Good Life Project - The Joy of Work [For Real] | Sparked Stories

Episode Date: September 23, 2021

So question for you: When was the last time you did something where it was so immersive, so enjoyable it so captivated, the essence of who you are that you completely lost track of time? You just vanished into the experience, the activity, the moment, the conversation, the relationship, like the world around you ceased to exist. The only thing that you became aware of, if you were even aware of that, was you and the thing that you were doing, or the person or the group of people that you were engaging with or all of those things, but everything outside of that, it just vanished away. And you felt like in that one moment in time, whether it lasted a minute, whether it lasted an hour, whether it lasted a day or a week or a month for whatever window that happened, it was like, the world was, as it should be, your world was, as it should be, you are doing the thing that you were here to do with people.What if the way you work could give you that feeling? Sounds bizarre, right? It sounds like it's some sort of, you know, like utopian far-off dream. But what if that was a lie?What if there was a way to do the thing that you do and have it feel that way? Not just losing yourself in flow, but also you feel like a sense of purpose. Like you're working towards something that actually matters to you, a sense of meaning, like who you are and what you're doing is meaningful. That is what my new book's Sparked is all about. And along the way beyond the massive dataset we've gathered, that shows that you can experience this, have been story, after story, after story, after story use cases, applications, individuals showing up and sharing how they have integrated these ideas into their work and life. And today I'm going to share two of those stories with you. Amazing, powerful, moving, insightful stories, about two people who have done incredible things and continue to do incredible things and have explored how this thing called the Sparketype integrates into the way they do it. So excited to share this conversation with you.If you LOVED this episode:I have a single ask: Join me on this journey. Pick up a copy of SPARKED wherever you buy books. We’ll drop links to various booksellers. Dive into it, discover your own personal Sparketype. Then begin to bring it to the world. Because right now, we need people who’ve come alive, more than ever. Barnes & Noble | Amazon | Books-a-Million | iTunes | Audible 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.

So question for you, when was the last time you did something where it was so immersive, so enjoyable, it so captivated the essence of who you are that you completely lost track of time? You just vanished into the experience, the activity, the moment, the conversation, the relationship, like the world around you ceased to exist. The only thing that you became aware of, if you were even aware of that, was you and the thing that you were doing or the person or the group of people that you were engaging with or all of those things. But everything outside of that,

it just vanished away. And you felt like in that one moment in time, whether it lasted a minute, whether it lasted an hour, whether it lasted a day, a week, or a month, for whatever window that happened, it was like the world was as it should be. Your world was as it should be. You were doing the thing that you were here to do with people you could not imagine doing anything else with and you never want it to end. What if the way you work could give you that feeling? Sounds bizarre, right? Sounds like it's some sort of utopian far off dream. Of course, work won't make you feel like that. We've got meetings and we've got video conferences and we've got deadlines and memos. Do we even do memos anymore, by the way?

We've got deliverables and output and metrics and benchmarks and KPIs and all these things we need to perform to. And that doesn't allow for space to get lost in the way I just described. You only do that on the side, right? You only do that when you're doing things with friends. You only do that when you're doing things that don't fall under the category of capital W work. But what if that was a lie? What if there was a way to do the thing that you do and have it feel that way? Maybe not all day, every day. That might be a little bit of a utopian fantasy. But what if you could feel that way a whole lot more often than you ever imagined possible?

What if a big part of the reason that you showed up for work was not just the benefits and the salary and the status and the prestige that it might give you, but simply the way that it made you feel, the very notion that you felt away when you weren't, that you just wanted to feel more of. Not just losing yourself in flow, but also you feel like a sense of purpose, like you're working towards something that actually matters to you. A sense of meaning, like who you are and what you're doing is meaningful. You can lose yourself in that gorgeous flow.

You feel like you're excited and energized by this thing. Even if you're working really, really hard, long hours, something gets you up in the morning and says, I want more of that. Well, that is what the entire body of work around the Sparketypes is all about. That is what my new book Spark is all about. And along the way, beyond the massive data set we've gathered that shows that you can experience this, have been story after story, after story, after story, use cases, applications, individuals showing up and sharing how they have integrated these ideas into their work and life. And today I'm going to share two of those stories with you. Amazing, powerful, moving,

insightful stories about two people who have done incredible things and continue to do incredible things and have explored how this thing called the sparketype integrates into the way they do 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.

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Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to 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. Hey, so we are going to dive into two what I call sparked stories today. These are stories about people who are doing some pretty stunning things in life and in their work, and in some way have integrated the wisdom of the sparkotypes into what they're doing. Sometimes you'll hear in the first story, really aligning with it long before they knew what it was or gave names to it. And then once they started to interact with the body of work,

it just brought a whole lot of clarity to it. And then you're going to meet somebody else who is doing some pretty stunning things. Now, a quick word before I introduce our two stories, our two amazing human beings today. These conversations were recorded in the field. So they're recorded in May before we picked up and headed out to the East coast for the summer. One of them was recorded in what was then my backyard in Boulder, Colorado, literally with the backdrop of the foothills behind me. So you will hear things like little birdies chirping. You may hear the occasional kid run by in the background. Right next to our house was a house with an outdoor trampoline, and it was the place for pretty much every kid in the

neighborhood to hang out for hours and hours and hours in the afternoon. But you won't hear a whole lot of that probably. But just to give a little context to what you're hearing. And in the second one, and I'll remind you, we actually had this conversation standing and walking through this stunning rebirth of a biodynamic farm, a little bit North of Boulder, Colorado nestled right against the foothills. So you'll see, you'll hear all sorts of outdoor noises. You'll hear far off in the distance, a little bit of road noise. You'll hear the crunching of our feet on gravel as we walk around because the whole time we were just walking and talking. And you'll hear the wind rustling, not so much in the leaves and the trees, but as you

will learn in the remains of many of the trees that were devastated by fire not too long before we stood on that spot and had the conversation. So really excited to tee up this first story. And I'm sitting down with a dear friend of mine, Charlie Gilkey. Now you may know Charlie's work. He runs a company called Productive Flourishing, which is all about helping people get things out of their head and figuring out how to actually take the actions to produce the things that they so deeply want to make real in the world.

