The One You Feed - Jonathan Fields on Discovering Your Sparketype

Episode Date: September 21, 2021

Jonathan Fields is a father, husband, award-winning author, executive producer, and host of one of the top-ranked podcasts in the world, The Good Life Project. He also speaks globally to groups and organizations and his work has been featured widely in the media including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Oprah Magazine, and many others. In this episode, Jonathan and Eric discuss his book, Sparked: Discover Your Unique Imprint for Work that Makes You Come Alive. But wait – there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you!In This Interview, Jonathan Fields and I Discuss How to Discover Your Sparketype and …His book, Sparked: Discover Your Unique Imprint for Work that Makes You Come AliveThe 10 impulses that underlie the drives that humans haveWhy the words “life purpose” and “passion” often lead us down the wrong pathHow very often in life there’s not A “right” answerHow to find out your SparketypeThe difference between primary, shadow, and anti sparketypesEric’s SparketypeHow to align your work with your Sparketype (without blowing up your life!)How to figure out the answer to “what am I going to do with my life?”How to step into the important work of self discoveryJonathan Fields Links:Jonathan’s WebsiteTwitterInstagramUpstart: The fast and easy way to get a personal loan to consolidate, lower your interest rate, and pay off your debt. Go to www.upstart.com/wolfPeloton: Of course the bike is an incredible workout, but did you know that on the Peloton app, you can also take yoga, strength training, stretching classes, and so much more? Learn all about it at www.onepeloton.comIf you enjoyed this conversation with Jonathan Fields, you might also enjoy these other episodes:Jonathan Fields (2016)Jonathan Fields (2014)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I think we're in a moment in time where a lot of people are asking the big existential questions, and central to that for a lot of people is, what am I going to do with my life? Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter.

It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure?

And does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Jonathan Fields. He's a father, husband, award-winning author, executive producer, and host of one of the top-ranked

podcasts in the world, Good Life Project. Jonathan also speaks globally to groups and organizations, and his work has been featured widely in the media, including New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Oprah Magazine, and many, many others. Today, Eric and Jonathan discuss his book, Sparked. Discover your unique imprint for work that makes you come alive. Hi, Jonathan. Welcome to the show. It's awesome to be here with you. It is a pleasure to have you on again. And we'll be talking about your upcoming book here in a moment. But before we do that, we'll start like we always do with the parable. There's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say,

in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and thinks about it for a second and looks up at their grandparent and says, well, which wolf wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in that we're in and the context, you know, on the one hand, I think, well, it speaks to all of us have the capacity for both doing harm and for compassion. And how we move through the world, what actually shows up is about intention, about which one we honor, about which one we cultivate practices around, and about our awareness of the

fact that they exist within each of us. The other thing that really comes to mind, given the current moment and really the years that we've been moving through, and the fact that we are sort of upon the 20th anniversary-ish of 9-11, is in the context of beloved community and othering. You know, I see so much of the harm that we do to ourselves and to others when we lose the capacity to see ourselves in other people and to see them in us. And that feels like a very of the moment context for me from that parable. Yeah.

And, you know, that othering, I see it on kind of both sides of the aisle. You know, one of the fundamental problems that's underlying so much of what happens is we just other people for believing differently than we do. And instead of at least starting from some commonality. I so agree. I love Valerie Kor's work and the phrase she uses, which is, you know, a stranger is just a part of me I have not yet met. And that keeps coming into my thought process lately. Well, let's turn our attention to your latest body of work. You've got a book called Sparked, Discover Your Unique Imprint for Work

That Makes You Come Alive. I'll just let you lead us into where that comes from, the spark type assessment, but I'll let you take us in. Yeah, you know, for probably my entire adult life, take us in? Yeah, you know, for probably my entire adult life, I have been fascinated, deeply fascinated just by the human condition, by how we show up in life, by how we get what we need from life, by how we choose what we're going to contribute to life. You know, a lot of this is couched in the context of work. And when I use that word work, I'm not necessarily just talking about the thing you get paid for, you know necessarily just talking about the thing you get paid for. It could be the thing you get paid for. It could also be a role that you play.

