The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 467: Marcus Buckingham - How To Find Love In Your Work, Designing The Future Of Education, & Breaking All The Rules

Episode Date: April 10, 2022

Text Hawk to 66866 to join tens of thousands of others who subscribe to "Mindful Monday" -- A carefully curated email to help you start your week off right... Full show notes at www.LearningLeader.com Twitter/IG: @RyanHawk12    https://twitter.com/RyanHawk12 Marcus Buckingham is best selling author of 10 books, including his international hit, "First, Break All The Rules," He's been the subject of in-depth profiles in The New York Times, The Today Show, and by Oprah. Marcus spent two decades studying excellence at the Gallup Organization and co-creating the StrengthsFinder tool. His latest book is called Love + Work. Notes: "When you see someone do something with excellence, there is always love in it– loveless excellence is an oxymoron." Fear versus Love – "The evolutionary purpose of fear is to narrow your focus to a few clear choices, fight or flight, the point of love is to create in you such feelings of safety and connection that you broaden your outlook and build your strengths." If you're feeling fear, there's something you're passionate about Excellence = They take their love seriously They are confident that their love is worth paying attention to They are vivid in what they're drawn to Consistent They value mastery "We aren't short on time, but on energy." How Marcus would design a school: Teach self-awareness and self-mastery curriculum Get rid of the SAT, ACT, and GPA Your fullest life is one where your loves and your work flow in an infinite loop. The energy of the one fuels the energy of the other. Thus, the only way you'll make a lasting contribution in life is to deeply understand what it is that you love. Goals: "Goals are tricky. They are one of the most common characteristics of your working world, and yet they're also one of the least loving. They don't have to be loveless."  The Red Thread questionnaire. It's full of "When was the last time…" questions: "You lost track of time…" "You surprised yourself by how well you did…" "you found yourself actively looking forward to work…" Never brag – Don't say, "I'm the best." Instead say, "I"m at my best when…" And "You can rely on me for…" Marcus shared how he responded to his ex-wife being involved in the college admission scandal where she offered large sums of cash for their kids to get into USC

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book to get your free copy today. Welcome to the Learning Leaders Show presented by Insight Global. I am your host, Brian Hawk. Thank you so much for being here. Text, Hawk to 66866 to become part of Mindful Monday. You along with tens of thousands of other learning leaders from all over the world will receive a carefully curated email from me each Monday morning to help you start your week off right. You'll also receive details about how my book, The Pursuit of Excellence, will help you become a more effective leader. Text, Hawk to 66866. Now on to tonight's featured leader. He's back.

The great Marcus Buckingham is the best-selling author of 10 books, including his international hit, First, break all the rules. He's been the subject of in-depth profiles in the New York Times, the Today Show, and by Oprah. Marcus spent two decades studying excellence at the Gallup Organization and co-creating the strengths finder tool. His latest book is called Love and Work during this conversation. We discussed how he responded to his ex-wife, being involved in the college admission scandal where she offered large sums of cash for their kids to get into USC.

Wild part. I'm grateful that Marcus went there. And then why we should be a scavenger for love within our work and how we can do this. And then Marcus shares what we can change in our school's curriculum to better prepare kids to be more effective as adults. This one's so good. Ladies and gentlemen, it's Marcus Buckingham. Marcus, I loved having you on one time.

So when the opportunity came for you to come back on, I could not resist, man. So good to have you back on The Learning Leader Show. Welcome. Thank you, Ryan. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. So to start, your next book is called Love and Work. And I was digging into the depths of it and really analyzing and love it.

one of the things I noticed about this book is that it's personal. In fact, you write a lot about Michelle, who is your fiancé. You guys are not married yet, correct? No, in a couple of, well, a few weeks. Oh, wow. Okay. That's coming up. Coming up.

But you write a lot about her, and you even publish a number of her journal entries. And I think that's, it's a little scary to do stuff like that to really put your personal life out there and to publish that. What made you want to focus so much of this work on your love with your partner? Well, the pandemics have been a funny situation for all of us. We've all gone down pretty deep in all sorts of different ways. And some of those deep diving is pretty scary where you look in the mirror and you see who you are and you ask questions about what's important to you and what you value and what you want to be an activist for. And some days it's super confusing. And then certainly for me anyway, there were other days where it was really

clarifying in terms of what kind of a contribution you wanted to make in the world and what kind of dent you wanted to leave behind. And as I was thinking about everything that I've done over the last 25 years, there's been a lot of data, a lot of effort to try to bring reliable data about the human experience into the world of work. But I haven't really shared my own personal story. And people have their own stories to tell. and my story, I felt as though, would be a way for people to kind of pivot and think differently about their own story. And if we're going to share a story, then we're going to do it honestly and lovingly.

Love is seeing someone. So I felt as though without, you know, without breaking down any barriers that I thought were inappropriate, to share kind of where love is played in my life. and particularly how we develop in response to another human being. Whether we like it or not, we're not living on an island all by ourselves. We all grow in response to other human beings. And those human beings who really see us with love are part of our story. So I hoped that in sharing some of Michelle's life and her work and her writings and what she loves,

it brings vividness to a story. And if there's vividness in my story, then the reader, hopefully we'll find increasing vividness in theirs. Did you have some fear to publish that work? Yeah, always. I mean, I'm a repressed Brit. As I say in the book, it's like, it's just so much easier for me not to share anything. I've written, this is my 10th book, but I haven't really shared any details of my own personal

journey in any of those books. And so, yeah, it's a little, it's a little unnerving. It's still a little unnerving, but it's real and it feels honest and loving. So if I put all those things together, I feel like if you're going to do anything with love, you're going to have some fear because you desperately want to be helpful. Love is a really, really good clue to where you want to make a contribution. And of course, instinctive fear is a great clue to what you love. If you don't feel any fear, you probably aren't moving down a pathway of love.