As a maker myself, his work has resonated so profoundly with me. But Charlie also has a really powerful background. He came out of the military where the decisions that he was making, the systems and processes that he was building, the advising and mentoring and coaching and decisions that he was making, the systems and processes that he was building, the advising and mentoring and coaching and leading that he was doing very often had extraordinary stakes, life and death stakes. If he chose wrong, lives were at risk in a part of the world that was very far from where he grew up. He's since written a fantastic book called Start Finishing, which is all about his methodology. And we sat down in my backyard in Boulder, Colorado, and I wanted to

really understand what were his deep impulses for the things that he's done and what have been the through lines. And then he shares his Sparketype profile and we dive into how that has informed the different types of work he said yes and no to, the way that he has stepped into them, and what he's learned along the way about how he makes decisions that better align with that. So really excited to share this conversation with my dear friend, Charlie Gokey. We go back, you know, I was just thinking about this, 2008, 2009? Yeah, my first South By. Right, so we met at a house party, which neither of us normally would go to

a house party, in South Austin at this giant event, and something clicked, and it's been just an amazing journey for both of us, but I want to talk to you about a whole bunch of different things I want to talk to you Explore the spark of types and how they show up in your work and also a lot of the team's stuff that you've been doing But I'm zooming the lens out a little bit and stepping back in time even before I knew you Actually, I think when we first met you were probably still in reserve for Army National Guard But you spent some time serving the country in a pretty major way. Yeah, so I joined the Army National Guard in 2002, and then we very shortly after that got mobilized to go to Operation Iraqi

Freedom. And so I spent, I was federalized. My job there started as leading tactical convoys throughout Kuwait and Iraq, and then I got promoted to battalion headquarters, which is largely looking at all the different convoy operations, making sure that they were going where they needed to, making the plans for them. And then when I got back stateside, I used a lot of what I learned over there to design joint force training scenarios that basically took troops through what it was like

to lead a convoy in the ambiguous situation that was Operation Iraqi Freedom in Afghanistan. Right. So then you take all those skills and also you have this kind of fascinating philosopher king meets operational tactical systems thinking practical on the ground business. Like, are you aware of the fact that you don't normally find those two lenses in one person? Yeah. I thought everybody else was like me, like most people do. Like, everybody's like me. And I was like, wait a second.

No, that's kind of a unique combination. Yeah. So you come back. And then you're effectively saying, all right, what do I do? How do I transition? And where do I want to redeploy this mindset, this skill set? And you land in the world of, effectively, entrepreneurship and creativity. I don't think I've ever actually asked you how that happened. Completely accidentally, actually. So the real challenge point that I had is when I came back

from Iraq, I was still pursuing my PhD in philosophy. And so I was simultaneously doing all that logistics and training stuff in the PhD. And I was like, ah, I don't understand why it's so easy for me to do this stuff over here with the convoy ops and all that sort of stuff. But this 5,000 word essay is kicking my butt. That does not make sense. It doesn't compute. And so what I realized is like, oh, after a lot of thinking, I was like, I've never been trained on how to do this. I'm not in a context, academia, that's really good at giving the structure around doing that.

And so what I started doing was like, OK, this is a learning gap. Right. So I'm going to learn how to do it. And then by the way, I'm going to share what I'm doing because I realized all of my peers, every graduate student I was with had this problem. Every faculty member had. It's like, why are we all with this problem? We're not talking about it. So that became what later became productive flourishing. And then along the way, a lot of entrepreneurs, business leaders like, hey, you're really good at planning and strategic thinking, assistant thinking. Like, can you help me with my business? And I was like, no, that's not really what I do. Right. I'm this over here. And then they kept delightfully pestering me enough. I was like, okay, okay, we'll give it a shot. We'll make some boundaries around it. And in a real way, I've been doing it, like giving it a shot for the last 13 years.