I know that you just personally, you have things you get paid for, but also you invest a lot of effort and energy and work into taking care of others in your family right now. And that is part of the blend. It could be a devotion that is part of what makes up the thing where you wake up in the morning and you invest effort. And I've been fascinated by the way that we choose where to place our effort, where to invest ourselves in work and not, and whether those choices give us the feeling of meaningfulness, allow us to sort of drop into that place of flow where we get lost in this amazing state, whether it excites us and energizes us, want to get up in the morning and do this thing,

whether we have sort of a sense of expressed potential. It's like we're not holding anything back. We're not stifling anything. And finally, whether it gives us a sense of purpose on two levels. One, a more immediate sense of purpose. Like there's something specific that we know that is deeply meaningful to us that we're working toward. And then more broadly on a meta level, you know, do we have a broader sense of purpose in life? And I've always been curious about how we can make better choices for what to say yes or no to in the context of work that would get us closer to these feelings. And when I look at those five different things I just described, the sweet spot of those is the feeling that I would call coming alive or feeling sparked. So for years, people have been coming to me asking the question, what should I

do with my life? Which is kind of funny because I see myself as having just gone so many different directions and taken so many different tangents. I'm like, why are you asking me this question? Of all people, you know, I'm still on the road, just like all of us. But on the other hand, maybe I have been slightly more intentional in some of the choices. Maybe I've spent more time building my life

so that I can really reflect on the past and the choices that I've taken and digest and really think through what's going on and develop frameworks. And like you, I've been blessed to have this incredible opportunity to sit down for years now with some of the most accomplished leading voices in nearly every domain of science and art and industry and life and philosophy and theology and see a lot of patterns and learn from them. And over time, what I started to wonder was, are there a set of impulses that we all have that underlie whatever job or role or devotion or title that we may have at any given time that would be relatively innate to us and that would really just give us this feeling of a drive

to invest ourselves in a particular way for no other reason than the way it feels, because it gets us closer to that state of coming alive. So I started really wondering, and I had no idea if I would be able to identify a set of impulses like this or not. And I literally started looking at every imaginable job. I'm like finding lists of jobs and this or not. And I literally started looking at every imaginable job. I'm like finding lists of jobs and industries and titles. And I start asking myself, what's underneath this? What's underneath this? What's underneath this? And I keep trying to distill and distract from or extract from these, the more fundamental ways that you would exert yourself in all of these different contexts. And slowly,

they all start to distill down to an unbelievably small set of universal impulses for work that give you this feeling potentially of coming alive, which really surprised me. I mean, we landed at 10 of these impulses. I had no idea if it was possible to distill this down. If it was, I thought, well, we'd end up potentially with hundreds or thousands. So it was interesting to me to sort of say, well, you keep conflating things into each other and into each other and into each other. And it's actually, we're a lot more basic than we think. You know, we're a lot more primal in terms of the fundamental drives for effort that

we all have. And once I identified and mapped out these 10 impulses, I started to realize, you know, each one of these, they have their own sort of quirky set of tendencies and behaviors and preferences that tend to get wrapped around these impulses. And those form archetypes. So then I gave them the name sparkotype. I mean, really just because it's a fun way of saying the archetype for work that sparks you. And from there, I started just testing them out and I started running them by a lot of

different people, you know, gathering stories around them. So I realized that we have these impulses and we have these sparkotypes, but I wanted to go deeper into whether they were real or not. I wanted a way to figure out like, can I validate these or invalidate them? And I was kind of agnostic, you know, the scientist side of me is sort of like, okay, there's this really interesting idea. It seems to be validated on a story level, an anecdotal level by so many people where I share it with them and they're like, oh yes, this, this is me, this is me, this is how it shows up. So we spent most of 2018 developing an assessment, the Sparketype assessment, and beta testing different, you know, more levels of people

through it until we found it was giving fairly stable results where people could literally have an experience where they spend a reasonably short amount of time answering about 50 questions. And I say about because the algorithm underneath this assessment is actually dynamic and it adjusts the number of questions based on how you're answering it actually sort of watching you as you answer and then it kicks out some really fascinating results so we finally came out of beta with that assessment and i was looking at two things one i wanted to create a tool that would give us a ton more data and two i wanted to create a tool where we could share it with the

world, make it freely available, completely accessible to anyone who wanted to interact with it so that they could actually use it to help them figure out what is my personal impulse. So we released that into the wild. We came out of beta right around the end of 2018, beginning of 2019. Since that time, we've had well over 500,000 people complete it. 19. Since that time, we've had well over 500,000 people complete it. We're generating over 25 million data points and just stunning amounts of information and insight, really powerful validation, not just of the fact that these imprints are real, but also of the fact that they are in fact tied to those states that I had talked about. And once it's out in the wild, then we start getting mountains of stories and use cases and how these things are being expressed, how

they're showing up in personal life, in work, in business, in leadership, in team building, even social dynamics within families and friends and community cultures. And it's just been this stunning gift to sit at the center of this and know that, you know, this all started as a fascination. Probably, if I'm being honest, almost two decades ago, that led to a deepening into questions that led me in no small part to eventually start Good Life Project so that I could gather teachers and learn from for a decade. And in the middle of that, that leads to this more refined question around the nature of work and what work makes us come alive. And then this much more focused body of work around

