Purpose as a Skill: Choosing Contribution Over Consumption

00;00;02;18 Junior: Welcome back, everyone to anotherepisode of The Leader Factor. I'm JR here with my co-host Doctor Timothy Clark,and today we've got a good episode lined up.

00;00;10;22 Tim: This we do.

00;00;11;23 Junior: It tilts very introspective. So for allof you listening, get ready for some introspection. It certainly wasintrospective for me in, prepping the episode, I like the episodes that leanthat way. Gives you a lot to think about. Each of us is on a leadershipjourney, and I think today, talks to some of the heart of that journey.

00;00;31;11 Tim: Well, junior goes back to the first domain,right. Lead self.

00;00;35;02 Junior: It does. And this is the first skill inthat first domain.

00;00;38;00 Tim: And it always loops back to that as well.Yeah. Right. We never we never graduate from that.

00;00;43;18 Junior: Yeah. We've been talking about thistopic personally and professionally, personally professionally and personallyinstitutionally for the last little while. And so I think it's especiallyrelevant, given that we're towards the start of a new year and there's a lotgoing on. It's a dynamic environment. And if purpose is two dynamic, that canbe problematic. So we need some status there.

00;01;06;14 Tim: Yeah. But how appropriate for JanuaryBerry.

00;01;08;23 Junior: Yeah I don't know when this is going togo live. So this is February then happy February. That's right. There are threepurpose problems high performing professionals experience when pressure is on.00;01;19;01 Tim: Hang on a second, junior. That's interesting. The way youframe that a purpose problem. So people can have purpose problems.

00;01;27;08 Junior: Most people have purpose problems.

00;01;29;12 Tim: Okay. That's quite a hypothesis.

00;01;31;16 Junior: Most organizations have purposeproblems.

00;01;34;11 Tim: I just wanted to call that out becausethat's not language we normally hear that someone has I have a purpose problem.

00;01;41;05 Junior Yeah.

00;01;41;05 Tim: And so this really is an invitation forintrospection here.

00;01;45;22 Junior: I think most people scream that theyhave purpose problems. They just use different words. And it may be unbeknownstto them.

00;01;53;13 Tim: Let's see if we do that.

00;01;55;16 Junior: And it's not because people don't care.It's not because they're lazy. But under stress, people have defaults. Andthere are three patterns as it relates to purpose that people often fall into.Everybody's slides. And that happens when pressure increases. So when theenvironment is more dynamic or there's more stress, people tend to derail as itrelates to purpose into a few different categories.

00;02;20;09 Junior: Right. And these are the threeentitlement, martyrdom and theater. Those are strong emotional words.

00;02;27;04 Tim: Yeah. Those are vivid words.

00;02;31;05 Junior Wow.

00;02;31;08 Tim: Entitlement, martyrdom and theater. Let'stalk about it.

00;02;37;20 Junior: Let's talk about how.

00;02;39;00 Tim: Are we going to begin with entitlement?

00;02;42;05 Junior: We're going to let our users figure outwhich one we start with by not being so on the nose.

00;02;47;20 Tim: Okay.

00;02;48;04 Junior: We'll go through the first a little bitand let you guess. But here's the question that we want you to ask when you'retired, stressed, overscheduled, or under threat. Which way do you drift? Andwhat we're going to do today is diagnostic. First and prescriptive second. Andso we're going to talk about the failure patterns of purpose before we get intotheir antidotes, okay.

00;03;12;14 Junior: And so it's important from a 10,000ftview that each of the listeners think about their own lives, their ownbehavior.

00;03;19;28 Tim: So you really gotta follow along andself-reflect as we go along so that you can try to identify which way youdrift.

00;03;29;29 Junior: Yeah, right. And I want to put someguardrails on that thinking as we start our introspection. So I want you tothink specifically about the last six months in a season, inside those sixmonths that was compressed, that felt pressurized, that was more dynamic thannormal, that was more emotional than normal, just generally more pressurized,because that will help us think about our own patterns and under pressure.

00;03;56;00 Junior: Most of us have a specific type ofpattern. We may fall into those three that we talked about earlier. We may haveone that's more dominant. But the point is that we each participate in thosethree categories almost every day to some degree. Yeah. And that's anotherimportant thing to understand at the outset of today's episode, is that all ofthese things happen by degrees.

00;04;19;00 Junior: They're not binary propositions. It'snot that it affects you or doesn't. We know that it does. It's just a questionof how much.

00;04;26;17 Tim: Well, junior, I like the way that you framethat. Go back and look at the last six months. And you I know you didn'tmeasure this, but you can kind of go month by month and look at what was thedegree of difficulty maybe overall for that month and then the next month andthat just reflect on that.

00;04;47;14 Tim: What happened? Degree of difficulty,adversity quotient. Yeah. Right. And and then kind of go back and think aboutwhat the pattern was.

00;04;57;18 Junior: And they're like the peaks and valleysfor everyone. And your mean for some people could be really high averagedynamism is high in the environment. Right. Or it could be low. But regardlessyou're going to have peaks and valleys. And so as we talk about these don'tjudge yourself too harshly. Don't moralize. Just observe. Just notice. That'sthe first thing that we want to do before we assign a whole bunch of emotion toit.

00;05;21;15 Junior: And I want to double click on that. Ithink it's important because pressure pulls us again, not in a binary way. It'snot that you immediately cross a threshold into evil, into disaster, but we domove into our default. And the way that it starts, it's often not dramatic.It's by degrees. And so we start to slide.

00;05;42;17 Junior: And you've probably seen that anywherethat anyone ends up that is polar. They didn't just teleport there. They movedthere by degrees.