Yeah. You mentioned Productive Flourishing. What is Productive Flourishing? So Productive Flourishing is a community and a website that really helps creative changemakers finish what matters most. So you can think of it as personal productivity, but I don't like that as much because personal productivity can be really over granular. I'm really about, hey, how are you taking these ideas? How are you taking these visions? How are you taking this purpose and making something happen in the world that helps you thrive, that helps your community thrive and helps the world thrive. Right. No, that makes a lot of sense. And it's funny because I think there's a tendency to sort of like lump people. Like we like to put people

in buckets and like the broadest possible bucket, you know, like people would put you in terms of like what you like offer through productive flourishing is productivity, but it's not really what you do. It's like, it's not really what you do. It's more about unlocking something internal that allows people to get the thing in their head out into the world and actually make it real. One of the things I've come to learn about you over the years also, which honestly makes me a little bit envious, is you think in systems and processes, and we've talked about this, in ways that make me want to cry. Thanks. Yeah. you think in systems and processes and we've talked about this in ways that make me want to cry thanks yeah um there's something about your wiring that just goes there do you feel like and it feels like a joyful pursuit to you whereas i kind of like i've become

skilled at it but the minute i can have somebody else do it i will yeah Do you have any sense for when that starts showing up in your life? I would say I could go back at least until I was 16. Right. So I ended up having an undergrad to philosophy, as you know. And one of the reasons I love philosophy, I didn't have a language for it at the time, but I do now is like, you get to solve these really interesting puzzles and you're not constrained to one particular field, right? And so being able to think about how ideas relate, how assumptions relate, how worldviews relate, and what that makes a difference on from the ethical perspective, from the knowledge perspective, it's always been what I've been doing.

And so really, it's really one of those things where I can see two things happening, especially if I know they're actually in the system and it just starts going like, okay, why does it work that way? What happens when we change this piece and make that happen, right? And really understanding those dynamics. Sometimes it can be really frustrating because you have complex systems and you make a change here and have some other change. You have no idea what happened, but it's always, at least since I was 16 or so, always been there. Yeah. I would be curious if you really like thought back.

I'm fascinated when these impulses start to show up for people. Like I'd be curious if I was like, okay, if you think when you were six years old, could you find this in your life? And what if, I think a lot of times we don't think back. Like we think back to the point where we're sort of like becoming adults and a little bit more foreign. But a lot of times when we think about like the simplest expression of the impulse, we can see it as, I mean, like I know like, like my sparkotype isn't maker scientist, like, and I can see the impulse underneath that showing up literally from the time that I am consciously

aware of anything in my life. Let's talk about you. This is what you've been doing in the world. You also took your whole philosophy and built it into a book, Start Finishing, which is a fabulous piece of work, by the way. And you're focusing a lot on developing your own team right now, developing your own company, potentially companies. And you advise a lot of different founders, leaders, and organizations right now, developing your own company, potentially companies, and you advise a lot of different founders, leaders, and organizations right now also. Your interaction with the Spark type. So

we've been playing with these ideas for a long time. You've seen me evolve them through iteration, iteration, iteration, iteration, to a point where I feel like we have a body of work that was in some way valuable. I'm curious to know how the work has landed with you, just on both, on two levels. One personally, and also within your own organization, and then because you work with so many other leaders and teams. So maybe on three different levels, I'm curious just what your lens is. Yeah, I'll start with the team. I'll go team, personal, and then across businesses, probably easiest way. One of my knacks as a team builder is that I can always find those unique things that make people tick and make sure that we align their work and jobs to match that and then build a team around that.

So if you look at our team at PF, which is currently eight full-time people, right, it's really me trying to figure out, like, okay, Steve is great at these things. That's what lights him up. Jess is great at these things, Corey, and really putting that system together so that it works. And no one when we do this right as leaders, no one feels like they're actually working. Right. But work is happening. And that's, I think, the ideal. And that's what I try to build. And so that's why we have really great retention. People come and don't right so and so forth because they show up and like why would I do anything else right um personally my wife Angela asked me I think it was last weekend she was like so what is like the best version of Charlie and I was like that's a really broad question and I my response

was well I think Sparkotype model data really well advisor scientists right I like helping people, I really like showing people these parts of themselves that they sometimes don't see, and then figuring, helping them figure out how to deploy that, you know, to use the military metaphor. But there's also this very intense curiosity of, you know, figuring things out. And so to your question about going back in earlier days, I think advisor came later. Scientist has always been there. Like I can go back where I was four or five and I used to drive my dad crazy. I'd pick up a tool. Like, what do you do with this? Why does it work? Why do you use this one versus that one? And he's like, ah, right. To put it down. Right. And so that's always been there, that intense curiosity. But I think figuring out

that I could apply it to help other people, that came with maturity. That's so fascinating because one of the things people often ask about, like, you know, the primary and the shadow and the relationships and stuff like that. And one of the things that often comes up is like people like, well, do these change over time? And what I've been more convinced of as we see more data and have more conversations and sort of study more use cases, is that it appears that it's less that they evolve over time, but some just show up a lot earlier. And then you don't have the life experiences, the work experiences. You don't have the experiences to tease out this other preference or this other impulse until a little bit later in life. So on

the advisor side, which is particularly interesting to me So the scientist gets rewarded early in life early So so there's plenty of opportunity to show up the advisor for a lot of people if you try and express it too early It gets stomped on because people like don't tell me what to do like you're eight years old you know or you're 12 years old or you're and so so a lot of times people sort of like they Play with it because the impulse is there and it's not received well. So they back away from it until you reach a point in your life or your career or your relationships where you kind of feel like you've either earned the right or somehow you have the accumulated knowledge experience where you can step into it more comfortably and then people respond differently. I'm curious whether that's any part of your story. I think that's true.