the sparkotypes. And it's been this really incredible evolution and eventually gathers enough insight and information that I start to realize, oh, this actually has to be a book. Because I started to realize my head was starting to feel like it was going to explode because there was so much more info in my head that I had gathered from over a number of years from so many different people, from my own experimentation, from work, you know, eventually with teams within organizations around this that just needed to be distilled into something that was not my head so that all lines didn't point to me for answers so that I could just have something that would go out into the world and share pretty

much everything that I have learned about these 10 imprints. So it's been this sort of evolution over time of thought, which led to insight, which led to the development of imprints and then tools and then eventually a book. It's a great book and it's a great tool. I want to break down a couple of the different things that you said in there and pull them out a little bit. One is you've referred to these different, you call it impulses, as sparkotypes. So somebody has a sparkotype. One of the things that you say early in the book is that words like life purpose or singular passion often lead people down the wrong path or a path of confusion. In what way

is what you're doing with the sparkotypes different than that? Because it's playing in the same domain. So when I think about passion and life purpose, they become these really nebulous words. And one of the things that concerns me is the focus on the phrasing of what is your one passion or what is your singular life purpose? And I do think maybe some people actually show up on the planet literally wired for a singular expression of an impulse that is there for life. But I also believe that most people do not. That we have a set of impulses and they may show up in any number of surface level expressions. So my sparkotype is a maker, for example. The impulse for the maker is to make ideas manifest. It's all about the

process of creation. And I've been that way since I was as young as I can remember. Now that deep and sort of DNA level impulse or effort may show up as a passion for painting, a passion for building houses, a passion for writing books, a passion for creating media, all these different things, all equally valid and it may shift over time. I may be drawn to express it in different ways over time that I may be fiercely passionate about. And I may almost identify myself with those surface level expressions. I may say, I am a painter. I am a builder. I am a producer. And I could do all of those at once, or I could have a season for each one of those. But the deeper impulse is the thing that stays relatively stable. So I feel like we need to allow space for an evolution or a collection of passions and

things that will give you a sense of purpose over time that can shift and change. I feel like sometimes when we say it has to be this singular thing, or you have to have a life purpose, it becomes more harmful and constraining than expansive and permissive. An extreme example of this, I remember hearing somebody who became an evangelist for basically finding and investigating people who cause harm to others. It was because that person lost a child to an extremely violent event. And I remember hearing them say, that moment set in motion my life purpose, which was to go out and make sure that I was protecting everybody else against this type

of thing. And I'm thinking to myself, what a horrible thing it is that somebody would have to feel like they have had to wait for this horrific thing to happen in their life in order to give them this purpose for life. I'm like, that feels wrong to me on every level. You know, what I could see is that that person may have had a lifelong underlying impulse for advocacy or for nurturing. And that this one particular moment honed in and really focused on a very specific channel for that impulse to now become a central focus in that person's life because of an extreme event and because of their values. But I get concerned about the use of the

word life purpose and passion for those reasons. Yeah, I think it points to this idea that if there's a right answer for me, it's this thing, then there's only one, right? Which I think you and I both agree is not the case. You sort of shown how this underlying impulse to do this sort of activity, to engage in the world in this sort of way, there's actually a huge number of ways I could take that basic impulse out into the world. And that frees up a lot of energy because I think we get really wrapped around the axle of what's the thing I should do. The example I always use for this to sort of illustrate is when I was talking with my son about college. And we've got it down to like five colleges. And I was like, what's the right one? I'm like, I don't think there is.

Right? Each one is going to offer different experiences. It's going to have more to do with how you engage while you're there. We've done enough to get us down to a reasonable list of places we think you would thrive. Beyond that, there isn't a right answer. There's just the path you're going to take. Yeah, I so agree with that. You know, I think the example of college is really interesting. And as you're talking, what immediately pops into my head as you're describing college is, yes, and there's that. And what if we took that same approach into the world of work as grownups, you know, where we say, okay, what if it's not about, you know, like trying to find that, like threading the needle of the absolute perfect job, but just finding a job where it looks like there will be an opportunity for me to express this impulse and also honor whatever values I have for security and whatever else it may be. And then I step into that space and whatever it is that makes me me, if I'm given the freedom and the agency and enough latitude to bring that to the job, whatever the job description is, I can probably make it into whatever I need

