Welcome to the How People Work podcast

Work and hap­pi­ness are intrin­si­cal­ly linked. Mak­ing hap­pi­ness the cen­tral goal of one’s life, and busi­ness, can change everything.

In this episode, Jason and Jor­dan dis­cuss how per­son­al and pro­fes­sion­al growth is essen­tial for long-term ful­fill­ment. They also explore how most learn­ing and devel­op­ment pro­grams offered by employ­ers fail to address the indi­vid­ual needs of employ­ees and don’t sat­is­fy this greater need for fulfillment.

Hav­ing a clear under­stand­ing of what one is aim­ing for is cru­cial to achiev­ing long-term suc­cess and hap­pi­ness. Jason and Jor­dan explore mean­ing­ful ways to help peo­ple grow, both per­son­al­ly and pro­fes­sion­al­ly, and how com­pa­nies can pro­vide men­tor­ship, train­ing pro­grams, and career advance­ment oppor­tu­ni­ties to sup­port their employees.

Lead­ers must be will­ing to lead by exam­ple. By set­ting clear expec­ta­tions and mod­el­ing desired behav­iors, employ­ers can fos­ter a cul­ture of growth and development.

Key ideas and highlights

• Aspir­ing towards some­thing pro­vides mean­ing and purpose.
• Devel­op­ing your peo­ple goes beyond the job descrip­tion and workplace.
• Lead­ers need to be will­ing to go first and set goals for them­selves and for their people.

We have to help our employ­ees fig­ure out who they are, what they believe in, and set a true north in life that they can pur­sue. And if that pur­suit takes them away from us, so be it, because our goal as employ­ers should be human flour­ish­ing. — Jor­dan

Word of the day

Sym­bio­sis — 15:31 ✅

Timestamps

• 0:00 Intro
• 6:30 Why coast­ing in life doesn’t lead to satisfaction
• 11:30 What most learn­ing & devel­op­ment pro­grams get wrong
• 15:50 Dis­cov­er­ing what your goals and where you’re aiming
• 17:30 How to help your peo­ple grow
• 20:53 How can com­pa­nies help sup­port their peo­ple in their goals
• 23:10 Why lead­ers need to lead by example
• 24:30 Are crazy auda­cious goals worth it?
• 28:30 Mak­ing hap­pi­ness the cen­tral goal will change everything

Lis­ten on Spo­ti­fy | Apple Pod­casts | YouTube

Transcript

Jor­dan (00:05):

How many hours and years of our lives do we spend on work? For near­ly all of us, we spend 30 plus years and one third of our days in our voca­tion. More time per­haps, than we spend at rest or at play. But this isn’t a prob­lem. Why? Because work is good. Work needs to be inte­grat­ed deeply into our lives and must be in line with our most impor­tant goals and val­ues. And if it is, we have a far more com­plete and ful­fill­ing life expe­ri­ence. Wel­come to How Peo­ple Work, pod­cast, where we explore the inter­sec­tion of how humans think and act and how they apply them­selves to their work. When you under­stand both of these things, you’ll be equipped to be insight­ful, com­pas­sion­ate, and com­pelling leaders.

(00:50):

Wel­come back to How Peo­ple Work. Again, this is Jor­dan Peace. I’m here with Jason Mur­ray. Say hel­lo, Jason.

Jason:

Hel­lo.

Jor­dan:

You should have said hel­lo, Jason. That would’ve been iron­ic. It’s sar­cas­tic, which would’ve been, you know, kin­da you. We were talk­ing about hap­pi­ness last week. And we got halfway-ish through that con­ver­sa­tion. Who knows? It could be a three parter. We’re plan­ning on doing a two-parter. We’re going to con­tin­ue this con­ver­sa­tion on hap­pi­ness. Last week we talked in par­tic­u­lar about this MIT study that was done on 1 mil­lion — 1 mil­lion US sol­diers. And just how impact­ful hap­pi­ness is com­pared to any oth­er sort of demo­graph­ic truth about a per­son in terms of their like­li­hood to be a high performer,-to receive some of these mer­it-based awards. And then we were get­ting into not only just defin­ing hap­pi­ness for our­selves, but more impor­tant­ly that val­ue hier­ar­chy and this idea of like, what are we after in life?

(01:50):

What is the goal in life? And at the very end of the episode, you were shar­ing some of your own per­son­al goals, which I real­ly knew some of these things, but obvi­ous­ly it’s always enjoy­able to hear a per­son­al per­spec­tive on the pod­cast. And you’re talk­ing about why a lake house, and it’s not because you used to be a finan­cial advi­sor and that a house is an appre­ci­at­ing asset and a lake is on the water, and they’re nev­er going to make a whole lot more water­front prop­er­ty, and there­fore the val­ue goes, it was­n’t a finan­cial thing for you. It’s much more about the mem­o­ries, much more about that, the mem­o­ries that you’ll make and what you expect to feel and expe­ri­ence in this place. And so that’s kind of where we were, just to bring every­body back to the discussion.

Jason (02:36):

Well, and I think it’d be great actu­al­ly, in the same way that we kick the last one off with that MIT study, kind of lay this one out a lit­tle bit with some oth­er research kind of around the whole idea of goals and how they relate to this notion of hap­pi­ness and how we find that, or how we facil­i­tate that maybe more sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly in our lives. And so there are a num­ber of stud­ies, but a cou­ple that, again, we’ll put in the show notes for the episode here, real­ly point to the fact that hap­pi­ness, or how we expe­ri­ence hap­pi­ness is real­ly a self-rein­forc­ing cycle. And so what I mean by that is when researchers have looked at this stuff, what they found is that the moments or the ways in which we real­ly expe­ri­ence hap­pi­ness or that sort of self — sense of well­be­ing is when we’re mak­ing progress on goals. And that progress on goals is what leads to that sense of feel­ing hap­pi­er and more sat­is­fied with life. And then those pos­i­tive emo­tions that we feel as a result of sens­ing that we’re mak­ing progress on those goals, facil­i­tate the intrin­sic moti­va­tion that actu­al­ly dri­ves fur­ther goal-direct­ed behav­iors that are nec­es­sary for that goal progress and attain­ment. So it’s kind of this real­ly vir­tu­ous self-per­pet­u­at­ing cycle that you see. And -

Jor­dan (04:04):

Yeah, it’s fun­ny, I don’t mean to inter­rupt you. I was think­ing today. I was hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion over lunch about col­lege and a guy that grew up in the same area of Rich­mond that I did. And we have kind of dif­fer­ent fam­i­lies, dif­fer­ent back­grounds, but grew up in the same area. And then anoth­er guy that grew up in the north­ern part of the state that’s a lit­tle bit wealth­i­er, a lit­tle clos­er to DC, more career-ori­ent­ed and edu­cat­ed and so forth. And we were talk­ing about why we went to col­lege and it made me reflect on child­hood. And then all the way up until the age of 22, I was just fol­low­ing a script. You just do what your par­ents say. You go to ele­men­tary school, you go to mid­dle school, you go to high school, you pick a col­lege because that’s what you’re sup­posed to do. And appar­ent­ly that’s going to set you up for life. Hav­ing this piece of paper that says that you attend­ed this school and paid way too much mon­ey and that’s going to pro­pel you into life. And for me, it was­n’t even until I was maybe 27, 28, that I was like, why am I doing any of this?

(05:09):

I just fol­lowed a script. There was no goal. There was no con­cept of I should have a pur­pose, I should have some­thing I’m aim­ing towards. It took a whole lot of years to do that. And we talked about this last week, but that’s because sur­vival is easy for me, which in some ways is a real priv­i­lege. In many ways. That’s a real priv­i­lege. I don’t want to have to fight or sur­vive every day. That seems ter­ri­fy­ing to me to think about that. But at the same time, that means that I have to actu­al­ly set goals. And that means that I have to be real­ly intrin­si­cal­ly focused on ​“who am I? What is my pur­pose? What gifts do I have? What abil­i­ties do I have? What can I con­tribute to the world?” And I got to think a whole lot about more than just I need to raise and cook and eat food and build shel­ter. And so I think I just want­ed to frame that up. Cause we talked about that a lit­tle bit last week, there’s a sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence that’s real­ly easy to for­get about this. We’re sit­ting here in the year 2023. It was not that many years ago that most peo­ple woke up in the morn­ing and just thought about, how am I going to put three meals on the table? Right. Or two or one.

(06:37):

And it’s very dif­fer­ent. And so if we want to be hap­py, we have to know what we’re aim­ing towards.

Jason (06:43):

Well, even in those sur­vival sit­u­a­tions, I’d say, it does­n’t mean that you can’t be hap­py in those

moments, either. But I think it’s -

Jor­dan (06:56):

Actu­al­ly, in some ways, I think — I hes­i­tate to say this cause I’ve nev­er actu­al­ly been in that sce­nario — But in some ways, I don’t want to say eas­i­er… It’s sim­pler. It’s simpler.

Jason (07:06):

Well, it’s clarifying.

Jor­dan (07:07):

Your goal is to stay alive. And when I wake up in the morn­ing and I’m still liv­ing, I hit my goal.

Jason (07:11):

You have few­er dis­trac­tions maybe, right? You don’t have all these things — you have less options. And so as a result, it’s either I’m going to make mean­ing and pur­pose out of what I have avail­able to me or I’m just not. Where­as I think life is eas­i­er to a degree for us in such a way that, well, maybe I just can kind of coast and it’s fine. I’m not penal­ized for coast­ing necessarily.

Jor­dan (07:36):

No, not nec­es­sar­i­ly. Not nec­es­sar­i­ly. Yeah.

Jason (07:38):

Well, it does­n’t feel that way in the moment per­haps, but I am penal­ized by the anx­i­ety and all of these oth­er things that start to man­i­fest them­selves as a result of not hav­ing that direc­tion and kind of expe­ri­enc­ing that dis­so­nance. Because I think you could say to put it in the frame­work of these val­ue hier­ar­chies that we talked about last time, maybe I am just sur­viv­ing, but I got to pro­vide these meals. Yeah. Okay. Well why? Why does that mat­ter? Right. Well, because I want to be a good provider. Right. Well, why do I want to be a good provider? Well, maybe I want to do my best to be a good father. Well, why do I want to be a good father? Well, maybe it’s because being a good father is part of being a good per­son. Well, why do you want to be a good person?

Jor­dan (08:25):

Or maybe it has some­thing to do with my rela­tion­ship with my dad and he was or was­n’t an awe­some provider and I want to be him or not be like him.

Jason (08:33):

Right, and why does that mat­ter to you? Well, it’s like because I have some aspi­ra­tional desire. Maybe it is being a good per­son. Right? A lot of peo­ple say that, well, why does it mat­ter? Why do you care about being a good per­son? And it’s not a right or wrong ques­tion. It’s just a mat­ter of like, well, if that’s impor­tant to you, what’s behind that? And peo­ple have all sorts of rea­sons that they’re going to say, well, here’s why it mat­ters to me to be a good per­son. Maybe they have some oth­er high­er pur­pose, or maybe that is the thing. They’re just like, well, being a good per­son is at the top of that hierarchy.

(09:07):

That’s the thing. That’s fine. They can still ori­ent them­selves around that now and say, well, in all of these domains of my life, I can take it down to a lev­el of prac­ti­cal­i­ty because I say, well, what it means to be a good per­son, let me start defin­ing that in all of these domains. Okay, I’m a father, I’m a spouse, I’m an employ­ee, like a work­er. What does it mean to be a good per­son as an employ­ee of a com­pa­ny? All of these kinds of things, or cit­i­zen in soci­ety and so forth. And so now all of a sud­den you can take these maybe things that you do day to day that seem triv­ial or mean­ing­less, and you can actu­al­ly imbue them with pur­pose because now all of a sud­den those tasks are ori­ent­ed towards maybe one of those things are hope­ful­ly ori­ent­ed towards one of those things on that val­ue hier­ar­chy. And if it’s not, you should prob­a­bly ask your­self the ques­tion of, should I be doing this? Or why am I doing this? Or do I need to recon­sid­er my val­ues or my goals in rela­tion to the things that I do every day?

Jor­dan (10:14):

Yeah, absolute­ly. First of all, very impressed with the word imbue used so seam­less­ly and your solil­o­quy there. But also, yeah, I mean, just think­ing about that and think­ing about my own life and where that hier­ar­chy sits, what it looks like, and I described how long it took me to even build one. And you don’t build it once, right? You don’t build it once. Because when I was 25, for exam­ple, I did­n’t have chil­dren. They did­n’t exist on the hier­ar­chy of what it is that my pur­pose in life is. Right? As soon as that lit­tle girl was born, and oh gosh, I remem­ber that night like it was yes­ter­day because she had that cord wrapped around her neck twice. And I just freaked out. I don’t think I ever freaked out that much in my life. And the nurse is just like, whoop, just removes the cord. Every­thing’s fine. First time dad sit­u­a­tion. But my life total­ly changed, and I’m sure whoever’s lis­ten­ing who’s had a child has expe­ri­enced this emo­tion of just like, oh my gosh, my life is stark­ly changed from today for­ward, and I’ve had four oth­ers since then. But the emo­tion of that very first time was huge. And so you don’t go through this exer­cise once. You don’t decide what that hier­ar­chy is and what that ulti­mate aim and pur­pose in life is one time you have to assess that rou­tine­ly over the course of time. And we talked about last time a lit­tle bit about as employ­ers, we are both employ­ees and employ­ers, and how impor­tant it is to facil­i­tate a place where we actu­al­ly encour­age that type of thinking.

Jor­dan (12:02):

That’s per­son­al devel­op­ment, learn­ing and devel­op­ment plat­forms. And it’s great. Watch a video about risk and why you should­n’t leave your lap­top open and not just one pass­word. Don’t get me wrong, our peo­ple need to not do that. But if we’re think­ing about employ­ees as human beings and we’re try­ing to make an impact on them, not just while they are here in this very tem­per­ate job and this tem­per­ate com­pa­ny that will end at some point prob­a­bly — before their life does, right? They’re going to have a life well beyond that. And if we’re real­ly about peo­ple’s well­be­ing and we’re real­ly about pour­ing into their life and help­ing them be hap­py both at work and at home, and per­sist in that hap­pi­ness through­out their life­time, we got­ta help ​‘em do this stuff. We got to help them fig­ure out who they are, what they believe in, what’s impor­tant to them, and set those goals in life and set that true north in life that they can pur­sue. And if that pur­suit takes them away from us, so be it. Right? So be it because it’s about human flourishing.

Jason (13:08):

Yeah, that’s what I was going to say.

Jor­dan (13:09):

That’s why we got into busi­ness to begin with. That’s the whole point. Sure. We want to make mon­ey. We need to make mon­ey so we can pay every­body and so that we can get paid and yeah, sure. Absolute­ly. Of course, it’s about mak­ing mon­ey. That’s why a busi­ness exists to a large degree. But also if you care about human beings at all, right? You have to look at your employ­ees as peo­ple that you’re try­ing to imbue with this idea of pur­pose. And some peo­ple walk in the door with that. They just hap­pen to be super mature peo­ple, or they have a cer­tain com­mu­ni­ty or aspect of their life that kind of facil­i­tates this sort of thing. But I would say expe­ri­en­tial­ly most don’t have that. They kind of come in with a notion of, here’s what I’m good at, here’s what I can con­tribute, here’s who I love, here’s what I’m inter­est­ed in. Which is a great start. But they prob­a­bly don’t have a busi­ness plan, so to speak, for their life, of just like, here’s my mis­sion, vision, val­ues, so to speak. Here’s what I’m all about. And so I think it would be just real­ly impact­ful to pro­vide that for people.

Jason (14:24):

Yeah. Well, and I’m glad you brought up the idea again of this human flour­ish­ing. Cause I think as I was think­ing about this con­ver­sa­tion, it feels like a con­cept that uni­fies all of the dif­fer­ent lev­els of rela­tion­ship, if you will. So at the indi­vid­ual lev­el, I can say, Hey, I’m aim­ing for the flour­ish­ing of myself, of my fam­i­ly, of my friends, of et cetera. And at the busi­ness lev­el too, you can also say, well, I’m aim­ing for human flour­ish­ing. And so it’s actu­al­ly not about the mon­ey, the mon­ey as it means to an end. Because to the degree that a busi­ness is suc­cess­ful and pro­duces mon­ey for one that is ori­ent­ed towards human flour­ish­ing, it’s like­ly uti­liz­ing those dol­lars to build an envi­ron­ment that cre­ates flour­ish­ing for its peo­ple and prob­a­bly cre­ates some­thing or pro­vides some val­ue to the world that’s con­tribut­ing to human flour­ish­ing. And so all of these things end up con­verg­ing togeth­er around this con­cept, and I think it’s real­ly compelling.

Jor­dan (15:30):

Would you say there’s a sym­bio­sis between those factors?

Jason (15:32): I would.

Jor­dan (15:33):

That was like a layup. That was just amazing.

Jason (15:37)

It was­n’t intend­ed to just lay it up so beau­ti­ful­ly for you.

Jor­dan (15:41):

But No, I appre­ci­ate that, man. I appre­ci­ate it.