I think there's a very contextual element too. I grew up poor, black, and in the South, right? And so there are only so many contexts in which that advisor sort of prototype could show up between priests, ministers, between teachers. Like there's a limited range of things. And actually I went to undergrad and one of the things I was gonna do is be a teacher. So it was there, but I didn't grow up around coaches and consultants and advisors. And you know, that's not, wasn't my

lived reality. So it wasn't a community outlet there. It was only until later that I came as like, wait a second, there's this whole broad range of ways you can be an advisor. I didn't use that language, but you can help people doing this. And then still so much of my work is that people come into me. Right. So, you know, I'm not great at proactive marketing. I'm not out there trying to get a bunch of business. I'm just like stuff just comes to me and I'm like, OK, I can I think I can help. And I've learned to not. This has been a huge learning skill,

is when someone comes and says, can you help? If there's a place where I don't see where I could cause legitimate harm, to not question whether I have the expertise or whether I have it. It's like they're coming to me asking me for help. So how about I assume that they see something in me that they need and I can at least go as far as I can go. And then be like, you know what, we've reached a point. I'm not the best at that. Right. You need to go talk to X, Y and Z. So that's been as I've aged, getting more and more comfortable when someone says, hey, can you come help with this? And I'm like, sure, let's figure it out together as opposed to, ah, I don't do that. I've never done that before.

Man, if I spent most of my life telling people what I haven't done before, I wouldn't have done anything. Right. But, I mean, to a certain extent, like, I read that as it's the scientist reaching a level of competence that it's telling the advisor, I can help you figure it out. Yeah. You know, so it's like it's them playing with each other. It's that dance. There's something else that I know about you on the advisory side, because I've seen you do this with clients.

And when we've worked on projects together, one of the things that I've learned over time is that the highest level, very often the most valuable people who are in some kind of advisory role, and we're using the advisory because that's the spark of type, but it doesn't mean you call yourself that or you have that title. It's just, it's the work that you do do is that when you start to reach sort of like higher and higher levels of impact, it becomes less about actually telling anyone what to do. And it's trust, safety, and understanding the appropriate questions to ask to elicit wisdom from the person that you're in relationship with. I learned that in part from Michael Gervais, who's this fantastic performance psychologist.

And it was floating around and I observed it, but he created a really great frame around it. And I've seen you literally evolve to do that same thing where people come to you and they're like, tell me what to do. And you're like, I have some questions for you. Yeah, yeah. I appreciate that.

At this point in my career, I know that my value add as an advisor is not what I know. It's what I can ask. And asking the right question in the right way at the right time. There's a lot of context there. And just knowing the person. This person is coming to me. I just kind of have to feel into it and say, hmm, if I give them a direct or if I give them a direct question, they're going to rebel and push against it.

They're not going to be able to see it. So I have to do this one obliquely versus another person who will never get the hint right on the oblique. So yeah, it's a lot of seeing what people are coming to you with. It's like that's the question they're asking. There's either a question under that or they're asking that question because there's just other harder questions they don't have the courage or the ability to ask quite yet. So how do we start dancing with these right questions? A lot of times I don't know like what the answer is and that's not the point. You know, to your point earlier, Sid, I have gotten much more comfortable knowing

that like I don't have to know all the answers, but I'm really good at figuring them out. Right. And so that's how it shows up most of the time. People say, I have a question for you. It's like, I probably don't have an answer, but I probably have a question. And that starts the process. Yeah. And it's like together we can figure it out.

Together we can figure it out. Yeah. I love that interplay. When you think about where you are right now, you run your own company. You have your own team, actually teams, plural, within the company. You advise people that run their own companies and teams. In the context of sort of like the broader scheme, I'm curious about the Charlie vision right now. Because I feel like we as a culture are in this moment right now.

But I also feel like you as an individual are in a really interesting moment right now you know because i feel like we as a culture are in this moment right now but i also feel like you as an individual are in a really interesting moment right now where you're sort of looking more expansively and holistically at like okay so so we've done some really good work up until now but we're in this moment where there's a lot of visioning about like what do i want this next season to look like what's what's in your head around that? Yeah, that's a good question. I guess at this stage, I don't have a fine point to it, but I do wanna make work work for everyone in the sense where when I look at how much of our lives we spend at work and how much it's not working for everyone,

just really thinking about how do we build more inclusive workspaces? How do we not get people caught in systems and structures that are really harming them? How do we rebalance some of the equity and wealth in our society such that people feel more ownership and things like that? So really broader questions like that. How do we rebuild teams? My next book is about building teams that focus on performance and belonging. And the belonging piece is the one where people are like, do we really need to talk about that?

I'm like, yes, we need to talk about, have you not learned over the last 20, you know, 2020 of the year? So that's really what I'm out about doing. And why work is, you know, for me, and we have this conversation a lot, some people work means going to a job. Some people work means running their business. Some people, like, work means having this great nonprofit. For some people, family is work.

Whatever that is, I want people to think about that thing that they're spending most of their days doing and saying, how can this work for everyone including myself better and being intensely curious about that and understanding that as you change the way you work you'll change yourself which means you'll need to change the way you work and it's just a constant evolution there's no fixed state and that's what gets me so excited and frustrated right because people think they're going to some fixed state of themselves and then they get there and they realize that self is still changing, right? There's no there there. There's no there there. And the freedom in that there's no there there, and there are no right answers, and there's no forever decisions. That's where we can come alive and really start to be

able to embrace the world, not as it was, but as we want it to be. I love that. I feel like that's a great place for us to wrap also. Thank you. Thank you. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman.