it to be to feel fully expressed in that space. So it's less about trying to like thread the needle with the job title and the organization and the industry and basically saying, do I think that this thing, this opportunity is going to give me the space to actually step into it and really be who I am, even if that's not exactly what's in the job description. It gives us so much more freedom, just like you were saying, freedom to choose a particular college. If we look at work that way too, it just opens up the universe to us. Totally. Yeah. And options within reason are certainly a good thing. You've mentioned there's 10 of these sparkotypes. You've got a

great online free assessment to figure them out. I went out there's 10 of these sparkotypes. You've got a great online free assessment to figure them out. I went out today with the intention of breaking it. Why am I not surprised about that? Well, all right. I took it the first time very seriously. And as I did it, it emerged for me, my primary problem with a lot of personality tests is for me, and I'm not saying this is a personality test, but it's in that genre, roughly. For me, it's always like, well, what day am I answering these questions? You know, so like one of the ways that you're getting at is like, do you like solving big, challenging problems? And I was like, well, some days I really do. And other days,

I'm like, just give me a bite-sized little thing, you know? So anyway, I took it once seriously, and we can talk about what that was. But I went through today, and I was like, you know the way I end up answering almost every question in tests like this is like, well, I end up just being like right in the middle. So I thought, I wonder what'll happen if I just go right down the middle? Which of these 10 sparkotypes was it going to put me in? And I should have known, knowing you, 10 sparkotypes was it going to put me in? And I should have known knowing you that I wasn't going to break it because I ended up getting, you called me a special case, the shapeshifter. So let's just talk about that for a second, because I think that's an interesting result, which was a shapeshifter. And then maybe we can talk about your maker sparkotype. I could talk about what mine shows up as, but I was just kind of

curious as I went into that, you know, what this shapeshifter is. Yeah. So we created that category for exactly what you just did, but especially for people who answer honestly that way. So when you take a lot of assessments, the algorithm beneath many of them is actually pretty straightforward. It's just simple addition. Like, like there are different categories and you have a series of prompts, you add up the points and whatever is the highest point value, that's like the number one. And the next one is the next one. The next one is the next one. I didn't feel in developing our assessment that that was necessarily an honest way to go about doing it because, you know, each question you can answer, you know, on a spectrum, which is, you know, like this is can answer, you know, on a spectrum, which is,

you know, like, this is absolutely like me, or this is absolutely not like me. Right? So half of the answers could be on the absolutely not like me side. And as we were thinking this through in the logic, I said, you know, if all of the questions end up either neutral or on the not like me side, how do we actually have the ability to say, okay, just because like, whatever is the greatest point tally for anyone is actually you when you're answering all of them in a way where you don't resonate with any of them. So we needed to have a catch-all category, which says, okay, for some reason, the way that you have completed this assessment tells us that we are actually not able to sort

of ethically assign you any type. And that can happen for any number of reasons, but the most predominant ones are one, either you're kind of rushed through and just blew it off. And like you went through in a way where you really weren't making any kind of discerning answers, which can happen. So the algorithm is built to detect that and to not just falsely assign you something. The other thing is that you may be somebody who has reached a point in your life where you have lived in a bit of a container and you actually haven't stepped out and had a lot of experiences in the process of making or the process of coaching or mentoring or advising or the process of going deep into burning questions, or, you know, in which case you don't necessarily have

a really rich data set of experiences and preferences that you can draw upon in answering the prompts in a really honest and intelligent and a discerning way. And that's completely fine. Or the same time, you may actually have those experiences, but you may be somebody who's not super self-aware and you just haven't really paid much attention to how you felt or how these experiences have made you feel.

Whether they give you the feeling of being more alive and dropped in flow and, wow, I felt like I was doing the thing I was here to do. You may just be somebody who really has never developed the skills and the practices of self-awareness. So when the assessment detects that, and it's extremely rare, by the way, but it is sort of coded to pick it up, it will drop you into this alternative category that we call the shapeshifter. And I try and phrase it, you know, if you're in there just saying, this is not a terrible

thing. Don't feel bad that we haven't assigned you one of the 10 types. You know, this is actually a really fertile moment because what this is telling you is you're in a moment right now where there's amazing opportunity to start to run experiments, to start to be intentional about trying a whole bunch of different things and to ask yourself, how does this make me feel? So that you can start to develop that discernment engine, start to develop the preferences and the understanding and the

understanding and the self-awareness that is going to be really necessary for you to move forward and understand what to say yes or no to in life as you're making decisions about the way you're going to bring yourself to work probably for the rest of your life. So that was what was behind that whole thing. It's interesting because the algorithm is actually much more complicated and nuanced than some people may think it needs to be. But for me, I felt like we had to go deep into the way that we were actually thinking through the logic underneath the assessment. I don't want to spend a lot of time on this question, but did you bring in data scientists to help you with this? In the analysis of the data and the beta parts of it, I started to, yeah, because I'm not somebody who can look