Jason (15:44):

Yeah. I think it’s inter­est­ing because again, com­ing back to some of this research that folks have done, it’s repeat­ed­ly demon­strat­ed, and this is research that’s been tak­ing place for decades. So this isn’t like, oh, peo­ple stum­bled across this in the last cou­ple of years. This has been around for some time, and for some rea­son it’s just not mak­ing its way into the cir­cles that we oper­ate in, maybe in a busi­ness con­text. But it showed that peo­ple, when they’re involved in the pur­suit of sub­jec­tive­ly impor­tant per­son­al goals, have high­er sub­jec­tive well­be­ing than indi­vid­u­als who lack a sense of goal direct­ness. So I mean, yeah, not to beat a dead horse here, but it just makes sense. It seems real­ly self-evi­dent that if you just wake up and go about your day and don’t have any idea of why you’re doing it, it’s just going to kind of feel blah. But if you actu­al­ly have some sense of, well, what I’m aim­ing for, it’s going to give you that mean­ing and pur­pose. So not only does it, I think it feels self-evi­dent, real­ly backed up by the sci­ence as well. And so I think that then gives us some rea­son to real­ly press peo­ple and encour­age peo­ple to say, Hey, you real­ly ought to sit down and think about these things. Think about the goals, put some pen to paper and write some things down. And then even for orga­ni­za­tions too, to think about, well, how do you design an employ­ee expe­ri­ence in such a way that you give peo­ple space or mar­gin to think about these things?

Jor­dan (17:21):

Yeah. Yeah, absolute­ly. And instead, I think we’re guilty of this too, of just giv­ing peo­ple time or giv­ing peo­ple space, flex­i­bil­i­ty, what­ev­er work when you want, work where you want, that’s great, but with­out any sort of encour­age­ment or direc­tion towards, Hey, here’s your well­ness day once a quar­ter, which is some­thing that we do of just lit­er­al­ly shut down the com­pa­ny, except for real­ly essen­tial cus­tomer ser­vice and some things that we can’t sac­ri­fice but shut down for a day, once a quar­ter for a well­ness day. But as I’m sit­ting here think­ing about it, we’re not giv­ing any sort of direc­tion. We’re not giv­ing any sort of advice around here’s how we might use that well­ness day. And we might call it a hap­pi­ness day or the pur­suit of Hap­pi­ness day, if you will.

(18:10):

We might want to think about in our own busi­ness, just through hav­ing this dis­cus­sion, how can we prompt peo­ple towards this end of real­ly iden­ti­fy­ing that true north and fig­ur­ing out where they’re going. And what’s inter­est­ing is the rea­son why I’m think­ing about that is because I know how sat­is­fy­ing it is to help peo­ple with their own goal set­ting and with their own goal ful­fill­ment. So there’s a com­mu­nal aspect of this that’s real­ly inter­est­ing because you can’t just go, Hey, every­body, set your goals. Fig­ure out your true north and go pur­sue it. Good luck. See you nev­er. There’s a com­mu­ni­ty aspect of this where we actu­al­ly both encour­age peo­ple towards what they’re going towards. We actu­al­ly help them towards that thing, whether that’s through an intro­duc­tion or through some sort of upskilling or some way that we help them towards that and they help us. And there’s such deep sat­is­fac­tion to be had from rela­tion­ships like that aren’t just this emp­ty, small talk, what­ev­er we drink togeth­er, we play togeth­er, we watch sports togeth­er, we like what­ev­er. That’s great. It’s good stuff. A lot of bud­dies. But the true friends that you actu­al­ly know what they want in life, and you are see­ing them ful­fill it and actu­al­ly help­ing them ful­fill it, it’s almost like just as sat­is­fy­ing, if not more sat­is­fy­ing, than the ful­fill­ment of the things that you wrote down as your own pur­suit of happiness.

Jason (19:47):

Yeah, and we’re built for that kind of com­mu­ni­ty, I think. Yeah. And it’s fun­ny, as you’re describ­ing that, I’m think­ing, man, if one of my direct reports came to me and said, Hey, I spent some time think­ing about my goals and what’s most impor­tant to me, and these are some of the things I came up with, I’d love to talk about. How could I do more things that help me achieve this here at Fringe? I’d say, absolute­ly. My gosh, oh my gosh, I’d be so excit­ed to have that.

Jor­dan (20:16):

You’d can­cel your day. You’d have that con­ver­sa­tion in front of the white­board. Yeah, you’d be thrilled.

Jason (20:24):

And so, I mean, think how pow­er­ful that it would be for peo­ple to come to their, and I think that’s part of the ques­tion I was ask­ing last time when we were talk­ing about what is the indi­vid­u­al’s respon­si­bil­i­ty. I’m not omni­scient. I’m not going to know that about peo­ple that I’m work­ing with.

Jor­dan (20:41):

Get out of here. You’re not?

Jason (20:44):

Sur­pris­ing­ly, right? And so we need, indi­vid­u­als need to take respon­si­bil­i­ty to take some of those steps themselves.

Jor­dan (20:54):

They have to. There’s no dig­ni­ty in the goal ful­fill­ment if they don’t do at least 80% of the work. Right? I’m not say­ing, we should ful­fill peo­ple’s goals for them to clar­i­fy, we should aid, we should lift, we should pro­vide opportunities.

Jason (21:07):

Pro­vide oppor­tu­ni­ties. And so I think that’s the role that com­pa­nies can play in that, and man­agers can play in that is like, Hey, if you have that knowl­edge, if your peo­ple bring you some of those kinds of things, cause they’ve done some work, there’s prob­a­bly a lot of ways that we can take that and say, Hey, you know what? There’s this project over here. Maybe you could jump in and work out on that one a lit­tle bit. Or, Hey, turns out this piece of your job, day to day, I had no idea that it was so mis­aligned with the things that are impor­tant to you. But turns out maybe this oth­er per­son over here actu­al­ly real­ly loves that stuff. We could prob­a­bly slide some things around and design the work expe­ri­ence in such a way that we’re aim­ing again for that human flour­ish­ing for everyone.

Jor­dan (21:54):

Yeah. I agree whole­heart­ed­ly. I think that when I think about the com­pa­ny side of this, and again, I was just think­ing about these kind of quar­ter­ly well­ness days and how do we facil­i­tate that and all that, but also I think this stuff is a lit­tle scary. I think we should acknowl­edge that. We talk about it as, and cause this is some­thing we do in our lives and oh, I mean, it’s been a lit­tle while since my wife and I have done this, but we even will take retreats, she and I togeth­er, and we’ll talk about our own, what are our com­mon goals? What are we after as a fam­i­ly and so forth. So when you do that repeat­ed­ly and you build that mus­cle, it’s not that intim­i­dat­ing. But just to acknowl­edge for a sec­ond, this could actu­al­ly be a lit­tle scary of an idea of just like, well, I don’t, what if I do this jour­ney of self-dis­cov­ery and I don’t actu­al­ly like the per­son that I am? I don’t actu­al­ly the things that I real­ly want?

(23:01):

Or maybe it’s hard for me to dig beneath the sur­face, beneath the sur­face, peel back enough onion lay­ers to real­ly see any­thing worth­while. And that’s fair. So I think there’s a lev­el of vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty required from lead­ers to go first and to actu­al­ly say, okay, I’ve done this work. I am on the whole a hap­py per­son. And I con­nect that hap­pi­ness to the fact that I have clear goals. Now some­times I’m run­ning towards them, some­times I’m crawl­ing towards them, some­times I’m falling back­wards and what­ev­er. We all go through our tribu­la­tions in life. But I think there’s a need for lead­ers to lead with that vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty and to share at least some of those things that are at or near the top of that val­ues hier­ar­chy to go, this is what I’m about. This is what I’m pur­su­ing. Because that’s what lead­er­ship is. It’s not just the direc­tive of ​“you ought to” It’s” I’ve done it already.”

Jason (24:08):

Yeah, hey, fol­low me.

Jor­dan (24:09):

Here’s the impact on me. Fol­low me. So that’s just what I was sit­ting here think­ing about, just doing my own lit­tle self-reflec­tion of me as a leader. And I’m like, I think I share a lot about how I’m doing, how I’m feel­ing, what my life is like. I don’t know that I share enough about what I’m about and what I’m after in life. Why did I start the com­pa­ny to begin with?

Jason (24:33):

Right, y eah.Well, and hav­ing the going to be use­ful, hav­ing the courage to think about those things. I mean, I think that’s a great point that you bring up, that it can be scary because you’re think­ing about it as I think about it, and I think about the jour­ney that we’ve been on over the last 10 years where we’ve been through some very, very, very lean years. And so you feel almost stu­pid lay­ing out some of the goals when you think about ​‘em because you’re like, I’m nev­er going to achieve this. In fact, all signs point to me hav­ing failed mis­er­ably at many of these things. So who am I? Why? What’s the point? What is the point of even think­ing about goals, hav­ing some sort of future ori­en­ta­tion? But the minute that you just throw those things to the side…

Jor­dan (25:22):

What’s left?

Jason (25:26):

Noth­ing. You’re just kind of float­ing around out there with­out any direc­tion what­so­ev­er. And that’s what leads to all this dis­so­nance and anx­i­ety and stress. And so I think, again, it’s why it takes courage, but to your point, I think lead­ers ought to go first. That’s their respon­si­bil­i­ty to go first in those things and help set that example.

Jor­dan (25:48):

Yeah, I think it is. Shoot, there was some­thing I was going to say, and I total­ly blanked on what it was while you were, I was lis­ten­ing. I was active lis­ten­ing right there.

Jason (25:59):

I appre­ci­ate that.

Jor­dan (26:02):

I think this is a good stop­ping point for us actu­al­ly around this top­ic of hap­pi­ness. I think though, that as our pod­cast pro­gress­es, one of the things that we’ll prob­a­bly always talk about: work is good, and this con­cept of hap­pi­ness, because it’s so clear in the research, the sci­ence, and also just the obser­va­tion­al life that we live, that it is the one thing if you’re lead­ing peo­ple orga­ni­za­tion­al­ly, that to tar­get to focus on in the employ­ee expe­ri­ence. And if you can do what­ev­er you can do to facil­i­tate some of this goal set­ting, clar­i­ty of vision, clar­i­ty of self, who I am, how I func­tion, how I work, and which I think we actu­al­ly, orga­ni­za­tion­al­ly, we typ­i­cal­ly do bet­ter with that part. We typ­i­cal­ly do bet­ter with the who I am, but the who I am, not ori­ent­ed to any sort of goal or any sort of thing that I want to accom­plish, does­n’t even real­ly mat­ter. All I’m going to walk away with is maybe a false sense of pride of some per­son­al­i­ty trait and then a whole bunch of shame at all the stuff that I’m bad at.

Jason (27:10):

Yeah.

Jor­dan (27:11):

How use­ful is that with­out an ori­en­ta­tion towards a fin­ished line or where I’m going?

Jason (27:16):

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I want to leave us with an idea if that’s okay before we wrap up. Well, I think this is a real­ly com­pelling idea that came out of some of this research that I was read­ing. Cause we’ve been kind of talk­ing about these ideas and the propo­si­tion, if you will, that was put for­ward is that well­be­ing can be this causal force inside of com­pa­nies. And so if you can imag­ine it in that way -

Jor­dan (27:44):

Are you set­ting up a part three right now?

Jason (27:46):

Well, I think this is going to be a thread of top­ics that we con­tin­ue to dis­cuss. I think that’s more there. There’s then this pos­i­tive feed­back loop that begins to take place because we talked about a cou­ple episodes ago, the rela­tion­ship between hap­pi­ness and pro­duc­tiv­i­ty. And I mean, it’s extreme ben­e­fits between hap­pi­ness and pro­duc­tiv­i­ty. And so all of a sud­den this notion of human flour­ish­ing, it just con­tin­ues to build upon itself. And I think why that’s impor­tant is because when it gets into this sphere of busi­ness, things become so prac­ti­cal that even as we’re hav­ing this con­ver­sa­tion, it’s real­ly easy for me to take this stuff that we’re talk­ing about and say, well, at the end of the day, push comes to shove, there’s oth­er stuff that we got to take care of. That’s prob­a­bly more impor­tant than think­ing about get­ting to do the job, the notion of happiness.

(28:38):

And that’s not real­ly the job. And I think the propo­si­tion that’s being put forth, and I think seems to be sup­port­ed by the research is that in actu­al­i­ty, the ben­e­fits of peo­ple focused on their hap­pi­ness and well­be­ing from the indi­vid­ual lev­el through the com­mu­ni­ty kind of orga­ni­za­tion­al lev­el, all of that is so pow­er­ful that it’s not just like, Hey, let’s just well­be­ing, hap­pi­ness. If we get to talk­ing about it, it’s great. You maybe we’ll put togeth­er a cou­ple pro­grams just to tamp down the chat­ter that’s hap­pen­ing, to put fires out, and the employ­ee sur­vey and stuff like that. And it’s always just this after­thought. And I think real­ly to the degree we can bring it into this more cen­tral place and think of it as this causal force in com­pa­nies for good, the good of the com­pa­ny, but also for the good of the world, human flour­ish­ing. It could be a real­ly, real­ly pow­er­ful thing.

Jor­dan (29:40):

Yeah. I think we have to stop think­ing about work is task and per­son­al life is rela­tion­ship and emo­tion. Rela­tion­ship and emo­tion and task is every­where. Between us, we have eight chil­dren. There’s no short­age of tasks at home. It’s not as if you just go home and it’s just like, well, we’re just sor­ta. We just hug our way through the last three hours of the day with our fam­i­ly and go to bed. All the tasks hap­pen at work. We kind of get this tough skin on when it comes to work. And it’s all about achieve­ment and it’s all about get­ting stuff done. And then we pre­tend like home is some­thing total­ly dif­fer­ent. We’ve talked about this before. Life is life and work is part of it. And I think we need to stop shy­ing away from the emo­tion. And it does­n’t mean that we go all emo­tion. It’s just like, well, let’s just sit around and talk about how we feel all day and do noth­ing. That is not the pro­pos­al here. But if peo­ple are hap­py and they’re hap­py in their job and they feel sat­is­fied and they feel like their lead­ers are invest­ed in their hap­pi­ness and invest­ed in their sat­is­fac­tion, they’re actu­al­ly more pro­duc­tive. Right? Which is, and that’s not why you do it. That’s not why you help peo­ple be hap­py so that they serve the com­pa­ny bet­ter. That is an impor­tant fac­tor. Less impor­tant than the human flour­ish­ing itself. Right. But there’s no rea­son why you can’t have both. Yeah. They’re not at odds. Yeah. They’re not at odds at all. Yeah. They’re at odds at all. Any­way, thank you so much, every­body. Thank you, Jason, for your time, your vocab­u­lary, your research. I real­ly appre­ci­ate it. What was the word again?

Jason (31:18):

Imbue.

Jor­dan:

I love that. Thank you for lis­ten­ing to how peo­ple work. We’ll see you next week.

Jason:

We got your word of the day.

Jor­dan:

Oh, my word of, I for­get it every time. What?

Jason:

For next time.

Jor­dan:

What is my word? You already got one locked and loaded?

Jason:

I do.

Jor­dan:

All right, go.

Jason:

Word of the day will be scrupulous.

Jor­dan:

Scrupu­lous. I like it. It’s fun to say too. All right, we’ll, we’ll see you next time and we will scrupu­lous­ly enter­tain you for -

Jason:

That does­n’t count.

Jor­dan:

Yeah, no, it was poor­ly used, but it does­n’t count. We’ll see you next time on how peo­ple work. Bye-Bye.

‍

Hap­pi­ness isn’t about the amount in your pay­check, but the val­ues that define your purpose.

In this episode, Jor­dan and Jason explore the sci­ence behind hap­pi­ness and its cor­re­la­tion to employ­ee pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and work­place wellbeing.

They dis­cuss the impor­tance of humil­i­ty in the work­place and why more mon­ey is not the key to achiev­ing hap­pi­ness. They also exam­ine why 100% hap­pi­ness in the work­place should not be the ulti­mate goal and what should be instead.

Key ideas and highlights

• Accord­ing to an MIT study, those who are self-report­ed to be hap­py makes them four times more like­ly to be a top performer.
• When it comes to goal-set­ting, our val­ues hier­ar­chy mat­ters more than mon­ey to achieve happiness.

Noth­ing is mis­er­able unless you think it so; Noth­ing brings hap­pi­ness unless you are con­tent with it. — Boethius — Jason

Now avail­able on Apple Pod­casts | Spo­ti­fy | YouTube

Word of the day

Malarkey 24:01 AND 24:18

Timestamps

• 0:00 Intro
• 1:30 The sci­ence behind happiness
• 3:38 Being hap­py makes you 4x more like­ly to be a top performer
• 6:13 Greek phi­los­o­phy and the pre­dis­po­si­tion of happiness
• 10:45 Can you build a hap­pi­ness playbook?
• 11:43 Why 100% hap­pi­ness in the work­place shouldn’t be the goal
• 12:19 Where unhap­pi­ness at work stems from
• 14:40 The impor­tance of humil­i­ty in the workplace
• 16:00 Why lep­ers in India are hap­pi­er than most peo­ple in the West
• 20:45 How lifestyle creep inter­feres with happiness
• 25:00 Why more mon­ey is not the chief tool to accom­plish your goals

Transcript

Jor­dan (0:00):

How many hours and years of our lives do we spend on work for near­ly all of us, we spend 30 plus years and one third of our days in our voca­tion, more time per­haps than we spend at rest or at play. But this isn’t a prob­lem. Why? Because work is good. Work needs to be inte­grat­ed deeply into our lives and must be in line with our most impor­tant goals and val­ues. And if it is, we have a far more com­plete and ful­fill­ing life expe­ri­ence. Wel­come to the How Peo­ple Work pod­cast, where we explore the inter­sec­tion of how humans think and act and how they apply them­selves to their work. When you under­stand both of these things, you’ll be equipped to be insight­ful, com­pas­sion­ate, and com­pelling leaders.