00;05;51;19 Tim: Yeah. So there are some there's theexception though right? I would say that's the normal pattern. But theexceptions are when you are thrust into a pressurized situation where there aretrials and tribulations that blindside you. And certainly that happens to sure,with much less frequency. But that also happens in life. And so if thathappened to you in the last six months, take take note of that as well.

00;06;23;27 Junior: But I would say that if you do make apoor decision under pressure, there are always antecedents. Sure. And so if youhave a harsh winter and you fail, there were some decisions that you made inspring, summer and fall that made that possible.

00;06;38;14 Tim: Well, junior, as you've said before, justtake a look at the last three times that you had a big challenge or adversityin your life. How did you respond? And with three data points, you'll start tobe able to see a pattern.

00;06;54;02 Junior: Right? Yeah. So I'm going to read alittle bit and I want you to ask yourself if this characterizes yourexperience. When you think about that difficult season in the last six months,you're in a season where you're carrying a lot. You're the one people come to.You're handling the messy stuff. You're protecting your team, you're takingheat, you're producing, you're doing work that doesn't always get seen.

00;07;15;18 Junior: And somewhere along the way, the quietmental shift starts to happen.

Not dramatically, not consciously, but you start keepingscore. You notice who gets credit. You notice who gets flexibility. You noticewho gets rewarded for less. You notice the perks, the promotions, the praise,the access, and a new internal question starts showing up more often. Okay, sowhat do I get?

00;07;38;07 Junior: At first it feels fair. It feelsrational. You're not wrong to want reciprocity, but over time, that questionbecomes the center of gravity. You start filtering opportunities, effort, andeven relationships through a payoff lens. Not what would help here, not whatdoes the team need? Not what's the right contribution, but what's in it for me.And there are some tells that go along with this pattern.

00;08;00;16 Junior: You feel a stronger pull toward roles,projects, and conversations that increase your visibility and leverage. Even ifthey don't increase your contribution, you start to resent unglamorous work,even if it's essential because it doesn't pay the way you think it should. Youfind yourself thinking in terms of fairness and exchange. If they want that forme, then I need this from them.

00;08;20;11 Junior: You become more sensitive to slights,tone recognition, being left out because your identity is quietly tied to whatthe organization gives you. You start doing mental math. Effort versus reward,loyalty versus return, sacrifice versus benefits. You become less willing totake ownership when the outcome is uncertain because uncertainty feels likeuncompensated risk. This is a drift away from purpose and, in its most commonprofessional form, entitlement.

00;08;48;24 Junior: Drift. That's the first one. The firstderail of purpose is entitlement drift. What do you think? As I share some ofthose observations, some of those patterns, what comes to mind?

00;09;01;23 Tim: Certainly seen it. I think it's interestingJR because I think, it often starts with seeds of resentment. Bitterness.You're thinking about fairness and equity at the beginning, but then that evenbecomes distorted and you move to entitlement, which is really not even aboutequity and fairness anymore. So you're moving off that, so you are drifting.

00;09;33;11 Tim: You are drifting from purpose and itbecomes so I think it's almost a boomerang where now it's all about you again,when at the beginning, maybe it was you were thinking about fairness. You werethinking about contribution. You were thinking about adding value. But that gottwisted, that got distorted. And so this combination of selfishness withresentment can really distort that sense of purpose.

00;10;02;08 Tim: And now you are really drifting. You'rewandering.

00;10;05;16 Junior: One of the important considerations whenwe talk about entitlement is that it's not binary. And I know I've said that 3or 4 times already, but it's really important here. So let's assume that thespectrum of entitlement runs from 0 to 100. Almost no one's going to be a zero.So where would you place yourself on a scale from 0 to 100.

00;10;26;19 Junior: Are you a 65. Are you a 12. Are you afive. Because each of us displays some of these tendencies. And what'sinteresting about it is as it begins, it's justifiable. It's objectively right.There is exchange that happens. I create value, I'm compensated for my value.

00;10;47;26 Tim: That's not wrong.

00;10;48;22 Junior: That's not wrong. That's absolutelyright. Reciprocity is 100% good.

00;10;53;23 Tim: Yeah.

00;10;54;06 Junior: We can't have a free market if there'sno exchange. We can't mutually benefit if there's no exchange. Right? Ifthere's no specialization of labor and there's no trade, where are we going togo as a society? If we were all left to ourselves to go create value inside ourteeny little radius with no one else, nothing would ever happen.

00;11;13;22 Junior: Yeah, so the fundamentals are right. Butas we drift, as we move from one to 2 to 77 on the entitlement scale, thepathology starts to creep in and that pathology displaces what was good aboutthe fundamental principle. And we start to get off the rails.

00;11;30;20 Tim: The way I like to think about that, junior,I go back to Adam Smith's invisible hand. And I think what happens with thatdistortion? The invisible hand becomes the greedy hand and then it becomesselfish once again.

00;11;43;12 Junior: Yeah, I agree, the invisible hand younow expect with no contribution from you.

00;11;50;21 Tim: Yeah, that's a greedy hand. What happenedto basic, basic expectation of reciprocity and exchange? Right.

00;11;59;25 Junior: So what is entitlement reform? How wouldwe define it? The gradual slide from contribution orientation to consumptionorientation. What's the cost of that? It's high. You start doing things underpressure that are best only for you. And in the short term there can berelatively small effects. In the long term, the organization suffers, which inturn means that you suffer.

00;12;27;18 Junior: So if you play out the entitlementmindset over a long enough time horizon, everybody loses. And so the timehorizon that you look at is really important, because in the shortest term itmight not matter that much. But as you move out and as weeks become months andyears, it has a massive, massive effect.

00;12;46;02 Tim: Junior, I do want to make another commenton that though. I have some empathy for that pattern and for if you if you findyourself drifting into that pattern. Because at the beginning we think, well,purpose means and implies and includes some level of self-sacrifice, it'ssacrificial and the assumption is that when you do that, when you cast yourbread upon the water, so to speak, to use a biblical reference, it will returnto you.