at giant data sets and say like, this is what's happening here. We have a preliminary follow-up survey that was looking at correlations between doing the work of your sparkotype and actual markers for those five states I was talking about, meaningfulness, flow, engagement, expressed potential, and purpose. And we got data on this and I am not the data scientist. So I was not in a position to look at this data and understand things like correlation coefficients and our values, which are really important to know. So I had somebody else actually come in and do the analysis and the data visualization on it. And when that person came back to me and said, this is what we found, I literally said to them, cool. What does that mean? Like, is this

good? Is it terrible? And she's like, no, it's actually pretty amazing. Really, really strong correlation coefficients here. The R values are super compelling on these things. So this was not something where it was possible for just me to sit down and create on my own. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer.

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or wherever you get your podcasts. on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I was just talking with a friend the other day who was saying they can't work out at home. They have to go to the gym, but they don't really want to go to the gym because it's far away. They're worried about safety, etc. And I was saying that, yeah, I was that way too for a long time. I felt like I had to go somewhere to work out. I just couldn't figure it out in my own house until I got the Peloton. The Peloton bike completely changed that equation for me, and now I get really good workouts in my home. One of the great things is the social engagement. You can keep up with close friends, and you can also work out with people from around the globe. You can hand out high fives on the leaderboard and join specialty groups like Working Moms of Peloton or Tabata for Tacos.

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like working out from home. Learn more at onepeloton.com. New members can try Peloton classes for free for 30 days at onepeloton.com slash app. So even if you don't have the bike, onepeloton.com slash app, terms apply. That's O-N-E-P-E-L-O-T-O-N.com. So in personality tests, kind of back to this idea a little bit, when I take them, I tend to be sort of middle of the road, like I'm a nine Enneagram, right? So I'm curious in the data, do you see like, you know, some people are really clearly like, there's no question, this is what they are. And other people who group closer to the center, I'm sure you do. And how strong does one person's tendency need to be in order for you to classify them? And maybe this is why it's worth talking about,

maybe you can use this to transition into the difference between primary, shadow, and anti. Yes. To answer your first question, there definitely are different levels of differentiation between the strength of how different one impulse might be from the next one and from the next one and the next one. So for some people, one is just massively dominant. For some people, they may be clustered more closely together. We do have tolerances built in to the algorithm to basically be able to tease out. And in fact, if we see a fair amount of clustering, this is one of the things the algorithm actually will dynamically insert additional questions

designed to prompt you to go a little bit more deeply into the values that have been closely clustered to ask you literally to help tease out which one of these actually feels more like you, more like the stronger impulse or the weaker impulse or which one is in service of the other. So it's actually built to tease out. So when there's a very strong differentiation, then we can kind of immediately assign a tight profile. When it's a bit closer, we'll add in dynamically new prompts,

additional prompts to basically guide you through a process of helping us determine which feels most right to you. So that allows us to assign. And I think that's probably one of the reasons why when we surveyed a group of people who completed the assessment and said, how valid does this feel to you? Does this actually feel accurate to you? 93% came back to us and said it feels anywhere from very to extremely accurate, which was

actually way higher than I expected for a tool of this nature, which is like a big, broad, sort of like general population tool. And we'll probably continue to refine over time. We've already released one updated version of the assessment and the algorithm, the 2.0 version earlier this year, actually, which added a new metric to it. And then you asked me to sort of like a transition into, well, what do you actually learn when you take this thing? So you learn three different things. You'll discover what we call your primary sparkotype. And you can think of this as your strongest impulse for work that makes you come alive. You'll also learn your, what we call your shadow sparkotype. And this is not shadow as in the Jungian shadow,

where it's sort of like the dark side that you have to work with. I call it shadow because it lives in the shadow of the primary. And you can think of it as one of two ways. It's sort of like your runner up, like your next strongest impulse. But very often there's a more nuanced relationship between the shadow and the primary. And that's this, that you do the work of your shadow in order to be able to do the work of your primary at a higher level. So I'll give you an example to make that a little easier to understand. My primary is a maker. So that impulse is all about making ideas manifest, just creating stuff. I build things. I have forever, my entire life, physical objects, homes, painting jackets, books, brands, businesses. It doesn't really matter, honestly. My shadow

sparketype is what I call the scientist. And the impulse for the scientist is to figure things out. It's all about burning questions, puzzles, problems, and finding the answers, the solutions to these things. So I'm led primarily by the quest to build cool stuff. And I will just be in this fiercely generative process. I'm making, making, making, making. And inevitably I'll hit a wall. There's a complex problem. There's a thorny thing that needs to be deconstructed.