Jor­dan (00:50):

Wel­come back to How Peo­ple Work. This is Jor­dan Peace sit­ting here with Jason Mur­ray. Today we’re going to talk about hap­pi­ness, and Jason has been, as I like to use the expres­sion, nerd­ing out on a study that was done by MIT about this very top­ic of hap­pi­ness. And I’m going to kick it to Jason to frame up what this study was, when it hap­pened, why it hap­pened, what the results were, at least some of those results. And then we’ll just kind of spit­ball on our take.

Jason (1:21):

Well, I think there’s a bunch of ideas that come out of that. You and I have talked about a lit­tle bit in the past already, and we’ll talk about a lit­tle bit more on this episode. Yeah. And I believe it was Feb­ru­ary of last year. So this is 2023. That would’ve been 2022. A study came out and it was sort of pub­lished by MIT’s Sloan School of Busi­ness. And I could­n’t believe it at first when I came across it because it was lit­er­al­ly about hap­pi­ness and the impact. Yeah, well, it was real sci­ence about hap­pi­ness. And I was like, oh my gosh, I wish we had known this in 2018 when we start­ed Fringe, because it’s like nobody was talk­ing about that kind of stuff.

Jor­dan (2:05):

Well, that is easy too, in a busi­ness set­ting to be Mr. Tough guy and be like, hap­pi­ness is for my 10 year old daugh­ter, and how her love of uni­corns. That has noth­ing to do with adults and work, much less sol­diers, which is what you’re about to talk about.

Jason (2:19):

So I think that the crazy thing is if you want to say, where would it be most unlike­ly that you think you would study some­thing like hap­pi­ness, you might say the mil­i­tary, but it is prob­a­bly one of the best prox­ies for what does this mean in the work­place or busi­ness, right? Because it is lit­er­al­ly the most mer­it dri­ven insti­tu­tion that exists because of the nature of what they do. And so this study, what they did was they fol­lowed about a mil­lion US Army sol­diers over the course of about five years, and -

Jor­dan (2:55):

Which is a huge num­ber, by the way. Your typ­i­cal sur­vey that you would pub­lish some­thing like Forbes and say, we inter­viewed 500 peo­ple and — And then you’d say a result that every­one is sup­posed to read and buy and believe based on 500 sur­vey results, which in all hon­esty is not so bad. 1 mil­lion is wild. That is a great cross sec­tion of soci­ety. If you got a mil­lion peo­ple, inevitably you got a sol­id cross sec­tion of -

Jason (3:25):

Right, and so they were look­ing at it from a lens of how did peo­ple self-report feel­ings of hap­pi­ness? So they lit­er­al­ly just asked them on a sub­jec­tive basis, which is real­ly how psy­cho­log­i­cal researchers do this stuff. So mea­sures of hap­pi­ness or well­be­ing are mea­sured by this sub­jec­tiv­i­ty scale, but it’s just peo­ple assess­ing you. Just a sense of it, right? Yeah. But they found that it’s still a reli­able way of assess­ing some­body’s over­all affect in that way. And so it was real­ly fas­ci­nat­ing because indi­vid­u­als that self-report­ed greater lev­els of hap­pi­ness were four times as like­ly to be top per­form­ers as their peers. So in terms of awards received, pro­mo­tions, any­thing kind of mer­it-based thing, those that report­ed high­er lev­els of hap­pi­ness lit­er­al­ly were bet­ter per­form­ers in the organization.

Jor­dan (4:19):

For math peo­ple, that’s 400% more. Or I think it is. Oh man, some­body’s going to call me on that. That’s wild. I mean, if you would’ve said every line that you just said, except for that num­ber, I would’ve guessed like 50%, like ish at best. 4x? Wow

Jason (04:42):

Yeah, it’s sub­stan­tial. And so this was a real­ly inter­est­ing piece of it too. So when you have a study like this, you can start slic­ing the data and say­ing, well, what are the fac­tors that need to be tak­en into account? Are there impacts when you slice things based on demo­graph­ics and so forth? Basi­cal­ly to look at what is the most sub­stan­tial pre­dic­tor of this out­come? So was it this self-report­ed hap­pi­ness or was it fam­i­ly back­ground? Was it race or eth­nic­i­ty? Any of these kinds of things, right? Years of expe­ri­ence or some­thing. And despite all of these oth­er demo­graph­ic fac­tors, when they were all tak­en into con­sid­er­a­tion, hap­pi­ness was still the great­est pre­dic­tor of this mer­it-based award attain­ment. And so there’s just some­thing real­ly com­pelling, I think, to the idea that what might be con­sid­ered sub­jec­tive, and actu­al­ly I think it’d be great to talk about a lit­tle bit more, is it actu­al­ly as sub­jec­tive as maybe we’re inclined to believe is this a sig­nif­i­cant pre­dic­tor of per­for­mance in the workplace?

Jor­dan (05:45):

Yeah. Yeah, it’s real­ly inter­est­ing. And I mean it also brings up ques­tions about, well, how are we defin­ing hap­pi­ness and how are the peo­ple answer­ing the ques­tion think­ing about hap­pi­ness and how much is hap­pi­ness poten­tial­ly a bit of a choice, right? A bit of an added per­spec­tive of maybe grat­i­tude and kind of focus­ing on what’s good in one’s life as opposed to focus­ing on the hard­ship or the neg­a­tives. It brings up a whole host of questions.

Jason (6:13):

Well, actu­al­ly to that point, there’s a real­ly inter­est­ing quote I came about in a book that I read a lit­tle while ago called The Hap­pi­ness Hypoth­e­sis, and I’d nev­er heard of this per­son, but it was a ancient Roman schol­ar in Greek phi­los­o­phy, and he said, ​“Noth­ing is mis­er­able unless you think it’s so, noth­ing brings hap­pi­ness unless you’re con­tent with it.” And so it actu­al­ly aligns per­fect­ly with what you were just describ­ing and how some­times we think about it.

Jor­dan (06:42):

Yeah, I mean, I was just the­o­riz­ing, but he sounds smarter than me.

Jason:

Yeah, well, his name was Boethius, so I mean, he’s got some­thing on you there.

Jor­dan:

That’s sol­id when you have an ‑ethius in your name, you’re set.

Jason:

Yeah. Well, I think there’s some­thing too to this idea. Could cer­tain peo­ple be more pre­dis­posed to being hap­py, for exam­ple? And that actu­al­ly is true. So as researchers have gone and looked at these sub­jec­tive mea­sures, they do find that when they assess dif­fer­ent per­son­al­i­ty traits and so forth, that there are some peo­ple that just do have a high­er base­line, sort of a set point, if you will, of hap­pi­ness. And so it’s not sub­stan­tial. It’s not by a wide mar­gin, but it is true that some peo­ple are slight­ly more pre­dis­posed to be hap­py. But the study from MIT actu­al­ly dug into that a lit­tle bit. So they looked at what they called these her­i­tabil­i­ty fac­tors. So that’s what you might con­sid­er some­thing that’s maybe more just bio­log­i­cal­ly intrin­sic. So you’re pre­dis­posed to, well, how much does that pre­dis­po­si­tion impact the actu­al sort of felt real­i­ty of how you report your feel­ings of hap­pi­ness? And so when they looked at this, again, I thought this was super fas­ci­nat­ing, they found that the her­i­tabil­i­ty aspect of hap­pi­ness only account­ed for 20% of work­place hap­pi­ness or job sat­is­fac­tion, which means that the oth­er 80% was influ­enced by fac­tors with­in the work­place itself, or maybe more exter­nal fac­tors. And so it actu­al­ly brings you to a place where sort of the neces­si­ty is, well, you got­ta design good work­places and good work expe­ri­ences because it’s such a huge con­tribut­ing fac­tor to what some­body’s actu­al­ly felt expe­ri­enc­ing happiness.

Jor­dan (8:37):

Right, you can’t just go out and find the hap­py peo­ple. You can’t just go out and — That old 20% push and it’s just like, oh, well this per­son, we could treat ​‘em like crap, we could pay ​‘em ter­ri­bly, and they’re just hap­py. That’s infor­ma­tive even when you find some­body that maybe is a lit­tle bit pre­dis­posed to put a good spin on things and smile a lit­tle bit more often or what­ev­er, that is a small per­cent­age of the work that needs to be done in the work­place to actu­al­ly gen­er­ate that job sat­is­fac­tion. I mean, I think that’s observ­ably true. I mean, not to say researchers and actu­al sci­ence isn’t valu­able, and of course it’s valu­able, but it’s also observ­ably true. Obvi­ous­ly com­pa­nies where peo­ple feel kind of appre­ci­at­ed, seen, heard, dig­ni­fied, respect­ed, they’re going to be hap­pi­er in that work­place in a place where they feel like a cog in a wheel. And I know in our own expe­ri­ence, I’ve just heard — well, we don’t do it any­more, but I used to be able to do the final inter­view for every sin­gle per­son that came into Fringe. And the sto­ries about their old job was nev­er, I mean, and maybe it’s just my inter­view style, and I’m very per­son­al, and I real­ly don’t care about your resume or expe­ri­ence, I just want to know your sto­ry. But the sto­ry is always about the feel­ing of what it was like to work there wher­ev­er there was, or even two or three or four jobs ago that great expe­ri­ence that they had. And they end­ed up part­ing ways for some rea­son, or the com­pa­ny did­n’t make it or what­ev­er. But it was always about words. I loved it there. I was so hap­py there. I had a great rela­tion­ship with my man­ag­er there, or I was mis­er­able there. It’s always this word that is asso­ci­at­ed with the hap­pi­ness scale.

Jason (10:35):

So that’s a great exam­ple that I think we could maybe try and unpack a lit­tle bit, because when I hear that, I think, well, how accu­rate is some­body’s assess­ment of that? Is it actu­al­ly a rea­son­able judg­ment of hap­pi­ness because… is it just tru­ly as sub­jec­tive as I felt a cer­tain way? Or are there ways that we might be able to cre­ate a more con­sis­tent frame­work for under­stand­ing hap­pi­ness maybe a lit­tle bit more broadly?

Jor­dan (11:09):

Yeah, I mean, I think you can set up a frame­work that gives peo­ple a lot high­er chance of being sat­is­fied in their job. There are peo­ple, in my obser­va­tion, again, this is not com­ing from sci­ence or research, but in my obser­va­tion, there are peo­ple that are deter­mined to be mis­er­able. Like you could set up every­thing in the way in which it kind of ought to lead to sat­is­fac­tion, but they’re just not will­ing to accept that. And typ­i­cal­ly it’s some­thing in their past, some expe­ri­ence that they’ve had, some wound that it’s, they haven’t over­come. That has­n’t been fig­ured out. And so we can’t pro­duce hap­pi­ness 100% of the time in our work­places. That’s not, should­n’t be the goal, right? I think the goal ought to be to pro­vide an envi­ron­ment in which peo­ple can thrive, that we can see this human flour­ish­ing and that we’re not in the way of that human flour­ish­ing, that we’re both pro­mot­ing it and not being a stum­bling block to it.

Jason (12:17):

Yeah. Well, maybe one way we could come at this, because I, I haven’t thought through the answer to this ques­tion, so I’m curi­ous what you’ll say is what caus­es some­body to be unhap­py at work?

Jor­dan (12:31):

I think there could be a num­ber of things. The thing that’s, let’s be hon­est, you nev­er know what I’m going to say. Human beings always look out­side of them­selves for their source of unha, what­ev­er the word is, dis­sat­is­fac­tion, right? Dis­ap­point­ment, what­ev­er. They always are look­ing out­side of them­selves. So I think in your sur­vey­ing, and when you ask peo­ple, why are you unhap­py? The answer almost always is going to be that per­son, that sit­u­a­tion, that I was­n’t equipped because of, right? There’s kind of always fin­ger-point­ing with when I’m not hap­py, when I am hap­py, it seems to be more bal­anced, right? It’s like, well, I’m sat­is­fied because I felt like I did good work and I was proud of myself and it’s bal­anced with, but I also had a great coach and a men­tor, and it’s bal­anced with, well, I real­ly love my lead­ers. And it seems to be more clear and hon­est and well round­ed in that answer.

Jason (13:35):

Well, because this is a tough thing, and this maybe ties into the quote from Boethius a lit­tle bit here, is at what point as an indi­vid­ual, do I actu­al­ly have a valid claim or an invalid claim on being unhap­py? So if maybe my unhap­pi­ness is large­ly a result of cir­cum­stances around me and I’m kind of point­ing the fin­ger else­where, can I not as an indi­vid­ual, take some respon­si­bil­i­ty to maybe per­ceive the sit­u­a­tion dif­fer­ent­ly? Or is that just kind of pos­i­tive think­ing bull crap?

Jor­dan (14:15):

No, no, I don’t think so. I mean, think what you’re describ­ing is one good def­i­n­i­tion of what matu­ri­ty is, being able to clear­ly see who’s respon­si­ble for what. Espe­cial­ly what you are respon­si­ble for. And humili, I think part of what humil­i­ty is when you are hap­py to rec­og­nize that you aren’t the one that got your­self there, not ful­ly, that there are a lot of peo­ple that poured into your life and your sit­u­a­tion and your work and what­ev­er it is to help you. And when you’re unhap­py, the matu­ri­ty is, I took part in this, my atti­tude, my lack of effort, my lack of for­give­ness for those that have wronged me, what­ev­er the case may be. So I think the claim that I’m not hap­py is valid because we’re talk­ing about an emo­tion, and I can’t tell you, yes, you are hap­py, you feel what you feel and that the feel­ing is valid. But I think there is a need to chal­lenge who­ev­er in our lives, whether we work with them or they’re our friends or they’re our wives. We’re talk­ing about our wives on the way here, very pos­i­tive­ly, all prais­es. But there, there’s a need if peo­ple care about each oth­er to kind of call out some BS and to kind of say, well, yeah, I know you’re mis­er­able, but some of that’s on you, and let me walk you through maybe some of the steps you’ve tak­en. And that’s tough love, and that’s hard, and that’s awk­ward to do that, and espe­cial­ly in the work­place to do that. But I think that’s kind of the lev­el of rela­tion­ship on a peer-to-peer lev­el or maybe man­ag­er to peer lev­el that breeds a healthy cul­ture in an orga­ni­za­tion or a healthy fam­i­ly to have the abil­i­ty to have those conversations.

Jason (16:07):

Yeah. Well, there’s some­thing to that matu­ri­ty. I think. I’m not going to remem­ber the name of the book, so maybe we’ll find it for the show notes after­wards, but the premise of this book was a guy went and lived with the lep­ers in Cal­cut­ta in India for a year. And he basi­cal­ly went to just study how they lived and what their life was like. And what he described in the book was some of the hap­pi­est peo­ple you would ever meet, and you would think, how could they pos­si­bly be the hap­pi­est peo­ple that you would ever meet? Because cir­cum­stan­tial­ly, there’s noth­ing about their life that we would look at, espe­cial­ly where we live in the first world, in the west, and say, oh, man, I can total­ly imag­ine why they must be so hap­py with every­thing they got going on. Sounds great. I mean, it sounds mis­er­able. It sounds hor­ri­ble. And so it speaks to the fact that what, I guess what lies behind true hap­pi­ness, even our sub­jec­tive feel­ing of it, has to go deep­er than those exter­nal circumstances.

Jor­dan (17:13):

It does. I mean, that will take me down a deep rab­bit hole to talk about that, right? I mean, real­ly, how many times have you heard peo­ple say, sta­tis­ti­cal­ly the hap­pi­est peo­ple are those just above the pover­ty line? So that’s just a finan­cial real­i­ty that breeds hap­pi­ness. In this sit­u­a­tion, these peo­ple are dying. How many sto­ries have you heard of peo­ple that are, how many songs have you heard? We were just laugh­ing about coun­try songs, and we don’t enjoy the twang nec­es­sar­i­ly, but the sto­ry­telling can be real­ly good. This sto­ry, we’re sit­ting here drink­ing tequi­la and this song about tequi­la, which I won’t share any lyrics of right now, but there’s a song, right? I hope you get the chance to live. You were dying. And it’s all in this coun­try, I can’t remem­ber who it is. I apol­o­gize, I can’t remem­ber who the singer is, but what he would do if he found out he was dying, and it’s not like, well, I would just sit around and mope. It was like, I’d go sky­div­ing and I’d go moun­tain climb­ing. I’d do this and that and the oth­er thing, because your appre­ci­a­tion of every moment is so much sweet­er when you see the time­line, right? So yeah, it’s not wealth that brings hap­pi­ness. It’s not even sta­bil­i­ty that brings hap­pi­ness. It’s a view­point of what I have, and I ought to be appre­cia­tive of what I have because it’s limited.

