Aaron Hurst, Author of The Purpose Economy, on Shifting from a Transactional to a Purpose Mindset for High Performance

Transcript

Aaron, welcome to the show.

Aaron Hurst 00:02:34

Thanks. Great to be here. Excited for the conversation.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:02:36

Yeah, excited to do this. So you have done many things throughout your career, and what I actually wanted to start with is where you first started, which is to be an entrepreneur. So you have been an entrepreneur entrepreneur for a long time across many sorts of portfolios. Id love to just go back to the beginning, maybe tell us your story, like, what were some of the first ventures that you started? We can use that as a jumping off point to talk about some stuff that youre famous for, which is around passion for purpose and more. But lets start at the beginning. How did you get into entrepreneurship and what kind of companies did you start in the early days?

Aaron Hurst 00:03:11

Yeah, happy to go there. And actually, the story really actually begins with family. I’ve been very blessed to have a family that’s pretty entrepreneurial. My grandfather was one of the first naval officers to be in Hitler’s bunk at the end of the war, in World War two, and actually stole a piece of his stationery, which we still have in a family, which is super weird, and we’re not quite sure what to do with it. But he’s coming out of that experience of World War II just really like his goal. I wouldn’t say it was his purpose, but his goal was to prevent World War three. That was really what drove and motivated him. He went on to create the strategy that started the Peace Corps here in the United States and then was the head of the Aspen Institute for 25 years.

Aaron Hurst 00:03:49

And both those organizations were fundamentally about purpose and connection. How do we bring people from different backgrounds together through their shared purpose as a way of building, understanding, and enabling societies to remove friction between groups, which we need now more than ever, given what’s happening in the news. So I grew up with that as a backdrop. Both my parents are more of what I would call garage entrepreneurs, just sort of trying dabbling and trying different things. We never use the word entrepreneur, but it was just sort of always, I feel like in the household. My first venture was a baseball card dealership when I was 16, which was a lot of fun. And that just started because I was at a baseball card show in Detroit, and I saw an ad saying you could rent a table for dollar 20 and then you could flip it around and buy people’s cards for half price. And I was like, that sounds awesome.

Aaron Hurst 00:04:35

So $20 down, got a table, started selling my cards, buying cards, learning how to merchandise, learning how to negotiate. Just loved doing that. And it helped pay for part of my college at Michigan. So it was a great, great starting place in Michigan. I started a program that took Michigan students out to teach in prisons and connected that to interdisciplinary curriculum for students. They could actually learn through service, not just through the classroom, which without exception, they all said was their favorite class at Michigan. So it was this incredible experience. After that, I sort of went and tried to work in the nonprofit sector for a little while and just got crazy frustrated by the lack of ability to scale.

Aaron Hurst 00:05:11

So it was 97, and I moved to Silicon Valley and just started informational interviews. And you’ll appreciate this story. Coming out of tech, met with a woman through networking startup. Just got a bunch of venture money. There were like five employees, and we hit it off. She’s like, if you can show me one page of HTML you’ve coded, like, I’ll hire you as our front end dev. I literally had taken someone else’s resume and HTML and like just swapped everything out and made my resume out of HTML like a couple of weeks earlier just to see what this new HTML thing was. So I got hired to basically be the webmaster front end dev for a startup, heavily venture backed company.

Aaron Hurst 00:05:46

And I had basically a weekend to learn HTML. So great. Sort of just, I love those kinds of startup stories. So that coming out of that, two startups that I was part of in Silicon Valley really felt like I had come to understand what it takes to scale an organization and realize that, yes, money is a big part of it, but talent is a huge part of it. And part of why nonprofits struggle in our community is money. But a big part of is they just. Unlike startups that tend to hire talent ahead of the need, nonprofits tend to not be able to hire the senior talent or to do it way behind the need. And they’re always in catch up.

