Good Life Project - What We Get Wrong About Work | Marcus Buckingham

Episode Date: June 11, 2019

In 1999, Marcus Buckingham burst onto the scene talking about these things called strengths and how to harness them in his mega-bestseller, First, Break All the Rules, followed in 2001 by Now, Discover Your Strengths. Helping people flourish in work and life became a lifelong obsession, leading to an acclaimed and deeply-rewarding career researching and developing strengths-based tools and insights, first at Gallup, and then launching his own consulting firm, The Marcus Buckingham Company (https://www.marcusbuckingham.com/). Marcus now leads People + Performance research at the ADP Research Institute and remains CEO of his consulting company. And, his latest book, Nine Lies About Work (https://amzn.to/2WJhLsO), takes an in-depth look at some of the biggest lies that pervade our workplaces, the biggest mistakes we make in building our own careers and leading others, and the deeper truths or antidotes that’ll put us back onto the right track. Be prepared to be surprised and awakened.-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

So in 1996, Marcus Buckingham burst onto the scene talking about these things called strengths and how to harness them in a mega bestseller called the first break all the rules that was followed a couple of years later by a book called now discover your strengths, which he co-wrote with Donald Clifton, who's kind of like the father of strengths. And it was all about helping people flourish in work and life. And that became a lifelong obsession of his leading to a really widely acclaimed, deeply rewarding career as a researcher, developing strengths based tools and insights first at Gallup, and then launching his own consulting firm, the Marcus Buckingham Company. So Marcus now leads the people and performance research team at ADP Research Institute

and remains the CEO of his consulting company. And his latest book, Nine Lies About Work, takes an in-depth look at some of the biggest lies that pervade the way that we work, the way that we build organizations and lead, some of the biggest mistakes that we make in building our own careers and in leading ourselves and others. And he also then reveals some of the deeper truths or antidotes that put us back on the right track. In today's conversation, we dive into all of this, his own personal journey, his encyclopedic knowledge of data and information and wisdom just dropping almost nonstop about the way we work. So fascinating, so illuminating, both to get to know him as a person

and his deep and insightful and incredibly valuable mind when it comes to the way that we make decisions about our own work and life. So excited to share this conversation with you. And by the way, be prepared to be surprised and awakened a bit along the way. 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 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 will vary. There's a story floating around.

Well, I guess, in fact, you built a whole bunch around it also about your interesting relationship with the instrument of trombone. Oh, yes. I grew up just outside London in a little town called Radler, which is about 20 minutes outside London. And then my parents split up and my mom moved into Notting Hill and my dad just moved outside the M25. I grew up with an elder brother and a younger sister.

And my brother was a really good pianist and a great composer and just super talented musically. And my sister was a professional ballet dancer and was also a very good musician. So I had an elder brother and younger sister who were really musical. My dad was very intent on me being part of that tradition. And I wanted to actually, I mean, I, you know, I wanted to be able to read music the way that my brother could or sight read the way my sister could. And for whatever reason, I couldn't make sense of the language or the grammar or somehow the the musicness of music didn't quite speak to me i so wanted it to and dad bought me because he wanted it too he bought me a trombone uh early initially a trumpet but then i guess my lips were too big or something so he bought me a trombone and i think his intent he was the dad who would always do christmas or boxing day um

concerts and stuff for the neighbors. And we'd have to do a play and he would make a play and then we'd have to sing. And he was sure that I would be the trombonist of a jazz band. And I would be, I'd grow up to be, you know, my brother would play the piano, my sister would be dancing or whatever, I'd be playing the trombone. And I was just terrible. I mean, I wasn't terrible. I was incredibly difficult to listen to because nothing was inevitable. There was no flowing, there was no smoothness, there was no slide.

No feel. a manifestation, a metaphor, if you like, for the differences between us all, regardless of gender or race or age. In the same house, same genetic inheritance, you get these three really different kids. One of them is given the tools, he's given the chambon, and somehow for the clash of his chromosomes or whatever, he can't make sense of it in the way that he needs to make sense of it. And so it became for me that sort of anchor point for how different we are and that that's good. I don't have to be a great trombonist. I put in no, you know, disrespect to Malcolm, but I put in probably 10,000 hours of really good seven years of good hard work and was really average. I mean, I did seven years of really hard work. I was in a small school. I was still the third chair of the trombone players,

because no matter how hard I practiced, I just would go from really average to average. You know, that was the extent of my improvement, which is why when we came to do a film about strengths and about uniqueness we chose to focus on a on a trombone player which is why it became trombone player wanted all ties back to like the origin story it's the personal pain that seeds everything in life exactly um it's interesting you brought up malcolm 10 000 hour rule we actually um a couple years ago i guess now had uh andrew Anders Ericsson in here who did the original research and then became like the source of the now. Actually, he's like, it was never really the 10,000 hour rule. Yes.

That was the really streamlined popularization of that. But that's not really certain sort of innate organic preferences, drivers that seem to emerge at the earliest of age that really differentiate us. Who knows where it comes from or why it's there, but it's there. And I feel like sometimes we don't like to acknowledge that or sometimes society says, you know, you shouldn't acknowledge that to a certain extent because we're all sort of like similarly equipped and similarly able and similar. We should all be able to exceed and excel at the same, you know, basket of things on the same level. But it's just not reality. No, and it's not reality. My sister was, I said, a ballet dancer, professional ballet dancer, Royal Ballet School, Royal Ballet Company, and yet probably spent 25,000 hours trying to learn to do pirouettes. And to be a

soloist in the Royal Ballet Company, you've got to be able to do three to the left and three to the right perfectly, because there's too much in the classical ballet repertoire that the Royal Ballet does that requires that. Well, she couldn't do that. I mean, beautifully talented dancer, extraordinarily good at many of the moves and maneuvers you have to make, but couldn't do that. I mean, beautifully talented dancer, extraordinarily good at many of the moves and maneuvers you have to make, but couldn't do the pirouettes. So at some point, there is difference there because there was a person right next door homogeneity, supposedly, there's heterogeneity, there's difference. And my sister then has to deal with that, not in a bad way, but has to go, well, what is my contribution as a dancer? As it turns out, she's a super lyrical dancer. And there's a wonderful ballet company for soloists called the Nedlands Dance Theatre, where a particular kind of choreographer, Yuri Kilian was his name, made dances just for long lyrical dancers like my sister.