Jason (18:44):

Well, it’s an ori­en­ta­tion. So I think what you’re talk­ing about, and we were talk­ing about this this morn­ing, is like you can’t expe­ri­ence true hap­pi­ness unless you actu­al­ly know what you’re aim­ing for. And so what hap­pens when you know, get that death sen­tence essen­tial­ly because you’re mor­tal­ly ill, all of a sud­den, it brings into focus what actu­al­ly mat­ters most. And most of us just kind of stum­ble through life with­out ever think­ing about these things. And so we just kind of wake up and we’re like, what are we doing today? I don’t know. I’m just going to go do some stuff and maybe it’s good. Maybe I have no idea because I’m not actu­al­ly think­ing about what’s most important.

Jor­dan (19:20):

Because I don’t have to think. For cen­turies, on cen­turies and mil­len­nia, your chief goal was to sur­vive, right? You had to make the food, find the food, cook the food, eat the food. Stay alive, have shel­ter. Like med­i­cine was­n’t even a thought for many thou­sands of years until it was, and then there was some con­cern about that, and that was part of the stay­ing alive nar­ra­tive and goal and focus. But it has become, for most of us, I should say, not to, there are unique sit­u­a­tions, but for most of us in the West, it has become too easy to sur­vive. Right? And so if sur­vival’s not the goal any­more, then we fail to make goals some­times where it’s like, oh, okay, well yeah, I just kind of coast, I guess. I’ll just go from one thing to the next rela­tion­ship to the next job, to the next what­ev­er, kind of wher­ev­er life leads me. And yet we have the high­est anx­i­ety rates, depres­sion rates in all of human his­to­ry, sui­cide rates in all of human his­to­ry, and we’re the wealth­i­est we’ve ever been, right? It’s so much eas­i­er to sur­vive than it’s ever been. We’ve got more med­i­cine, we live longer, and yet we’re less hap­py. Right? That should rock us to to think about that. Why is that, right? Isn’t that the whole point? Live longer, have more, relax more, work less, right? Isn’t that the whole thing?

Jason (20:58):

Yeah. Well, I mean, that kind of goes back to even what we talked about last week when we got on to all the weird def­i­n­i­tions of dif­fer­ent types of hap­pi­ness and what­not. But a lot of those things that you’re just describ­ing would kind of fall into that buck­et of hedo­nic hap­pi­ness, which is basi­cal­ly just things that I get to have very short term ori­ent­ed kind of plea­sure expe­ri­ences. And what hap­pens with all of those things, say food -

Jor­dan (21:20):

For those of us that aren’t as smart as Jason, that’s based on the word hedo­nism as in plea­sure-seek­ing. So just that def­i­n­i­tion for everybody.

Jason (21:30):

So if you take food, for exam­ple, like food sati­ates, so it brings a great deal of plea­sure for a very short peri­od of time. And when the expe­ri­ence is over, you feel full, you actu­al­ly can’t enjoy any­more with­out it becom­ing a hor­ri­ble expe­ri­ence. Right? And then the same’s true of some of these oth­er things. So when we talk about wealth or earn­ing income and things like that. There’s what’s called the adap­ta­tion prin­ci­ple, so this is again a psy­cho­log­i­cal term. I can’t take cred­it for it, but it just means that once you have some­thing, you adjust to a new set point of that experience.

Jor­dan (22:09):

When we were in finan­cial plan­ning, we used to call that lifestyle creep.

Jason (22:12):

Yes, exact­ly right? And so it cor­re­lates exact­ly to these stud­ies that have been done around happiness.

Jor­dan (22:19):

What­ev­er I had yes­ter­day is my new demand on life. I must have that every day from here for­ward, right?

Jason (22:26):

So I think this is why the research around that kind of looks at the cor­re­la­tions between income and hap­pi­ness, it all breaks down over a cer­tain thresh­old. Because over a cer­tain thresh­old, it’s just the adap­ta­tion prin­ci­ple at work. You have a new set point, it’s not going to sus­tain a lev­el of hap­pi­ness because it’s not actu­al­ly tapped into that goal ori­en­ta­tion. So you real­ly have to step back then and say, well, fun­da­men­tal­ly, that longer term sus­tained hap­pi­ness is based upon some­thing deep­er and more mean­ing­ful and pur­pose­ful. Yes.

Jor­dan (22:50):

Yeah. I mean, you look at the super wealthy in the world, and for most of their life, they gen­er­ate wealth, gen­er­ate wealth, gen­er­ate wealth, and some of ​‘em nev­er real­ly changed from that, or they die young or what­ev­er hap­pens. But you see a lot of peo­ple get into their six­ties, sev­en­ties, and all of a sud­den, like a Bill Gates, Bill and Melin­da Gates, for exam­ple, good exam­ple, just a switch flipped. And they were like, we need to give back. We need to seek pur­pose. You could just tell that that is the mis­sion in their house. Well, I don’t think they have a house­hold any­more, but you know what I mean. You could just see that change. All of a sud­den Bill Gates was Microsoft and then all of a sud­den Bill Gates was a foun­da­tion and it was all about that. And you just won­der, did it take him until that point in life and did his set point change so many times that he final­ly real­ized, oh, this is just a lim­it­less pur­suit of lim­it­less wealth that will nev­er sat­is­fy me. This is malarkey, for lack of a bet­ter word. Yeah. So you keep bring­ing up goals. So I think it’s a good tran­si­tion of what do we want in life? What is it that mat­ters to us? And I think anoth­er thing that’s malarkey, to use the word twice, is that we assume that it’s mon­ey that is the pre­dom­i­nant tool that will get us the thing that we want. And that might be the case. You might sit down and set goals, and the thing for you that just taps into the heart of hearts for you is a yacht. Maybe that’s the thing. Don’t, I’m not going to try to judge that push on that if that’s the thing. Right? I know you would. I would too, but I’m being a lit­tle bit play­ful here, but I’m not try­ing to say mon­ey’s unim­por­tant or it’s not some­thing to pur­sue for cer­tain means. Your goal might be to give away a bil­lion dol­lars in your life. You’re not going to be able to do that unless you have a bil­lion dol­lars. So it’s not that mon­ey, in and of itself is the bad thing. It’s just the assump­tion that that is the chief tool need­ed to accom­plish the goal is falsehood.

Jason (25:14):

Well, it’s a means. It is a means. Yeah. It’s one means to an end, which the end is the goal. But then you have to say, let’s say, let’s take the yacht exam­ple. See, you could­n’t let it go, then you can’t let it go. Well, I think it’s a good one. Yeah. Well, cause I take myself and say, I’ve been dream­ing about this vaca­tion house that we don’t have right now, but I’d love to have some­thing like that for our fam­i­ly. But you know, look at some­thing like that. It’s like, well, you need cer­tain resources and you have to get a down pay­ment. All these things got to come togeth­er in order to make some­thing like that hap­pen. But if I real­ly step back and say, why do I want that? Yeah. Well, it’s not exact­ly, because I just want a place to get away. It’s that I imag­ine all of the expe­ri­ences that I’ll have with my fam­i­ly there and all the oth­er peo­ple from my fam­i­ly and friends that I’ll bring there and the expe­ri­ences that we’ll share togeth­er. And so all of a sud­den the val­ue that’s behind just like, Hey, it’s not actu­al­ly about hav­ing a vaca­tion house, right, in and of itself. It’s actu­al­ly about these expe­ri­ences. And so then you start kind of unpack­ing that and it’s like, why does that mat­ter? It’s like, well, because those rela­tion­ships in my life are the most impor­tant thing to me. And so all of a sud­den you’re build­ing this val­ue hier­ar­chy that you can ori­ent your­self towards in the day-to-day things that you do. And so now all of a sud­den the hap­pi­ness isn’t like, well, do I have more mon­ey or not? Because that’s not real­ly the ulti­mate end any­ways. Yeah. The ulti­mate end is what’s at the top of that val­ue hier­ar­chy that I actu­al­ly care most about? What is that thing, and am I mak­ing progress towards it? Do I feel that I’m mak­ing progress towards it?

Jor­dan (27:01):

Right. I am shocked by how long we’ve been talk­ing. It feels like it’s been five min­utes and it has not been five min­utes. If you’re good with it, I would love to just pick this up next week. Con­tin­ue down this very same track because I think it’s a ton more to say on hap­pi­ness and I think some per­son­al sto­ries. We can share our own goals, how you go about set­ting goals, how you go about set­ting goals if you have peo­ple in your life like a spouse or a life part­ner or some­body impor­tant to you that you need to coset those goals with. I think there’s a ton to dis­cuss. Is that good? All right. Cool. I know we have anoth­er top­ic planned, but I think would be fun just to con­tin­ue. So let me wrap it up. Yes. And we’ll jump back on next week.

Jason (27:45):

And I got to give you the word of the day For this week, which is symbiosis.

Jor­dan:

I’m going to have to look that one up too. Is it like sym­bi­otics sym­bio­sis? Okay. I know my root words. Yes. I know my pre­fix­es pret­ty well. Yeah. Oh, okay. All right. I’m with you. Well, great. Real­ly enjoyed this dis­cus­sion. I hope you all enjoyed lis­ten­ing to our dis­cus­sion and hap­pi­ness. We’re going to pick this up next week. We’re plan­ning on talk­ing about hav­ing a pos­i­tive vision of work, and so I think we almost could even blend the two hap­pi­ness, pos­i­tiv­i­ty at work. They do kind of go togeth­er, but we’re going to pick this up. Real­ly enjoyed it. Thank you, Jason, for the time. Real­ly enjoy the dis­cus­sion and we will catch you all next week on how peo­ple work. Bye-Bye. Bye.

‍

Hap­pi­ness is under­rat­ed in the work­place. While most lead­ers under­stand that employ­ee hap­pi­ness is impor­tant, many have strug­gled to tie it to a core busi­ness metric.

How does work­force hap­pi­ness impact costs, earn­ings, or efficiency?

Hap­pi­ness is close­ly tied to pro­duc­tiv­i­ty. Accord­ing to research by MIT, self-report­ed hap­pi­ness is a pre­dic­tive mea­sure of per­for­mance — a much more reli­able pre­dic­tor of pro­duc­tiv­i­ty than employ­ee engagement.

So why is it so often over­looked by many organizations?

In this episode, Jason and Jor­dan explain the con­nec­tion between employ­ee hap­pi­ness and pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, build­ing a case for why employ­ers should care about the hap­pi­ness of their peo­ple from a busi­ness perspective.

They urge lead­ers to view human flour­ish­ing as an ori­ent­ing prin­ci­ple in their busi­ness to sup­port the hap­pi­ness and pro­duc­tiv­i­ty of their people.

Key ideas and highlights

• Most lead­ers dis­miss hap­pi­ness off-hand as a ​“soft” or ​“qual­i­ta­tive” met­ric that doesn’t have any­thing to do with real work.
• Peo­ple expe­ri­ence sus­tained hap­pi­ness when they move toward a high­ly val­ued goal.
• When we study the tie between employ­ee hap­pi­ness to pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, we find that hap­py employ­ees are more pro­duc­tive than their unhap­py counterparts.
• Stud­ies men­tioned in this episode:
• Influ­ence of Pos­i­tive Affect on Intrin­sic and Extrin­sic Motivation
• Hap­pi­ness and Productivity

When we view our work as a means of con­tribut­ing to soci­ety, we start to view our per­son­al pro­duc­tiv­i­ty as a means of dri­ving human flour­ish­ing. This ori­ents us to some­thing that’s big­ger than our­selves and requires that we take our per­son­al hap­pi­ness seri­ous­ly. — Jason Murray

Now avail­able on: Apple Pod­casts | Spo­ti­fy | YouTube

Learn more about how you can retain employ­ees and reduce the costs of your peo­ple pro­grams with Fringe.

Word of the day

• 26:07 Tan­ta­mount ✨

Timestamps

• 2:20 — Why employ­ee hap­pi­ness is an impor­tant busi­ness metric
• 5:00 — 3 dif­fer­ent def­i­n­i­tions for hap­pi­ness: Eudai­mon­ic Well­be­ing, Ful­fill­ment, and Hedo­nic Pleasure
• 8:29 — How to accu­rate­ly assess employ­ee happiness
• 9:35 — Is hap­pi­ness a ​“soft” met­ric or a core busi­ness met­ric? Why is it overlooked?
• 13:51 — Why busi­ness­es aren’t set up to dri­ve happiness
• 16:47 — Why lead­ers should care about the hap­pi­ness of their people
• 17:01 — Gen Z is poised to be the most phil­an­thropic gen­er­a­tion ever. Why?
• 20:30 — Lead­er­ship approach­es that inspire hap­pi­ness and pro­duc­tiv­i­ty vs those that don’t
• 24:21 — What hap­pens when we view human flour­ish­ing as an ori­ent­ing principle
• 27:37 — How does hap­pi­ness tie to productivity?

Transcript

Jor­dan (00:05):

How many hours and years of our lives do we spend on work for near­ly all of us, we spend 30 plus years and one third of our days in our voca­tion, more time per­haps, than we spend at rest or at play. But this isn’t a prob­lem. Why? Because work is good. Work needs to be inte­grat­ed deeply into our lives and must be in line with our most impor­tant goals and val­ues. And if it is, we have a far more com­plete and ful­fill­ing life expe­ri­ence. Wel­come to How Peo­ple Work, pod­cast, where we explore the inter­sec­tion of how humans think and act and how they apply them­selves to their work. When you under­stand both of these things, you’ll be equipped to be insight­ful, com­pas­sion­ate, and com­pelling lead­ers. Wel­come back to How Peo­ple Work. My name’s Jor­dan Peace. I’m sit­ting here with Jason Mur­ray, my co-host. Excit­ed to talk to you today about some very, very tech­ni­cal top­ic about how to get the very most out of your peo­ple. We’re going to talk about time man­age­ment. We’re going to talk about change man­age­ment, so much man­age­ment. What is

Jason (01:11):

What is Change man­age­ment? I don’t even know.

Jor­dan (01:11):

We’re not going to talk about — None of those things.

Jason (01:14):

Will there be stakeholders?

Jor­dan (01:15):

That would be absurd. There will be stake­hold­ers. No, actu­al­ly we’re going to talk about some­thing that actu­al­ly in real life helps employ­ees be pro­duc­tive and it is happiness.

Jason (01:26):

All right.

Jor­dan (01:26):

Shock­er.

Jason (01:27):

Yeah.

Jor­dan (01:28):

Crowd goes qui­et. Yes. Hap­pi­ness. In fact, we are not researchers. We are not aca­d­e­mics nec­es­sar­i­ly, but through much research, have affirmed the fact that hap­pi­ness is actu­al­ly a key — has a key tie to this idea of pro­duc­tiv­i­ty amongst employ­ees. And it’s also just a real­ly good thing all by itself.

Jason (01:52):

All by itself. Yeah. Well, it’s prob­a­bly a lit­tle iron­ic because I mean, my role in Fringe until recent­ly has large­ly been talk­ing with cus­tomers and prospects for the bet­ter part of four years. And when­ev­er I would talk to peo­ple peo­ple or HR peo­ple you would not get any kind of push­back what­so­ev­er around the notion of hap­pi­ness for peo­ple or employ­ees being a good thing. And so the dis­con­nect seem­ing­ly is exec­u­tives and com­pa­ny lead­ers, like our­selves that for what­ev­er rea­son, don’t con­nect with that or don’t feel that it’s maybe a busi­ness met­ric that mer­its any kind of real inspec­tion when it comes to think­ing about how you run your orga­ni­za­tion or mea­sure things that are rel­e­vant when it comes to peo­ple and what­not. And so that is some­thing that we hope to dis­pel today because there are many facts and much research that I think draw a very direct line between hap­pi­ness and pro­duc­tiv­i­ty is some­thing that ought to be real­ly core to what we’re try­ing to do as both peo­ple and indi­vid­u­als and as a company.

Jor­dan (03:07):

Yeah. Last week we attacked work-life bal­ance, and today we’ll attack the notion that hap­pi­ness does­n’t mat­ter. This is becom­ing a lit­tle Myth­Busters-ish, I believe, but I’m total­ly fine with it.

Jason (03:19):

Well, we were just look­ing at a old Super Bowl com­mer­cial of the office line­backer, so now I’m just imag­in­ing him tack­ling these ideas. That’s super cheesy. <laugh>. Sor­ry, guys.

Jor­dan (03:33):

Can I say nerd alert again? Yeah, I think I’ll squeeze that into every episode and it’ll be real­ly easy to do, actually.

Jason (03:38):

Yeah, it will be. Yeah. I’ll own it ful­ly. So hap­pi­ness is kind of the key top­ic. There’s prob­a­bly a cou­ple propo­si­tions that I have here. One, I think is that hap­pi­ness is under­rat­ed for some of the rea­sons that we just stat­ed, or at least under­rat­ed by cer­tain peo­ple and lead­ers with­in orga­ni­za­tions. And that sec­ond­ly, hap­pi­ness is a direct dri­ver of pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, that they’re real­ly close­ly linked to one anoth­er in some ways that we’ll talk about. So I think where it’d be help­ful to start is just what do we mean? Yeah. When we say hap­pi­ness, what are we actu­al­ly talk­ing about?