00;13;25;01 Tim: Not even commensurate, butdisproportionate. So it's going to return to you. So there's that sacrificialprinciple and concept. But what if you have been through periods of time whereyou have been exploited, you have been taken advantage of, you have beenmistreated, and that reciprocity isn't there, hasn't been there. You haven'tseen the fruit of your labors.

00;13;57;24 Tim: You haven't seen you haven't. There hasbeen no compensation for your sacrifice. I can understand where some bitternessand resentment might creep in. Does that.

00;14;11;07 Junior: Make sense? It does. But at the sametime, is it useful for you to live there? No. You can acknowledge that. Yeah.But then very quickly you need to say, hey, sunk costs are irrelevant. Let'smove on with our lives. And that might seem harsh and overly pragmatic, but ifyou sit in that for too long, it's not useful for you.

00;14;30;17 Tim: To help.

00;14;30;29 Junior: Anybody else.

00;14;31;26 Tim: No, I and I understand that. And then ifyou go too far and you go headlong into consumption and you almost abandoncontribution, you're chasing adrenaline, you're chasing dopamine. And if ifthat's your raw pursuit, there's really not a lot of joy, a lot of happinessand a lot of peace in that. And I think you come up empty, barren and desolate.

00;15;03;24 Tim: That's what people say.

00;15;05;06 Junior: Well, and the satisfaction doesn't liein achievement. It lies in pursuit. And so if you're not actively in pursuit,you're never going to feel fulfilled.

00;15;13;27 Tim: So expound on that. I think I think thatdeserves a little bit more explanation.

00;15;18;22 Junior: Well, if all you got was your paycheck,right, and you just showed up and you didn't have to go to work for thatpaycheck, how meaningful would that be?

00;15;28;17 Tim: Great.

00;15;29;06 Junior: That would be the worst thing ever.Okay. But I mean, this is a moral.

It's an economic. It's a philosophical conversation. Wecould plumb the depths of this.

00;15;38;24 Tim: It is. But but how do how do you feel ifyou get the paycheck and you didn't have to.

00;15;46;05 Junior: Work for it? Yeah. Well, think I guessI'll pose it as a question. What achievement are you most proud of?

00;15;54;26 Junior: For anyone listening, think of theachievements you're most proud of and rank order them. I can almost guaranteethat it's precisely proportionate to their difficulty. Almost guarantee? Yeah.So if you could go and win a national championship with no inputs, is itmeaningful? Yeah. No, it's the grind that made it meaningful. It's the priceyou paid that made it meaningful.

00;16;19;11 Tim: Well, it's just like I saw the other day onwhere did I See it? I think it was on, I don't know, some, some onlinemarketplace, but there was a collegiate national championship ring for sale.

00;16;33;16 Junior: Oof. That's a that's a good.

00;16;34;23 Tim: And I'm thinking.

00;16;35;17 Junior: An example.

00;16;36;23 Tim: Who wants to buy that.

00;16;38;02 Junior: Yeah.

00;16;39;06 Tim: Why would anyone want to buy that if youweren't on the court or on the field? Why would you want to buy that?

00;16;46;21 Junior: Yeah, as an artifact, it's cool.

00;16;48;04 Tim: But yeah, but you didn't. You're not partof that achievement.

00;16;52;11 Junior: Yeah, it doesn't mean anything. Well,and even if it's more obscure, like, let's say that you got a gold medal fromthe 1984 Olympics in figure skating. You bought that on eBay?

00;17;06;21 Tim: Yeah.

00;17;07;29 Junior: Not interesting.

00;17;08;26 Tim: No, it's.

00;17;09;16 Junior: Not unless there's a story. Right? Thatcould.

00;17;11;22 Tim: Be. But it's not your story.

00;17;12;28 Junior: No, it's not yours. So it can only be sogreat. So that's what I mean. That we have to be actively in pursuit. And evenafter achievement of something like that, you have to get up and go dosomething the next day. Otherwise, if there's no distance between what you'reaiming at and where you are, you're going to be sorry.

00;17;29;17 Junior: That's forever. That's right. Okay.There's an antidote to this, which is identity, which we'll get to later. Butthat's the first pattern is entitlement. Let's get to the next one. I'm goingto read a little bit more. So pressure hits this time. But something elsehappens. Instead of reaching for comfort you reach for control. You see thegaps.

00;17;48;18 Junior: You see what's not being done. You seewhat could go wrong. And you think, fine, I'll just handle it. It startsinnocently. You pick up one extra thing, then another. You become the personwho always catches what other people drop. And at first it feels responsible.It feels like leadership. It feels like being reliable. Here are some towels.

00;18;06;22 Junior: You can feel your standards rising inyour patients, thinning. At the same time, you tell yourself it's faster if Ido it. You keep saying yes because saying no would create short term mess andyou don't have tolerance for mess right now. You feel a low grade resentment.No one sees how much I'm carrying. Rest starts to feel like a threat.

00;18;24;14 Junior: Like if you stop, something will slip.That pole is what we're calling burnout, virtue or martyrdom. When your senseof responsibility quietly turns into over functioning, when carrying morebecomes how you prove your worth, and exhaustion starts to feel like evidencethat you're committed. You're not trying to be a martyr. You're trying to keepthings from falling apart.

00;18;48;21 Junior: But over time, the costs becomeunsustainable.

00;18;53;02 Tim: I like that last statement, junior. The yescosts become unsustainable.

00;18;59;04 Junior: Yeah, this is where I have more empathy.These are my people, okay. But there's cost to this one that's high too. Yes.Because it's not just burnout, it's relationship strain. It's emotionalflatness. And it's it's long again long term hurt long term cost.