You've probably slipped off that path somewhere. So yeah, there's a little fear, but at the same time it feels, Feels loving. I feel like the most rewarding outcomes have come from the scariest things. You know what I mean? Whether it was an athletic achievement or in your personal life sharing a little bit more than maybe you're used to, whatever it may be, it feels like the greatest rewards come from a moment when you're pretty scared.

And you're willing to kind of push past that and push your edges. And it then connects with people. And they feel that and they can relate to that a lot more than just the, hey, here's how to be a better manager type of a book. Yeah. And it's one hopes that it isn't like self-involved. One is simply just saying, hey, listen, this is how it played out with me. Because I've, you know, I'm 25 years into this, Ron. And it's like I've got the same sort of ups and downs as everyone had.

And as I talk about in the book, a career is like a scavenger hunt for love, really. I graduated from university in England and almost immediately moved to Lincoln, Nebraska. Why? Like, why the heck would you do that? And what can that say, if anything at all, about careers in general? Well, for me, a career was a scavenger hunt for love. You're just constantly looking for one little sign, one little red thread, as I call it in the book, that you can pull on. And that for me, there was something, there was some red threads.

There was some loves in Lincoln, Nebraska. And I'm 21 years old. I have no friends. I have no foundation in Lincoln, Nebraska, other than there's something about that work at that company called Gallup at the time. There was some love there. I don't know where I would lead.

I certainly didn't know it would lead to writing books and being on your show today. But if you follow the path of these red threads, if you follow the path of love and you keep looking to find love in what you do, there's no question the data suggests really strongly that you'll thrive more, you'll be more productive.

You will feel fear to your. point. And people often say you should push beyond your comfort zone, but that's not really the choice. Is it comfort or no comfort? In the sense, fear and love are linked. So if you're feeling fear, it is really a, it's a ringing of a bell that says there's something about this that you feel super passionate about. There's some love in it. That's why there's fear in it. So those two things, I mean, for me at the time, going from London to Lincoln, Nebraska, it's frightening, lonely, all by yourself. But you can't, but there's something loving in there. There's something pulling you there. So, yeah, a lot of the best moments that connect with us humans when you say, hey, listen, I was so bloody scared in doing this.

But I couldn't not. It was almost an obsession. I was scared, but I couldn't not. So yeah, that love leap, if you like. Yeah, what made you go to Lincoln, Nebraska when you were 21 years old? What was that? What made you go to Lincoln, Nebraska when you were 21 years old?

Well, I was studying social psychology at Cambridge, and we did a lot of studies of pathology and neurosis. I mean, that's what a lot of psychology is, it's to study what's wrong with people. And because my dad happened to be the personnel director, which is really the chief human resources officer, for a large company called Allied Breweries, They had 7,000 pubs.

And he'd asked Don Clifton. I think you've had Jim Clifton on your show, like Jim's dad. Yep. You know, Don was really the founder, the grandfather of positive psychology. And he was a client, or my dad was a client of his because dad wanted to figure out ways of selecting better pub managers. And Don Clifton had an approach that was, let's go study the best pub managers and build selection instruments to, see whether or not they have any personality attributes in common and can we select for those. So I had gone over in the summers of 1985, 86 and just gotten so hooked on the idea that excellence

isn't the opposite of failure, that you can only really understand excellence in anything from studying excellence. And you don't learn much about marriage from studying divorce. You don't learn much about happiness from studying depression. You don't learn much about how to keep employees engaged from doing exit interviews with the ones that leave. So that idea, which was so new at the time, was for no good reason that I can think of, was super evocative to me. I was riveted by that idea that excellence has got its own pattern. And if you took a rigorous approach to studying it in all, whether it's excellent housekeepers, excellent salespeople, excellent teachers, excellent leaders, if you really dove into excellence, you would find some things that were

different from just the inverse of failure. And that was, I don't even know why that was interesting to me, but it was so interesting or so intoxicating that I did like jump on a plane and I thought I was going to stay for a year, but I, you know, I stayed for 25 years in the end. Well, you're kind of had to be mature for your age. I remember at 21, I'm finishing up a college football career. I didn't really think about any of that stuff. I mean, that's just me speaking, maybe. But I just feel like that's pretty cool.

What did you find over the course of, and obviously you've published a lot of this work, but just now since we're talking about it, what have you found over those 25 years, starting when you were 21, to be some of the common behaviors of leaders who have sustained excellence over an extended period of time. Well, the first thing they do is they take their love seriously. I mean, that's in a sense with this whole book. You know, you've got a whole career at school where people are basically telling you that to be a successful student, don't think about who you are as an individual.

Learning is really just outside in. We're going to teach you stuff and you're going to retain it, hopefully, and then we're going to test you on whether you retained it. So all the way through high school, all the way through your college, you're not really told that your loves are interesting or even real or relevant. You're supposed to just acquire stuff from the outside and then we test you on it. And then you get a grade and then you do it again. Now, leaders on the other hand, the best leaders, they seem to know instinctively much more strongly than most that their loves are super real,

that what I lean into, what I find really makes time fly by for me, what I find I instinctively volunteer for, what I find that when I'm doing it, I feel like I'm sort of in my zone, to use a cliche, they know that it's really specific and really valuable to pay attention to it. So the first thing that all the best leaders have in common, although they don't share a love of the same things, they are super confident that the loves that they have for certain activities or moments or situation are worth paying attention to. And there's a vividness that comes with that because you're, I mean, if you think about an Elon Musk, let's say, I'm not saying he's a perfect leader or even the cliche of Steve Jobs. These aren't perfect people, but they are

incredibly vivid in terms of what they're drawn to and what they're into and they take it really, really seriously. And of course, that means that they apply competency to it and learning to it. And because of that, we as the followers, we have more confidence then in following a leader like that because we can see that that leader is going to be who they are, who they are, no matter what situation we're in. So they are consistent. But they're also people that value mastery. You can see that they value mastery because they valued it in themselves.