I knew you were going to 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. 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 10. 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. So I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Charlie. I learn so much from him. Every time I sit down with him, I absolutely strongly recommend go check out his book, check out his work,

check out Productive Flourishing, check out all the incredible solutions and programs and experiences they offer. If you are somebody who has ever stumbled at trying to figure out how to get more done in your life and in your work and how to get the things that you want to make real in the world out of your head and into the world. He is my go-to person when it comes to

that. Now, I want to introduce you to my next guest. Her name is Azurai Wyckoff. And she grew up in Boulder, Colorado, but then left and she went East and she went East to go to college and kind of thought that she was never coming back. It was sort of like she left the town and she was out there in the world building her life, building a moving company in Boston, small hall, Boston Small Moves. And she's there doing incredible work. Something inside her called her back to Boulder in the fall of 2020, last year. And shortly after she got there, she would be greeted by a profoundly transformational experience. Her family was on land that they'd owned for quite a long time.

And they were a farming family. They had converted the farm into all sorts of different uses over the years, from horses in the early days to food, to all sorts of different things. This place, the Yellow Barn Farm, has now become this stunning vision of re-imagination. It is a regenerative, sustainable, not just farm, but community where they're bringing together different farmers and different participants in the land and in the community from all over the area to create something truly extraordinary together. And Azarai came back and she stepped into this moment and felt a sense of calling to stay there and to build this

thing, to literally reimagine it from the ground up. As I met her, I drove up to the farm and got out of the car and was just standing around and looking. On one side is a road, and you'll hear a little bit of the road noise as people drive by. And then if you look across this biodynamic farm, where she had just recently brought in people from the community who volunteered and raised their hands to plant thousands of trees, just because it was something that was important they wanted to do. She has rallied the community in a really powerful way to do something incredible, to rejuvenate land that

many thought might not be rejuvenatable, if that is even a word. And we spent the entire conversation just walking and talking around the property as she showed me around, as she showed me the very beginnings of what she was working on, as she explained to me and shared just her stunning vision of what this could be. And as we walked around all the way up to the back of the property, which butted right against the foothills of the front range of the Rockies here in Colorado, as I looked up, I was a little bit horrified by what I saw. And we talk about what I saw. And we talk about why that was a big part of why she decided to

stay. It turns out Azarai didn't just come here and decide to work on Yellow Barn Farm and build this incredible sustainable community around it. She's still running the moving company in Boston. So she's literally running two companies, 2000 miles apart. And I met her because she reached out to me because she had kind of a funny moment when she first discovered the sparky types and then her sparky type. And it was like this light bulb moment. And it has since become essential part of the work that she's doing, that she integrates with her teams across all the different businesses and projects that she's doing.

And she shares in a really powerful way, not just her story, not just the story of her different businesses, not just the story of this incredible farm and community, but also how the notion of the sparker types has profoundly informed, not just her own choices, but also the way that she builds teams and the way that she thinks about systems and organizations and culture and process. It was incredibly eye-opening and valuable to me, and I hope it will be the same for you. Here's Azarai Wyckoff. We're at Yellow Bond Farm, which is this really kind of fascinating place. Your family has actually had this property for about two decades now,

but it's changed in a lot of ways over that time. Yeah, it used to be a big horseback riding facility. We were doing big dressage competitions and we had over 50 horses being boarded here. I myself grew up riding horses. My sister was riding competitively in dressage and had won first in the nation. It was a pretty insane place to grow up. We had a bunch of different animals, pigs, goats, sheep, alpacas, miniature donkeys, and even a tortoise. That's amazing. The farm right now is sort of like in this period where it's changing in a really dramatic way. So tell me what's going on in the place. Yeah, so we've had this farm for about 20 years and for the last five years we really

kind of let the land go back to sleep. All the horses left, we stopped everything that had to do with horseback riding and we were really looking to sell the property. But it seems like every single time that we have tried to sell it, we have had multiple people come ready to sign contracts, done all the due diligence and for whatever reason something's always fallen through. And it's kind of felt like this boomerang we've thrown out into the universe and it's always come back to us. And I myself kind of disassociated from the farm when I was 16. Just a lot going on in life and didn't really want to be here anymore and really wanted to focus on school and friends and ultimately went to college, moved to Boston, was running a moving company, learned a lot of incredible skills. And then after the pandemic happened, I really started getting this call to come back home, to be back in nature and around the earth and the land and to really start stewarding this property.

Yeah. And I mean, literally you got here and within hours almost from the time that you got here I mean we're walking on this dirt road in this property and what's out in front of us is a hill that we're kind of looking up at so what's what happened right when you got here it was pretty wild I got back here on October 15th and on October 17th the Cowlitt fire happened and every single year we have always had to evacuate with fires around the vicinity but I've never seen anything get this close. It came over the mountain ridge and within 45 minutes we had to completely evacuate the property and they locked us out and you couldn't even

get a mile within the area for a whole week and we thought that the fire was totally gone for sure there was just no way it was gonna survive there were 100 mile an hour winds coming down the mountainside. So you literally left. The fire is literally feet away. It's coming towards the farm and you have no way of knowing whether anything was safe. So in your mind, it's gone.