00;19;19;20 Tim: Right. So where where did that what are theantecedents of this junior that then explain the distortion. And then okay herewe go. Right. This is.

00;19;34;07 Tim: These are people that are willing to emptythemselves often in the service of others.

00;19;42;29 Junior: Right. Yeah. It has admirableantecedents. Yes. And that does what makes it dangerous. Right. And theadmirable antecedents to this one are mostly responsibility and initiative andself-directed ness and ownership, accountability, initiative. All of thosethings are trait conscientiousness. Yeah.

00;20;11;00 Tim: Right off the chart, off the charts, thingslike that. These are yeah, these are virtues. These are strengths. These arecapabilities that you have in abundance. Often you begin with that.

00;20;22;08 Junior: That's right. And I'm sure that thereare people listening to what I described in the last few paragraphs and aresaying, that one's me.

00;20;28;24 Tim: Yeah, right. Or part of me.

00;20;32;05 Junior: Right. Yeah. But if I default in adirection, maybe that one feels like your default.

00;20;38;11 Tim: Yeah.

00;20;39;10 Junior: Yeah. That one also has an antidote,which is stewardship, which we'll talk about later. So as a reminder, we talkedabout we're going to diagnose first. We're going to prescribe second. So we'restill in the diagnosis phase. So bear with us as we go through one more.

00;20;53;22 Tim: The pathology phase.

00;20;55;15 Junior: Yeah okay. Next one is purpose astheater or purpose as performance.

Let me read here. You're in a meeting. There's tension.People want clarity. You feel the pressure to look like you have it. And youcan feel the temptation to manage perception instead of reality. You reach forlanguage that sounds strong. Mission values, alignment culture. Not becausethose are fake, but because they're powerful.

00;21;22;01 Junior: They smooth things. They make you lookcomposed. And in the moment it works. People nod, the room settles. You're morefocused on how the decision will be perceived than what it will produce. You'redrawn to explanations that protect your image. You use principles more asjustification than as constraint. You can feel yourself wanting to win the roominstead of tell the truth.

00;21;44;02 Junior: There's a version of you that wouldrather sound principled than pay the price of principle. This is purpose asperformance, or purpose as theater. When values, language starts functioningmore like image management than decision governance. I like that you don'tnecessarily lie, you just become selective. Principles get emphasized when theyhelp you and soften when they cost you.

00;22;09;03 Junior: Over time, purpose becomes flexiblerhetoric. Instead of a North star. What do you think about this one?

00;22;17;12 Tim: I see it a lot. That's I think about thisone.

00;22;20;19 Junior: Tell us more about that. Do youliterally see it a lot in the conversations that you have, the organizationsyou work with, the leaders you see?

00;22;27;02 Tim: Yeah, I think, there are very few that areuncompromising in their integrity in, in, in the moral map that charts thecourse for them as leaders and then the organization, they're just too manythings, junior, that are negotiable. That's what I see, that they will open itup and I, I like the the language that you used to sound principled.

00;23;01;18 Tim: So it does sometimes. Well with greatfrequency become more about image management then, really the rock solidcharacter underneath? That's just not the concern.

00;23;18;02 Junior: And the cost of this one over a longenough time is the erosion of your credibility. It is because if I start seeingdissonance between the principles, you tell me you have the principles you'reinvoking in the conversation and then the principles you display. That'sproblem. Yeah, that's a big problem.

00;23;42;27 Tim: I remember having a conversation with aleader once, and he was telling me that someone had questioned his integrity,publicly and visibly. And he was quite upset about that. And he said to me, noone has ever questioned my integrity before. And my response to him was, it'sit's not about whether someone questioned your integrity. It's about whetheryou have integrity.

00;24;16;18 Tim: Forget about that. Forget about the opticsof having someone question your integrity. It was all about the image. That andthe, the public stage and the theater of having his integrity questioned. And Ijust tried to tell him, it's not about that. It's about, do you have it? Do youhave it in the dark? Do you have it when no one's watching?

00;24;42;22 Tim: That's what it's about. Forget about that.But for him, that was his obsession.

00;24;47;29 Junior: Well, you could ask the question. Whatwould the person who has the most integrity on planet Earth, the closest toperfection? How would they handle a situation like that? They wouldn't sweat itfor two seconds. Why? Because they know that integrity lies in behavior. And ifthey have enough behavioral evidence with the people around them that it won'tmatter.

00;25;07;09 Junior: And it bleeds into some other skills aswell. Yeah, but I'm pretty sure that that's how the person with the mostintegrity would look at that situation.

00;25;14;16 Tim: And another reason juniors, because theyare willing to be misunderstood. So that's the price. That's the price ofintegrity.

Most of the time it's going to happen. Yeah. And are youwilling to to bear that burden and pay that price at different times that maybe required? Yeah. Okay.

00;25;33;29 Junior: If you heard yourself in any of thosethree, good. I did because I play in all three of those. Sure. Each of us doesevery single day. And as I said, it's a matter of degree. But each of us playsin all three of those and probably have a dominant pattern. So what's theantidote to those three patterns?

00;25;56;02 Junior: In a word, it's purpose as a skill,we're going to break down purpose into its component parts and give you threesubscales to think about that directly. Defuze some of those direct patterns.But what is purpose to you in colloquial terms, like when you think aboutpurpose, what comes to mind?

00;26;17;23 Tim: My why, my deep why? The meaning that Iattach to my life? I would say those two things come to mind. First of all.

00;26;32;07 Junior: I agree, when I think about purpose, Ithink about the same language and where we're going to take you today in theconversation is to come up with a purpose as a system, as a decision makingrubric, because that purpose is only practical insofar as it helps you makedecisions every day. You're presented with a whole host of decisions that aretrade offs everywhere.