They don't pretend to be all things to all people. They are really deep in a couple of areas. And of course, that means that they're super attentive to where somebody else has mastery, where they don't. So there's an expertise orientation that comes. that. So those are the two things around. I think there's a there's a real confidence in what I love to take it seriously. And then there's an expertise orientation that flows from that because I don't have the same depth of mastery that some of these other people do. I will go find people that love

what I don't and and have pursued mastery where I haven't. And together, say the best leaders, together we can do something extraordinary. What if you don't know? You know, you talk about love, and talk about passion. What if, I mean, if there's a long period of my career, where I have no idea. I mean, I was passionate about a sport. That sport retired me when it told me you're not good enough to play anymore professionally. So you have to go do something else. I didn't have a love.

There wasn't something out there to love. I mean, I think part of what you write about is you know, you got to start doing it, right? Start doing something. So I found, I think, passion in my work for being a professional, a sales professional and then rising the ranks. but I definitely didn't know what it was. So what about for that person who they have a job, they have a good job, they're providing for their family.

So they feel good about the fact that like, okay, I'm responsible and I'm taking care of my loved ones, but they don't necessarily love it and they don't even know necessarily what their love is. What about for that person? Yeah. Well,

I was talking to my daughter the other day. I actually wrote about this in the book where she said to me, what's the difference between a rhombus and a parallelogram? She's like 16 at the time. And when you, obviously I couldn't remember, but what occurred to me listening to her was that somebody took geometry really seriously. So 10 years of geometry for her. And there's routines and there's rituals and there's language and there's processes and

someone's taken geometry really, really seriously. No one's taken seriously helping her discover that which they love. There's not 10 years on her and how she builds relationships or how. she's creative or how she thinks. There might be some stuff on a theory of relationships or a theory of creativity, but not really about how she is creative or how she builds relationships and all the self-mastery that you really need in today's world. There's none of that.

So the scenario that you paint is most of us are like that. Most of us are alienated from ourselves by the schools that we go to or by the workplaces that we go work in. So to begin with, let's just. all be aware that a huge proportion of us are lost, are separated from ourselves. And we say to ourselves, well, work is just a transaction. I'm just going to go there. I'm going to get the money I need. And I want to go and buy things for people I love, but I don't get love from work. And yet, you study people that are super successful. And the two most powerful questions that separate highly

successful from less successful people are, I was excited to go to work every day last week, and I had a chance to use my strengths every day last week. So there's something about More than mission questions or relationship questions or learning questions, two questions about everyday excitement and strengths separate high performing from low performing people. So what do you do with that? Well, what you say to anybody going, well, how can I become fluent in my own love language, what you would say is to start with, think about your day differently. your day isn't something to get through.

I know we wake up and it's like there's a million to-does that we didn't get done. So you like you sort of try to figure out how to keep the day at bay as you move through it. But instead, think about the day as trying to put on a show for you. Every day life's trying to put on a show for you. It's trying to show you a whole bunch of different activities or moments or situations or people. Every day it's sort of throwing threads at you. Some are gray, some are white, some are brown. Some lift you up a little.

They bring you down a little bit. Some of these threads are red where you're like, I was in my zone there. So first of all, think about your day as trying to put on a show for you. And then second, look for the signs of love. There are signs. Before you do it, you look forward to it. That's a good sign.

While you're doing it, as Mike Checkschema High said, the positive psychologist, who he lost last year, flow. When time sort of speeds up and it feels like you've been doing it for five minutes, but you look up at an hour. What's that? when you're done with something, you feel like you just learned it so fast, rapid learning.

When you're done with it, you feel like you've been your most you. Like there's moments like that every day. And so what we should be teaching people, but if you haven't learned it by the time you're 25, that's okay. You can start now. Just try to look every day for the signs of activities that you love.

And you don't need to do what you love. There's no data saying that the most successful people do only what they love. That's a cliche not borne out by data. But they do find the love in what they do. They deliberately find love in what they do. And that love accelerates performance and accelerates learning. So if you just start like you did, you started up in sales. Okay, that's what I, if I was your life coach, I would have said that. Hey, Ryan, just start something. There might be some little red thread. It's your equivalent of like me just jumping on a plane to Lincoln, Nebraska. Well, where's it going to head? Where's it going to lead to? Is it

the right ladder. I don't know. You didn't know. You just, you just went, you know what? There's something in here. And if you'd have started off that way, Ron, and then there was, after weeks, there was no red threads, nothing. You just kept looking and it was like, this is stressful and weird and tedious and draining. Okay. Then you've made the wrong step. So then you jump, you tweak, you adjust, you jump, you tweak, you adjust. That's what the most successful people do. It's, it's a constant scavenge for that which you love. What if you find yourself being, and this is written about and love and work as well,

really good at something that you don't find many red threads. You've developed a skill, whatever the job may be, but you don't really like it. Maybe you make a lot of money doing it, and so that's nice because it helps you, again, support and provide and potentially do fun things with turning that money into experiences. But you don't necessarily love

that much or hardly any of the work, but you're good at it. Yeah. Well, it's one of the weirdest things. I mean, it works the other way, too. Some of the things we really love to do. We don't actually get good enough out to get paid for. For sure, probably more so then, actually. Yeah. Right. I mean, and we call those hobbies. And that's okay, because that's the best hobbies bring more love into your life, little moments, little red threads. And those all accrue. Those all fill your cup just a little bit. I mean, because if you think about it, Ryan, what we are short of in life isn't time. It's energy.

So you're really looking for a life in which you move through it and bring enough nourishment or energy from the moving through it to be able to keep moving through it and keep up in your game as you move through it. The opposite of that is just burnout where you, it's like productivity porn, where you try to figure out new and faster ways to get stuff done, but there's no nourishment coming in. So if you've got a hobby that you're not quite good enough at to get paid for, that's okay. That's nourishing. So that's a little more love in your life. The other side of that, of course, is really tricky where you're good at something. Let's say you're going to finance because you're like, I can trade. I'm a good trader.