Jor­dan (04:14):

Yeah. I mean, I think it’d be impor­tant to look at some of what you’ve been read­ing in terms of how the researchers are defin­ing that hap­pi­ness, right? But I would hope that it is deep­er than the dopamine hit received when we check a box in our to-do list or when some­one says a nice com­pli­ment, and that thing that fades with­in about 30 sec­onds and then kind of we’re back to our default men­tal state, what­ev­er that was pri­or to that lit­tle dopamine hit.

Jason (04:47):

Right? Right. Yeah. So there’s real­ly three, kind of, main areas, I guess you’d say, that there’s con­sen­sus from researchers and psy­chol­o­gists around. So one is just real­ly sim­ple sub­jec­tive well­be­ing. So it’s kind of like how do you define hap­pi­ness? While it’s what­ev­er you feel, in some ways, is kind of how you would say that. And so if you eval­u­ate your life as pos­i­tive or sat­is­fy­ing or ful­fill­ing, that the pos­i­tive emo­tions asso­ci­at­ed with that would be defined as hap­pi­ness. And so anoth­er more tech­ni­cal, which I’ll admit I did­n’t know before this pod­cast when I was doing my research, is what they call you eudai­mon­ic wellbeing.

Jor­dan (05:28):

That should have been my word of the day.

Jason (05:29):

But I actu­al­ly think — yeah that should have been. And so while I did­n’t know the word, I think the con­cept itself is actu­al­ly very deep and maybe even the most sig­nif­i­cant way that we could think about hap­pi­ness. So it’s the sense of ful­fill­ment and pur­pose that comes from liv­ing a mean­ing­ful and ful­fill­ing life. And so it’s often asso­ci­at­ed with auton­o­my, com­pe­tence, sense of com­mu­ni­ty and relat­ed­ness. And then what we were talk­ing about in the last episode was being engaged with things that align with your most impor­tant val­ues and goals. And so that being a key dri­ver of hap­pi­ness there. And then the third which is maybe the most basic hedo­nic plea­sure which are the emo­tions and sen­sa­tions that just come from enjoy­ing some of the more basic things in life myself.

Jor­dan (06:21):

I see. Enough said.

Jason (06:25):

We will leave that one to the side. And I think part of the rea­son for that isn’t that not impor­tant, but most of the research has shown that that par­tic­u­lar aspect of hap­pi­ness isn’t gen­er­al­ly asso­ci­at­ed with sus­tained hap­pi­ness. And I think that’s what we want to real­ly focus on here.

Jor­dan (06:43):

Kind of that dopamine hit idea.

Jason (06:44):

Exact­ly. And so, I mean, an exam­ple of that would just be food. So food is some­thing that trig­gers pos­i­tive emo­tion in us. When we eat it, we con­sume it, it makes us hap­py but it does­n’t help us devel­op new skills to move through life or cre­ate a dri­ve to expe­ri­ence new things because it sati­ates. And so that actu­al sati­a­tion, bio­log­i­cal­ly, means that it’s just not going to be some­thing that sus­tains that feel­ing of hap­pi­ness in the same way that pur­pose, mean­ing, and ful­fill­ment will. So I think those are impor­tant dis­tinc­tions here.

Jor­dan (07:20):

Well, it’s some­thing that’s com­ing from with­out, as opposed to some­thing that’s com­ing from within.

Jason (07:24):

Yeah, that’s a real­ly good way to put it.

Jor­dan (07:26):

That first def­i­n­i­tion, which I think is not one to skip over either — that self-defined idea. I’ve offten heard this idea that hap­pi­ness is a choice. And to some degree, I actu­al­ly think there’s some truth to that. The per­spec­tive, the belief that I have a good life. I have a lot to be grate­ful. Hon­ing in on what is good and choos­ing to focus on that I think can have a real­ly big impact on that emo­tion­al expe­ri­ence of hap­pi­ness. I don’t think it’s some­thing to skip over alto­geth­er to get to that. Eu-di — Say it again?

Jason (08:03):

Eudai­mon­ic.

Jor­dan (08:04):

Eudai­mon­ic. I’m nev­er going to get that.

Jason (08:05):

Real­ly enun­ci­ate that.

Jor­dan (08:07):

Well, eu-dai-mon­ic. Dai-mon­ic? Okay. I just keep hear­ing demon­ic in my head. The sense of ful­fill­ment and pur­pose, this deep­er thing like that. Obvi­ous­ly that’s where we’re going to spend most of our time talk­ing about this and study­ing this and look­ing at the research. But I also just want­ed to call out that first part because we should­n’t skip over the fact that when you say sur­vey employ­ees, for exam­ple, and they say that they’re hap­py, that should be con­sid­ered, right? Espe­cial­ly if it’s some­thing that is anony­mous and you don’t know. They have no rea­son to lie when you don’t know who’s answer­ing the sur­vey. So they’re iden­ti­fy­ing as hap­py that that’s an impor­tant data point.

Jason (08:49):

Well, and it’s actu­al­ly prob­a­bly one of the most accu­rate things that we can ask an employ­ee to report on when it comes to engage­ment sur­veys. So some of you all out there might be famil­iar with Mar­cus Buck­ing­ham’s research, but one of the things that he talks about when it comes to engage­ment sur­veys, feed­back and things like that, is that we’re ter­ri­ble asses­sors of oth­er peo­ple, but we’re great and accu­rate asses­sors of our own state of being. And so when you ask some­body about their feel­ing of hap­pi­ness, we can actu­al­ly reli­ably use that in our employ­ment data as a ref­er­ence point for hap­pi­ness and things of that nature. So I think it is valid.

Jor­dan (09:26):

Plus one for nar­cis­sism. That’s great.

Jason (09:31):

So I think what’s inter­est­ing, we men­tioned this at the top of the episode, is that a lot of lead­ers dis­miss hap­pi­ness. The notion of hap­pi­ness is some­thing that’s maybe soft or just kind of a qual­i­ta­tive met­ric. It real­ly does­n’t have any­thing to do with real work. And so, I mean, a ques­tion that would be inter­est­ing to kick around a lit­tle bit is why is it over­looked in that way?

Jor­dan (09:53):

It’s mushy. First of all, right? I think there’s an ego there. There’s a left­over idea that this is a trans­ac­tion. I’m pay­ing you to do work. Just get it done. Shut your mouth, I’ll pay you money.

Jason (10:11):

I don’t care how you feel.

Jor­dan (10:12):

I don’t care how you feel. Yeah. I don’t have to care how you feel. Why should I?

Jason (10:15):

Hap­py or Sad.

Jor­dan (10:16):

Does­n’t mat­ter. Right. So I think there’s an unwill­ing­ness to engage on things that are emo­tion­al. Well, for the rea­sons I just said, but also maybe the fear of that that’s a slip­pery slope, that, well, we’re not real­ly sup­posed to be friends. We’re sup­posed to be cowork­ers. This is not a fam­i­ly. It’s a team. Right? And there’s this sense of I don’t want to go there. And also, I don’t know, I guess if you’re a leader and you’re think­ing, I’m going to get into an emo­tion­al engage­ment with my employ­ee, this is a per­son I might have to fire some­day. I can’t — I don’t want to know about whether or not they’re hap­py. So I just think there’s some fears. There’s some fears there. I don’t think their fears are legit­i­mate. I don’t think the fears should cause us to over­look these things. But I’m just you try­ing to iden­ti­fy some of the rea­sons why we might push back against the notion, maybe to give them the ben­e­fit of the doubt. Maybe they’re think­ing, how could I impact that? Even if we study it, what does this work have to do with their hap­pi­ness if they’re not hap­py? It’s prob­a­bly, this is an assump­tion that’s being made. It’s prob­a­bly because things aren’t okay at home. There’s prob­a­bly an issue with this, that and the oth­er. Right?

Jason (11:38):

It’s not the work. It could­n’t pos­si­bly be.

Jor­dan (11:39):

Exact­ly, because we assume what’s hap­pen­ing not at work is what’s kind of con­trol­ling their emo­tion­al life and their state of being, which it can be, cer­tain­ly. But it also could be very much about the peo­ple in the room or the vir­tu­al room or what­ev­er, and those rela­tion­ships or the task is too dif­fi­cult or too easy or what­ev­er the case may be.

Jason (12:01):

So, well, it goes the oth­er way too. Yeah. I mean, there’s lots of research on the expe­ri­ence of hap­pi­ness at home because of what’s hap­pen­ing at work. So it’s a lit­tle iron­ic in some ways that we’re talk­ing about it from the per­spec­tive of those things influ­enc­ing that feel­ing of hap­pi­ness and how an employ­ee is at work and how that relates to pro­duc­tiv­i­ty. But what hap­pens at work very much has a very direct impact on the sat­is­fac­tion of fam­i­ly mem­bers and kids even, in particular.

Jor­dan (12:30):

Yeah. So I think it’s those things. And then prob­a­bly the thing that you’re try­ing to dis­pel here to begin with is that it actu­al­ly is impact­ful. So if I don’t believe that this is a sta­tis­tic that mat­ters, if you tell me that we had a 3% increase in our health insur­ance claims expe­ri­ence last year, right? Oh, the ears perk, God, what peo­ple miss­ing work, what? Our pre­mi­ums are going to go up? I can tie it to dol­lars so quick­ly and so fast that it’s just like, okay, well, there’s a stat I want to hear, right? And so some of it is just, I think the matu­ri­ty of the research that needs to come out and get more wide­spread to help peo­ple look past, well, it’s a lit­tle mushy. Well, it’s a lit­tle inti­mate, but it’s worth look­ing at. And sad­ly, typ­i­cal­ly it’s the finan­cial real­i­ties that cause lead­ers to break through the bar­ri­ers of their fear and engage with some­thing new.

Jason (13:29):

Yeah. Well, it’s the eas­i­est way, and I mean, you and I have our role in the demands of our posi­tions inside of Fringe have changed a lot over the last four years. And I have some sym­pa­thy, I guess you might say, for those lead­ers. I mean, I don’t think it’s cor­rect, maybe the way the deci­sions are being made, but you can empathize sit­ting on a board and being a part of finan­cial con­ver­sa­tions and look­ing at the met­rics of a com­pa­ny the way that we’re required to do now, it’s easy to see how you can get stuck on — there’s not a sin­gle place on a bal­ance sheet or a PNL that hap­pi­ness shows up as remote­ly prac­ti­cal. And so the whole notion of that being some­thing that’s a real core busi­ness dri­ver, I think is chal­leng­ing to say the least.

Jor­dan (14:18):

Yeah, it is. I mean, at best, we’ve got some data at this point that’s pret­ty firm around reten­tion, and you can tie hap­pi­ness to reten­tion and then go, oh, okay, now I under­stand how this saves me mon­ey. But the two prob­lems, one, that’s not deep enough finan­cial­ly, it’s not well-round­ed enough finan­cial­ly. But also the per­spec­tive out­side of the finances all togeth­er is miss­ing that I work with human beings and I should want to impact them in such a way that I help them to be hap­pi­er and more ful­filled and to flour­ish. That should be a goal regard­less of the rest of that. So you kind of have to sneak in through the back door of the bot­tom line to some­times get peo­ple’s atten­tion, but often if you can wake ​‘em up and help ​‘em remem­ber that these are peo­ple, then you can get more ful­ly into the minds and hearts and make some change.

Jason (15:16):

So I think that that’s actu­al­ly an idea I want to stay on for a few min­utes here, because I mean, we have some data and we have some research that we want to talk about that I think helps kind of prove out some of the ROI around this. But I think — I’d love to say maybe more ide­al­is­ti­cal­ly, why should we care about hap­pi­ness to begin with? And say, you start­ed to touch on that a lit­tle bit, but why should hap­pi­ness mat­ter to us as maybe com­pa­ny leaders?

Jor­dan (15:44):

Well, hap­pi­ness. Hap­pi­ness is like sneez­ing. And it’s like some­body sneezes — Excuse me, yawns, yawn­ing. I take it back. Not like sneez­ing. It’s like yawn­ing, right? It’s con­ta­gious. Some­body yawns. You got to yawn, okay? You can’t not do it. And the next per­son does it before you know it, all the air’s gone in the room. But it’s one of those things, you can’t be around a per­son that is hap­py and not crack a smile. Some­body that’s just had the best day and they walk into a room or a vir­tu­al room and they’re just lit up and they got a sto­ry to tell and some­thing great hap­pened and it just catch­es on. And that is on a shal­low, momen­tary lev­el, but it’s also on a deep­er, more per­ma­nent lev­el when you are around a bunch of sat­is­fied peo­ple that they’re grate­ful for their life and the rela­tion­ships in their life, and they just have that attitude.

(16:41):

It just rubs off so much. And the only rea­son I bring all of that up is because these lead­ers should care for their own sake. Because the pur­suit of help­ing oth­ers be hap­pi­er is what makes human beings hap­py. That’s what makes us hap­py, is the pur­suit of help­ing and uplift­ing oth­ers. That’s why Gen Z is, I, I’ve read in many dif­fer­ent places, poised to be the most phil­an­thropic gen­er­a­tion ever. They don’t have any mon­ey yet. So you can’t mea­sure it on dol­lars, but on vol­un­teerism, for exam­ple, yeah, they’re like 6% high­er vol­un­teerism from the age group of 15 to 19 than even the age group of 20 to 24.

Jason (17:23):

Wow, I did­n’t know that.

Jor­dan (17:25):

And why? I mean, I’m going to get into a big tan­gent here, so I apol­o­gize, but we talked about this in the last episode, right? Around the what’s gone, each era of human his­to­ry and what’s become more and more and more true, and then the wealth of your coun­try you live in is that sur­viv­ing is real­ly easy. When you wake up tomor­row morn­ing, there’s not one time that will ever cross your mind, I hope I have enough food in shel­ter today.

Jason (17:55):

Right.

Jor­dan (17:57):

Or I hope my child does­n’t die from the com­mon cold, right? You won’t think that. You don’t have to think that. That’s won­der­ful in and of itself. That’s great. But when you don’t spend your time think­ing about sur­viv­ing, you can go one or two dif­fer­ent direc­tions. You can think about human flour­ish­ing, and you can think about serv­ing oth­ers, and you can think about real­ly uplift­ing those around you so that oth­ers can expe­ri­ence that same lack of wor­ry, lack of doubt, lack of anx­i­ety around the basic needs of life. Or you can get just real­ly, real­ly into your­self and just explor­ing how won­der­ful and unique you are and how great your thoughts are that no one else has ever thought in human his­to­ry. And you can get real­ly, real­ly self-cen­tered. And you see peo­ple do that. And where does it lead <affir­ma­tive>, just mis­ery, right? Just misery.

Jason (18:51):

Self-absorp­tion.

Jor­dan (18:52):

The self-absorp­tion nev­er leads to a great place. So I bring all of that up just to say, these lead­ers, if they’re so self-absorbed that they can’t see that the hap­pi­ness of their employ­ees is impor­tant, then they’re real­ly doomed, nev­er expe­ri­enced very much hap­pi­ness themselves.

Jason (19:10):

Or at worst, their employ­ees are sim­ply means to an end for their own pur­pos­es, which aren’t -

Jor­dan (19:17):

Which won’t be ful­fill­ing, right? Because if they treat their employ­ees that way, they’re going to treat the next peo­ple that way once they get the ins that they’re jus­ti­fy­ing through the means.

Jason (19:27):

So I guess maybe an oper­at­ing prin­ci­ple here that we could talk about, that’s a vision of hap­pi­ness. And I think this con­nects to the con­cept of pro­duc­tiv­i­ty that’s root­ed in human flour­ish­ing. Because what you were talk­ing about there is well, sort of the premise that well, every­one has a right to be hap­py, and that’s kind of west­ern soci­ety infused into the basic build­ing blocks of a free soci­ety. And we get to pur­sue hap­pi­ness and well­be­ing as we define it for our­selves and have the abil­i­ty to con­struct that in our lives. And so what would be inter­est­ing to talk about now is, well, how does hap­pi­ness con­nect to pro­duc­tiv­i­ty? Yeah. Because those two things maybe seem at odds with one anoth­er to some degree.

Jor­dan (20:22):

I mean, it’s not that hard to under­stand. I know we always take it back to kids. We always take it back to kids. But when I go to my kids and I’m just a big grump, and I’m just like, how does your room look this bad? We just cleaned it two, and I’m not a per­fect — I’ve done this speech a cou­ple hun­dred times, right? We cleaned like two days ago, how is it this bad? What are we, wild ani­mals? Yes, I’m just right. And they are, right, to an extent, and I’m just like, clean it, shut the door. How much hap­pi­ness is tak­ing place in the room, and how much pro­duc­tiv­i­ty is tak­ing place in there? There’s two paths that I can take after I give that speech. I can go back in there and I can dou­ble down and I can be scary dad­dy and I can be like ​“clean it or else,” and they’ll be pro­duc­tive for five min­utes out of just kind of fear, right? Out of just like, oh, he was, did you see that? Yeah, that was seri­ous. But I’m going to have to go back in five and a half min­utes lat­er and triple down to get anoth­er four min­utes of pro­duc­tiv­i­ty out of them, right? But if I walk in, I’m like, guys, check out the room.