Yeah, it's gone. I pretty much written it off as like, great. I just drove back, totally sealed up my entire life to come back to a place that's not gonna exist in a week. And we came back on the land a week later and saw that the fire had stopped three feet in front of the first structure on the property. The winds had changed direction and blew north, ripped around the entire property of these 100 acres and burned all the bramble and brush, jumped over the highway and didn't touch a single

structure on the property. Unbelievable. Yeah. And that's kind of a sign. I took it as such. Yeah. I really took that as a sign to get it in gear and really start taking this seriously and making things happen. So here we are. We have partnered with this incredible group of researchers called Drylands Agroecology Research, and they are really focusing on regenerative land design, using permaculture techniques to really bring the soil back to life and to make this incredibly beautiful biodiverse ecosystem. Right, so now you're sort of here investing in completely reimagining what this farm was for 20 years, and this has been around also, you know, generations ago. This was massive. And

so it's not like this is just a 20 year thing. So when you're thinking about re-imagining this, you also mentioned you're in Boston, you had a moving company, which still exists, right? So you're kind of now juggling multiple different, you're here trying to completely redo this biodiverse farm, which will require years. You've still got a business across the country running, managing different people, different expectations, you know, from all these different places. And you stumble upon the Sparketypes in a kind of a funny way. Yeah, kind of a ridiculous way. I was really at like the bottom, truly the bottom. A lot had just happened in the last two years. I had switched multiple jobs. My

family had just had a lot of stuff going on. And I was really in this soul searching mode and was kind of scrolling through Instagram mindlessly one day and came across this assessment, this ad for an assessment. And I was like, don't do it. It's an Instagram ad. That's a bad idea. But I ended up taking it. And the results I got of being an advisor essentialist, something clicked in my brain. And it was like, I felt like I had, I was seen for the first time. And I think I always knew that I was definitely an advisor. I love talking to people. I loved guiding people and really holding space for them and hearing about their lives. And then also reflecting back to them a distillation of what they had just told me about themselves. And really what really made everything click was the essentialist. That to me was something I had never

recognized in myself. And once I finally recognized that pattern, I saw it in everything that I did. Whether it was talking to people, managing projects and tasks, building systems and designing ways that energy and information can all flow. Everything just clicked at that point. Yeah. It's interesting that you say that too, because what we hear from a lot of essentialists is for a lot of their lives, they don't actually think it's what they do. It just happens to be a way they do things. Not really saying that it's really, it's something much deeper. You know, it's actually, it's the verb, not the adjective. And when they realize that it's like, they can start to connect the dots across all these different things. And it's,

it's like a sense-making thing. Yes, absolutely. So you realize this about yourself. You start integrating it in pretty much everything that you do, the way that you do everything. But also you're running effectively two companies, two organizations, leading from different places. So how do you start to think about this in the context of the people that are on your teams? Yeah, so that was a really big thing for me. It's once I realized that I actually had this skill.

There were so many people that were in our ecosystems. And as I was trying to cinch up everything for Small Hall, our moving company in Boston, so I could move back out here, I had to hire more people. And so we kind of sent out the word to everyone. We had two people come back. And the first thing I did was have them take the sparkotype test so I could understand how to really interact with them. Like what were they looking for? What was actually going to light them up? Could I put them in the right seat? And I didn't know what I was going to be hiring each of them for. There were definitely many facets of my job that needed to kind of be divvied up. So I had one person who was a nurturer advisor and another person who was a warrior advocate. And as I started to really get to know them, I understood that they really needed to be in completely different kinds of roles that would

ultimately complement each other. So I had one person, the nurturer advisor, handling all the customers, dealing with the education, really getting to interact with people. And then the other person was in charge of logistics and more complex organizational structures and making sure that he was dealing with the crew members because he was that leader. He knew all the people that were on the trucks, he really understood how to advocate for them, making sure that they were paired with the right people, put on the right kinds of jobs. And as we started to define these rules for them, making sure that they were paired with the right people, put on the right kinds of jobs. And as we started to define these rules for them, they fit so perfectly into

the organization that there was very little friction. And I was just like, there's something here. There's definitely something here now. Yeah. I love hearing that. I love sort of like seeing how people are integrating it with themselves, but also with the people on their teams. Because on the one hand, you know, big picture from making things work more effectively and more efficiently, it's super cool because like you said, it can have this sort of ability to remove friction. But also, you know, when you care about people and you want them to feel like they're showing up and doing something that makes them feel like they're their best selves as often as possible like as much of them is actually being given a space to show up it's like you get the benefit as the

organization but also you get the benefit of you know being a caring human being knowing that you're finding ways to help caring beings that you care about yeah do the thing that makes them feel nourished. Yeah, absolutely. And I think it was really amazing to see how much more people were lit up doing what they were doing. And it was almost like they were coming into this genius zone that they didn't even know that they had. And if you could really just kind of put them in that right seat, it was like the lights just flicked on. It was really amazing. I love seeing that. What are you thinking about? Because I know that you're never thinking about just the present. You're always sort of like 10 steps out about

the future. What do you think about, I'm curious, not just future in terms of working with the sparky types, but bigger picture. I'm curious, like, where are you going with everything? Yeah. So to me, really, this is the creation of the mycelial network, really. We are building these hubs. And as I started to recognize the patterns in the world and in nature, I started seeing that also reflected in people, in organizations, and was really trying to create this biomimicry in the way that we were designing teams. And so looking at the farm as like the major hub in this wheel that has all these spokes going out to these smaller farms, and then really all these people like sand essentially in this entire ecosystem that needed to kind of be put into a database so that we could find them. Know what their skills were, ideally know what their sparkotypes were, so that when we needed a combination of team members, I knew how to pull