I mean, it bores me to tears and it feels all kinds of wrong. But I'm going to do it for 10 years. Earn my money. Then I'll retire, open up the bed and breakfast in Maine. The problem with that calculus is that because, you've had 10 years of no nourishment, no psychological nourishment, you're not in your zone, you don't feel like you, you're alienated from yourself. Now, you keep saying, well, the tradeoff is in five years time, I'll be, you know, the problem is by the time you pop out the top,

you're damaged. You're not the same person. Now, maybe you can reclaim that person, but you've basically, you've had a 10-year run where every single day, for 10 to 12 hours a day, you're getting nothing back from the activities that you're doing. There's no red threads in your day at all. If that's the kind of life that you have at work, it breaks you down. Humans, we know this, that chemical cocktail in your brain, when you're doing something that you love, that lovely combination of oxytocin and vasopressin and anandemite,

it's a very specific chemical cocktail in your brain, and it opens you up for learning and for growth. and it's nourishing for you. Ten years without that, you're not the same person. And so for many of us, it's really, you're going to get to the end of your life and you're never really going to feel as though you live the first-rate version of your own life. Oof, out of that comes all sorts of pathological behaviors. What advice do you give to that person?

There's somebody right now working in finance who makes a boatload of money, but they don't really like it, but maybe their standards of living have increased with the income. And they, they, Marcus, what do you want to just to quit? Like, what am I going to do? I don't have any other way to provide. Like, what advice you give to that person? Well, I think three things. The first thing would be, look, first of all, just start to see whether or not there are

actually any red threads at all in this thing that you're doing. Maybe you started off trading, but actually what you really like doing is running a team of traders and you're actually inching toward that. So to begin with, start from where you're at. Is there anything, just take a regular week. Do love it, loathe it for a week where you just take a bank pat around with you, draw a line down the middle of it, right, loved it at the top of one column, loathed it at the top of the other, and see whether or not in the course of a week you see any signs of something that you love. Then can you maneuver your job so that you're getting more of those over time.

73% of us say we have the freedom to modify our job to fit ourselves better. 73% of us. So yes, that means 27% of us are in the wrong job, according to ourselves. But that does mean there's a chunk of us going, you know, well, I've got the freedom to maneuver here. So that's what I would start off with with this person is going, can you see what red threads you can find here at all? And then can you maneuver the job at all into that?

Second, in your own life as a mom, as a dad, as a friend, as a community activist, It's a person of faith in terms of your hobbies. What are the other red threads that you've got? Maybe there's nothing for you at work. Okay. Maybe therefore you could survive by filling your cup only with red threads from other aspects of your life. I know we talk about work-life balance as though work isn't part of life, but it is.

So actually, you don't have six different cups that you're trying to balance. You've got one cup. it's either filled or not filled with love with things that nourish you. So can you look at your role as a father and figure out what parts of that you really love? Can you get enough love from your hobbies or from your community or whatever? Perhaps you can. If you try the first two things and you don't find any sources of love that that's enough for you, and only you can never know if it's enough for you.

But if you can't do one and two, then your third choice is to say, I deserve actually a life which truly fits who I am. I'm not suggesting people are irresponsible financially. If you've got a lifestyle that only can support X, then you can't immediately unravel it. But you do actually have to know that you're here for a really short period of time. And if you think that a life at work of 40, 50, 60 hours a week of no red threads leaves your family uninjured, you're deluding yourself.

You take your emptiness at work home. far more devastatingly than you take any personal problems you may have at home to work. The arrow going the other way is really powerful. So please don't imagine that your loved ones aren't feeling it. Work is a lot of your time. Your job, I mean, is a lot of your time. So you can't just sit there and go, I'm going to get nothing psychologically from this and it'll all be okay because it won't.

Yeah. You talk a lot about family and kids. I'm as a dad myself, Marcus, I really was zeroing in on those sections in the book and in what you're saying. How do you impart this wisdom onto your kids to the things that they've learned as they're growing up to be adults who want to leave their own unique debt in the world and do well? What are some things that you teach them and you talk with them about when it comes to love and work? Well, the first thing is that what I've tried to teach both of them is that they are the best judge of what their red threads are. So much of growth and development is about agency.

It's about self-mastery. And yet you go through, as you know, with your kids. By the way, how old are your kids? How old is your kids? Old is 14. Youngest is seven. Okay. So you're about to go into this time period where you sort of hope against hope that your kids will be able to explore. Yep. And learn about what they love and, you know, channel it. And yet what you'll find. sadly is that there's an entire school system that is very noisy the other way. It's not really telling them about what they love. It's not telling them what is unique about them. It's not helping them use life to figure that out.

Instead, it's actually saying that there are right answers. And you, dear 14-year-old kid, you've got to figure out the right answers. And your teachers have all the right answers. Maybe your parents have all the right answers. Maybe your sports coaches have all the right answers. But you don't. Now, of course, there are a lot of course. are some places where teachers and parents and sports coaches do have the right answers.

But in terms of that which you love, in terms of what you lean into, in terms of how you build relationships and in terms of where you feel creative or you feel that you're most resilient, you've got all the answers to that. And you start off with 11-year-olds, Ryan. You can do this with 11-year-olds. So asking an 11-year-old, when was the last time an hour flew by? What were you doing? Even with kids and video games, it's a fascinating thing.

thing to say to a kid, well, I love video games. Which ones? When? When do you find that time zips by the most? This last week, when did time fly by? Like that kids know the answer to that question. You as a parent may disagree with their answer, but they've got the right answer because they're the only one who knows really where it's like you're the only genius when it comes to what you love. So that's the first thing that we try to do is say that you actually know this better than anyone else does. And then, of course, the second part of it is what I've tried to keep doing with them is saying there's nothing good or bad about it. They live in a world, like your kids live in a world of such comparison. Social media, too, it just turns the comparison dial up to 11.

And of course, when you compare, you disappear. So I've tried to help them go, no, there is no one who's got the 100 trillion synaptic connections in their brain like you do. There's no one. So the best way to figure out what that is is to keep trying to turn it into some kind of contribution. So you don't have to get the best grades in every single subject, but you do have to figure out what is your way of learning. You do have to figure out what is your way of joining a group, what group, what's your

way of being a loyal friend? So we've tried to get across to them anyway, that they are the only genius about what they love. and the point of love is contribution. It's not GPA. It's not having the right major. It's not even getting the right job. It's figuring out how to make a contribution. And there's a lot of different places in which you can do that.