(21:39):

Looks pret­ty ter­ri­ble. Do you remem­ber what it was like when your room was clean and you had all this room to run around and do cart­wheels and explore? And you remem­ber how much fun that moment was when we fin­ished clean­ing it last time? Let’s do it again. And then I grab the first toy and I grab the first, what­ev­er, pair of dirty sev­en year old boy under­wear and put it in the, car­ry it over to the, what­ev­er the damn thing’s called, the laun­dry bas­ket. And they’re like, let’s do this. Right? And they will work for 30, 40. I mean, these are lit­tle kids. They’ll work 30, 40, 50 min­utes and they’ll crank it out. And occa­sion­al­ly I’ll have to be like, Hey, are we work­ing or play­ing? And have to redi­rect. And there’s a lit­tle bit of play in there too. And I don’t even nec­es­sar­i­ly have to stay the whole time.

(22:33):

I can be like, all right guys, I’ll be back in a few min­utes. And they’ll keep work­ing. Because the per­spec­tive was, I cast a vision for what it was going to be like when they were done. And I jumped into the work with them, and it was all very, there was no blam­ing. There was no you suck, no why are you such ani­mals? We did­n’t focus on how ugly it was to begin with. And they’re chil­dren. We are just chil­dren that got old and have more respon­si­bil­i­ties. There’s not a great deal of — we did­n’t real­ly grow up that much — There isn’t that a great deal of dif­fer­ence between us still fig­ur­ing it out? And I think why would­n’t adults work the same way when they see the vision and they feel like they’re on a team and they feel like their leader is will­ing to go first and to be a part of the work and be in the trench­es, why would they not be pro­duc­tive? That feels good. All of that feels very good, kid, adult or whatever.

Jason (23:35):

Yeah, total­ly agree.

Jor­dan (23:35):

But that was a long mono­logue, but -

Jason (23:37):

I could­n’t help but think about, so my dad, you know was Marine when I was grow­ing up, and so a com­mon phrase I heard -

Jor­dan (23:44):

Not just a Marine.

Jason (23:45):

He was a drill instruc­tor for a few years as well. So there was a phrase, ​“Beat­ings will con­tin­ue until morale improves”, which I will caveat: I was not beat by my father.

Jor­dan (23:57):

I think that’s like a Dil­bert article.

Jason (23:58):

Yeah, I think so. But he loved it. He loved it because, well, being a drill instruc­tor, right? There prob­a­bly was a lit­tle bit more going on.

Jor­dan (24:07):

And you can moti­vate out of fear. You can. No one’s enjoy­ing it, and they’ll leave you for some­one that does­n’t make them feel scared as soon as they can. It’s possible.

Jason (24:21):

Yeah. Well, I think there’s some­thing about this idea of pro­duc­tiv­i­ty too that’s real­ly impor­tant because it con­tributes to, let’s say, the bet­ter­ment of human beings in soci­ety, or this notion of human flour­ish­ing. I think we’ve now talked about it a cou­ple times and in pre­vi­ous episodes. And I think that is an ori­ent­ing prin­ci­ple becomes real­ly sig­nif­i­cant because then it’s not even just about hap­pi­ness for the sake of hap­pi­ness and kind of self grat­i­fi­ca­tion, but it’s also a high­er vision when you talked about, in the exam­ple with your kids hav­ing that vision of, Hey, this is what we’re aim­ing for togeth­er. That kind of moti­vates the action and the activ­i­ty. And so when we think about what we’re doing as indi­vid­u­als with­in teams or with­in com­pa­nies or as a soci­ety, I think if we could say, well, hey, we’re aim­ing for human flour­ish­ing, all of a sud­den the degree of my pro­duc­tiv­i­ty actu­al­ly becomes a con­trib­u­tor or detrac­tor from that human flour­ish­ing. And so I think it ori­ents us to some­thing that’s maybe big­ger than our­selves that puts the hap­pi­ness in a place that becomes more sig­nif­i­cant. Because if hap­pi­ness can help moti­vate us towards pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, towards good human ends then that seem­ing­ly is a good thing.

Jor­dan (25:44):

Yeah. I think that’s excel­lent. I think it’s a great replace­ment for this idea of employ­ee sat­is­fac­tion. Sat­is­fac­tion is com­pared to what? Com­pared to my last job, com­pared to doing noth­ing alto­geth­er? <laugh> Like that. It’s not, when you say, are you hap­py? It’s tan­ta­mount to mean­ing, to pur­pose, to the core of who you are. And if you could tie work to the core of who peo­ple are and why they exist and con­tin­ue to exist. I mean, you could sur­vey on that one ques­tion. And that’s not to say that there’s no oth­er work to be done, but that would be, I can’t imag­ine a more clear kind of heart­beat check than that question.

Jason (26:40):

Yeah, I total­ly agree. Well, and the research by psy­chol­o­gists, and hon­est­ly, I mean, lead­ing up to this, I read prob­a­bly a dozen dif­fer­ent actu­al research papers.

Jor­dan (26:53):

I know, you real­ly nerd­ed out on this.

Jason (26:54):

I did. And went real­ly deep. And hon­est­ly, it was shock­ing because some of this stuff that is old, I mean, it’s like 20 years ago, researchers were writ­ing about these things, and I was like, oh my gosh.

Jor­dan (27:09):

Well it can’t pos­si­bly mat­ter then, cause no one had any good thoughts 20 years ago. Right? Every­one was an idiot.

Jason (27:14):

Total­ly. So I mean, it’s just kind of strik­ing to me how far removed these ideas have been from a busi­ness set­ting when they feel, I can’t think of things that feel more rel­e­vant in some way than these con­cepts. And so in some of these stud­ies, psy­chol­o­gists found that what they call pos­i­tive affect. And so it’s worth dis­tin­guish­ing between hap­pi­ness, well­be­ing, and pos­i­tive affect. A pos­i­tive affect is just the man­i­fes­ta­tion of the feel­ings that some­body may have. And so in one of these stud­ies, I mean, they did some­thing so basic where they gave peo­ple a 10 minute com­e­dy clip and then asked them to per­form a bunch of task-ori­ent­ed prob­lem solv­ing, or they gave some­body a lit­tle gift before, like a lit­tle bag of choco­lates. And those sim­ple things that increased the pos­i­tive affect that these peo­ple felt lit­er­al­ly increased their pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and com­ple­tion of these tasks. They were assigned by 15 to 20%. So I mean, it was astound­ing that they felt like, so it increased the inter­est and satisfaction.

Jor­dan (28:28):

A few laughs, or just the feel­ing of get­ting a gift. Not an expen­sive gift. Just like a few chocolates.

Jason (28:32):

Just like that basic feel­ing. We’re not even talk­ing about the deep­er things sur­round­ing hap­pi­ness. We’re talk­ing about real­ly sur­face lev­el hap­pi­ness kind of things that had such a profound

Jor­dan (28:45):

Plea­sure lev­el stuff.

Jason (28:46):

So they found it increased inter­est and sat­is­fac­tion in the work. It increased cre­ativ­i­ty in task exe­cu­tion. So peo­ple were more cre­ative in solv­ing the prob­lems that they were giv­en as a result of the increased pos­i­tive affect. It increased actu­al per­for­mance on the prob­lem solv­ing tasks, espe­cial­ly the ones that were more com­plex and required cre­ativ­i­ty for solv­ing. So you think about we’re in a tech­no­log­i­cal world, it’s increas­ing­ly com­plex. The kind of work that’s need­ed to be done requires increas­ing cre­ativ­i­ty, right? What could be more help­ful than doing things that help peo­ple be more cre­ative? It increased speed in com­plet­ing the tasks and it increased their focus in com­plet­ing unpleas­ant tasks, which I thought was real­ly fas­ci­nat­ing too. So I mean, there’s mun­dane things that all of us have to do in our work. And so even in the mun­dane tasks that were assigned, it increased the focus in com­plet­ing those things. And that was just the real­ly sur­face lev­el hap­pi­ness kind of stuff. And so what I think is real­ly fas­ci­nat­ing is what if we go a lit­tle deep­er? Cause some ways I don’t even think it’s that hard. So com­ing back to the notion that we had, I got to real­ly enun­ci­ate it. The eudai­mon­ic well­be­ing, that’s

Jor­dan (30:11):

Your word, man.

Jason (30:12):

So this is the one that’s asso­ci­at­ed with your val­ues and goals. And so why I think that mat­ters is if we can help peo­ple lay out their val­ues and goals, which in the last episode you said, Hey, one of the things that you could do as an indi­vid­ual if maybe you’re strug­gling with work or life or just try­ing to fig­ure it out, is take some time and write down things that are impor­tant to you. And actu­al­ly, that task lit­er­al­ly con­nects very direct­ly to this sense of hap­pi­ness and well­be­ing that you expe­ri­ence. Because psy­chol­o­gists also know that human hap­pi­ness, that is the sus­tained vari­ety, is expe­ri­enced in con­junc­tion with the feel­ing that we’re mak­ing progress towards goals of the high­est order that we val­ue and hold in high esteem. And so if we don’t have those goals and val­ues, we’re not going to be able to expe­ri­ence that sus­tained hap­pi­ness. And so I think that’s a real­ly unique way to even think about prac­ti­cal impli­ca­tions for how do we go about set­ting up the employ­ee expe­ri­ence in such a way that peo­ple are giv­en the oppor­tu­ni­ty to maybe think about those things.

Jor­dan (31:21):

Or why pri­or­i­tize employ­ee experience?

Jason (31:24):

Exact­ly.

Jor­dan (31:24):

Why con­tin­ue to pri­or­i­tize employ­ee expe­ri­ence in a down mar­ket, right? Right. I mean, I’ve got­ten ques­tions about that. Why are we still spend­ing mon­ey to have events and send peo­ple gifts and real­ly just enhance peo­ple’s day?

Jason (31:38):

Hap­pi­ness. <laugh>

Jor­dan (31:41):

Hap­pi­ness.

Jason (31:41):

It’s right here.

Jor­dan (31:42):

Because it’s the right thing to do. These are peo­ple that we’ve inter­sect­ed in our lives, and it’s the right thing to do to treat them real­ly well. So just sort of on an eth­i­cal stand­point, but beyond that, they’re going to be far more productive.

Jason (31:57):

It’s good business.

Jor­dan (31:58):

It’s good busi­ness. Well, I’m con­vinced. I hope our lis­ten­ers are. It’s been a fun top­ic. I hope this has been mean­ing­ful. I hope espe­cial­ly to any lead­ers are tak­en away, <laugh> pay atten­tion to this. Get over your­self that it’s a lit­tle mushy. It’s a lit­tle soft in the begin­ning. It is the right thing to focus on and has real life and real world, real busi­ness outcomes.

Jason (32:27):

Yeah. We’ll share some links in the show notes as well to the arti­cles. There’s a hand­ful that I think are worth­while to nerd out on. And there’s some more digestible ones that are eas­i­er to read.

Jor­dan (32:38):

They’ll read the long ones, I’m sure. I won’t, but they will. Give me a word. What’s our word for next week?

Jason (32:47)

All right. Word for next week. You ready for it? Malarky. <laugh>.

Jor­dan (32:50)

That’s easy. Yeah. Oh man. That’s going to be a cake walk. Alright, good. Well, thank you for lis­ten­ing. We’ll see you next week on How Peo­ple Work.

‍

For many of today’s employ­ees, it is no longer pos­si­ble to sep­a­rate work and life the way we used to. Emails fill our inbox­es after hours, our homes have become our offices, and we car­ry noti­fi­ca­tions from boss­es and col­leagues in our pock­ets at all times.

The notion of ​“work-life bal­ance” has there­fore lit­tle res­o­nance for the mod­ern workplace.

But is that a bad thing?

In this episode, Jor­dan and Jason argue that work and life have the same aim (ful­fill­ment) and there­fore should be seen as two means of reach­ing the same end.

They urge lis­ten­ers to move from a work-life bal­ance mind­set to the ​“66% of time” mind­set — a view that allo­cates eight hours a day (or one third of life) to sleep and the oth­er two-thirds of time to seek­ing ful­fill­ment in and out­side of work.

Key ideas and highlights

• Some of the best parts of life hap­pen at work — mile­stones achieved, skills devel­oped, & rela­tion­ships formed
• For employ­ees that work from home or from a com­put­er, work no longer has the built in lim­its that it did in the past
• The ​“66% of time” mind­set: life can be split into two groups of time. One third is ded­i­cat­ed to sleep and the oth­er two thirds, or 66%, is avail­able for seek­ing fulfillment.

What do we do with the 66% of time we’re not sleep­ing? The val­ues that you hold high­est should fill all of the time that you’re not sleep­ing. It’s not a mat­ter of whether I’m at work or at home. The things I’m aim­ing for — pur­pose, flour­ish­ing, mean­ing — are the same. — Jason Murray

Now avail­able on: Apple Pod­casts | Spo­ti­fy | YouTube

Learn more about how you can retain employ­ees and reduce the costs of your peo­ple pro­grams with Fringe.

Word of the day

24:02 — Anachronistic ✨

Timestamps

• 0:00 Intro
• 7:22 The mis­placed assump­tions behind the notion of work-life balance
• 8:36 Debunk­ing the work/​life bal­ance myth
• 12:01 Why work and life don’t have to com­pete with one another
• 14:26 How the his­to­ry of work has shaped how we think about work
• 18:56 What the work used to have built-in limits
• 22:22 Where peo­ple are seek­ing community
• 29:14 Mov­ing to a ​“66% of time” mindset
• 30:53 Why ​“ful­fill­ment” is a bet­ter aim than work/​life balance
• 35:00 The role com­mu­ni­ty plays in staving off fear and anxiety
• 38:54 The key to mak­ing work more meaningful

Transcript

Jor­dan (00:05):

How many hours and years of our lives do we spend on work for near­ly all of us, we spend 30+ years and one third of our days in our voca­tion — more time per­haps, than we spend at rest or at play. But this isn’t a prob­lem. Why? Because work is good. Work needs to be inte­grat­ed deeply into our lives and must be in line with our most impor­tant goals and val­ues. And if it is, we have a far more com­plete and ful­fill­ing life expe­ri­ence. Wel­come to the How Peo­ple Work pod­cast, where we explore the inter­sec­tion of how humans think and act and how they apply them­selves to their work. When you under­stand both of these things, you’ll be equipped to be insight­ful, com­pas­sion­ate, and com­pelling leaders.

(00:50):

All right. Wel­come back to How Peo­ple Work. Episode, what are we on? Four?Jason, Jason, episode four. And today we’re going to be talk­ing about work-life bal­ance. In fact, Jason and I have been talk­ing the last 10, 15 min­utes already. We prob­a­bly should have pressed record before now but it’s a com­pelling top­ic for us. It’s one that I like to jump right in. We maybe are one of the one or two gen­er­a­tions that have expe­ri­enced the shift from when the phrase work-life bal­ance made a lot of sense to win. Now it makes zero sense. And so it’s inter­est­ing to kind of walk that jour­ney from child­hood and see­ing what that bal­ance looked like to now that not even being an avail­able thing in life and fig­ur­ing out a way to be okay with that and fig­ure out a way to nav­i­gate life in a dif­fer­ent way than our par­ents did. So, fun top­ic. Inter­est­ing. Very kind of philo­soph­i­cal and -

Jason (01:49):

Iron­i­cal­ly, very per­son­al today. Yes. Just know­ing that you and I both are kind of start­ing our work day as we record this, which the audi­ence won’t know in the evening because wives and chil­dren have been sick all day and we’ve had our hands full doing oth­er things.

Jor­dan (02:05):

There was no bal­ance what­so­ev­er. It, it’s 8:30 PM and this is the first work I’ve done today.

Jason (02:10):

It’s just not Fringe work. It was oth­er things. So yeah, I think this whole notion of work life bal­ance or this dichoto­my between work and life. I mean, where I’d love to start is just maybe kick­ing around the notion: how did we even get here? I’ve kind of engaged on LinkedIn with a bunch of con­ver­sa­tions, peo­ple talk­ing about this thing. And I think just what’s run through my mind often is: how did we even get to this place where it’s like, Hey, we’ve got work life bal­ance and it’s this big thing and every­one’s talk­ing about it, and work seems to kind of be the ene­my in that par­a­digm. And it just kind of leaves me won­der­ing, how did we get here with that?

Jor­dan (02:53):

Yeah. I think it’s com­ing from a good place. I think the idea of work life bal­ance is com­ing from a place of self-pro­tec­tion. And maybe even bet­ter than that, maybe we’re try­ing to pro­tect each oth­er soci­etal­ly or in our com­pa­nies, we’re try­ing to look at each oth­er and say, ​“Hey, don’t over­do it.” And when we say that, we’re always talk­ing about work, right? Don’t over­do the work. Right? Don’t check the emails too late at night. Don’t stay too long. Don’t what­ev­er, sleep under your desk, what­ev­er. Which I actu­al­ly would rec­om­mend not doing that. So I think it’s com­ing from a good place. But to what you just said work is the ene­my. The assump­tion is work is bad, life is good. Life uplifts us and work drags us down. Right?

Jason (03:41):

Yeah.