I need to figure out. It's not necessarily part of the process of continuing to build, but it's a block. And I have to figure out how to get past that so I can get back to the process of building. So I drop into my shadow and that shadow goes deep into the burning question and the puzzle side. And as soon as I have the answer, then I drop back out of that mode into that hyper generative maker state. And I'm all in on the building. Now, if this was reversed or if the scientist was actually my primary, I would drop into that

question and I would just go deeper and deeper. And I'd be looking for tangents. I'd be looking for more complexity. I'd want to like solve the biggest, baddest, most complicated version of this thing that I possibly could, because that's the impulse that really leads me. But for me, the minute I have what I need to go back to the process of creation, I tap out, I'm done. So those are the primary and the shadow. And then we added in this one new metric in the beginning of 2021. It had been on my mind for a long time before that. And I call it the anti-sparketype. And you can think of this as your weakest impulse for work. You can think of it as the type of work that takes the most out of you. It takes the greatest amount of external motivation. It's the heaviest lift, requires the most recovery when you do it. Even if objectively,

from the outside looking in, it's really not that hard from other people looking at it. It's really not that hard from other people looking at it. And what's so fascinating is we had been gathering 80% of the data needed to actually tease this out and help people understand what this is for them. But similar to the way that I described, there's a fair amount of complexity in helping us figure out and assign the primary and the shadow. We hadn't built out that level of complexity and nuance around the bottom end. So eventually we built it.

But before we did that, because I kind of wanted to get a sense for whether anyone would care about this thing called the anti-sparker type, I was doing this engagement with the executive leadership team, one of the giant global consulting companies, you know, the seven C-level people in this organization. And they all took the assessment. This was the first version and they learned the primary and their shadow. And then I went into their data and it just so happened to cut really lucky. The data was super clean for all seven of them. And I was able to manually calculate the anti-sparka type for all seven of them. And then I shared it back to them and it was like, they were lighting up. The conversation shifted immediately to that. They want to know all about it. And then that kind of let me know,

I was like, oh, this is something that actually people want to know. And they want to understand more for a lot of different reasons and in a lot of different ways. So we went back and we built that part into the algorithm. We released the 2.0 version of it. And what's interesting is so many people are geeking out on that part of the profile now. But at the same time, we had just been building this out and releasing it when I was closing the pages for the book. So I do speak about the anti-sparkotype and the role in the book. And since then, I've actually gotten so much more nuanced understanding and insight and stories around it. I'm pretty sure I'm just going to release a sort of a bonus chapter, you know, in the next few weeks that just talks more about the anti-sparkotype because, you know,

we've understood things like, okay, so let's say you get the anti-sparketype of nurturer. So the impulse of the nurturer is to lift others up. It's about to give care and to take care of other people. It's a deeply empathic impulse. And if people get the nurturer as the anti-sparketype, some people have been like, wait, does that just mean I'm an awful person? Like, does that mean I just could care less about other people? Or they're like, does that mean I'm an awful person? Like, does that mean I just could care less about other people? Or they're like, does that mean I'm totally off the hook? Like I never have to help another soul in my life. Sorry, mom. Right. It's like the two sides of the spectrum. And I've really had to think seriously about these questions. And, you know, the answer for those

questions like that is on the first one, no, it doesn't mean you're a terrible person at all. You know, you may care deeply about other people and invest seriously in helping them feel good and lifting them up and being of service to them. What it tells you is that for some reason, there's something in you where that type of effort, that type of work, it's going to be a heavier lift for you. And it's probably going to require more recovery from you. So it's a really good idea to know that, to know that there's nothing wrong with you. You're not a bad person, but also you may need to take care of yourself more. You need to spend more time filling your well, because it's just going to be a bit more

effort for you than someone else. And the other question, like, does this let me off the hook completely? The answer to that also is no, it doesn't. You know, because we live in a society where we're not hermits living under a bridge. You know, we're part of a collective where we are part of one big giant macro organism and the health and the wellbeing and the elevation of all of us is interconnected. And if you hold the value of being a constructive and good part of that society, then we all have a certain value set that says, we wanna play this role in different ways and the ways that feel good to us

because it honors a sacredly held value, even if it's not the work that comes most naturally to us. What's your anti-sparketype? So my anti-sparketype is the essentialist. So the work of the essentialist is to create order from chaos. It's about systems, process, utility, clarity. That kind of work makes me just want to cry. But the funny thing is, as a lifelong entrepreneur, as somebody who's made a whole bunch of things and built businesses, I've had to get good at it, you know, because in the early days, especially, I don't have the resources to have anybody else do it. So over time, I built a skillset around it, and I'm