00;26;55;07 Junior: And without a North Star that governsthat direction, right, it's going to be very difficult for you to find your wayin the world. And so if that purpose isn't stable, your direction won't bestable either. Or it could be in your purposes. Unbeknownst to you, and youdrift toward consumption, which is also a pattern.

00;27;12;11 Tim: That's right. Well, I liked what you said,George. So your purpose. So what is the practical value of purpose? It givesyou decision making support. Yeah. In your life? Not once in a while, butevery.

00;27;26;00 Junior: Day. Yeah.

00;27;27;14 Tim: In the big things and the little things.

00;27;30;00 Junior: So our invitation and general sensewould be to be more explicit about what your purpose is. That's right. So let'sdefine it. Purpose. The imperative that we use is choose contribution overconsumption. So if there is one thing that you pull out of today's conversationas our imperative to you and to ourselves, it would be that choose contributionover consumption definition decision governing North Star that makes trade offsvisible and defensible.

00;27;57;15 Junior: Purpose is one of those things that whenyou make a decision, you can lean on as explanation. And that's very usefulfrom a personal perspective for yourself internally. And also when you'reexplaining that to other people, if you don't have a purpose. Why to lean on inyour decision making. It's difficult for people to understand why you're goingthe way you are.

00;28;18;27 Tim: Yeah, it's a it's bedrock, isn't it?

00;28;21;01 Junior: Yeah. Speaking of, let's talk about thefirst subscale, which is identity. It's imperative is build on bedrock identitydiffuses so much of what's problematic with the derails for purpose. So true ifyou have a clear identity that you can explain to someone, it's so useful inavoiding some of the common pitfalls. So let's dig into this one a little bit.

00;28;50;00 Junior: I got so many notes I'm lost. I got tostart numbering these so bedrock sentence a one liner under heat, who youserve, what you're building and what you refuse to trade to get it.

00;29;03;08 Tim: So you need to be able to answer thosequestions.

00;29;05;14 Junior: Yeah, yeah. And do you think most peoplecan.

00;29;12;08 Tim: I think most people can't.

00;29;16;16 Junior: I think that that's probably true. I'mthinking about myself and how, you know, if I took all of the years that I'vebeen alive, how many of those would I be able to in how many of those would Ibe able to explain this clearly, not all of them. Who you serve, what you'rebuilding and what you refuse to trade to get at each of those components isimportant.

00;29;36;13 Junior: So who you serve, that's close to at thetop of the hierarchy. If you can't explain who you serve, that's a problem.What are you building? What are you building for those people that you said youserve? And then as you're building, what are you refusing to trade?

00;29;54;03 Tim: Well go back junior. Who you serve.

00;29;59;18 Tim: But if it's you, what if it's,

00;30;05;29 Tim: Some other questionable cause. Pursue.Right. Then you're gonna line

up behind that.

00;30;14;26 Junior: Yeah, well, here's another point that'simportant to consider. We should be able to answer this sentence for everysingle person through observation. So it's way easier to fill in these blanksfor somebody by just watching what they do for a week than it is by askingthem, asking them will only get you so far because there could be misalignmentbetween what they say and what they do.

00;30;40;20 Junior: So really, the ultimate test of whetheror not we understand this tool is looking at our behavior. If it's alignedtoward something that we understand, it's going to point to something. Andthat's my point.

Yeah. If you look at someone's behavior over a certainperiod of time, it will be aimed at something. And that may be unknown to them,but it will be aimed at something.

00;31;04;09 Tim: It will.

00;31;05;00 Junior: And if it's if it's not aimed atsomething intentionally, it usually falls on the consumption side of theledger.

00;31;12;23 Tim: And when you when you frame the questionthat way, who do you serve? You could also you could also reframe it and say,who do you worship? It just reminds me of that statement by David FosterWallace. Right.

We all worship when it comes to the practical reality ofeveryday life. There are no atheists. So as you said, look at people's, look atyour behavior.

00;31;39;13 Tim: Look at the allocation of your resources.Look where you spend your time, money, attention, energy. And lo and behold,there's the altar. Yeah, we can see it. Yeah. And that's true for all of us.And you can't say that's not true.

00;31;54;01 Junior: Yeah. I was thinking the other day totry to put language to this. And what I came up with was your calendar and yourbank statement are moral documents.

00;32;02;22 Tim: Absolutely true.

00;32;03;26 Junior: Because if you look at how your scarceresources are spent, that will tell us what you're in service of who or what.

00;32;13;06 Tim: You say that again, junior, your calendarand your bank account are moral documents.

00;32;21;07 Junior: You know your bank statement, theledger, the actual.

00;32;23;21 Tim: Ledger.

00;32;24;04 Junior: Debits and credits. Right? If we look atthat and you show me your calendar. Yeah, that's representative of what youactually did. Yes. Those are two things that I, I can use to know a whole lotabout you.

00;32;36;09 Tim: That's right.

00;32;37;06 Junior: And hopefully for good, hopefully I canlook at those two things and fill in these three blanks. Well, this personserves this cause or this person, they're building this thing and they refuseto trade, you know, X, Y and Z in order to achieve that. That's right. And so Ithis identity build on bedrock is the direct antidote to the first derail,which is entitlement.

00;33;03;03 Junior: If you appropriately understand whoyou're serving, what you're building, and what you refuse to trade to get it,it's very difficult to it's more difficult to slide into the EntitlementDriller because you have a North Star and you're understanding that serving isserving about consumption or contribution. It's about contribution. So if youunderstand every day who you are serving and what the goal is, it will be muchmore difficult to slide into that pattern.

00;33;28;23 Tim: Another way to say this other one, junior,that last one, what what? I refuse to trade.