So it's not as though saying that we are unique limits us. It just defines the nature of the contribution that we're going to make. And so, you know, you have a child, I have kids, you see how they naturally interact with the world. And you look at them when they're two or three years old. And you go, I didn't make that. I mean, I made it genetically. But when my daughter's mom was leaning over her one time and her necklace sort of fell down uh or dangled down and my daughter was i think two years old um and looked up and said you can imagine all the things that she possibly could have said she looked up and just went that's a lovely necklace mommy and in saying that you knew immediately that my daughter didn't necessarily think that

was a lovely necklace or not but she knew even at even at two, that you sowed goodwill. She knew how to sow goodwill. She still knows how to sow goodwill. Not that she's being manipulative, but she knows that you invest in other people. You see a thing, you say something nice about it, or you do something nice, and that works for her. Well, I didn't make her say that. Her mom didn't make her say that. Her mom didn't make her say that. And my son, of course, totally different in the way that he naturally reacts.

We have uniqueness as a fact of life. And the fact that we say, Marcus, you can't become like your brother, isn't an absence of a growth mindset. We can all grow. The question is, can you grow to become a different human? And the answer unequivocally, both biologically, but also psychologically, and probably even spiritually, the answer is no, you can't. You are a beautifully unique human. And you have a beautifully unique set of contributions to make. And we hope that in life, you discover what those are. But it's going to be a rare day that you actually just totally have a personality transformation and turn them to someone else. And that's, that's not a fixed mindset. That's just helping someone to own the trajectory and the nature of their own growth. Yeah. So I so agree with that also. I feel like,

I actually feel like it's, it's become a very Western mindset to focus on transformation, like capital T transformation, like to become someone else. But when you go so much further back in time, when you look at a lot of thousands of years old Eastern philosophy and Eastern tradition, and you look at the language, you know, if you look at the Sanskrit word, Jivamukti, you know, which translates roughly to liberated being. It's a very intentionally not transformed being. It's liberated being. And virtually every path with a lineage that long with practices that have existed for thousands of years that have led to better living, the word is more related to liberation than transformation. And it's really along that idea. It's like, it's not about becoming someone else. It's about revealing the essence of who you are and then allowing that to fully manifest in the world and in whatever way it can.

Well, and that's why the Greek word that's become, I think, trivialized a little in the last few years, but the Greek word eudaimonia, daimon, the idea that we have a soul's code, if you like, and that we each have a unique spirit or daimon. And that you means obviously the good expression of that daimon. There's a lovely deep truth in that good living comes from the best, purest, most beautiful and contributive expression of your daimon. That doesn't mean that transforming your daimon into your brother's just because you wish you could compose like he could. It means, hey, Marcus, you probably got one. You've got a spirit. You've got a set of uniquenesses that come together in a daimon. You can you, you could use them poorly, you could resent them,

you could use them unintelligently, but if you want good living, you'll figure out ways in which you will contribute those for the benefit of yourself or the benefit of those around you. That's probably the Greek version of the Sanskrit one.

And again, it's like you trace it all into those cultures that have existed for so long and endured in some way, shape, or form. And I think it keeps coming back to those same core set of ideas. You know, I wonder sometimes why we have drifted. Like what have been the external pressures that have sort of pushed us in different directions from that? And I'm curious what your thoughts are. I've seen so much what it seems to be societal and familial pressure to sort of validate,

you know, like this is an okay path for you in life. Whereas this thing over here to the left, even though it may be a much truer expression of who you are, it's kind of not like we don't see the path for you to be safe and secure. So we're going to completely invalidate, you know, even the essential, you know, like imprint that that comes from. There are a number of different things that push that. What we do know is certainly we've just done, I now run this research institute at the ADP Research Institute. So I've got this opportunity to do all this great studying of particularly people and performance at work. And we've just finished

this global study of engagement. And I won't dive into the details of exactly how we measured this, but 15.8% of people are fully engaged at work in the world. And you'll just have to trust me that there's a reliable methodology applied to that, which means 85% of us are just coming to work. 85% of us are just selling our time and our talent, getting money to go buy things that we love. And that means work really aren't right for us is because the world of work in which we live anyway is impatient with our uniqueness. We build, most companies today, are metaphors extending from the assembly line. There's more sophisticated versions of it, but there's sequences and there are processes. And nowadays we talk about lean processes, but within the context of that, uniqueness is a bug. Human uniqueness is a bug. And we want all leaders to be the same. We want all salespeople to be the same. We want all engineers because it's easier because you are one cog in a big machine. So the uniqueness of humans, which we as parents

or as friends or as lovers find beautiful, where we spend 40% of our time, that's annoying. We, with the best of intentions, we will grind down your uniqueness because it's frankly a little bit inefficient and a little bit annoying that you're not 10 salespeople who are all motivated by the same coin-operated extrinsic motivations. The idea that you might be 10 people in the same job with different motivations or styles is just annoying. The other part, of course, is we project. So when I give you advice on what you should do with your life, or even advice on what you should do in that next encounter you're going to bump into later on this afternoon, it's just easier for me. Because it's really all I've got. I've just got my own

experience and my own natural loves and loathes. And we can't help it. We're all so egoic, aren't we? We've all got such egos, which we don't necessarily feel, but the default is to overlay me on you. So if you actually start listening to this now, conversations, when you listen to them, are the battle of eyes. I say, well, gosh, I didn't sleep so well last night. Your natural reaction, well, I didn't sleep very well. Well, I just missed my, you know, I missed my plane too. It's just a battle of eyes. And it's comforting for us to overlay ourselves onto you. But of course, and we underlie that with the golden rule that you should treat people as you would like to be treated, which of course presupposes

that everybody likes to be treated the same way that you would, which when you peel that at all begins to sound super self-involved. But certainly that projection coupled with one last thing, which is a desire to fix things. We are frightened of things that are broken and we look at other people and we realize just how imperfect they are. And we can't help ourselves. We want to fix them. You put those three things together, an impatience with individuality and an instinct to project and then a desire to remediate. And boy, it's hard to let people just be free. Do you feel that those three things are influenced in any meaningful way by things like culture, gender, any other sort of identifiers?

We haven't, short answer is I don't know. We haven't seen any difference in a natural instinct to fix weaknesses versus build on strengths by gender. It's not as though women are more remedial than men or vice versa. It's not as though different people in different cultures have a different desire around this either. One of the analyses we've just done with these 19 countries we studied is look at what is the strongest driver of full engagement at work. And it remains in every country the same issue, the same question, which is, at work I have a chance to use my strengths every day. Whether you work in the United Arab Emirates, or whether you work in Edinburgh,

or whether you work in Eden Prairie, you want to feel as though you're seen for what is special and valuable about you. That is a human condition and desire and yearning wherever we were born. The only thing we do see is there is some difference in age. So the most remedial generation is the youngest. The least remedial generation is the greatest generation. Tell me what you mean by remedial.