competent at it. And it's made it better, you know, it's made it me able to do it more efficiently and faster at a higher skill level. And I get a little bit of that hit of just being competent at it, you know, that always makes anyone feel good. But to this day, it will always be a more emptying experience for me than filling, no matter how good I've gotten at it. And it's generally the type of work that I love when we find others who can do that work on our team. And it nurses them where that is their orientation. When we build teams, we're looking for good people more than anything else. And then we always want to help people invest in their own personal growth and then figure out like, where do you want to be in a

way that allows you to feel fully expressed? So for me, my anti is essentialist. And it is the thing that I just really, really, I love when it's done. I love the fact that, you know, our podcast producer for Good Life Project, Lindsay, who you know, is an essentialist, you know, and she builds this massive spreadsheets of editorial calendars with 40 different episodes in production at any given time. I love the fact that we have all that ready to go. It makes my life so much easier. And I also really love the fact that I don't have to do any of it myself. What about you? I'm curious what yours came out as.

Yeah. When I didn't try and break it, I came back, my primary is advisor, my shadow is maven, and my anti is advocate. Interesting. All of which feels directionally correct. I think I'm one of those people that probably if you went and looked at the data, you'd say, oh, things cluster up a little bit for him. But as an advisor, I mean, I coach people. That's what I do. Right. The coaching work that you do is sort of spot on for that.

I know that you really enjoy that. Yeah. And I thought about, you know, the maven, which is learning. And I was like, I do love to learn. But you're right. It stands in service. Usually anytime I'm reading or learning anything, I'm immediately thinking, how can I use this? It's my primary flaw in meditation. My primary distraction in meditation is always an insight

or an idea or a thought about the meditative process instantly. I'm like, how am I going to share that? Where am am I gonna share that? Where am I gonna share that? Who else can use that? So both those feel pretty true. And yeah, I'm not a natural advocate. I can do it and have had to do it, but I don't like it. I'm generally like a, here's what I've got.

If you want it, great. If not, okay. You know, like I'm not out here to change your mind. Yeah, and that lands, I mean, like we've known each other for a bunch of years now. And just from the outside looking in, that lands as pretty accurate from the outside looking in. So interesting thought about the advocate in the role of the anti-sparka type too. That same question that people have asked me now, well, does that mean I don't have

to do it at all? Or, you know, does that mean I'm a bad person? And the answer to both is no and no. You may still have a deeply held value. Like if you're advocating on behalf of someone you love to get healthcare, it may be hard for you. It may not come naturally to you. You may make you really uncomfortable and empty you out energetically. And yet, because you have such a deep connection to that person and any sacred value of, no, this is what I need to do.

You're still going to step in and do it. Like it doesn't necessarily let you off the hook. You just kind of know that you may also really need to take care of yourself along the way. So let's talk about once you get this information. You know, if you're very young in your career, then this can be very guiding thing. But for a lot of people who are further along in their careers, they may get information from this that shows like, oh boy, I'm not really engaged in the type of work that most brings me alive. And you and I've actually talked about this over the years in different contexts, right? About like, don't go blowing up your primary gig just because you feel mildly unsatisfied with it, despite that being sort of the cultural norm we

get. Quit the day job, you know, but talk a little bit about this. So I find out that I'm not doing work that aligns, or at least it doesn't seem to me initially that it aligns. And yet I'm, you know, 45 years old and I've got a kid in college and a mortgage. And, you know, what do I do with this? I love this question. And you're so right. Like we've both talked about the fact that I am not a fan of the, Hey, blow it all up and start over option, especially once you're further into life. Cause that's going to cause a whole lot of pain, not just to you, but to everyone around you. Like if you have a family, you know, and, and you are, you know, a big part of. Like if you have a family, you know, and you are, you know,

a big part of the financial security engine for that family, it is not just about you. So I think there's more of a bit of a staged approach that makes more sense. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like Why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you

and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park.

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Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So let's say first you find out this thing about yourself. Okay, I have these impulses. They're real.