Jor­dan (03:42):

Every­body’s work­ing for the week­end, right? Right. I mean, there’s songs about this and get­ting your pay­check on a Friday.

Jason (03:47):

Five o’clock somewhere.

Jor­dan (03:47):

It’s five o’clock some­where. It’s all about get­ting through the work to get to the fun and the assump­tion that life is all fun and work is all not fun.

Jason (03:57):

And that it’s a means to an end.

Jor­dan (03:58):

It’s a means to an end. And I think that is the par­a­digm that you and I very much dis­agree with and would love to tear down in our con­ver­sa­tion today if we can.

Jason (04:09):

Very much so.

Jor­dan (04:10):

I think we are big believ­ers that work is actu­al­ly good and that now there are some qual­i­fiers. There are some ways in which work needs to be good or can be made good by these qual­i­fiers. The fact that the work is mean­ing­ful, that I feel con­fi­dent in the work. I know how to do the work. I have the skills, have the intel­li­gence. I’ve got the moti­va­tion, right? Yes. I want to do the work that’s impor­tant. I’m get­ting com­pen­sat­ed to do the work, right? There’s an incen­tive and there’s maybe peo­ple I get to work along­side. And so this is not just that, well, I just pick up a shov­el and I dig a hole, and every sin­gle time it’s super sat­is­fy­ing, right? Not the point. But it’s also not always dis­sat­is­fy­ing. It’s always, it’s not always toil. It’s not always, oh, I’m exhaust­ed. I hat­ed every minute of that. I can’t wait to get home and get to my life.

Jason (05:07):

Right, right. Well, it’s prob­a­bly only fair to give the dev­il’s due a lit­tle bit here, because there is some­thing about this dichoto­my that is appeal­ing. I mean, there’s just a sim­plic­i­ty of some­thing that’s that bina­ry, that’s easy to grasp onto. And I think it’s root­ed in some­thing that feels a lit­tle bit right, expe­ri­en­tial­ly. And so, and I haven’t worked togeth­er for as long as we have pri­or to our busi­ness ven­tures togeth­er. We work at a place that real­ly was­n’t an amaz­ing expe­ri­ence cul­tur­al­ly or oth­er­wise. I mean, it was a pret­ty excru­ci­at­ing­ly bad work envi­ron­ment and work expe­ri­ence, I would say. And so I can under­stand the appeal of, yeah, I did not nec­es­sar­i­ly look for­ward to, right, work when I was in that set­ting. And there’s maybe a vari­ety of rea­sons, ways I could have reframed that. But when I was liv­ing in it in the moment, I can appre­ci­ate the sen­ti­ment of peo­ple that say, ​“Hey, I’m just try­ing to get through the day to get to my life because work sucks” and I get it there. There’s some hon­esty to that.

Jor­dan (06:25):

Yeah. Also though, I think we for­get that life can suck. Yeah. <laugh>, right? I mean, it’s

Jason (06:30):

Evi­dence by today.

Jor­dan (06:31):

If you real­ly break it down, I mean, if there are hard rela­tion­ships at work and there are dif­fi­cult dynam­ics at work, what would make you think that in a world full of human beings that at work, every­body and every­thing would be dif­fi­cult and frus­trat­ing. And in the rest of your life, every­one and every­thing would just be sim­ple and easy and smooth like that. That’s not real. We’re going to expe­ri­ence hard­ship at work. We’re going to expe­ri­ence hard­ship at home. We’re going to cel­e­brate at work. We’re going to cel­e­brate at home. And so I think we need to, where I’d love to take the con­ver­sa­tion is just talk­ing about how work is sat­is­fy­ing and when it is sat­is­fy­ing, what makes it sat­is­fy­ing. And I know you’ve got a bunch of notes that you put togeth­er in prepa­ra­tion for this but I’ve got some per­son­al sto­ries I want to tell too. So just tell me when you want me to jump in on that.

Jason (07:21):

Yeah, for sure. Well, and I think one of the things too that’s worth call­ing out here is this sense that all the good things to be had that we can expe­ri­ence don’t take place in work. So I think that’s one of the oth­er things that hap­pens when we make this dichoto­my: work’s bad, life’s good, there­fore, joy, hap­pi­ness, ful­fill­ment, all of those kinds of things live over here in life and inside of work. It’s real­ly just a means to an end. It’s become some­thing entire­ly trans­ac­tion­al and it’s wages for time and effort. And that’s lit­er­al­ly it. And the wages are what afford us the abil­i­ty to expe­ri­ence and enjoy all these oth­er things. And it just feels like a real­ly shal­low way to approach life. And we spend so much time at work because it’s nec­es­sary and prac­ti­cal for a whole vari­ety of rea­sons. But more so than that, I think what we want to sug­gest and con­vince peo­ple of is that there’s all of those things, joy, hap­pi­ness, ful­fill­ment, pur­pose to be found in the work itself if it’s designed with inten­tion and set up properly.

Jor­dan (08:24):

Yeah, absolute­ly. I think when I look back over the last, I don’t want to go too far back, but even just two years, some of the very most fun moments, the most mean­ing­ful moments, the most com­pelling moments, the moments that changed me — they hap­pened in very close cor­re­la­tion with work, or they hap­pened in a phys­i­cal place like this one, the Fringe club­house in Rich­mond, Vir­ginia, that I asso­ciate with work in some way stand­ing about 12 feet that direc­tion, address­ing our com­pa­ny at our first Fringe Fest. I don’t know that I’ve ever had, I should­n’t say this cause I have five chil­dren, but it was a top six moment. And I also got mar­ried, sev­en moment of my life, not because I was stand­ing there, I had the micro­phone nec­es­sar­i­ly, but just look­ing around and look­ing at the faces of the peo­ple that had giv­en over trust to come and work with or advise or invest in or what­ev­er. This com­pa­ny that we start­ed based off of an idea that we once put on a sticky note and stuck to a wall.

Jason (09:43):

What did you feel in that moment?

Jor­dan (09:45):

Oh man, a lot of things. I think a deep, deep sat­is­fac­tion that some­thing that I did­n’t believe that was for some­one like me, became some­thing that I got to expe­ri­ence that I did­n’t ever believe I had. The pedi­gree, the intel­li­gence, the con­nec­tions, what­ev­er it is that you need to do that.

Jason (10:12):

Yeah. Yeah. We’ve talked about that. Yeah. Just how peo­ple you’ve come across from your life in high school, and they say things like, ​“wait, Jor­dan is what?”

Jor­dan (10:24): Jor­dan Peace. Jor­dan Peace?

Jason (10:25):

Are we talk­ing about the same guy?

Jor­dan (10:27):

Exact­ly. Yeah. Does he have a cousin? Are you sure? Yeah yeah. Absolute­ly. Yeah. Man, I think I felt that I also just felt insane­ly con­nect­ed to the peo­ple in the room because I knew so many oth­ers. It was­n’t just me. So many oth­ers had put their blood, sweat and tears into get­ting to that moment as well, and think­ing about who was going to ben­e­fit from that down the road and all the peo­ple that owned por­tions of the com­pa­ny and what it would mean for their lives and the future. And it felt all kinds of things. And all of that was because of work. A whole lot of work.

Jason (11:03):

Yeah. It took a lot when it was just the five of us and grind­ing away doing everything.

Jor­dan (11:09):

And it’s still a whole lot of work, but it’s hard. Yeah, it’s hard. It’s stress­ful, but it’s also incred­i­bly sat­is­fy­ing. And that is more than I can say about most of my week-long beach trips that I’ve tak­en in the last four years, much more than I can say. Yeah, leisure’s great. Sit on the beach, read a book.

Jason (11:33):

More deeply sat­is­fy­ing more for

Jor­dan (11:35):

For three hours. Okay. Yeah.

Jason (11:38):

I mean, I can’t imag­ine sit­ting on the beach for three hours with a book at the stage that we’re at.

Jor­dan (11:44):

Well yeah, I say sit­ting, I mean chas­ing chil­dren, but hypo­thet­i­cal­ly, I’m there on the beach. But I don’t know. I don’t know. That, to me, I just think we just for­get to reflect and rem­i­nisce on what’s actu­al­ly hap­pen­ing in our lives, and what are the moments that are actu­al­ly real­ly impact­ing us, and where are we laugh­ing? Where are we shed­ding tears? Where are we real­ly feel­ing? And I’d argue that many of us expe­ri­ence just as much with our cowork­ers and in a work set­ting of that mean­ing and that growth that we do any­where in life. And I don’t think we need to, these two things don’t need to com­pete with one anoth­er. All we have is life, right? It’s just life. And work hope­ful­ly could be a real­ly, real­ly sat­is­fy­ing part of life.

Jason (12:35):

Yeah. Yeah. I remem­ber in that moment for myself when we had every­one here for Fringe Fest think­ing, I can’t believe that this just ran­dom idea that we had is actu­al­ly com­ing to life the way that it was, because I mean you know me and how ide­al­is­tic I can be about things and my visions prob­a­bly far out­pace my actu­al capa­bil­i­ties. And so the fact that we were stand­ing there,

Jor­dan (13:07):

I did­n’t know you were going to say capa­bil­i­ty when I decid­ed to agree with you, that was not an insult.

Jason (13:11):

Well, I think it’s true though. I mean, the fact that we had, I don’t know, at that time it was 50 some peo­ple that were part of this jour­ney and this mis­sion, and I think very much felt like they were expe­ri­enc­ing some­thing inside of the com­pa­ny that we cre­at­ed. And it just felt kind of wild. But I think it speaks to some­thing I think is impor­tant in this whole con­cept of how do you man­age work and life, and what does that look like is what are you aim­ing for? What are your goals in all that? Because it would’ve been one thing if our goal set­ting out with Fringe was like, ​“Hey, we’re just here to make a crap ton of mon­ey and build a cool tech prod­uct.” And that was it. I think giv­en the fact that nei­ther of us had ever had a lot of mon­ey or built a tech prod­uct, all we real­ly had was like, well, hey, it’d be real­ly cool to build some­thing awe­some for these peo­ple and for our fam­i­lies, of course, as well. But those weren’t sep­a­rate goals, I would­n’t say. I think they were real­ly kind of inex­tri­ca­bly linked to one another.

Jor­dan (14:21):

Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.

Jason (14:23):

So I think it’d be inter­est­ing to take a lit­tle bit of a look at some of the his­tor­i­cal con­text here because I think that’s real­ly use­ful as it relates to just how did we arrive where we’re at today, and maybe some of the dif­fer­ences and how over the course of most of human his­to­ry, work has been expe­ri­enced and viewed by humans. And real­ly the par­a­digm we’re liv­ing in is extreme­ly recent in that con­text. And so I’ll give kind of a quick fly­over, and then I know there’s some top­ics there that we want to delve into a lit­tle bit fur­ther. This may be obvi­ous to some, but real­ly sort of human work orig­i­nat­ed in agrar­i­an soci­eties where work was pri­mar­i­ly focused on agri­cul­ture, ani­mal hus­bandry. I could­n’t help but think of Age of Empires when I was putting down some of my notes. How you start out in the game and nerd alert, but it was cul­ti­vat­ing crops, rais­ing live­stock. It was very in touch with the land. You were pro­duc­ing the food that you were going to eat to lit­er­al­ly sur­vive and pro­vide for your fam­i­ly. That work was often com­mu­nal in nature. And so it was­n’t just you off on your own, it was often with oth­ers in the com­mu­ni­ty or fam­i­ly around you work­ing togeth­er to accom­plish these things.

Jor­dan (15:46):

And­he work that you accom­plished. I think it was so clear how that worked impact­ed the entire com­mu­ni­ty, right? If you did­n’t do your job, then peo­ple did­n’t eat. That’s right. And if they did­n’t do their job, then your crops weren’t pro­tect­ed from the wild ani­mals that want­ed to eat them and et cetera, et cetera.

Jason (16:04):

Yeah. So I think that’s an impor­tant idea as we start to come clos­er to the future in this. So kind of fol­low­ing that, we had the rise of trad­ing net­works, mar­ket­places. Peo­ple began to spe­cial­ize in trades. So there was kind of a shift towards com­merce and trade. So agri­cul­ture was still very much a part of what that human work looked like, but there was more of the exchange of goods and ser­vices like, Hey, you have some­thing, it’s more effi­cient. If I pro­duce this thing that I’m real­ly good at pro­duc­ing, we can trade. And in that trade, we’re gain­ing some effi­cien­cy in our endeav­ors as humans. And so work start­ed to become a lit­tle bit more cen­tered around these mar­ket­places and trad­ing hubs. So it actu­al­ly, I’d say in some ways, brought the com­mu­ni­ty even clos­er togeth­er because that inter­con­nect­ed­ness and reliance upon the spe­cial­iza­tions and trades and crafts­men and what­not became real­ly important.

(16:58):

And then we start­ed get­ting into a lit­tle bit more of the mod­ern era that I think peo­ple are going to be more famil­iar with. So the indus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tion, obvi­ous­ly, was a huge shift in the way that peo­ple worked. The rise of fac­to­ries, mass pro­duc­tion, peo­ple work­ing in these fac­to­ries, things becom­ing more mech­a­nized and so forth. Kind of the rep­e­ti­tion of tasks. I mean, in some ways, that was sort of where work start­ed to become a lit­tle bit more removed and dis­con­nect­ed from, say, the land, from com­mu­ni­ty, from rela­tion­ships. I think that’s where the phrase being a cog in the wheel came from.

Jor­dan (17:35):

That’s where the trans­ac­tion­al­ism started.

Jason (17:39):

Right. And then the real­ly quick evo­lu­tion has been the ser­vice indus­try, right? So in the 20th cen­tu­ry, this is real­ly in the six­ties and sev­en­ties, pri­mar­i­ly work shifts towards the ser­vice sec­tors. So indus­tries like health­care, edu­ca­tion, hos­pi­tal­i­ty, et cetera. Things that weren’t actu­al­ly pro­duc­ing goods, but we’re pro­vid­ing ser­vices for peo­ple. And then the most recent shift, obvi­ous­ly has been tech­nol­o­gy. So work’s more and more dig­i­tized, decen­tral­ized jobs are done remote­ly, work’s reliant on that tech­nol­o­gy and automa­tion, gig econ­o­my, free­lance work, all these things have become much, much more preva­lent. And so one of the things as I was mak­ing some of these notes, and I know you have some thoughts on this too, is over the course of that his­to­ry, I could­n’t help but notice how dis­con­nect­ed the work has become from the actu­al human impact that it has at the end of the day. And you kind of allud­ed to that at the begin­ning, dear com­ments around the food that we pro­duce and where it’s going and some of that kind of stuff.

Jor­dan (18:52):

I think our work, when I say our, I mean as a species, our work pro­duced sev­er­al things that were real­ly obvi­ous back in the day. One is that we felt our work. It was very, very phys­i­cal. There was a lim­it to the amount of work that could be done sim­ply because your body could only han­dle, but so much strain. And then we rest­ed, and then we worked, and then we rest­ed. And that was the nat­ur­al order of how things worked, because it had to work that way because our bod­ies had lim­i­ta­tions. We’re also lim­it­ed by nature, by weath­er, by light, by when we could see to do the work. And speak­ing of see­ing, I think there are two dif­fer­ent ways that we could see our works. We felt our work. We also could see our work. One is that we could see our work in the phys­i­cal envi­ron­ment around us.

(19:45):

So at the end of the day, the crop that was not har­vest­ed was now har­vest­ed. The wall that was not built was now built or par­tial­ly built. The field that was not plowed is now plowed. I could see that which was undone is now done. And I have, I’ve earned this rest and I also need this rest. And I can see, but I also can see real­ly tan­gi­bly the impact on the peo­ple around me, right? I can see that I pro­duced X and that per­son need­ed X, and they got that thing, and now their fam­i­ly is fed or safer or what­ev­er. I pro­tect­ed the flock of their sheep because I’m a shep­herd and that’s my job. And no sheep died today, and there­fore that fam­i­ly is bet­ter off. What­ev­er the case may be. Many of those things we’ve lost.

Jason (20:41):

There’s some­thing real­ly instinc­tu­al about that. I think reci­procity and human nature that I think is sort of intrin­sic and you know, you real­ly lose that when you start get­ting away from the real­ly kind of earthy rela­tion­ships with both the land, the way work was per­formed at that time, but also the com­mu­ni­ty that just lit­er­al­ly lived next door. Work was for the peo­ple imme­di­ate­ly around you that you saw all the time.

Jor­dan (21:11):

Yeah, absolute­ly. And I think we talked about this in the pre­vi­ous episodes. I don’t want to harp on it, but I think one of the things that took place in the mod­ern era when things did get more trans­ac­tion­al, and I think peo­ple start­ed to feel as though they were that cog in the wheel. And it was very much like, I’m going to trade my time for mon­ey and I’m going to get home. And that’s it. And then the com­mu­ni­ty was at home, right? Now, whether that was a social group or a place of wor­ship, or just the neigh­bors right around you and the com­mu­ni­ty that you cre­at­ed right there, geo­graph­i­cal­ly, wher­ev­er it was. That was com­mu­ni­ty and work was work. And then through the tech­no­log­i­cal are­na. And then I think the decline of many of the more social and reli­gious aspects of life. Peo­ple are more iso­lat­ed in their home life. There’s not so much of a sit out on the front porch and wave at the neigh­bors and know every­body that’s right there phys­i­cal­ly around this. That still hap­pens, but it’s not so much the focus as what’s going on on this screen, right? And so I think what’s hap­pened, peo­ple still are com­mu­nal. They still need com­mu­ni­ty, but now they’re seek­ing com­mu­ni­ty at work.