Which do you think will help you be most successful, building your strengths or fixing your weaknesses? Okay. And the generation that is most predisposed to fix their weaknesses is Gen Y. Interesting. And then it gradually, the scales gradually tip over the course of your lifespan. And one could argue all sorts of reasons for why that is, but it's probably because over time you start to realize as a human that you are who you are, who you are. And so it's a bit of the Popeye syndrome of I am who I am. It's like, am I going to keep banging my head against the same wall

10 years down the road and then 20 years down the road eventually? You're just like, okay, so let me make peace with a certain amount of that. Right. You know, it's like that Broadway play, I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change. At some point with you as an individual, you think, I love me, I'm perfect, now change? Wait a minute. No, I love me, I'm perfect, now change? Wait a minute, no, I love me, I'm perfect, now contribute. That's kind of where you, that's probably what

maturity is, is coming to terms, not with your limitations, but coming to terms with your uniqueness and both the possibilities and the uniqueness that that entails. It seems like that would also overlay with the classic curve that you see about fulfillment slash happiness, which you would think, well, you're at your happiest and most fulfilled when you're younger. But it turns out that with every increasing decade, it's actually your 50s, 60s, and 70s where those things start to elevate. And I wonder if there's this overlay because there's a certain level of acceptance of,

okay, so I don't need to spend so much of my waking hours just trying to fix what's there's this overlay because there's a certain level of acceptance of you know like i okay so i don't need to spend so much of my waking hours just trying to fix what's wrong because maybe it's not what's wrong it's just not the central thing that allows me to flourish in the world and let me make peace with that and deepen into these other things yes there the one of the things that we wrote about in this latest book, Nine Lies About Work, was line number eight is that work-life balance matters most. And we address this because we do seem to be in love with balance. As balance equals health, the four humors in the body, we need to have them in balance. We put leeches on you so that we can get your blood back in balance with your

bile. And then that becomes the earth, fire, water, air. And there's a philosophical manifestation of that. Nature is in balance. And so balance is,

we, we have it as a metaphor for health. And yet, of course, if you ever found balance, if you, one morning at 9.15, you had the mortgage paid and the kids were happy and your spouse or partner was happy, work was going well and the grandparents were happy. If you ever got to that point, precarious point though it is, what would be running through your mind is,

nobody move. Everybody stop, stop, stop, stop, stop. I've got it. I got it. It's right down the date of the time. I'm perfectly in balance. Balance is stasis. Balance is stationary. What we now know, of course,

is that when we look up at the stars, they're not hanging there in balance. We know actually everything is in process. Everything is movement. That health is movement through in such a way that you get the nutrients that you need to be able to keep moving through. Everything is process. So as you think of applying that to us as individuals, we move through life. And all of us, because we are different, all of us draw strength from different contexts, different situations. Maybe there are some things that none of us like, like none of us like to be humiliated. None of us like to feel shame. But moving on through that, you find way more differences in terms of how we draw strength from other than death, public speaking is the greatest fear for many of us.

And yet there are clearly others of us who yearn for that kind of audience and a million other different examples of that. As we think of how you have a good life, one of the things that is a beautiful thing that you probably do accrue with age is an awareness that life is offering you, I don't know what the metaphor is, psychological oxygen of different kinds over the course of your life. And you start to realize that if you would but stop trying to be something that you're not, life is actually offering you up people, context, situations, moments that for no good reason other than who you are, they seem to invigorate you. And perhaps at 21, you're less attuned to that reality, and that over time, you realize that life is abundant in a very specific way for you, if you would but have the ears to hear it and the eyes to see it,

and the heart to feel it. Perhaps that's why at 50, 60, 70, you start going, no, life will provide. Life will provide. Or not. I guess there's probably some 70-year-olds who still haven't figured out that life is bountiful if you can just listen. Yeah. That all makes so much sense. And I also wonder if our metrics, the metrics by which we measure a good life evolve as well. Whereas like when we're earlier in life, you know, it's all about money, power, prestige. It's about accumulation and accomplishment and achievement.

And we look at, you know, the boxes that we check off are fairly well-defined and granular. And, you know, like, these are the things where I know when the last box is checked, I will have quote made it. And then we get there, you know, and we don't feel the way we thought we were going to feel. And somebody asks, well, how much more do you need? And the answer is always just a little bit more. It's the one more room syndrome in New York. Like we're in New York here. Everybody goes,

well, here's my apartment. I like, it just needs one more, just have one more room syndrome in new york like we're in new york here everybody goes well here's my apartment i like it just needs one more just have one more room right and because you then you get the one more room and you're like well there's one one more room a big a big closet maybe just yeah it's just slightly larger bathroom over there yeah it it's i'm you know i'm 53 now so you you start to look back and you realize that you were striving really hard to click off some of those boxes. But the, you know, I think it was Grace Slick who said, no matter how comfortable your bed is, sooner or later, you have to get out of it, which I've always loved as a metaphor for a comment on life. It doesn't matter how many rooms now your house has. Sooner or later, you've got to get up,

move through that day and feel either depleted at the end or energized at the end of the day. You're going to have to do that. That's what moving through life is. So the sooner you can realize that it doesn't matter how many rooms that house of yours has,

if it just has one more room, you've still got to move through that room with joy or with depletion, with elevation or with depression. I mean, you're the one that's drawing strength from life or not. And there's no box to tick off there. It's interesting. Gosh, I'm blanking on the name of the Japanese community

where everyone seems to live. Oh, that okinawa right yes and there's a there's a difference even a town in yeah i'm anyway talking about right the blue zones yes exactly and the blue zones and it's a charming and powerful discovery to realize that the reason so many of these people live so long isn't their wealth, isn't their diet. It's that they continue to do their thing. They continue to work. They don't retire. They found some things in life that for whatever reason, make them feel contributive, make them feel useful and valuable without suffering. They seem to enjoy it. And they keep doing it. They just keep doing them forever and then they live long and maybe diet may have a part to it as well. And chance may have a part to it as well. But there's clearly something that

human beings feel invigorated by when they have a chance to express, contribute themselves. And that enables you to feel life lived and then life lived longer. Yeah, I mean, it's the Japanese word, ikigai, translates roughly to the reason to jump out of bed in the morning. It's like those people have that and it stays with them for years and years and years. And they're also in community,

which is such a huge thing. 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, you mentioned this phrase and something that you also do write about in Nine Lives

work-life balance and how it's a misnomer and also how we're very process-oriented. One of the things that really has always rubbed me the wrong way about that phrase is that there's a presupposition about it, which is that those two things are in opposition. Absolutely. We create these categories. We have a lot of areas where we have category error. In this case, work and life are the two categories. And in work, the presupposition is that work is tough and challenging and difficult, and life is joyous and uplifting. And that work, you lose yourself in work, but you find yourself in life. You are dragged down by work, but you're uplifted by life. And so the challenge, of course,