them all together based on the domains of interest and then what they love doing and what they were naturally gifted at. I think the biggest difference I'm realizing is like in that team structure, it's people that really have to want to come together, that you can't really just pull together a group of people and expect them to want to really show up in the way that would light them up even if you do have them doing things that they love doing if there isn't that like that true true trust at the foundation of it I mean nothing happens without trust and safety you know especially if you're asking people to work really hard and to say no

to other things yeah you know it's, I found that so many times with different things that I've built, sort of like, people will sacrifice a lot. They'll say no to money, to status, to power, to be a part of something where they feel like they can show up and be who they are, where they believe in the bigger mission. But like you said, also, even with that, if there's no sense of trust and safety, game over, nothing happens. But if you have all three of those, it's like, it's unstoppable. I mean, people will work harder for the love and the passion, like in the sense of like meaning and impact than they normally would. I am so excited for, I mean, what you're

doing now is amazing to me. You know, I can't wait to see what it looks like a year from now and three years and five years from now. I'm inspired by the way you look at the world, by just your commitment to creating meaning in a lot of different ways, which is interesting. So we've been walking, you know, we kind of look down at the farm in the valley behind us now. And you mentioned earlier, you know, this kind of looked down at the farm in the valley behind us now, and you mentioned earlier, you know, this kind of started with you coming back because you felt like you had to come back, and then days after you're here, a fire comes tearing down.

And, like, we're standing at a point now where, if you look at the brush off to the side, you can see it's all burned out. You know, like, we're literally where the fire was. Yeah, it came... That structure that you see right there, it's an arena. All this was burned right up to three feet right before that arena. Well, I'm glad that you're here to sort of spearhead a process of renewal. And thank you so much for sharing time today.

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era, or yoga era, dive into Peloton workouts that work with you. From meditating at your kid's game to mastering a strength program, they've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals. No pressure to be who you're not. Just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are. So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton.

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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't shoot him, we need him.

Y'all need a pilot. Flight Risk. Hey, so I hope you found Azuraiah's story interesting, informative, inspiring. To be around her, her energy is just absolutely infectious. She is alive with this profound commitment to build something extraordinary and to extract from it a whole new lens on how to create culture and uplift people and invest in their personal growth while also investing in the land and the community. I learned so much and it was incredibly inspiring. And I love the way that she integrates

and expands on the ideas of the sparkotypes in all aspects of what she's doing. So I want to thank you. These are just two different stories. There has been this beautiful experience since the sparkotype assessment first moved out into the world, came out of beta at the end of 2018, and now well over half a million people have interacted with it, thousands more literally every week. The volume of stories that have come back to us is just breathtaking. I've had the incredible opportunity to include so many of these stories in my book, Spark. You can dive into story after story after story and use cases and applications and realize that these aren't just ideas. They're

not just tools. They're not insights and it's not data, although it is all of those things and big data. This is about humanity. This is about us as individuals learning how to wake up, wake up in the context of our work, wake up in the context of our lives, and serve as models to those who might look to us about how to make choices in the world that allow us to live from a place of integrity and meaning and purpose, where we feel lit up, where we feel that we are standing in a place of energy and excitement and enthusiasm. And we feel lit up, where we feel that we are standing in a place of energy and excitement and enthusiasm. And we're not hiding. We're not stifling. We are allowing all of us, our quirkiness, our dorkiness, our capabilities, our identity, our skills, our abilities,

our deepest impulse for work that makes us come alive to fully shine through, to step into a centering role in the way we bring ourselves to our work and to the alive, to fully shine through, to step into a centering role in the way we bring ourselves to our work and to the world, to our relationships and to our lives. That is my invitation. That is the central reason why I care so much about this work. And I thought a fun way to maybe wrap up this episode would be for me to share just a little bit from the final pages of my book, Sparked, which as you well know now, as a listener, especially this week, is available at booksellers everywhere. So this is actually from the very last part. This actually is how I wrap up the book. It's from the final part of the book entitled

Spark Your Life, Spark the World. It's not just about coming alive. It's about coming home. So here's what I share. Something tends to happen to us when we reach adulthood. We get lulled into the belief that living as your true self, working and offering and creating meaning and connection from that deepest part of yourself is less important than toeing the line. We walk away from ourselves. Makers stop making. Performers stop bringing moments alive. Advocates quiet their impulse to champion. Nurturers stop giving care, sometimes at the behest or command of others. Other times, because a sense of grown-up propriety or responsibility claims it. Often it's more insidious. We never actively decide to

abandon who we are and the pursuits we knew as kids that sparked us. It's more of a slow, unwitting surrender until one day, years down the road, we find ourselves responsible and accomplished, yet empty. Wondering how life got away from us when we stopped being that person we've always known ourselves to be. We feel the weight of that abandonment. It shows up as an unshakable baseline of discontent, melancholy, disconnection, malaise, and frustration. A pervasive sense that somewhere along the line we've lost ourselves. We don't entirely understand where it's coming from, but we feel it. And in the moments where the stakes are high and life gets harder, uncertain, complicated,

and it always will, we feel it even more. For many, we're taught and expected to ignore it. It becomes simply the ever-thickening air we breathe. It's just there, laden with enough oxygen to let us function, yet perpetually wrapped in an invisible cloak of dysfunction, one we cannot remove because it cannot be seen. What I came to realize from the vast and rapidly growing archive of stories as thousands of new people discovered their sparkotypes every week is that for many, this discontent had become their new normal. So many people had been living in a state of low-grade crisis their entire adult lives. A crisis of meaning, a crisis of joy, a crisis of excitement and enthusiasm, a crisis of purpose and expression. It had just become

an accepted part of life. It's not that we don't work hard. We do. It's not that we don't create output. We do. It's not that we don't get things done. We do. We are mighty and beautiful and accomplished.