None of them are better than others. Some of them may be more renumerative than others. But you're always at your most powerful when you're thinking about love turned into contribution. I mean, I have to tell you that there's a lot of time and energy and noise. saying other things to them. So it's a constant, and you'll find this too. It's a constant challenge.

By the way, we can edit this out if you need to, but did I read right that your ex-wife was involved with this college admission scandal with your kids? Yeah. Is that right? So again, you cut this out if you need me to,

but that I can't even imagine. Like, because I, from what I read, you had no awareness. And even your kids didn't have any awareness of it either, that she had, was going to pay, basically to get them into USC. What, I mean, how do you even, how do you, how do you deal with that? How did you deal with that?

How are you dealing with that currently? Well, yeah, it's, it was, I mean, it's devastated because you, it, you can see, I put it in here because, you know, it's out there. So it's like what it created for me in 20 years, everybody always used to say, Ryan, well, this whole uniqueness approach, the idea that each child, is, and each human is individual. We should do that in schools. I was obviously talking about it in the world of work,

but everyone would always say we should do it in schools. We should do it in schools. When are you going to change the schools? And I just kept punting it. I just kept kicking the can down the road. That experience with the varsity blues thing was so intimate. It was like everything that puts crazy pressure on kids and parents. In this case, it pushed some parents to do something.

illegal and immoral. For many parents, it just pushes them to get super intense on their kid, and it pushes their kid onto Adderall and onto Xanax and all the anxiety stuff that we see in kids these days. So for me, it was like, this is almost like God reaching down and going, hey, you need to do something now about this because it's come home to roost. So for me, it was like, gosh, how quickly can you find that something, some pressure isn't theoretical. It's really personal. So I'm only here for a short time. This was like the universe saying, you better actually take this notion of how do people take responsibility for their uniqueness

and actually talk about what a better school would look like. What would a love and work curriculum look like? So for me, I tried to sort of do what you said, which is where you, how do you find meaning in unavoidable suffering? That's Victor Frankel, his notion that you find meaning in unavoidable suffering.

So here, that was suffering. I mean, my kid suffered. And it's still, it's going to be an ongoing suffering. Because how do you make sense of a parent who would do that? Well, it's not. It's nonsense. In no sense is it right. But you try to take that, I think I did anyway, and went, well, what's, what are the actions

that we can take to try to change the ecosystem of education so that we have, we don't have those kinds of weird artificial GPA college branding as a result of that. GPA. The whole system is sort of set up to use your kids as their mechanism for branding a college. I mean, that's, that's weird. And so it was an impetus, really, to go, let's go and try and make things better. And I think that was the only way that I could make sense of it. Yeah. How are your kids doing now? Great, actually. Kids are resilient. Kids are really resilient. and they are they're really thinking

you know as teenagers they're thinking a lot about themselves and what they can do and their friends and so for them I think it's it's a it's a thing they want to move forward and beyond. Sure.

And that's fine because they're young and they should do that. For me as I said it isn't that you've got to stop you got to look at it you got to go had that happen and of course for me personally what what should I have seen. What should I have done five years ago? And there's a lot of, I could have been a lot more intentional about how we changed schools earlier. I had a platform. I could have done more,

should have done more. But I can do more. Tomorrow's another day. Do you, because I feel like what you're saying when it comes to schooling is, you know, there's a set curriculum. You know, we have these subjects and you have the honors classes. I know this. We're like scheduling in high school and they're on a five point scale versus a four point scale. And they're like, hey, you take this class. And even if you get a B, you're out of four point O, you know, like that type of talk. I'm hearing it literally right now, Marcus. So this is top of mind. And I see and kind of can almost feel the pressure. Are you saying though you'd rather revamp how curriculums are built with education? I mean, it sounds like a monumental task. Or what would you change about how our kids are educated so that it's more about kind of finding

their red threads potentially earlier as opposed to, okay, you're just going to take history and you're going to take math, you're going to take English. Like, how would you do it? Well, yeah, you're right. It is almost like boiling in the ocean. So in the book, there's a whole chapter on what would a love and work school look like. And you can't change everything. It's a 10 point plan of what we could do differently. And we can't do everything differently all at once. The first thing that we can do, go is we can say to ourselves, look, the working world actually wants people to graduate who are articulate at describing that which they love and how to contribute it. They want people to join teams and be able to say, you can turn to me for this. I'm at my best when. People always ask

me for. People can rely on me for. You want people in the working world with that kind of mastery. So in a sense that colleges serve the working world, there is a big, there's a big loud noise from the working world going, stop graduating people into our workplaces who are completely clueless about how to join teams and explain themselves to the people they need to collaborate with. So that's the first pressure on colleges and schools to go. Could we build self-mastery curricula? Could we do that? That doesn't mean we have to stop everything else we're doing. But could we build curricula? over 10 years that helps a child know that life is sending them clues all the time about that which they love and giving them clues about how to contribute it or how they learn or how they build relationships. Could we do that? Yes.

Is that super expensive? No. It's just deciding that helping a child have self-mastery is an important and valuable thing to give that child. So that's where you'd start. You would also, by the way, you'd get rid of. standardized achievement tests, SAT, ACTs, those are trying to measure something that we know isn't real, namely uniform generalized intelligence. We know it's not real. We know it has no

relationship to earning power or well-being after you graduate. You'd get rid of GPA, great point average. You would get rid of it because it's all bad data. And it's all bad data because you can't, for many, many, many subjects, the teachers that are grading it don't have inter-rater reliability. Somebody might give something an A, somebody else might give something a B, which by the way is okay if you just keep it as an A and a B because we pay teachers to have judgment and they'll have different judgment. Our problem comes when we try to take their different judgment and pretend it's real data or when we turn our exams from essays and qualitative analysis into true, false, right or wrong, multiple choice in order to get data to fuel our GPAs. And suddenly now we've

turned, you know, who wants the GPA? Well, the colleges want the GPA because they want to be able to say or prove that they have slightly smarter kids than some other college. So we've turned our whole education GPA system into something that feeds a college branding machine. and the people who suffer are the kids who are now trying to simply get a high GPA. Well, frankly, that doesn't serve the kid and it doesn't serve the working world. So that's the second thing that we could absolutely get rid of. The GPA system is designed to give people that select freshmen for colleges a shortcut. Well, we shouldn't give them a shortcut.