is that you have to balance work and life so that you can put the scales where they need to be and not get dragged down too much. But of course, those are odd categories, right? Because work is part of life, actually. So community is part of life, family is part of life, spirituality is part of life. There's lots of bits of life. Work is a pretty big chunk of life. Okay, well, now that we've got that sorted out, work-life balance vanishes. And I don't mean just in terms of the normal triage of how do we make sure that our emails don't hit us during the child's school play or something, which we all deal with. We know that we've got a challenge in terms of making sure that we are present in whatever moments we happen

to be in. But the categories are wrong. We shouldn't think about work and life. We should think about love and loathe. Those are good categories. The world is set up so that we, for whatever reason, each one of us can draw strength or love certain things. And some of those things might be us as a dad, us as a mom, us as a friend, us as a volunteer, us as a worker. Tons of situations, people, context, moments that we encounter in each of those facets of our life. And the real challenge isn't to find work-life balance, it's to find love-loathe imbalance. If we have the right categories, we start going, can you deliberately imbalance your life toward more of those moments that you love? Because if you do, love is a precursor to contribution. So if you can deliberately

imbalance your life toward those things, moments, situations that you love and away from those you loathe, not a hundred percent, but can you, because no one else will do it for you, by the way, can you deliberately take responsibility for drawing strength from moments that you love, which by the way, is going to be different for everybody. Then you've created a life that nourishes you, not for self-aggrandizement, not for self-involvement, but for contribution. Boy, that's not easy. It's hard, but it's the right hard thing. Work-life balance is the wrong hard thing. We get category error.

We then end up with misprescription. Love-loathe imbalance is a really interesting concept to pursue when you're 11, as well as when you're, like imagine if we started to help our students think about their own experience as a totally unique experience and their experience of moving through the process of life as a totally unique one. And like, what's my responsibility in that?

Well, your responsibility is to imbalance your world so that you are drawing strength from it. And the 11 year old goes, huh, I kind of know what you mean by that. It's like you, you can identify, you can measure that regardless of how old you are. There was a chap, a teacher called me when he'd seen the first episode of Trombone Player Wanted, which is this, you know, I did this film series, 15 minute episodes. I did it for business people, but he had a bunch of 11 year olds in a school in vancouver island so just off vancouver and he called me said listen uh i've had the students all watch

the first episode the 15 minute one and um uh can we use it to build a class and i got it i'm like uh that wasn't for the students but okay yeah i hung up i forgot about it a year later he goes could you come up and see what we've done? And I'm like, wait, who are you again? And he described that he's got all these students on Vancouver Island, and there's a bunch of First Nation kids, particularly, where truancy rates are high, graduation rates are low, risky teen behavior, drugs, sex, alcohol was on the rise.

And they were trying to get the kids to stay in school, and the would say well i i don't see a future for me i don't the school is an instrument for what um and so we've used your chombo and play i wanted video as a way to get them to stay in school and i'm like wait what what did you say and he said come up so i flew up to vancouver took a little boat plane to vancouver island i went to school, this middle school. It's in a big, big, big school, but in the depressed mining community at that time. And we're going to give you a cardboard box at the beginning of the year, just a cardboard box. And it'll be your voice box. It's your voice box. Everyone's got a voice box. Here's a cardboard box. And throughout the course of the year, it'll start off as a brown cardboard box. But during the course of the year, you'll fill it. You'll fill it with moments, experiences, situations, context, people, whatever,

those things that you love. And from that, by the end of the year, you'll have a voice that's rich and has tone and precision to it. It's yours. And we don't behavior, you can own your own voice. And I'm like, wow, I walk into the room and there's brown cardboard boxes on the bottom. And then as you go up the side of the wall, they're increasingly colorful, filled boxes of these kids. And I said, what was the first thing you did with them? And he said, oh, we just gave him these little flip cams. And we said, here's a question that you know the answer to. Everyone has to go back. And over the next two days, all you have to do is do a two-minute video clip of answering the question, when was the last time a day flew by? When was the last time a day flew by?

And he said, of course, every 11 years, they know the answer to that question. And what's super cool is that you had 25 kids in that class, of course, in the first class. Every one of them had a different two-minute video. But your point, you know, at 11, you know that your life speaks to you in a language you understand. And the problem with school mostly is that no one's interested. Well, similar to what you described as the factory model. I mean, the schools were meant to feed into that. So it's all about order and training for whatever that next environment is going to be. So of course, we wouldn't be teaching

the things like what you just experienced. And because it's counter to the model of economic prospering that, you know, has been built for generations now. Although the funny thing is, it isn't. Like it can't be financially capitalistically sensible to have 85% of people not engaged at work. It's disastrous. I mean, but that was the assumption for so long. Yes.

And it's intriguing that we've created a world in which almost we've baked alienation in because everyone's a little – think about healthcare. A place where you'd have thought because apparently we need to know why we work and if we know the purpose of our work, we're more engaged. Well, that couldn't be a profession where the purpose of your work is more available for you to see as patients get better. Nurses and doctors should be the most engaged because they're so close to their purpose. And yet we know 73% of doctors would not advocate to their children to be doctors. We know we're going to have a 25,000 doctor shortage in the US in the next five years. We know that the only profession more disengaged than doctors is nurses with levels of PTSD higher than returning veterans from Afghanistan and Iraq. And the only person you wouldn't want to be more than a doctor or a nurse is the patient on the receiving end of a super disengaged doctor or nurse.

We've created situations in hospitals where you have a nurse supervisor and then 72 nurses reporting to the nurse supervisor. And we wonder, I mean, it might make financial sense to have that sort of span of control, but you imagine a nurse, one of the 72 walking in and going, I don't think anyone sees me. I don't think anyone knows I'm even here, let alone what I love or loathe or I'm into or I'm struggling with. I'm not seen. And we have created that as though it makes good financial sense. But actually, what you want from the nurse is you want innovation, resilience, creativity, generosity, all those wonderful things that we could be helping our 11-year-olds know about how to take responsibility for, so that when you become

a nurse at 23, 24, we know quite a lot about how to help you feel those things. It would make tremendous financial sense to teach that kind of life living early. And yet we don't. And then we wonder why we have high levels of PTSD in nurses than veterans. We've got something wrong. And the thing that, I know it's a silly word to use in the context of work, but we've got love wrong. We have CEOs saying we want people to be creative and resilient and powerful and open. And they describe all these adjectives and then imagine you can put them on a wall in a break room or employee manual and and get them but those adjectives those descriptions are things that you only feel if you are when you are either in love with a

person or in love with an activity or situation. Love is a thing. We've got to really examine that word. If we want, I'm talking purely pragmatically here, if we want really productive, creative, innovative, resilient employees, we can't use cognitive euphemisms like discretionary effort. And we've got to go, okay, then how are we going to get employees to find love in our work? I don't mean just do what you love because that's too bland. I mean, how can you find like those students in that classroom? How can we help

people to find their voice, find love in what they do? Because then love combined with technique and practice, that turns into contribution, which of course kid's experience and then vocabulary and then realm of possibility at a young age where then all the choices that they make after that aren't corrective and stifling. You know, it's building upon a deeper realization. And it's not fake. It's not like you're not putting it on someone as a palliative. You're saying to a real 11-year, no, no, no, no, no, no, seriously. When was the last time a day flew by? That's not immaterial. It's super material. And by the way, it's available to you and it'll be available to you when you're 16. It'll be

available to you. That's why we say nine lies. If you want to have a really engaged life at work, spend a week in love with your job. Spend a week in love with your role right now. You may discover that you're in the wrong job, but most of us won't. We will discover that there's an awful lot of activities in the course of a week that we lean into. Like, love what you do. This teacher had their truancy rates went down, their graduation rates went up so much that the supervisor of the entire district of British Columbia said, take that class.