00;33;37;19 Tim: To get it.

00;33;38;22 Junior: Right.

00;33;39;22 Tim: In other words, what is not for sale inyour life? You got to be able to answer that question. Yeah.

00;33;49;02 Junior: Is a great way to put it. What's not forsale? Yeah. Or what's your price? Assuming that you are for sale. Yeah.Hopefully it's nothing there. Okay. Subscale to utility be useful.

00;34;02;15 Tim: I love this one.

00;34;04;03 Junior: This is choosing to be valuable onpurpose.

00;34;06;07 Tim: This is utilitarian.

00;34;08;18 Junior: It is. And I think that like there'ssomething so beautiful about being utilitarian. It is if you had no other lifemantra then be useful. Yes. That's beautiful. Yeah that's beauty. You would geta lot of things right. So I guess is the way that I would put it true if youchose that as your mantra.

00;34;28;25 Tim: And don't think of this in the strictJeremy Bentham sense of the word. Right. Think beyond pure economics. How canyou be useful? What does it mean to be useful? Have you committed yourself tobe useful? How do you create value? What is the nature of your contribution?These are all questions that surround that.

00;34;57;09 Tim: But utility is a good word. Yeah, it reallydoes come down to utility.

00;35;03;11 Junior: Yeah. So let's look at the question whatwould actually help here. And I liked it. You mentioned not just Jeremy Benthambecause you could be in a social situation. You could be with somebody else.And it's the nature of the thing is relational. You can still ask thatquestion, how can I be used?

00;35;21;20 Tim: That's right.

00;35;22;14 Junior: And it's not economic. It'sinterpersonal. That's right. You walk into a room and instead of, heyeverybody, here I am, you walk into a room and you say, hey, there you are. Howcan I be useful to you?

00;35;34;07 Tim: To you, where's the focus?

00;35;36;11 Junior: And if you're oriented that way, again,harder to slide into those drillers tool. Any values language must be pairedwith a concrete trade off. There's a saying. I don't know if it's a saying.It's a saying in my head. I don't know where it came from, but nothing is trulya principle until it costs you money. And that gets at the heart of what thisis saying, that until it's there's a price attached to it, until there's atrade off to be made, it's really not meaningful.

00;36;06;12 Tim: And until you're tested to exercise thatprinciple, you don't even know if you have it.

00;36;11;04 Junior: That's right. And so I think it'sappropriate to think about the winter that we talked about in the beginning.When you do get under pressure, whatever the outcome is will have had itsantecedents. And so the antecedents, we hope, lie here in literally associatingour values language to trade offs and saying, I am not for sale. There is noamount of money that I would be willing to trade for a breach in, you know, myintegrity through misrepresenting data, through doing whatever the thing is.

00;36;42;27 Junior: Right? Until you get to that point andit becomes practical.

00;36;48;23 Junior: We don't know what's going to happen.

00;36;50;26 Tim: It's you don't know what's going to happen.You yourself.

00;36;54;19 - 00;36;54;27 Junior Yeah.

00;36;55;03 Tim: Until you're thrust into the situation, youdon't know how you're going to respond. Yeah, probably. Not. It's probably notgoing to be good. Yeah.

00;37;03;29 Junior: Well and that that has to be theassumption. I read a terrifying book, a while ago called Ordinary Men. Ifanyone's interested in a terrible yet informative book, that's one of thehighest on my list about a Polish police brigade. The idea, to your pointbeing, that each of us could find ourselves in that situation and make thewrong choice.

00;37;26;13 Junior: That's right. And we have to assume thatwe have the capability of doing things that we wouldn't be proud of, less thanproud that we have the capability of falling into any one of these traps. Themoment you think that you are infallible, the moment you think that you'recompletely inoculated to the risk of those three D is probably when the risk isthe highest.

00;37;51;13 Junior: It's true you're not on the lookout andyou're not prepping. Okay. Quick check. Do I default to sounding right ormaking things right? Oh.

00;38;01;24 Tim: I love that question.

00;38;03;27 Junior: Making things right now.

00;38;05;18 Tim: Cuts to the marrow, junior. That one cutsto the marrow. Are you are you really concerned about is it image management.Is it optics. Is it your reputation.

00;38;16;20 - 00;38;17;28 Junior Yeah.

00;38;18;01 Tim: Or is it genuinely doing what you think tobe right. And bearing the costs. There's something the chips fall.

00;38;29;01 Junior: This one is deeper than it might look.As I think about this one, there's a lot there because sounding right, whodoesn't want to sound right? We all want to sound right. Making things righthas such a different price tag, and the visibility to making things right isoften so much lower than sounding right. Sounding right means we have anaudience, right?

00;38;54;08 Tim: You could even be invisible and making itright.

00;38;56;20 Junior: Totally. You often are. A lot of whathappens in the realm of making things right goes on without anybody seeing it.There's not necessarily an audience, and there's often not. Let's get to thefinal subscale, which is stewardship. Budget your life. It is in here. Calendarand budget or moral documents.

00;39;17;29 Tim: Nice. Well it's glad you got it. Yeahthat's that's important.

00;39;21;22 Junior: Tool reallocate plus plan abandonmentplus renewal as infrastructure.

What are those mean. It means that up front we're going tobe opinionated about how we allocate our time. It's not always going to be inthe perfect ratio that we prescribe. But we'll have some buckets.

00;39;38;14 Tim: That are reflex purpose.

00;39;39;24 Junior: It does. We have, I guess, the way thatI would I would explain this is that my calendar at the beginning of the weekand the end of the week looks different. I planned, but then some thingshappened and things got rearranged. I had to reallocate.

00;39;56;03 Tim: That's always true. But you were. You triedto be as deliberate as you could, right?