Your kid, your 14-year-old, I would hope that any college that's interested, in your 14-year-old, would interview them, would ask them to write about what they love, would be qualitatively interested in the uniqueness of your kid, and that we would help your kid present that. Does that take more time for a college admissions process? Yes, it does. Well, I'm sorry, that's good time. That's time well spent.

Let's stop giving like shortcuts with your kid's not a 3.68. That is not your kid. It's bad data, and it hides your kid. Why do you think it's set up this way? Just because it's easier, it's quicker? Yes, because colleges have to brand themselves. And the best way to brand themselves is they can say, look, our GPA, I mean, look, you've got a US News and World Report.

The first piece of data you see is on any college, anywhere in the US, the first piece of data you see is their admissions percentage. They're trying to get better than the college that they're competing with. So the first thing that you can see almost immediately is colleges are looking for ways to say, we are this, not that, which is why, by the way, for those parents that are listening to this, your kid is going to get inundated. And Ryan, your eldest, who get inundated with admissions brochures, really fancy schmancy kind of brochures on, come join us here, come join us here, you're perfect for us there.

And you think, well, that's great. Look at all these colleges interested in my kid. They aren't. they're interested in their admissions percentage. And the more applications they get, the lower their admissions percentage will be, so they look more selective. And that's not a cynic. That's not me being cynical. That's actually the way that it will work.

And then GPA is part of their scorecard. Our average GPA of our incoming freshman class was 3.72. And that's a very nice shortcut way to say our brand is 3.72 admissions. percentages. As it happens, that 3.72 is a made-up piece of data. It's bad data upon bad data, and it hides the kid. But it serves the brand of the college. So the biggest, every single one of us as parents, as managers, as educators, we can all make our little, we can add our light to the sum of light, Ryan. Can you change the educational system tomorrow? No. But can you educate your kids to be self-mastery, to have self-mastery rather, to think about that which they love,

to become articulate in talking about who they are and what they bring. Yes, you can do that as a parent. And you can raise your voice against colleges and schools that place a total bloody premium on some simplified number of who your kid is. This is, I love when I see this actually happening, you know, in the small examples. one of them is my friend Brooke Cups, who's been on this podcast. He's a state champion basketball coach, but he decided to basically create his own curriculum and stop teaching math and shifted to teach a leadership class, two of them, Leadership 101 and 201. The cool thing about it, though, is I've been a guest speaker a number of times, and I'm going actually next week again this year for his class.

And what's cool about it is when I actually look at the curriculum, it is all about leading yourself first. the whole first year, 101, is all about this self-awareness and emotional intelligence and communication skill and understanding yourself. And I thought, what a class, man. What a class for these high school kids. How lucky are they? And now I know there's a waiting list because so many people have heard about it because it's become a thing. But how cool is that, though? Like in his little way, he's making a difference, making a dent. And those kids and those classes that I've gone to, amazing. I mean, the questions they ask, their curiosity, they're, they become really good writers because they're forced to write all the time. And then they enjoy it because they see like I'm getting better. And so like all these things are being developed. Like it can happen. Now, this is one class. I realize that at one school, but it's really neat to see when someone says, you know, I'm just, I'm actually going to do something about this. And then they created themselves and they go and they take action on it. It's, it's very cool, Marcus, when when this actually gets to work. Well, and that's why I chose in the end to to have Harvard business publishing as my publisher, because it was.

like we're trying to rehabilitate the word love. When we see excellence, we see love. Loveless excellence is an oxymoron in sports, in creativity, in leadership, anywhere you look, in coding, programming. So you're trying to rehabilitate it. Well, what better way to do that than to have Harvard behind it going, hey, listen, we are not serving our students. By the way, parenthetically, we're not serving the working world.

either. The working world wants to hire people that aren't clueless about who they are and what they bring. They are hopefully going to be hiring people who are aware of how to leverage that which they love and also talk about it, be articulate about it. So when you join a team, you don't pretend to be perfect or try to cast your weaknesses as strengths or something. You can articulate where you can be relied on the most and you can probably articulate where your brain shuts down or where you look like a deer in the headlights. That's part of being a really great team member, as you know, from being in professional sports. Anybody who goes, I'm great at everything.

All of your alarm bells go off because you're like, no, you're not. So every single teacher, every single in that case of that person, the college coach, everyone can make a little bit of a difference going, wait a minute, we shouldn't be just doing outside in teaching. We should be doing inside out. Who the heck are you? And how can you contribute? And the fact that Harvard's behind it going, yes, no, no, no, that's worth looking at.

I think it gives some heft and some encouragement to all of us that want to make a difference. I'm not saying, well, we get a change overnight. That's ridiculous. But we can actually start going, time out, something about this. We are creating a generation of damaged, super anxious graduates. we've seen it. And at some point, people like you and me and others have to be able to go, this isn't working.