And now they've had 10,000 kids go through this. That's amazing. No budget. Well, sorry, the budget was cardboard boxes. And you go, oh, this is so eminently doable. And it's not in any way dismissive of the 11-year-old child. Right. And making them, I don't know, feel better that they,

I don't know that they too have a voice. It's no, it's really serious, meaty, gritty, hard work. You have an set of experiences in the course of your week at school. Your emotional reaction to those is different than anyone else's. Uh, your emotional reaction to those tells you something about you. We are going to help you have, you said about a vocabulary a vernacular a set of rituals maybe to help you learn how you can use life to inform the voice that you have and therefore the contribution you can make okay that's cool and and if we could as employers what i love the idea was employers would fund that like crazy if they knew that therefore they would be getting graduates at 21, 22 who had been schooled, not in being self-involved, but in being aware of how to draw strength from life so that contribution could be made. Not to get too kind of rarary about it, but if that isn't what school should be for, then we need to really re-examine what we've got school designed for. Because at the moment, it's not entirely clear to me what problem it's solving. Yeah. And I think a lot of people are really starting to look at that. You know,

we're seeing progressive education sort of like really dive into how do we do this differently? And what is the, why are we actually doing what we're doing? And where is it leading to? Like, what's the outcome that we want? to a life well lived to organizations or companies or entities out there in the world who are doing anywhere near what they're truly capable of doing on the level of impact and contribution. And we're so aligned with this in so many ways. And like the idea of early education, especially focusing around a process of self-discovery,

of self-awareness, of self-revelation. I feel like sometimes we feel like that's too trippy. It's too soft. It's too self-discovery, of self-awareness, of self-revelation, I feel like sometimes we feel like that's too trippy. It's too soft. It's too self-involved. But in fact, that is the heartbeat of an improved society on almost every level. Well, as we're seeing with the healthcare profession, technique minus love equals burnout. If you take technique, in whatever form you're looking at, whether it's technique of being an emergency room nurse, or whether it's the technique of being a software engineer, whatever the technique is, if you then don't help the person know which of the activities inside of that technique that they draw strength from, and the Mayo Clinic's research is super

interesting on this. They looked at how many hours doctors said they were doing things at work that they loved. And they just counted the hours and counted the number of activities that they were saying that they loved. If you get below 20% of your job doing what you love, 19, 18, 17, each point reduction has a commensurate linear one point increase in burnout risk it's like a it's like a perfect seesaw but they found out if you get above 20 percent 25 30 percent you don't see a commensurate decrease in burnout which for them and obviously we need to research this more but it seems as though a little love can go a long way. It doesn't need to be, and the analogy we used in the book was your fabric of your life is made up of many threads.

Some of them black, some of them white, some of them gray, whatever. But there are red threads. Some of these threads are red. Some of these activities are made of a different material for you. They are, because you happen to be a person who loves stress. Your red thread is you love the stress of trying to keep somebody alive on the operating table because another person loves empathy. You happen to love when they come around. I'm using healthcare examples here, but it's not as though every person in the same job has the same red threads, but every one of us has red threads. And the challenge for us isn't to quote the Mayo Clinic research, it isn't to build an entirely red quilt. It's to weave these red threads intelligently into

the fabric of our lives. And when we do that, we are stronger. This material, this love or activities that we love material is strengthening for us. And therefore, we do contribute more and we can contribute longer. However you wanted to slice it, whether you were slicing it spiritually, whether you were slicing it pragmatically, it simply makes tons of sense for a society to take each person's red threads really seriously, really early. And to realize that as parents or as teachers, whatever, you can't tell someone what their red threads are. Right. But you can foster it. You can nourish it.

Yes. Or you can snuff it out. Yes. Or you can make it irrelevant. Yeah. And say to a child at 14, 15, we don't care what yours are. We're going to tell you what yours should be. And down that road lies many, many things that we're seeing lately that are super destructive for a child.

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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. I love the idea of the red thread also. Flight Risk. this horrible challenge, like big giant, and lays this red thread back.

And by doing that, is able to trace their way back to a place of homecoming, of power, of a sense of I've done what I came to do. Yes. I mean, I actually hadn't thought of the Minotaur, but I was thinking of red threads as actual threads you weave. But of course, you're right. You find your way back. One of the stories we write about in the book is about Sergey Polin,

the ballet dancer who was probably the best ballet dancer in the last 100 years, male ballet dancer for the Royal Ballet Company. And he was trained for 15 years with the Royal Ballet Company and then got to be a male soloist. And after two years of that, quit because he was being told to dance the classical repertoire according to the classical Royal Ballet way. And for whatever reason, that dragged him down. And the only way he found himself sort of finding his way back to his own life was to find, which we talk about, which I'll dive into here, but find the right red thread college cheating scandal and stuff where we have kids who aren't seen and we have to help kids find their way and i'm connected to it through ways that i so wish i wasn't but helping kids to find their way back to their strength through the

their own red threads we cannot tell people what they're drawn to. We have to let them, whether it's weaving a thread or following to use your, following your way out of, if you ever find yourself lost in your career, in your life, the way back is to spend a week in love. No matter how tough your life is right now, spend a week in love with your life. Find those particular activities that you know,

ineffably you know are ones that invigorate you. And then you just, with all trust and intention, you follow where they lead. Because wherever it will be, it might be renumerative, it might not be. But it will be restorative. It'll fill you. Yes. It may not fill your bank account. But it'll fill you with the stuff that you need to be able to get up the next day and do it again. Yeah. It's so important. And I feel like that's, it's such an important

point that you're making also is this, that last part, especially, which is that we really do feel, I think that there's like, that thing has to also be the thing that becomes the central source of income for us. And, and I agree with you. I do believe that very often we can take whatever gig we're at or job or industry or whatever it is now, and we can kind of deconstruct it a little bit. We can do your love and loathe exercise and realize that there are actually seeds of these things that exist that maybe are only 20% now, but if we're intentional about it, we can grow that to 80% and love a lot more. But I also know that there are times where there are things that are really high on the love list that either will never