They really matter. I know the feeling that they give me. I really, really want, and I'm not finding that I can actually express these things in my current work. So step one is look at your current work and then sort of start to note, what am I actually doing in this particular job? You know, what are the activities, the tasks, the processes? What are the tools that I'm using, the platforms, the channels that I get to use? What are the topics that I'm focused on or the areas or the themes? And note what all of those different things are. And then ask yourself, in all of these different things, is there an opportunity for me to take what I now know is the type of work that is really, really important for me and do more of it? Can I do

this little task over here? Can I involve myself in this project over here? Can I step up and, you know, ask to be a part of a team that's doing this one particular thing, even if it's not necessarily part of my job description, just because it'll be a conduit for me to do something that gives me the feeling I so deeply want to feel. And what most people find is that over a period of time, they're able to largely reimagine the very thing that they thought was a container that was unmalleable and was a trap. And rather than feeling stuck and a sense of futility, they start to realize that actually they can kind of change this thing in a lot of different ways that will give them so much more of what they're looking for. And a lot of times we can get all

the way there, which is an amazing thing because now we've got whatever illusion of security we want to hold on to, whatever financial security like we hold dear without having to endure the pain of a big disruptive change. And we've been able to largely rework the work that we're doing to give us so much more of what we need. But let's say it gets you part of the way there, but not all the way. Well, that's okay too now because you've got this thing. It's a whole lot better than it was. And you've also probably got a whole lot of time outside of that. Or maybe not a whole lot of time, but you've probably got thing, it's a whole lot better than it was. And you've also probably got a whole

lot of time outside of that, or maybe not a whole lot of time, but you've probably got windows of time. And then you can start to look for different roles, different activities, different devotions that you can do around it that will be really pure expressions of this impulse, where you have a lot of control, you have a lot of agency, you choose the size and the shape and the path, and you start to do those things. And the blend of having a very sparkotype optimized main job, and then activities on the side that are really beautiful, high level expressions of this thing, they blend together to create this sort of blended feel where you're getting so much more than you imagined that you could do.

So I'm a huge fan of first optimizing what you currently have, re-imagining it, adding things around the margins that will really bring more of the fire of coming alive to you that will spark all parts of your life. And then for most people that actually gets you there, but let's say it still doesn't. What then? Well, you may reach a point after you've done all this work and you say, you know what? Things are actually a lot better, but I'm still not there. I'm not getting as much of the feeling that I want to feel. I don't have enough of a sense of meaning or flow or excitement and energy, express potential or purpose. It's a lot better, but I just sense that it could be way more.

And I'm now at a place where I don't feel like I'm futile. I don't feel like I'm without power. I actually have realized I have a lot of control over my ability to reimagine and make choices and discern. I'm emotionally and psychologically, energetically in a much better place personally. And chances are actually that's showing up in a lot of different ways and people are responding to that around me. And I'm showing up in my work and my life differently. And if you decide at that point, you know, I still think I want to go out and look for something entirely new and different.

You're going to step into that process of exploration and seeking in a very different psychological and emotional state from a place of much more empowerment and confidence and understanding of who you are, what you're capable of, what really matters, what doesn't matter. So rather than stepping into that exploration with almost a victim mindset of like, I have to get out of this thing. I really don't know which way is up. My life is kind of spinning and I'm feeling kind of flatlined.

You step into that space from a really empowered, positive space. And you have to know that people are going to respond to you profoundly differently as you move through that exploration. That is said really, really well and mirrors very much my experience. Yeah, right. It's so similar, yeah. We've talked about this where I knew at a certain point, I wanted out of the job I had

because I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to do this podcast. I wanted to do this coaching. And I tried two approaches in this, one of which you describe in the book, which is I subtly just thought maybe if I hate what I'm doing enough, that'll get me out. That didn't work. That made everything else I did less good. In service of getting to where I ultimately wanted to be, I went, I've got to figure out how

to really like what I'm doing 50 hours a week. I've got to really optimize that to give me the psychological energy to carry on in a different way. So couldn't agree more. You and I are going to wrap up here in a minute, but any last thoughts on the book, Sparkotype, anything we've talked about that you'd want to leave people with? Yeah. I think we're in a moment in time where a lot of people are asking the big existential questions. And central to that for a lot of people is what am I going to do with my life? What should I do with my life? And they're really talking about work in a lot of ways. And the first step for me is always it's self-discovery. So my invitation would be, don't hide from yourself. I think a lot of times we have resisted a process of self-discovery

because A, we don't actually know how to step into it. That's a big part of the reason I've created this body of work, to make that first step in easy. But also, even if we do, we're not entirely sure we want to know what it might tell us. Because like you said, what if you learn what you're doing actually is really misaligned with who you come to know you are. And rather than avoiding the process because you don't know what's going to come next, step into it, learn about yourself and know that there are really healthy, constructive ways to then move forward once you're in this process of self-discovery. Beautiful. Well, I think that's a great place to leave it. We'll have links in the show notes to the book and the

Sparkotype assessment test where people can get access to all those things. As always, it's a pleasure chatting with you, Jonathan. Always so great. Thanks so much for having me. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community. Thank you for your support.