It's that for far too many, we work hard at something we could care less about. We create things that do not emanate from our souls. We get things done that matter to others, but little to us. And even though we can turn back and point to the great work we've done, the litany of accomplishments, we still walk through life hollow, just a touch sad, unfulfilled, living in a haze of pace, achievement, and exhaustion. For millions who have stepped away from their essential nature, discovering their sparkotype can be an inciting incident. A call to discover and then embrace the work that makes them come alive, first as a salve

for an anxious, isolated existence, then a reclamation. Turns out honoring, then building around your sparkotype is in part about making an unsatisfying working life a whole lot better. But it's about pulling the ripcord on the level of chronic low-grade despair that has become so much a part of the fabric of our existence, we don't even realize we're wearing it. Whether you do it as you're living on the side or as an ingredient in some blend, your sparkotype is not just about coming alive. It's about coming home. We've made it this far, the beginning of many journeys. So the world of work for most people is anywhere from mildly to severely broken. Nobody intended it to be this way. And honestly, nobody really benefits from it. We're all doing the best we can. And truth is,

we are all in this together. There will be times where we feel more compelled and freer to focus on being sparked and other times where we're more in survival mode. There will be times where we need to just do what is necessary to take care of the bare necessities. Times where we have less control than we yearn for. Times where our aspirational needs for purpose, meaning, excitement, joy, expression, and flow will take a backseat to sustenance and security. Times where it won't be easy to become sparked purely by the thing we get paid to do. Still, whether we're looking for work employed but in a sustenance job or well-paid but flatlined, so many of us can get so much closer to the feeling of coming alive, being sparked, than we thought possible. If you're fully employed, explore how you might

integrate your sparkotype into your current work. How might you reimagine or redefine the day-to-day elements and possibly even the bigger scope of your work? How might you honor your commitments and acknowledge whatever circumstance you find yourself in and maybe even explore a more blended path to becoming sparked? Reflect on the details of your spark type and think about the tasks and tools and topics that give you that feeling of aliveness. Seek or create opportunities to bring more of those into what you do, even in areas where these things do not fall squarely within the description of what you were hired to do. There are often ways to embrace them that are unseen to you

until you start actively looking for them. If you're not currently working or underemployed and you find yourself in a place of discovery for your next work adventure, this may be an understandably disconcerting, yet also sacred and powerful time to do this work. To learn more about what makes you come alive, to think about how you might create or find your next opportunity that brings as much sparked work into what you do as possible, or to create the space to make it happen on the side. Look for the indicators, the signs from past experiences or

current yearnings that align with your sparkotype when you're considering what to explore, what to say yes or no to. They matter, often more than we realize. If some are there, but not all, consider how you might bring more of what you want and whether you have the power to do that into the experience. No matter where you go from here, an invitation. Don't turn away from the road you've begun to walk down when you said yes to discovering your sparkotype, yes to sharing it with friends, family, colleagues, and collaborators and asking them to discover theirs. Yes to diving into this book.

Yes to taking steps, even baby steps, to come more fully alive in whatever way is accessible to you. Yes to fanning the flames and bringing more meaning, expression, flow, purpose, and possibility into your work and life. Right now, you need that possibility into your work and life. Right now, you need that. And so does the world. We need people who've stepped back into a place of possibility and potential.

We need people who are fully alive, maximally capable, and fired up, tapping everything they have from a place of joy and enthusiasm to create the next generation of ideas and solutions, services, platforms, institutions, and experiences that will lead us all into the future in a more empowered, activated, and alive way. We need organizations and leaders fueled by the unleashed potential, purpose, drive, expression, and energy of a fully sparked workforce to serve as centers for innovation and growth and the furtherance not just of industry, but of culture, society, and the unbridled elevation of every individual who contributes to the quest. Not just because we want to feel better, but because the depth and complexity of the challenges we face demand the

best we have to offer. When we show up sparked, we come alive and the world comes along with us. This is bigger than us. It's time for a reclamation of work as a source of meaning, energy, purpose, joy, and potential. And every individual plays a part. Beyond the awakenings and invitations to activate your own sparkotype, do one simple thing. Invite one person, maybe two, three would be great. Okay, just invite everyone you know to become sparked. It starts with a simple fun step. Just ask them to discover their sparkotype. Along the way, we'll grow a community of a movement of human beings around the world on a mission to come alive and radiate that energy, that sense of purpose and possibility to everyone around us to do well and do good, to change the way we work and live.

And along the way, the state of the world as we know it. Together, we can spark the world, one lit up human at a time. And that is how I wrap Sparked. And that invocation, that invitation is where I'm going to leave you today. I hope you've enjoyed this. I hope you've enjoyed learning about and from Charlie and Azurai and their incredible work and lives and projects and inspiration and energy. I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project. notes, dive into it, discover your own personal sparketype, then begin to bring it to the world. Because right now, right now, we need people who've come alive more than ever. I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off. Till next time. Thank you. 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. On January 24th.

Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're gonna die. Don't shoot him, we need him! Y'all need a pilot? Flight Risk.