generate a livable income for us, and maybe they shouldn't also. Maybe it's actually okay, and maybe it's actually a better thing to kind of keep those on the side and do them purely without any attachment or expectation beyond just our ability to do them, to engage with them and to feel the way we feel when we're doing them. Yes, it raises the question of how do you define income? I mean, there's financial income, but there's other sources of income and spiritual or psychological income

is not to be sniffed at. You want to burn yourself out. And we always say, you shouldn't bring your work, your home problems to work. And it's always struck me as odd because that's by far more, you know, far more dangerous the other way around. People bringing their alienated empty selves from work back home to their kids, to their spouse or partner, to their community. We have lots of sources of income. from work back home to their kids, to their spouse or partner, to their community, we have lots of sources of income and psychological income is hugely valuable for us as human beings. It's interesting, part of this study we've just done, we asked, we tried to look at what work

status is most engaging, whether there was a relationship between full-time, part-time, gig, non-gig, one part-time, two jobs, three part-time, and we sort of sliced it everywhere you could think of. And it turns out the most engaging work status, and it's not the most powerful explainer of engagement, but if you were to say which work status is the most engaging, it's one full-time job and one part-time job for a different company. And it seems as though that may well be the best of both worlds, if you will. The stability of one full-time job, which, you know, ideally would give you everything you need, but the stability of that. And then a side hustle or side hustles, plural, where there may be some income, but when we asked the people with the side hustles what you love most about them, they said,

and this is not going to surprise you at all, two reasons, two reasons came to the top. This is in every country. Greater responsibility for my own time and effort, so more agency, and then second, a greater opportunity to do more of what I love and money wasn't money was not not there but it was like way down I took the side hustle because I wanted some place where I can control what I do and then some place where I can actually do

things that I love yeah and when people do that when they do a side hustle like that they are more engaged now this doesn't mean that everyone should have a side hustle I don't mean that at all I just mean it's interesting. You slice the data 17 ways to Sunday, you end up with, huh, yeah, best of both worlds. Isn't that funny? Yeah. It actually, it correlates with,

have you ever read the book Daily Rituals? I haven't actually. Oh, you would love this book. Really? You got to check it out. Actually, there's a new version of it out. So the author tracked the 24-hour window of the, like, what would a person do in the lives of a whole bunch of some of the world's leading,

like, writers, creators, artists, and people like this. And they mapped the patterns, you know, like they said, okay, across this wide cross-section of people. And what was fascinating to me, I mean, there are a lot of really interesting data points from that, but one of the things that stood out completely validates what you're saying, which is that many of the people who we know as the greatest writers, the greatest artists, the greatest innovators or inventors actually like worked from nine to five at the post office or as a CPA or did something like this. And that bought them the peace of mind, the security, like the, I'm gonna take care of my family thing. And it was okay.

It wasn't terrible, but it wasn't fantastic. It was just okay. But it gave them the peace of mind and allowed them still, you know, plenty of cognitive and creative access to go and play nine to five or seven to nine at night or like one day a week on the weekends. And even in that compressed amount of time, the work that they were able to create

was so free from commercial expectation that it was astonishing. And they became known in the world, not for their nine to five, but for the work that they were creating on the side. And had they not had that main thing, they probably would have felt so constrained by like, will this sell? Yeah. That they never would have given themselves a freedom. Well, Einstein's probably the best example of that, isn't he? Working in the patent office in Geneva and then in his spare time, just, I don't know, reinventing reality. Just a small thing like that, right, right. But yes, it goes back to your term of the difference between transformation and liberation.

Why are we busy transforming ourselves? We're not broken. Stop fixing me. I'm not broken. Instead, can you liberate what's inside of me? If you've got a stable, you know, full-time job, as you said, it kind of, it doesn't deplete you and drain you. It gives you enough of a platform for you to be able to move into something else whereas as you said no financial expectation at

all which frees you liberates you to discover things and connections about you and contributions you can make that help you feel you're most you i mean why was einstein doing that stuff because he couldn't not do it he was in love with that part of his brain and it wasn't renumerative until it became so, which sometimes side hustles can really become, you get so amazingly valuable in the fact that you've opened 17 more doors than anyone else has in that space

that it becomes a thing that you can live on if you so choose. Yeah, and you also, if you're creating in that side thing and that thing, like if it were a mainstream pursuit, was governed by a certain paradigm, a certain set of accepted rules. You know, like by operating on the side, you can kind of sidestep the limitations of the paradigm and you can be the maverick. You don't have to worry about being judged or ostracized from the paradigm or the community, you know, whether it's academia or the linear nature of like the way you're supposed to be in science. It just, it frees you. It's so fascinating to know that your most recent research and the data is supporting this in a lot of interesting ways. It suggests that we should make make and there's been a number of articles of late saying that gig work is lonely and atomizing and so forth but actually this data our data seems to show that we should make more work more regular

work like gig work in the sense that we should give people this data also show that people are capable of feeling super connected to their team even if if they're a gig worker, and even if they're remote. Team, that sense of being connected and that sense of making a contribution isn't a function of location. It's a function of that feeling that you have. So as we think about how to make work better for people, looking at those data points that show that one full-time, one part-time, and then what is it about the part-time? Oh, it's about the agency and the opportunity to do what you love and the freedom. Huh, I wonder if we could take some instructive lessons to weave those threads back into more traditional work. I know, given what you just said, actually, about not being constrained.

I know when I first wrote First Book, All the Rules, my first book, I had a full-time job and I didn't really have any, no one was telling me to go write that 17th book proposal, 18th book proposal, 19th. It's just, it becomes, as Churchill said, it's like somebody that you sneak off to see because it's so freeing. And I wasn't, I mean, I had no idea that it would become a thing. It was incredibly freeing to realize that it didn't have to be a thing. It could just be an expression of me, hopefully in some useful way.

That is a, it's a lovely state of mind to find yourself in. Yeah. There's Anthony Bourdain told the story when he wrote Kitchen Incompetential. He was then full-time running Lizelle in New York. And he never thought a single person would ever read this.

So he just wrote exactly what he wanted to write. Zero filter. He thought a handful of people who work in kitchens would read this. And they all kind of knew this was reality anyway. So he was like, there was nothing he was holding back you know and that gave him the freedom

to just utterly do what he wanted to do express exactly what he wanted to express and he also knew he had his thing we're all you know

human beings I think are wired to see authenticity yeah and that's why Sergey Polonin's thing where he this is the dancer who quit

the Royal Ballet Company at 21, found his way back. And he's a character. I mean, he's, you know, tattooed up the wazoo and is clearly a maverick in his own way. The way that he followed his red thread back to some coherence in his life was going to a friend and saying, just choreograph a piece for me that is, I don't care which ballet company it's for or not for. I don't care which repertoire it is or it isn't in. I'm going to take, Hozier's take me to church and I'm going to write a piece of choreography that is manifesting the purest, best expression of me. And I don't really have any, I have no idea where this is going to go other than I'm going to put something out in the world that no one else could put out in the world.