00;40;00;11 Junior: And there are some things that go on thecalendar that aren't negotiable. And one of the things that you could do is, ifyou look, protect recovery as an input, you could say protect contribution asan input, and you could design in three 60 minute contribution blocks into yourday or your week, probably your week, and say, come hell or high water, I'mgoing to get those things done because I will end this week having made somesort of meaningful difference.

00;40;27;28 Junior: That's right. Regardless of how manyother meetings I had to attend.

00;40;30;27 Tim: The big rocks got to go in.

00;40;32;14 - 00;40;33;02 Junior Yeah.

00;40;33;04 Tim: And then a lot of other things will change.That's how it goes. I mean, I look at my I do that junior in the morning, I, Iplan again my day replan. And then at the end of the day I review it and planthe next. And it's dynamic, but yeah. And by the way, if you haven't noticedeveryone, there are a lot of other people out there that would like to allocateyour time for you.

00;40;59;04 Junior: Right. Well, that's that's I'm so gladyou said that because that's the actual large failure pattern of purposes.Absence is you arrive at a place that's just a reflection of other people'spriorities. Yeah.

00;41;16;17 Tim: Drifting is, mighty easy thing to do.

00;41;19;27 Junior: Yeah. It is. We all do it. Planabandonment. You need to understand when you're going to jump ship onsomething.

00;41;28;14 Tim: Yeah.

00;41;30;01 Junior: And so there can be there are a coupledifferent ways that you can look at planned abandonment. The way that I'mlooking at planned abandonment right now is that if this thing happens, we'regoing to cut it and we're going to be done, and you're not going to continueallocating scarce resources into something that's a dead end. So you have toreallocate.

00;41;48;01 Junior: And that's a big piece of stewardship,because if you're saying, hey,

I have responsibility as a steward over these scarceresources, then I have to constantly be triaging and thinking about how toallocate those every single day. And once something looks like it's not goingto bear fruit in the way we need it to to be successful as a steward, pull theplug.

00;42;10;25 Junior: Stop giving it your money. Stop givingit your time and your attention and put it somewhere.

00;42;14;27 Tim: Else to that point. Junior. And this may bea little bit of an aside, but I don't think so. And that is, what we're talkingabout is equally relevant if you are young, if you're an adolescent, if you area teenager. Let me give you an example. So the statistics here, at least in theUnited States right now, a teenager spends an average of five hours a day onsocial media, five hours allocation of time and attention and the energy thatgoes with that.

00;42;47;06 Tim: If your calendar is a moral document thatreflects your sense of purpose, right, because it's the allocation of thosescarce resources and you're a young person, maybe you're a you're you're alittle older, two, maybe you're an adult, whatever. But if you're allocatingthat kind of time to social media, what does that say about purpose?

00;43;13;05 Tim: So there's a question. And this is this isa question that we can you know, a lot of people need to answer, what does thatsay? If you if you spend time doomscrolling every day and you're caught intothat. So there's a, there's a collision that's an example of a collision, Ithink, of purpose, because if you sat down with a lot of these young people andeven adults.

00;43;42;06 Tim: They would tell you, they would they wouldarticulate a beautiful purpose for their lives. But then the allocation ofresources would not reflect that.

00;43;54;20 Junior: I don't even think that that'soptimistic.

00;43;57;08 Tim: Okay.

00;43;57;23 Junior: I don't know that people would be ableto reflect a grand aspirational purpose.

00;44;03;00 Tim: I think some would. But yeah.

00;44;04;13 Junior: Sure, some.

00;44;05;19 Tim: But most. No.

00;44;06;25 Junior: But if you look at the social mediaexample, it speaks to the point that we made a couple of minutes ago, which isthat you're now the product of someone else's priorities. Sure. So there arepeople out there whose priority it is to have you consume the content. Yeah. Asproduct and so and that might be a way to imbue this with some emotion is doyou want to be someone else's product.

00;44;32;03 Tim: Right.

00;44;33;05 Junior: When I hear that, I'm like, no, youdon't get my time.

00;44;36;04 Tim: Right. Exactly.

00;44;36;21 Junior: I'm not going to sit here and scroll andbe a product.

00;44;38;18 Tim: I hope that you're offended by that, right?Because in this case, for so many people, your agency has been neutralized.Yeah. And you're allocating your time. Yeah. Under that control.

00;44;54;08 Junior: Yeah, I think I know that. So mostproduct managers that are doing that are not malevolent people I know. But it'suseful to me to think about the malevolent product manager sitting behind thecurtain trying to get my attention. And I'm saying, no, because without that,without the story, without the narrative, how do you get the motivation to notdo that?

00;45;15;29 Junior: It's so easy. I find myself doing itright and just going through.

Yeah. Also, pro tip and what I said, I love scrolling a fewdifferent things. I love scrolling Facebook Marketplace, I love scrolling

Reddit. I love scrolling X. And so what I did two weeks agowas I said instead of reaching for those three, every time I get on my phoneand feel that urge, I'm going to go into the Substack and read long formcontent.

00;45;45;26 Junior: Nice. And it's.

00;45;46;28 Tim: Changed.

00;45;47;17 Junior: It's changed a lot.

00;45;49;02 Tim: There you go.

00;45;49;13 Junior: Just in the last two weeks.

00;45;50;12 Tim: So but.

00;45;51;09 Junior: I'm finding that.

00;45;52;00 Tim: Too. It just tells us, junior, these thingsare a blessing and a curse. We got to be incredibly reflective. Yeah.Deliberate. Intentional. We've got to be able to self-diagnose andself-correct.

00;46;04;13 - 00;46;04;22 Junior Yeah.

00;46;04;28 Tim: And align with purpose. But as you said, ifyou can't articulate purpose in the first place, we have a deeper issue.