It's not working for the working world, but it's also not working for the individual. And it would be crazy to think that we could just have like one sort of get slim quick pill and it's done. But you've got to start somewhere. And that, you know, a class like the one you're describing is exactly what we can all do. And that's why I wrote the book to try to give a language and a discipline

to how do you help someone to speak their own love language, if you like? Your experience in your career is unique. And I want to unpack it just for a second because you've worked within a company and you've started your own company. I believe you've even sold a portion or a part of it, the standout to ADP, the standout work and the standard assessments, the technology behind standout, which is something that you've built and created. So you're unique in the fact that you've been inside a big company, you've started a company,

you're an entrepreneur, you've sold, you've been back and forth. I'm just curious about that element of building a career where both inside a big company as well as outside and starting. What has that been like for you? Well, it's part of that scavenging around for love. At some point, I was with Gallup for 17 years. And Gallup was a great organization because it took. measurement seriously. We're living in a world where everybody has an opinion, Ryan, as you know,

and because we live in a content-rich environment, we can put our opinions out there. So there's a lot of opinions out there. Gallup was really good and disciplined me in psychometrics. How do you measure things so that we know, if somebody wants to say, well, here are the three skills of leaders. Really? How are you measuring that? How can you prove? Because if you can't measure it, You can't prove that the best leaders have it and everyone else doesn't. What can we reliably measure? Sounds like a fairly boring question, but it really isn't. It's like getting to, if you can't measure something reliably,

then you can't know if people have it or don't. And what's the difference between those who have it and don't? So it's really important. All the way through my Gallup days, I was really fascinated by that. But at some point, and this is, again, speaks to a scavenger hunt for love. I was like, I want to stop measuring things and I want to start trying to improve the things I'm measuring. So let's stop measuring strengths and try to build them.

Let's stop measuring engagement and try to build it on a team. How do you do that? That was for me, that was scary because I left a company up to 17 years. But as you might have found in your career, at some point, a red thread gets so interwoven into your thoughts that you wake up at 3 a.m. And this thread is weaving its way through your brain. And you go, I don't know what I'm doing, but I'm going to try to follow where this thread leads.

And that was why I started the company. And then I've got 10 years of building this business. I didn't know how to build software. Suddenly I woke up. I have 100 engineers building software. And you follow where that leads. because now you're going across town, so a stoplight to stoplight.

You're not waiting until all the stoplights are green, but that thread is pulling you across town and you keep bumping into red lights and green lights and red lights and green, but you iterate your way. You're just pulling on that thread. That's the way that it felt like for me. I was like, I can't be doing anything else other than this because I've just, that thread is woven in my brain

and it wakes me up at two in the morning. And then when ADP came, they basically, they said, we want to buy this technology because everything's about teams. Everything's about teams and everything's about the local leader. But they also said we got this institute that we fund and we want you to run it. And so at that point in my career, I was like, oh, okay, now we're living in a very content-rich world where sort of everyone's going, who do I listen to?

What's real? What can I really trust? And it felt to me, again, right or wrong, it felt like now was a great time to go, let's try to be a voice for objectivity, valid data, reliable measurement. Let's do that again because in the world of social media we have today, why do we listen to anyone is an interesting question. So is that right? Is that wrong?

Did I do the right thing? I don't know. I'm just following that which I love and trying to weave it into something useful. and it'll take you all sorts of places. How did you, so I'm fascinated by the beginnings of things. So you create this standout technology. What is the standout technology? I mean, you made it so good that ADP, this big time company says,

we're going to make a significant investment to purchase the standout technology. What was that? Now, like, what was the genesis of the idea there? Oh, well, if you study really, I mean, most software inside of companies, Ryan, as you may know, is HR software, goals and ratings and performance reviews, all that stuff feels really alien to most managers and employees because it's been designed for the company's needs,

not for the individual or the team leaders. So what we did is we just inverted that. And we said, well, look, if you study really, really successful team leaders, what do they do and can we just reverse engineer it? And when you study really successful team leaders, they've really just got three things they want to know how to do. They want to know quickly how each person on their team is wired.

So like, who are you? Second, they want to know, what are you doing? What are you doing this week? Not your silly goals that you put in that silly human capital management system six months ago. What are you doing this week? And how can I help you? And then the third thing is, how are you feeling? How, what are the mood of the troops?

So those are the three things. Who are you? What are you doing? How are you feeling? Every team leader seems to want to have input into those things. And it's tricky to do, even more tricky today, of course, with the hybrid virtual environments. So we just built a standout assessment that is basically very quickly tells a particular team leader

how a particular person is wired. How do they learn? How do they think? How to motivate them? When I built Strength Finder with Dawn, Strength Finder is for the individual. Strengths finders, 34 different themes, and you get your top five, or you might get all 34, but as a team leader, 34, I've got 10 people, that's 340 different. It's like, that's too much for me.

Standout was like, no, no, let's just build it for the team leader. We build an assessment that gives the team leader immediate and individualized input on each team member. Then we built a check-in tool, which simply enabled the team leader and team member to check in every week. What are you working on? How can I help? And then gave the team leader individualized coaching so that we built. that you can help the team leader get the best out of person this week. And then we put an engagement pulse in there.

So you can reliably measure the mood of the troops. And then just handed it to the team leaders and went, hey, you run with this. We're not going to tell you to use it. We've just reverse engineered what the best team leaders do and then put it into a software platform. And so that's what was different is that you then had what's called uncoerced voluntary usage. you had team like Slack where the IT departments are like don't use Slack and every team leader everywhere is like

sorry but it's better so with Standout it was the same thing it was like a lot of centralized corporations were going no no no don't use that but then the team leaders were like no because I want to know my people and I want to know what they're doing and I want to know how they're feeling so that's how it started

Wow and the ADP said sorry man this is too good we're just going to take it off the market and it's going to be ours and you're going to be part of our team. Yeah. You're going to run the institute because we think you're a researcher in your heart, which is probably true, actually. And we ADP are known for, you know, they pay, or do the W-2s of a third of all working Americans. So they've done that whole national employment report thing where they, every month, say what the actual level of employment is in the US. But they didn't really have anything to do with employee sentiment. How are people feeling? And so you have

the consumer confidence index, but there was nothing to do with employee confidence. How resilient are people feeling and how included are they feeling? How engaged are they? So that was the lure for me was they were like, no, no, no, we want something that's equally trusted in the world of employee sentiment as we have in terms of just the labor market. So that was fascinating. And then, yeah, in terms of the standard platform, it was like they were. we're thinking very much, like the world of human capital is going to move to teams, teams, teams, teams, teams, teams, teams. And this was really the only team-centric software platform out there. Wow. Okay. And so are you technically an employee of ADP?