And you might like it, you might not. But we, what is it, 28, 29 million people now have seen that. Because even if we don't love ballet, we look at it and go, that is the purest, most authentic expression of that particular weird, wonderful human. And we lean into, even if we don't love that art form or what we lean into the authenticity of it how many cooks and chefs read anthony bourdain's book probably a lot but how many people who aren't really interested in that part of the world still read it because authenticity in and of itself is a beautiful we are so attracted to the purest expression of another soul. Weird is actually, I mean, we're all weird, but weird, I was talking to a friend of mine I work with,

and she was like, weird is actually from the Old English, you probably know this, W-Y-R-D, which is the Old English for spirit. It's the Old English word for daimon, is weird. As in, you're weird it could be y-o-u apostrophe r-e weird you're or why oh you are what's your what's your weird your weird is your spirit it's your essence it's your authenticity and we are drawn to it obviously we want you to manifest it healthily ethically morally intelligently but we are drawn we want you to manifest it healthily, ethically, morally, intelligently.

But we are drawn to the purest authentic expression of another human. Even if we don't necessarily love the art form, we go, oh, that's a thing. Leaders too. It's why in the ninth chapter of the book, the lie is leadership is a thing. And the truth, of course, is that we follow people who are weird. We follow people who've taken their weird so seriously that we trust it, even if we don't agree with all their policies. If they're a politician, let's say, we still go, you know what? That person knows quintessentially who they are, as I follow that person into the forest of the future, I can guarantee that this person knows how they're going to behave, how they're going to show up, what they're going to stand firm in. And even though I don't agree with everything they stand

for, or I can see that they're imperfect, because leadership is first, I mean, followership rather, is first and foremost an act of forgiveness. I forgive that because your weird is something that I can see and trust in. And so there's an attraction to people's weird. And at the extreme, there's attraction to leaders who have combined their weirdness with something that matters to us. And there's lessons for us there. Yeah. So, so agree with that. And there's lessons for us there. Yeah, so agree with that. I mean, there is a resonance. There's almost like a gravitational force that comes from that person

that attracts people, resources, possibilities, opportunities into their orbit. And you can't necessarily, well, like, what are they doing? Like, what are the steps that they've taken to do that that we can replicate and train other people to do? And it's not, like you're saying, it is not about that. It's about them standing so utterly, transparently and fully in the essential nature of who they are, that there's something that radiates from that being that people want to be around. know not to get political but it right now you know president trump is a polarizing sort of figure but he it's funny to see the articles which say well how can people keep supporting and since he's lied 9 000 times whatever the count is and you go that's we're smart he makes

us smart we can hold two thoughts in our mind at the same time one is that this particular person is not perfect by any means and two we seem to believe that this person is deeply in the spirit of himself. He knows exactly who himself is. Now we could have debates about whether or not that manifests itself healthily, but that's beside the point. If we're just looking at leaders, you have to turn around as a leader. And if people are following you, then you are one. And he can turn around and he sees people falling. Now that's a leader. Now we can then debate policy decisions, but we are attracted to people who stand coherently, lovingly, firmly, uniquely in their weird, and then move it in a direction that matters to us. We wrote deeply about Martin Luther King in the final chapter of that book, because there

were so many other civil rights leaders of that time who wanted the same thing, whether it's Malcolm X, Ralph Abernathy, whether it's John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, all of whom had the same sort of goal. Martin Luther King had a very specific weird, and that weird wasn't strategic in terms of the grand plan, and then we're going to do this. He wasn't policy, really, in terms of first this law, then this, then this. The thing that we zeroed in on that last chapter was his genius for crucible making, flashpoints. You go to Selma, you do the bus boycott, you go to Chicago. He was always a genius and so courageous at finding those flashpoints, which created moments that were contingent. He didn't know what was going to happen next. He

just knew that if we missed that flashpoint, it would be a missed opportunity for people to come together and go, where do you stand? Where do you stand? Why did he end up in Memphis on that? He didn't need to go to Memphis and see. It was another flashpoint. And his genius and why, I mean, there's so many reasons why we are inspired by him, but one of them is that he knew exactly, and he was obviously so quiet and noble and nonviolent in his approach to creating these moments of extreme heat in which people had to decide for themselves, where do I stand? But when we think of him, we see this person who was so strong in his own sense of self. He knew that there was no way he couldn't go. He couldn't not go to Memphis. He's going to Memphis. It's pouring with rain. He's going to go anyway. He's sick. He's

going to go anyway. Why? Because he creates these furnaces and then he does it again. And then he does it again. And in his, is that the right way to lead? As you said, oh, should we all follow those steps? No, no. There are other ways to advance that particular cause. And there are other leaders who are advancing it differently. So it's not as though we can look at Martin Luther King and go, oh, we should all be that way as a leader. There are no steps. What we see in him was a beautifully, powerfully unique dent in the world that he made. And we are following it because it was so purely him

and of course it where he was moving generally mattered to many of us but it's yes you're right it's very hard to take the steps of that man and sort of transpose them into our own if we're not careful we end up losing the very thing that we got to have as leaders, which is authenticity. Yeah. And it's so interesting too, because you, I've heard so many people explore this, this idea of modeling. Let's take somebody like that. Let's designate them as the quote exemplar, you know, and let's, let's deconstruct their thought process, their brain, their behavior, their actions, their, all the things that we can potentially deconstruct. And then we'll create a model that is teachable and we'll model that so that then others can line up

and step into that model. And the assumption is thereby have similar results. And I've always been so mightily suspect of that because that model is, even if you assume that you could deconstruct all of the things, all of the data points that went into it, it's relevant and effective only for one person. And that's the person you're modeling. And the chance that you are close enough in all the different ways to that one person so that you could step into that and have it be even minimally effective is slim to none. Yeah. No, it's the akin to, you know, you look at Steve Jobs on stage doing his once every three months product launches, and you see a person in a black turtleneck and jeans in his essence.

Even when he's dying, you see a man who's fully alive. And every time you see him, you get drawn further closer to the world of Apple. You see Tim Cook, who's just as smart as him, differently perhaps, but do the same thing. Just look at the pictures. Go online, look at the pictures.

