think an equally powerful promise would be, we acknowledge belonging is really important to you as an individual and a human being, and we're going to structure your job so that you can experience exactly the belonging that you need by giving you the agency and the freedom to do it outside of us. and whether that would lead to as much, quote, allegiance to the organization, if not more, than trying to force it to happen within the culture of the company.

Let's talk about two different things. The first one is allegiance, retention, reducing turnover. In the old model, training takes a very long time. Trust takes a very long time. You want retention because it's cheaper to keep people. And one way to have it is for people to have no options. So if you get caught putting your resume in the company's Xerox machine, you're in trouble because the boss doesn't want to think that you're looking for another job. But significance needs enrollment. It needs people who are voluntarily and eagerly there to make a change happen. So if I had a company with a lot of people in it, I'd say the first thing you got to do when you get here on your first day is update your LinkedIn profile and you need to maintain it.

And I would regularly run resume improvement sessions, teaching people to make the resume better because I want them to stay because they can and want to, not because they feel like they have no options. So if people want to come to work because it will help them make a change happen that they believe in, they will come to work. But if you are saying there's really no good reason for you to come to work other than me trying to trick you into staying here when it's not in your interest, come to work or you're fired, a lot of the people you most want to keep aren't going to come to work because you're using Zoom poorly. You don't understand distributed work. You're imagining that people, when they work from home, are actually getting their dry cleaning done.

And you're trying to control and surveil people. And there are lots of companies that have a little camera that's watching folks all day long when they're at work. That can't possibly be a significant job because we're not voluntarily engaging in it. So the second part of what you're talking about, and I'm sorry if I'm ranting, but you asked such a good question. The second part of what you're talking about is what if we gave people agency to go find belonging? And that brings up this idea of stress versus tension. Stress is no fun. Stress leads to PTSD. Stress is wanting to be in two places and feeling stuck. Tension is good. You can't shoot a rubber band across the

room without pulling it backwards first. And what we know is that most people left to their own devices, given the marketing of the last hundred years in which we've pushed people apart and made them feel insufficient and isolated them and given them a television, left to their own devices, most people will not deal with the tension of finding new kinds of belonging. They need to be pushed to do it. That college works because for the first two weeks, you are miserable because you feel isolated and alone. And the only way to solve it, there's someone sitting right next to you at the cafeteria table and they become your best friend for the rest of your life. Why did that happen? Because you got pushed into it, not because you sought it out. So our culture will

get better when the modern rotary shows up and actively recruits people. Last week, I went to see a community orchestra perform. Not only was every person unpaid, they were paying dues to be in it. And I think if we asked those people, they would say, rehearsal is the highlight of their week. And they would say that they're happier than people who don't do something like that. But the only reason there's a community orchestra is somebody cared enough to invite somebody else who invited somebody else and put social pressure on you to show up the first day when you didn't feel like it. And so if a company is seeking to weave together people, they have to intentionally inflict tension. That's a

generous act. And so when I built the Carbon Almanac, I didn't write it, but I organized it. And 300 of us are friends for life now because we came together, all as volunteers, to build the thing. And it was hard and there was social pressure to connect. And that feeling that you would be missed if you were gone was super powerful, even though we never once met in person, never once had a Zoom meeting, because that's not how it's done. You do it by saying, together, we're going to make a change happen. Make a promise to the others in this room and let's go keep it. Yeah.

I mean, part of what I'm hearing from you is a distinction I almost phrase as the difference between commiseration as a driver for connectedness and collective elevation using a Mildred Kahn sort of like language. And that's so much in the culture of work had been largely based around commiseration. This sucks. This is like, whatever it is, we're like in the grind together, but at least I'm not doing it alone. And I'm raising my hand. I've been in that culture as has everyone rather than, no, I'm showing up because I want to do something incredible that is an expression of what I truly believe in with people that I feel deeply connected with. And when we do it together, the feeling that we all get is something I never want to leave. Exactly. And it can be working on an oil rig.

It can be working at a financial institution. It's not that it has to be remediating climate damage. It doesn't have to be working for diversity, equity, and inclusion. It can be something that isn't considered a social good, but if you and the people around you are working on this, well, yeah, it's like the local baseball team that came together and ended up winning the championship. You will remember that for a long time, even though you didn't need the trophy, but the journey made you feel like you were glad you were there. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever.

It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised.

The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot.

Flight risk. You mentioned the word enrollment, which you've kind of been deconstructing a little bit here. One of the other things that you point out as sort of, you know, among the conditions for the emergence of significance or a significant oriented approach to work is recognized dignity. And again, this is something where in the old world, I feel like you got dignity when you met a certain metric that entitled you to dignity. That was the way that it happened. And that's not humane. Correct. So here's the story. Leona Helmsley, noted felon and tax chief who owned some hotels, is having tea with her lawyer, Alan Dershowitz. And I'm using her words here. She summons the servant, who was an older man, and asks for tea. He brings two cups of tea on saucers,

and Leona inspects her saucer and sees that there are three drops of liquid on the saucer that have come out of the cup. And she turns to him and says, this is unacceptable, drops the cup and the saucer on the marble floor where it shatters into pieces and then makes him clean it up. This is an evil person stripping someone else of their dignity for kicks. This is somebody who is managing through fear and trying to get someone to comply by stripping them of dignity. Dignity is something that each of us already has, but that we recognize when someone else acts as if we have dignity, that when we give other people dignity, we earn respect and connection. And there are countless examples of institutions, of leaders, of cultures where dignity is on offer.