Jor­dan (22:27):

They’re seek­ing com­mu­ni­ty with their cowork­ers so much more. I mean, almost every­body I talk to that’s our age. We’re 37, by the way, and down when I ask: Who are your friends? They’re like, It’s who I work with? And there might be one or two left­overs from col­lege and that, that’s pret­ty much it. And then when you switch jobs, some of those stay and some of them don’t. And they pick up anoth­er group of friends. The next job, it’s very much around the work. And so work and com­mu­ni­ty have come back togeth­er. And it took a long, long time for that to hap­pen. But it’s actu­al­ly an excit­ing thing. I think that work and com­mu­ni­ty are more tied again.

Jason (23:07):

Yeah. Or there’s at least the poten­tial for it to be more tied. Cause I think, as we talked about, and I think it was the last episode with the native analog/​native dig­i­tal thing, one of the things I think we just maybe haven’t quite fig­ured out as a species is: how do you do com­mu­ni­ty well in this kind of dig­i­tal vir­tu­al world? And I think it’s some­thing that we’re sort of exper­i­ment­ing with as we go here as a species and fig­ur­ing those things out.

Jor­dan (23:36):

Yeah, absolute­ly. Yeah. And speak­ing of that, I think the con­nect­ed­ness, and we talk about con­nect­ed to peo­ple, but I think just the plugged in-ness of life that we just have the infor­ma­tion stream con­stant­ly. And I was think­ing about that. I was think­ing gen­er­al­ly gen­er­a­tional­ly, and what did I expe­ri­ence as a child? And this’ll sound a bit anachro­nis­tic in 2023, but as a child, I remem­ber my mom and dad, my mom actu­al­ly got home from work before me, so more so focused on my dad here, get­ting home from work. And I could tell that he car­ried his work with him in his mind, at least for the first 30 min­utes, hours, two hours. I could tell it was rumi­nat­ing, espe­cial­ly when I was old­er and more obser­vant than just run­ning and grab­bing his leg and demand­ing his atten­tion when I start­ed pay­ing atten­tion. But he did­n’t bring work in the door.

(24:35):

There was no com­put­er, well just there, just lit­er­al­ly wasn’t. There was no notes. There was no noth­ing. Right? He man­aged a fac­to­ry. There was­n’t any­thing for him to do. And so when he was at home, he was at home. Unless there was some emer­gency call of come back to the work, he was just there and, and it was forcible. We talked about the weath­er dic­tat­ing that. And we talked about light dic­tat­ing when we could work. Geog­ra­phy dic­tat­ed that he could not work because he was­n’t at the work, right? Not him. And it’s noth­ing against my dad, but it was­n’t his dis­ci­pline. It was­n’t his good deci­sion mak­ing. It was the envi­ron­ment that caused the work to be put away and the fam­i­ly to become the focus. It was just geog­ra­phy. But now we have an oppor­tu­ni­ty no mat­ter where we are, and we always say, wow, we real­ly need to unplug from work. We need to dis­con­nect from work, but we don’t dis­con­nect from home. I don’t come in when­ev­er I do come into the office, it’s not all the time, but I don’t turn tex­ting off. I don’t turn the noti­fi­ca­tions off from the MLB app or what­ev­er news apps that I get things from. So my life is stream­ing at me while I’m work­ing. And while I’m sup­pos­ed­ly doing life, which is a sep­a­rate thing, appar­ent­ly, work is stream­ing at me, right? So there there’s no -

Jason (26:03):

Which is a huge dif­fer­ence. Cause I’m think­ing about dad, when he was at work, if your mom was call­ing him, it was a big emergency.

Jor­dan (26:11):

Oh, some­body bet­ter be dead. You don’t inter­rupt the work day for just the idle chitchat. There was­n’t texting.

Jason (26:20):

What are you eat­ing for lunch?

Jor­dan (26:22):

There was no plans being made for that evening or what­ev­er. You fig­ured it out once you were phys­i­cal­ly togeth­er. So I just think we need to under­stand that for the first time in human his­to­ry, we have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to find out any infor­ma­tion we want any­time, no mat­ter if we’re at home or at an office or at a cof­fee shop, or wher­ev­er the heck we work. When I’m in my clos­et and my bed­room work­ing, most of the time, I can find out any­thing that’s going on with my peo­ple, my fam­i­ly, my com­mu­ni­ty, what­ev­er you want to define in my tribe. And I can find out any­thing that’s going on with work. I can find out any­thing that’s going on in the world. And so real­ly, it just comes down to a dis­ci­pline of under­stand­ing how many things should I let — how many things should I let enter my brain in one giv­en day? Yeah. How much can I take? So it’s not so much about the phys­i­cal toil any­more, of just like, well, I work until I’ve fall down and then I stop. But we don’t fall down because of our work. Most of us any­more. We don’t hard­ly use our bod­ies at all. But we do fall down men­tal­ly. There is a stress, there is an anx­i­ety that is sin­is­ter, right? It’s sneaky, right? We’re just like, well, I don’t know. I real­ly haven’t done all that much today, but, but you did read 200,000 words between the text, point­less emails, slacks, and the -

Jason (27:53):

That real­ly stressed you out.

Jor­dan (27:54):

But it does because it’s just stuff.

Jor­dan (28:00):

That’s why I go back to this work-life bal­ance idea. The heart behind pro­tect­ing our­selves in some way is good, but it’s not pro­tect from work because work is all bad. We need to pro­tect from something.

Jason (28:14):

And I think you’re get­ting at, when I’ve pushed back at some peo­ple on LinkedIn in these con­ver­sa­tions, I don’t think it’s work. I think it’s the con­tent of the work or what’s going on dur­ing the work. And so I think there’s prob­a­bly two streams that come to mind for me. And one is very much what you were just describ­ing, which is the things tak­ing place, whether it’s in our work­day or whether it’s in our life day with our fam­i­ly and stuff, are cre­at­ing that stress and anx­i­ety. So there’s maybe two themes there, kind of stress and anx­i­ety, kind of what we’re expe­ri­enc­ing as a result of what’s com­ing at us all the time. And then this notion of con­nect­ed­ness and dis­con­nect­ed­ness and sort of con­nect­ed­ness, which I think we prob­a­bly often take as a pos­i­tive thing. But in this case, I think what you’re imply­ing is that we’re too con­nect­ed all the time to every­thing hap­pen­ing at every moment. And it’s just sim­ply overwhelming.

Jor­dan (29:12):

Com­plete­ly. Yeah. I mean, you used to think about work is eight hours and life is eight hours and sleep is eight hours. And that was sort of how you broke up your day. And so we used to say things like, well, if you’re going to spend one third of your life doing some­thing, you bet­ter love it. Right? But it’s not so much that any­more. We still hope­ful­ly spend about a third of our lives sleep­ing. So we still have this oth­er 66%. How much of that 66 are we con­nect­ed to the entire world with the com­put­er that’s in our pock­et? Yeah. How much? 65 out of 66.

Jason (29:47):

Yeah.

Jor­dan (29:47):

Do you even ever not take your phone to the bathroom?

Jason (29:51):

Yeah.

Jor­dan (29:52):

I don’t. I take it to the bath­room. Every time.

Jason (29:55):

Yeah. Oh yeah.

Jor­dan (29:55):

Yeah. I mean, in the show­er. The show­er might be the only time. And I’ve even bro­ken that rule. Cause I’ve had to be on a phone call, <laugh>, ignore the sound of run­ning water. It’s my kids.

Jason (30:07):

Real­ly want to know what phone call that was.

Jor­dan (30:08):

Every­body believes, every­body believes you when you just blame kids. It’s usu­al­ly true. But that might be my 1%. Yeah. Where it’s not going to ding. It may not even be in the room. That might be, and that’s my own prob­lem. I could do bet­ter than that prob­a­bly, but I don’t think I’m abnor­mal on that front.

Jason (30:29):

I guess the ques­tion is, what do you do with that 66% right of your time? Yeah. I mean, some amount of it’s going to be per­form­ing work out of neces­si­ty because we do need to earn mon­ey to live and basic neces­si­ties. But it’s an inter­est­ing ques­tion because I think it’s not about hours. And I think that’s some­thing I always grate at, when I see peo­ple com­ment or make state­ments, it’s like, ah, it’s just what­ev­er. If I get my work done in four hours or eight hours, I’m, the whole par­a­digm just does­n’t even seem right to begin with. It’s like, who cares? We should be aim­ing at just ful­fill­ment in that 66%.

Jor­dan (31:15):

Being suc­cess­ful in the work, find­ing sat­is­fac­tion in the work, right? Doing what you promised that you would do, either with your cowork­ers or your employ­er, being a per­son of integri­ty. And yeah, you ful­fill­ing the role.

Jason (31:28):

And that’s not unique to work. And so I think that’s even where not all, we prob­a­bly say that’s where we’re try­ing to tear down this wall between the work and the life is like, well, the val­ues that you hold the high­est, I think should fill all of the time that you’re not sleep­ing. And so it’s not a mat­ter of whether I’m at work or at home. It’s like, well, the things I’m aim­ing for I think are the same, right? If I desire flour­ish­ing or pur­pose or mean­ing for myself or my fam­i­ly or what­ev­er, some of that’s going to be in work. Some of that’s going to be at home. But they’re not sep­a­rate in some fun­da­men­tal kind of way.

Jor­dan (32:06):

No, I don’t think they are at all. And I was­n’t try­ing to be the old guy attack­ing the phone in the pock­et and that that’s the ene­my. That’s not the ene­my. It’s not the hard­ware. Right? It’s our inabil­i­ty to process what you are say­ing, which is, what is most impor­tant to me? What goals do I have in life? What am I aim­ing at? I don’t know, because I’m busy read­ing my 45th arti­cle this morn­ing, I don’t know what I’m aim­ing at. I don’t think!

Jason (32:38):

I don’t have time to stop and think. Right? So I want to get it, so you talked about stress and anx­i­ety, and I think those are things that are maybe easy scape­goats because we all feel ​‘em, we, and some­times it’s over­whelm­ing. And you, and have both been there per­son­al­ly in those moments where it’s felt so over­whelm­ing that you know, you lit­er­al­ly can’t work, can’t do any­thing. But I think there’s some­thing more to it. What is it that maybe goes beyond just stress and anx­i­ety? Cause I think that’s too super­fi­cial, maybe.

Jor­dan (33:20):

Yeah. I don’t want to sum­ma­rize it with the word pur­pose­less­ness, that it sounds too hope­less, but it’s not that our lives are with­out pur­pose. It’s that we’re often unaware of the pur­pose, and we’re often for­get­ting to align what we’re think­ing and how we’re spend­ing our time and what we’re doing and with the pur­pose. And so we’re just real­ly anx­ious because we feel like we’re just being pulled around, just being blown about by the wind, as opposed to actu­al­ly steer­ing at all into any sort of direc­tion. That is real­ly anx­i­ety-induc­ing feel­ing. Just like I’m watch­ing the days and the years tick by it. I don’t even know what I’m doing here. And then the oth­er thing I think is fear. Yeah. I think we’re ter­ri­fied. One, the pace of change in the world is faster than it’s ever been, ever. And it’s get­ting faster. So what­ev­er I learned today is use­less in five years <laugh>, like that’s scary to ever feel accom­plished enough, smart enough, good enough, capa­ble enough when you’ve just got to con­stant­ly, to use a very mil­len­ni­al word, rein­vent your­self, <affir­ma­tive> all the time to keep up. And I think also, if we don’t spend a whole lot of time cre­at­ing com­mu­ni­ty and inti­mate com­mu­ni­ty and hav­ing real rela­tion­ships and real con­ver­sa­tions, and we don’t have a lot of peo­ple in our lives that real­ly affirm us, that real­ly tell us, actu­al­ly, you are good enough and help us under­stand our place in the world.

Jason (34:56):

Yeah. What’s real­ly inter­est­ing about that too, I’m just think­ing about it in my own life, is hav­ing that com­mu­ni­ty helps you artic­u­late your val­ues. And if you don’t artic­u­late those val­ues, then you expe­ri­ence that anx­i­ety, right? And there’s actu­al­ly, it’s a psy­cho­log­i­cal prin­ci­ple that when we don’t have clear­ly artic­u­lat­ed val­ue hier­ar­chies that we ori­ent our­selves around, that lit­er­al­ly the bio­log­i­cal result of that is anx­i­ety, right? Because we’re not ori­ent­ed around -

Jor­dan (35:25):

It’s a recipe for men­tal chaos.

Jason (35:27):

Because we’re not ori­ent­ing our lives in any kind of way towards any­thing that we hold in high esteem. And so I think there’s two real­ly crit­i­cal things that you just point­ed out there. One’s like, what do we care most about? And are we ori­ent­ing our lives, work or home, wher­ev­er, towards those ulti­mate val­ues that we have? And then what com­mu­ni­ty helps point out and kind of hold us to those things, or explore those things out we find most valuable.

Jor­dan (35:57):

And encour­ages us that we can actu­al­ly pur­sue and be suc­cess­ful in what­ev­er those endeav­ors are.

Jason (36:03):

Yeah. So I think maybe to start wrap­ping this up a lit­tle bit, there’s some prob­a­bly prac­ti­cal take­aways from that. I mean, what would you say for indi­vid­u­als who are lis­ten­ing, and I’m sure there’s peo­ple who feel like, hey, I don’t have the best work expe­ri­ence at this moment. What do I do? How do I think about some of this stuff?

Jor­dan (36:27):

Yeah, I think it would be easy to tell peo­ple to remove things from them, from their lives. I don’t think it’s actu­al­ly very good advice, because nobody’s going to fol­low it. So what I would sug­gest is adding things to your life, which sounds stress­ful, but add 10 min­utes a day where you don’t have a phone and you have a note­book and you have a pen. 10 min­utes. You know? You could do that every day for, I don’t know, 14 straight days. I don’t know what the mag­ic num­ber is. I can’t imag­ine how much more you might know about your­self, about how much more you might know about what you care about, what you kind of believe in, what your world­view is, what you pri­or­i­tize, what you hold in high esteem. I like that expres­sion. We don’t know. Cause we don’t think, and we don’t think because there’s always some­thing going in.

Jason (37:23):

Yeah.

Jor­dan (37:23):

Noth­ing can ever come out.

Jason (37:25):

Yeah.

Jor­dan (37:26):

Because we don’t ever have the time. So pro­duce some­thing, pro­duce a sen­tence a day of just some­thing that mat­ters to you. The first day is, I love my kids. That’s enough. So I would add that into life. And then I think through a process of doing some­thing like that, then you can begin to reflect on, do I have the right job? Am I in the right career? Am I like, yeah. But I would­n’t think any of those thoughts until you spend some time fig­ur­ing out who you are and why you are.

Jason (38:03):

Cause I think the work, the work can actu­al­ly be infused with pur­pose when you start to explore those ideas of what actu­al­ly mat­ters most to you. And you might find out, well, actu­al­ly I’m doing work that turns out is actu­al­ly fair­ly in line with this. But before I real­ly sat down to think about it, I was just kind of all over the place because I real­ly did­n’t know and I had­n’t artic­u­lat­ed what I want most.

Jor­dan (38:27):

And work is the ene­my because the work just gives me more tasks to do, and my life already feels full. And so I just need to get away from it so that I can relax, even though I don’t know how to relax.

Jason (38:38):

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. No, that’s great. I mean, I think the one oth­er thing I’d prob­a­bly add, and this would be more for peo­ple who lead peo­ple or peo­ple who are build­ing com­pa­nies and so forth. There’s some­thing that I always said to my team as I was work­ing with them is to the extent that you can help peo­ple that you work with or man­age align the actu­al con­tent of their work to the things that they’re excit­ed about, that they love doing, that match­es their strengths and abil­i­ties and so forth. And it’s nev­er going to be a hun­dred per­cent per­fect, but a job descrip­tion is real­ly just some­thing that’s nec­es­sary for legal pur­pos­es, but it real­ly does­n’t match what most peo­ple end up doing in their day-to-day. And so I think the word I’d prob­a­bly use is inten­tion or inten­tion­al­i­ty. So for peo­ple who are man­agers and lead­ers of peo­ple is kind of using that inten­tion­al­i­ty to help design work for the peo­ple that they lead on their teams and try and align those things more closely.

Jor­dan (39:41):

All right. Lay it on me. We got to wrap it up. I need a word for next episode, I don’t know if you noticed, but I nailed it on this one.

Jason (39:48):

Yeah, I was ready this time too. So the word of the day for our next episode will be tantamount.

Jor­dan (39:57):

Wow. You just keep upping your game and I appre­ci­ate it.

Jason (40:00):

AI know you love the word games, so we’re going to make this fun.

Jor­dan (40:05):

Oh, all right. Well, thank you. Thanks Jason, and for the riv­et­ing con­ver­sa­tion. And also thank you to our lis­ten­ers for tun­ing into episode four on Work Life Bal­ance. We’ll see you next time.

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