And he looks, every time you see him on stage, you go, I'm going to lean back a little bit more. It's the wrong venue. It's the wrong moment. It's the wrong situation. He looks less of a leader every time he does it. And it's bizarre that no one's told him this,

but that everyone knows it. Don't ever do that again, mate. If you want us to follow you, that is, or at least find a different way to do it so that it seems like you. Of course, we know this in the performing arts. We know that you would never tell Ed Sheeran to sing like, you know, Frank Sinatra or Beyonce to sing like Halsey. You know these singers are different. You just know. The same way with comedians. You would never say,

well, what's the model for funny? Well, I suppose it depends. If you're looking at Steve Martin, it's put a crazy hat on and put an arrow through your head and strum the banjo and wag your knees. But if you're Eddie Murphy, it's put on a spandex sort of suit and be as if you're chris rock if you're sarah so you just keep you you know there's no

model for funny the only thing that any comedian has in common with another really good comedian is that the people in the audience are laughing so the question then becomes much less about, well, what's the model for being a comedian and more, well, what's your way, do you have one, of getting people to laugh? We've got a tsunami of models in the corporate world at the moment. Everyone is being held up against competency models. These are being,

frankly, it was one of the reasons why I wanted to write this book right now, was because we are about to take a bunch of assumptions and bake them into math in the form of algorithms and machine learning algorithms inside of human capital management systems, which sounds a bit esoteric, but it's just that for anyone working, whether they know it or not, they live inside of a human capital management system that deals with their pay, their promotion opportunities, their succession planning, what sort of training or development they should receive, whether they're a high potential or not. And we are about to bake in all of our assumptions about human beings into these algorithms that are going to supposedly spot our talent and position our talent with increasing ongoing intelligence.

And yet, unfortunately, so many of the fundamental assumptions about humans and humans at work are deeply flawed and not flawed in some idealistic sense, just flawed in terms of what the real world looks like. And we got it now is a now of all the times is the time to go. What do we want to bake into, if anything? What do we want to bake into these algorithmically machine learning systems? Yeah, I mean, we are creating the matrix. Yeah. And we're optimizing for metrics that are not human flourishing driven and very likely genuine impact driven. Yeah, we're in an interesting moment, which is, I think it's, I love the fact that you're sort of putting a flag in the sand right now saying, can we just pause for a moment and re-examine some of the fundamental assumptions by which we A, live our lives

and B, build and structure the organizations, which in theory, we would spend huge amounts of our waking hours in service of, and just say, is this true? Like when we look the fundamental assumptions that got us here, are these things true? Because a lot of them aren't.

Well, when we put these nine lies together, the first assumption was, you know, I'm a researcher by background. So I want to start every sentence with, well, the research says, or the data says. And I know, obviously, there are some parts about life that are unmeasurable and ineffable and just inspiring for their own. I totally get that. And yet, there are clearly some things we know about human beings. One of the most obvious of which is that we are enduringly unique, each one of us is.

And that's a beautiful thing to see the uniqueness of a human. And all the stuff that we've talked about today is about the expression of that human usefully for the benefit of the particular human and hopefully for the benefit of the people around that human. And so we know that. And yet, if you look at so many of the fundamental assumptions that we are now baking into our world at work. Even the first lie is that people care which company they work for, because we have an assumption that each company has a unique culture. And we, in fact, we tell CEOs that they should build a particular kind of culture. And what's your company culture is probably the top question asked in job interviews.

And then of course, we have the second lie is the best plan wins because we think everyone should be aligned around a coherent plan. The third lie is the best companies cascade goals because we ought to align people through coercion, through goals being mini goals of the CEO, mini, mini goals, mini, mini, mini, mini. And suddenly yours arrive in your little field in your software tool, which says, here are your goals. They've just landed upon you. Every one of these, if you go through all the nine lies, they're all well-intended, but they're all actually coercive.

They are designed to ensure that the uniqueness of a human being is ground down. And we do it because we think that's going to be efficient. But of course, what you're grinding out with all of that, you're grinding out not just creativity and innovation and inclusion and true diversity, but you're also in the end, you're just grinding down resilience. No wonder we are sicker at work than we've ever been. It's killing us. And it doesn't have to be that way because human beings have found the apex human technology for making use of the fact that we're all so different. And we found it 50,000 years ago and we called it a team. Teams make homes for individuals. It was our way of going, wait a minute minute you're different from me

and we're different from her and oh yeah maybe together we could accomplish something together we couldn't do alone and yet as we say in the first chapter of the book you can't we can't see the teams we do not build organisms we talk about teamwork as a palliative on top of this alienating machine that we all live in i'll have have a bit more teamwork. But we actually can't see where the teams happen. We've had a fundamental misunderstanding of where the work is. Google doesn't know how many teams it has, who's on them, who's leading them,

which are the best. And that's no knock on Google, no company. They're not different than anyone else. No, they're the same as everyone else. We just don't, we don't know where the work is, which is probably why it's so disengaging because we haven't been able to address the actual place where work lives. There's a moment right now for us to stop, take a step back, whether we want to think about it

spiritually or whether we want to think about it in terms of the capitalistic outcomes that we want to drive. And those things do not have to be in opposition to one another. We can think about how you marry the needs of a large organization to achieve great things and the needs of an individual to live an authentic good life. There's a marriage there. And that marriage flows through an appreciation of human uniqueness and the fact that the team is the way in which we take advantage of the fact that each one of us is not the same. That's not easy. It's hard to do that. But it's the right hard thing. And at the moment, we're doing the wrong hard things. And it's hurting people. Yeah.

It makes so much sense. In the end, it comes back to people and the nature of the relationships between us. It feels like a good place for us to come full circle as well. So we're sitting here in this container, a good life project. If I offer out the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? Oh gosh. When you say that, to live a good life, what comes to mind for me is that I take myself really seriously. To live a good life is to take seriously your natural reactions to the situations and contexts and people that you meet. To take seriously if you recoil from something and consistently recoil, even though everyone's

telling you that you shouldn't. To take seriously where you lean in, where you find something flows, where you find something, even when you're done with it, you're not depleted, you're up somehow. Take that super seriously and respect the unique pattern that that implies and the unique contribution that that implies. Take that seriously

because if you don't take that seriously in you, if you don't honor that in you, you won't be able to honor it in anybody else. A good life starts, not to be self-involved, but a good life starts with you taking seriously the natural reactions that you have to the world that you live within. And while you're at it, if you've ever asked yourself, what should I do with my life? We have created a really cool online assessment that will help you discover the source code for the work that you're here to do. You can find it at sparkotype.com. That's S-P-A-R-K-E-T-Y-P-E.com. Or just click the link in the show notes. And of course, if you haven't already done so,

be sure to click on the subscribe button in your listening app so you never miss an episode. And then share, share the love. If there's something that you've heard in this episode that you would love to turn into a conversation, share it with people and have that conversation. Because when ideas become conversations that lead to action, that's when real change takes hold. See you next time.

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