And then there are people like Leona Helmsley that need to strip it away. There are people, billionaires, who need to fire loyal employees on social networks in public, humiliating them because it gives them satisfaction. And the last part of my rant about this is I did some work with Judy Kalimo, which is a lending institution in Kenya. And their deal is they will loan you enough money to buy a cow, and then they will take milk as interest payments. And at the end of a year, you've paid off the loan and you own the cow. And it transforms lives when they do this. A couple of interesting things about Judy Klima. One of them is that the only way

to get a loan from them is to have your neighbors suggest you as somebody who could pay. Their repayment rate is over 97%, better than a typical bank on a car loan. And the second thing is I spent the day with one of the local heads of a village who was responsible for their business there. And everywhere he went, he was addressed as Mr. Chairman because he was the chairman of this volunteer collective. And his interactions with these people were not the money divides us. It was the work connects us. That they called him Mr. Chairman, not because they had to, but because they wanted to.

He saw them and helped them, not because he had to, but because he wanted to. And in that moment, watching community being woven, that is what capitalism is capable of when it seeks the retreat from dignity, it's oppression manifest. And it's just, there's no way to actually separate. There's no way to actually have quote conscious capitalism, which has been this other movement happening on the side to a certain extent, at least in lip service, right? Almost like little c conscious capitalism. And what you're suggesting is it's not entirely true that actually we don't have to tear down the structure. Yeah. I think that every person who's ever burgled a house has been wearing shoes, but shoes don't turn you into a burglar. That is something that shoes enable you to do. In the case of capitalism, when we scale it to the point of industrialism, which means leverage so that you borrowed money to buy

machines so that you could scale to compete with other people who are doing the same thing so that the stock market can make more money because they think Milton Friedman is right. At that point, you can narrate that you have no choice but to be inhuman. But capitalism has been around for a long time before that. And now that the means of production are owned by the workers, because if you have a laptop, you own the same means of production as every other person in the system, the machines are different. And that means we can get back to the other kind of capitalism, which is find a problem and solve it.

If you can solve a problem and voluntarily engage with somebody else, you get to do it again. So D-Lite has electrified the homes of more than 50 million people, not with some top-down system, but by trading the money someone was going to spend for kerosene to buy a solar lantern instead. That's how it's supposed to work because it makes things better for both sides in the transaction. You can really think about all these things, the indicators, the contributors or the conditions using your language to work that steeped in significance, they're actually competitive advantages.

Correct. It's not like we're giving something up in the name of trying to honor the humanity of those who make our very existence possible. We're actually enabling it all. It's like, yes, and, but the perception often is not that. Yes. So Henry Ford had an enormous number of defects. But one thing that he did that was fascinating is he, at the time that people were making a dollar a day, he paid them $5. And the reason he did that was he said, if there is a successful working class, people have money to buy cars. And once I start paying people $5 a day, my competitors will have to start doing it too.

But I'm so efficient that I can afford it. And now there will be more people out there with money to buy stuff. And this is an analogy to that, which is if you race to the top, you're going to get the most talented people to work for you, because why wouldn't they choose to want to see significance? And if that's the case, you're going to make better stuff. And if you're making better stuff, people with a choice will buy it. And so there's nobody here who's doing anyone, quote, a favor. What they have done is seen that humanity evolved this way over tens of thousands of years for a reason, because it makes us feel alive. It gives us hope. And when we have

hope, we are more likely to do the stuff that we're good at. So let's talk about the scale question then, because you hinted at this very early in our conversation and just circled back to it. This idea of significant centering work actually possible to be at the core of what you're doing when you're talking about scaling to enterprise level thing? Or does this actually tell us that once we hit a certain point, the only way to quote scale potentially even exponentially is to strip some of this out? Well, I guess it depends on what we mean by scale. And it depends on what we mean by an organization. There are some organizations that are natural monopolies. We don't want 18 different delivery companies all competing to go to our house every single day because it's duplicative and expensive. But we don't have a music shortage in our country.

There's more music than ever before, but no one seems to be in charge of making or putting out music, but it keeps coming. There isn't a podcast shortage and there aren't any giant podcast corporations, but we have plenty of ways to do it. Hollywood for a very long time has figured out that when talented people come together, they can make really good or successful media, but there isn't a giant media corporation that makes the stuff. It's made by teams of impromptu collectives that come together and make something and then stop. So as we think about what actually needs industrial scale, it's not that many things. Yes, Facebook and Google have an enormous number of employees, but they don't need to. Their life gets harder at that scale, not easier.