I am in a chunk of me. Yeah. So I'm in terms of running the institute. Interesting. Yes. And then you can write your books. Keynote speaking, other consulting, or is that how like your business is off? I mean, I'm curious about this selfishly as I went building just how you've been able to build such an amazing business over the years. And it's kind of gone, like I said, back and forth from your own thing to then acquisition, gallop, all that. Like there's, it's a pretty awesome career, man. Yeah, well, ADP were great because they were like, no, we want you to run the institute. As an employee of ADP, run the institute. And you can keep doing all the bookwriting, all the research, all the public speaking that you want to do, which was.

great because I don't think I would have done it if I couldn't, frankly. But in a world where we have so much opinion, to be able to say, look, let's go study 27 countries right now and do 27,000 people and let's figure out how much connection or inclusion there is in the world. Like, that may bore some people to tears, but I love that. I love the ability to do immediate global research in a rigorous way. At the same time, I'm entrepreneurial, so I want to be able to do my own speaking. I want to be able to do my own writing, whether it's articles or books or whatever. In terms of consulting, I feel I could do that. I'm not actually, I've done so much consulting over the years at the moment in this part of my career. I want to do really rigorous research,

and then I want to talk about it and write about it in the hopes that it's useful. Love it. One more question, Marcus. What are some general pieces of life slash career advice you give to somebody a little bit earlier in their career? Well, first, I would say take your love seriously. So there is that. You are the wisest person in your world. So what you lean into, the specifics of that are super important. Right alongside that is that details matter. So for people to realize, in the end, the what always trumps the who and the why. We always say, you know, find your purpose. But that's, that's really disorienting because many of us find something that we really believe in, a company that we really believe in or a cause that we really believe in. But I mean, you look at

doctors and nurses. Why are they the least resilient, least engaged population in the working world, which they are? I didn't know that. They are. Yeah. Yeah. Teachers, well, nurses and doctors least engaged, least resilient, healthcare, and then education's number two from the bottom. So our teachers who've got such a clear purpose of teaching and educating kids and our nurses and doctors, it's such a clear purpose in terms of what they're doing. So the why for those two professions couldn't really be more vivid, could it, then why are they so disengaged? Why are they so burned out? Because of the what, because what the activities are that we're forcing these teachers and nurses and so forth to do, for whatever reason, there's not enough red threads in there

for those people to feel resilient and strong and thrive and nourished. It could be a funding issue in the case of nurse supervisors to nurse ratios of one to 60. In some cases, it's an organizational structure issue where those 60 nurses don't feel seen. They don't feel understood. They don't feel paid attention to. But the what, what am I actually doing? What are the activities I'm filling my week with? I would tell someone, pay attention to the what, because in the end, the what always trumps

the who and the why? You believe in the purpose, but what's the actual activities you'll be doing at 2 o'clock on a Thursday afternoon? 10 o'clock on a Monday morning. And then that's really where the nourishment lives. It lives at the two foot level, not the 30,000 foot level. So that's a huge one. And then the last one, I suppose, would be never brag in terms of your career.

You're not the best at. I'm the best at this. I'm the best at, no, no, you're not. Instead, change your language to, I'm at my best when. That is gold right there for you to be vivid and specific and detail. of I'm at my best when. That's how you join together with other people to create super powerful teams because they can't read your mind.

So it's incumbent upon you to walk into a new team and be able to articulately say, I'm at my best when this. You can totally count on me for this. People tend to alarm me for this. That's the most valuable thing you can bring to a team because they don't know. And your race, your gender, your age says nothing about really what. what you are when you're at your best. That is so unique to you. So never brag. You're not the best at anything. You are at your best when. And that's what we want to learn about you.

So good. I am at my best when. It takes some work to know how to answer that prompt too. So it's worth it to do that work. The book is called love and work. Really well done, super practical, very personal, more personal than I think I feel like I've ever read. I've read a ton of your work, probably most known before this one for a book called First Break All the Rules, an amazing book too on leadership that I think everybody should read. But this one's called Love and Work. I highly recommend it. Marcus,

I'd love to continue our dialogue, man, as we both progress. I would too. Thanks to having me on again, Ryan. Thanks, man. At the end of most episodes, I ask my guest to continue our dialogue as we both progress. And Marcus and I just continued that dialogue for another 30 minutes. I was peppering him with questions. after we finished recording about the building of his business, the standout assessment,

including all the engineers he had to hire until he eventually got an investment from Survey Monkey and then ADP bought it. Amazing stories, but Marcus was so helpful as I'm on this path building my business and thinking about assessments and engineers and getting help to scale. I'm just so grateful for people like him and especially for Marcus specifically because He didn't need to do that. He's got a lot of things going on and then offered up, said, hey, follow up anytime and we'll continue that dialogue even more. So it's just cool to see how somebody is, especially off the mic.

Nobody else would know about that but me. And I want to make sure that's publicly known because he's such a good dude. A few topics, takeaways from my notes, never brag. Don't say I'm the best. Instead say, I'm at my best when. And you can rely on me for those. are better terms to use instead of bragging. Then what a love and work school would look like. Get rid of the SAT, ACT, GPA, and instead focus on self-awareness, self-mastery and understanding of

oneself, communication skill, how all of that will help prepare you to be more effective as an adult. And then the red thread questionnaire. This is from within his book, but he brought it up multiple times. It's full of questions like, when was the last time you lost track of time? Or you surprised yourself by how well you did doing blank. You found yourself actively looking forward to work when those types of questions are the red thread questionnaire and are helpful to pull from this book, Love and Work. And I think they'll help you find more love at work. Once again, I want to say thank you so much for continuing to spread the message and telling a friend or two, hey, you should listen to this episode of the leader show, I think it'll help you become a more effective leader. And because you continue to

do that and you continue to write reviews and rate the show, hopefully five stars on Apple Podcast, you are giving me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis. And for that, I will forever be grateful. Thank you so, so much. Talk with you soon. Can't wait.