00;46;11;09 Junior: Yeah. And I want to call out that I'm onthe bus too. It's a difficult position to give voice to all of these derail ersand come at them from a certain angle.

00;46;21;17 Tim: Yeah.

00;46;23;02 Junior: While also understanding that I fallvictim to those three derail or just like anybody else. And so I'm not tryingto come within any sort of greater than now moral authority. Sure. I'm I'm inthe same boat.

Okay. Let's go into the situation. This is our little casestudy. Let's say that you have a high status opportunity. It's more money, it'smore visibility, but it displaces your core work and it pressures your healthand your family.

00;46;50;28 Junior: If we allow purpose drift into the threederails that we've talked about, three things might be true if we drift towardentitlement, we're going to look at and we're going to say, finally, it's myturn. You're going to pay me for all the work that I've been doing for forever.There's an element again, to our original conversation here.

00;47;09;03 Junior: That's that's justifiable. That's good.Sure. But that's what we're saying. If you go past that, it can be bad.Burnout, virtue. I can carry it. It's way more I understand, but it looks likethere's there needs. Someone needs to go and do this.

00;47;27;29 Tim: So I'll do it. I'll handle it.

00;47;30;07 Junior: Regardless of the health pressure,regardless of the family pressure, regardless of the fact that it displaces mycore work and then performance. This will look aligned. If I take this role, itwill look like it's in alignment with the principles that I've espoused. Allthree of those would be the wrong decision. All three of those would be thewrong outcome.

00;47;54;11 Junior: If you install the purpose system as adecision making system that we've talked about, we would filter it through thethree sub skills. First is identity. And we ask, who do I serve? What am Ibuilding and what won't I trade? You overlay that on top of the opportunity andyou see if there's alignment or if you disqualify the opportunity on any one ofthose three grounds.

00;48;18;13 Junior: If you pass those, you get to the nextone value and adoption or status and applause. Can I actually move the needlein the metrics that matter to me, which is true.

00;48;28;04 Tim: Utility in my core work.

00;48;29;21 Junior: Which is true, true.

00;48;30;22 Tim: And utility.

00;48;32;12 Junior: And then finally stewardship. What wouldhave to be abandoned, what renewal would have to be protected? And is it asustainable cost if you filter it through all three of those layers and there'salignment, right. Proceed. Green light. Yeah. If there's not, then one of thosethings has to change either the nature of the opportunity itself or your beliefabout what your purpose is.

00;49;00;08 Junior: And more often than not, if you alignthe purpose to the opportunity, it will be worse than if you align theopportunity to your purpose. And so the order in which you manipulate thosethings should be first before any other opportunity even gets here. Let's getclear about what our purpose is. Right? And then once it arrives, let's staystrong here and reject the opportunity.

00;49;23;18 Junior: If it doesn't fit, embrace it. If itdoes.

00;49;25;24 Tim: Well, I want to add one more thing tojunior as you go through the sequence. So we have identity first. That's thefirst test. Utility is the second test stewardship is the third test.Inevitably if you if you have the clear identity and you're seeking utility,there will be a new and you apply the stewardship test, which is the thirdtest.

00;49;50;15 Tim: Inevitably there will be times where youhave to abandon that. That's expected. The trade offs will always be difficultto make, but you will have to abandon certain pursuits, certain opportunities,certain open doors. That goes without saying. So I just want to emphasize thata little bit more. Prepare to abandon. Yeah. As you go down the road, as amatter of stewardship.

00;50;20;26 Junior: I appreciate you calling it out, becauseanother piece of that is that now, your decision is justifiable to yourself andother people because this is your criteria. And so if you have to reject anopportunity like that, you can point to one of these things and say, hey, it'snot aligned. That's right. It's not aligned here. Right? Right.

00;50;40;01 Junior: It looks like this is oriented towardapplause more than I would like it. To me, it looks like this is orientedtoward it. A work requirement in four hours. It's not in alignment with whereI'm at in the season of life. You can look at that. And that becomesjustifiable and set of. No. And just because, those will not be satisfactoryanswers to most people.

00;51;05;19 Junior: Not that your explanation, even if it'sgood, will be satisfactory, but at least it'll be there. And something that youcan lean on that.

00;51;11;17 Tim: Junior, I've got one more question as itrelates to the second test in utility. Yeah, right. And this is where I justgot to bring in the three transcendental goals. Okay. How do you defineutility. Is it good. Is it true. Is it beautiful? I think those are excellentcriteria by which to determine utility.

00;51;33;25 Junior: Yeah I agree it's only been in the lastlittle while. And I think we were talking about this the other day that Ireally appreciated beauty as valuable in and of itself. And so that's given mea deeper appreciation for people who create beauty for its own sake.

00;51;54;13 Tim: That's right.

00;51;55;11 Junior: And so now I'm looking at artdifferently. I'm looking at architecture differently. I'm looking at literaturea little bit differently because I've been looking at utility through probablythe Bentham lens more than I should be. Yeah, but utility can mean the creationin any of those categories. That's right. That's beautiful thing. Right. Okay.As we wrap up, any final thoughts?

00;52;18;05 Tim: I, I would just say I think that thesequence of these three tests JR is, is right on the money identity and thenutility and then stewardship. That sequence matters and we have to go throughit. It's a repeating cycle. As we are confronted with challenges andopportunities throughout life of a. Well, I appreciate.

00;52;44;18 Junior: Your time today, Tim. I think this is agood discussion for everybody who's given us your time and paid attention. Asksome of these questions. Thank you. If you haven't subscribed to the podcast,we would ask that you do that. We're going to be doing this for the entire core15. And I think it'll be valuable conversations every single time.

00;53;01;24 Junior: It's given me a lot to think about. Sowith that, we will say, see you later and see you in the next episode. Bye bye.