They're not delivering value to anybody except piling on for what the stock market needs. So we are seeing a concentration among some industries of just a few companies that are going to be behemoths. But aided by communication networks, aided by artificial intelligence, what we're going to see is that you can make a very big impact without having a lot of people who you tell what to do. Now, I love the reframe around scale on that, where you're really looking at net impact rather than, okay, so scale only happens when a small number of players reach a certain monstrous size. And rather than saying, no, they can be hundreds of thousands, millions, tens of millions of players. And the net effect of that is impact at scale and centered within

each one of that, whether it's an individual, small team, whatever it may be, are all of these ideas. People being able to show up highly engaged and motivated, enrolled, using your language in what they're doing. Fantastic if they're earning their living doing it also, but fundamentally because of the feeling it's giving them. I think it's interesting if we zoom the lens out in the conversation right now, we're kind of talking about this in the context of work and the domain of work and organizations and culture, but we're also at this really powerful potential tipping point for the human experience. If we figured that the vast majority of most people's waking hours for the

rest of their lives is going to be doing this thing we call work. The potential to reimagine how that makes us feel. And the normalization that I feel that has come over the last three years of being able to publicly reimagine that rather than hiding it because people around you would be like, you're bonkers if you think you're going to leave this thing that you've been doing for so long and everybody else wishes they had that thing too. There's a disruption that's normalizing a radical re-imagining, which isn't just about work. It's about the human condition. And if you think, you brought up the rotary a long time ago, you and I remember growing up when there were three or four of these clubs, they had to have a meeting in some bad restaurant once a month to put that little sign on the outskirts of town. Now, you can go start an online community of six people and a mastermind that meet once a week on Zoom and keep it up for years. I have seen that happen. People who have

been through my workshops have done that four years in, five years in. And the next thing I know, they're visiting each other across the world and going to each other's weddings. Is there meaning there? Of course there is. It was impossible to imagine the logistics of pulling this off even six years ago. And so when you hear people whining, where's my flying car? Well, if we made a list of how you spend your day. Basically, everything I did today was impossible 20, 30, 40 years ago, right? That I drove a quiet electric car to a place where I could work by myself, but connect with tens of thousands of people, making a living doing something that no one had ever heard of before, and go on and on and on. And it's not because I'm living in some weird vanguard. It's because the tools have changed. And I can't imagine explaining to a blacksmith in 1885 what you

and I do, but there are no blacksmiths left. So what are we going to do with these tools? Because I don't think we should try to recreate a much bigger blacksmith shop. I think we can do better than that. And doing better than that, especially in this moment. I mean, it's about change. Change is groundlessness. I think the last three years have also trained us all in, to a certain extent, the expectation and the art of navigating groundlessness, uncertainty. But it feels like also what you're inviting us to all do is stay in that space and not look at change as something which is going to get us from where we were to that place we want to be.

But change is the place. I love this. This is a really important point. So there's a word called Lyman, which I keep pronouncingon because it goes with the word liminal. In ancient Rome, the limon was the thing on the ground between one room and the other in the doorway. And the lintel was the part over your head. The liminal space is the space between here and there when we cross a threshold. And most people try to get it over with. They try to get from here to there and not have that sense of flying between the two. But if you think about comic books, as Scott McLeod has shown us, all the action in a comic book happens between the panels. It happens in our mind. That's why comic books work. And as we are living in this world of

fast change, it's easy to say, when are things going to settle down so that I can just go back to work? And what I have found is so much more useful is to say, here I am on the lineman. Here I am in that spot between here and there. And that spot is the point. The tension that I feel right here, this is part of what it is to feel alive. As you write, perhaps the yellow brick road is the point. As Kierkegaard wrote, anxiety is a dissonance of freedom. We've got to feel something if we want that feeling of freedom and possibility. It feels like a good place for us to come full circle in our conversation as well. So

I have asked you this in the past, but it's always years in between when I ask, because I'm always curious to see whether your thought has evolved in this container of good life project. If I offer up the phrase to live a good life. What comes up? Enroll, take responsibility, and do work that matters, especially if it's scary, as long as it's generous. Thank you. Hey, before you leave, if you'd love this episode, safe bet you'll also love my January episode featuring the sparkotypes and how to better align your work with who you are in order to experience more meaning, purpose, and possibility. You'll find a link to that episode in the show notes.

And of course, if you haven't already done so, please go ahead and follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app. And if you found this conversation interesting or inspiring or valuable, and chances are you did since you're still listening here, would you do me a personal favor, a seven-second favor, and share it, maybe on social or by text or by email, even just with one person. Just copy the link from the app you're using

and tell those you know, those you love, those you want to help navigate this thing called life a little better so we can all do it better together with more ease and more joy. Tell them to listen. Then even invite them to talk about what you've both discovered. Because when podcasts become

conversations and conversations become action, that's how we all come alive together. Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes.

The Apple Watch Series 10. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman.

I knew you were gonna be fun. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him! Y'all need a pilot.