Aaron Hurst 00:06:18

And I envisioned a model where we could create a consulting firm, but that only uses pro bono. So it only uses people volunteering their time out of companies to help nonprofits close this gap. And that was a taproot foundation, which ultimately scaled it to seven cities across the US, built a $15 billion marketplace and partnership with the White House, and then I partnered with BMW to take that to 30 countries around the world, which is this incredible experience. And it really, I think, just convinced me of the power of connection, purpose, and that how this was really going forward going to be important for business. The businesses that know how to bring meaning and purpose to their employees are the ones that are going to thrive. And that really caused me to try a different type of entrepreneurship, which is being an author, which is a form of entrepreneurship, because it is like its own little business, and wrote the purpose economy and spent about a year or two just touring the world, talking to CEO’s, heads of state, et cetera, just really making the case that purpose is something that we need to start paying attention to. It’s not just about charity. So that’s sort of the early, my early journey.

Aaron Hurst 00:07:17

I can go on from there, but just. Yeah. Give you a down payment on it.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:07:21

Yeah. You said something, this phrase like informational, you did informational interviews and that’s kind of how you landed your first job. I mean, that sounds interesting to me. What’s an informational interview and how do you do them? Do you just cold email people or how did it work?

Aaron Hurst 00:07:37

Yeah, I mean, I’m just a curious person and that’s just the nature of who I am. So I tend to just bring that into conversation. So just generally be reaching out to people that I knew or through. In that case it was through an alumni, through the alumni network and just saying, hey, I just moved to town and really trying to explore what my career options are and I’ve got some ideas. Would love to get your advice. Can I take you to lunche? Go to lunch, share who I am, ask a lot of questions and show a lot of honest curiosity about the person and didn’t always follow, but the best practices at the end of it, make sure you ask for three introductions from that person, for three more. And then the idea being, and eventually you’re going to find somewhere, you just hit it off. And in many cases they end up creating a job for you because there’s just such chemistry, especially when you’re talking to founders.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:08:22

Yeah, that’s awesome. It sounds like if you had a recorder with you, it could have turned into a podcast, especially with the interview to three other people. Super interesting. So the idea behind Taproot. So this is very interesting because a lot of companies for sure, that have funding hire ahead of their growth. They almost hire people in order to create the growth. But you’re right, sometimes growth comes first and people come later. I guess companies that don’t have organizations, don’t have the funding have to deal with that.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:08:51

So what is it that taproot did? So I guess the idea was you almost take volunteer hours from other people.

Aaron Hurst 00:08:58

Yep.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:08:59

In lieu of funding, you can get the people ahead of time, and then once the growth is created, then you can get people from start to build up the wheel. Oh, that’s cool. That’s a great idea.

Aaron Hurst 00:09:08

So I think it’s also because if you don’t have people who’ve been in a skilled organization, they don’t even know what a skilled organization looks like. They don’t even know what to build towards. There’s just like, I just ran to that all the time. And you see this in small business too. Like I’m working the joint venture right now and they’ve just always operated a cottage level. They’ve never seen like what it looks like to get to that next stage. So being able to have someone come in and says this is what it’s going to look like. Here are the next steps is so critical to growth.

Aaron Hurst 00:09:32

We so many times think like why aren’t they growing? And a lot of cases just because the leadership has never seen what growth is. They don’t even know what that like, they have no idea how to do it. They’re smart, they’re capable, they just have never seen it.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:09:43

Yeah. So this is a really good question. And you know, for anyone working in a tech startup or a rapidly growing organization, this is stuff that we all think about. So I have a philosophical question for you then on this, which comes first for most organizations, do you think it’s growth comes, you get a whole bunch of customers, you get a whole bunch of revenue, and then you have to backfill with people, or do people come first and the people create the growth and the revenue? I’m sure there’s cases of both. But which one happens more do you think, Trey?

Aaron Hurst 00:10:16

I don’t know about more. It’d be hard to. Probably depends a lot by sector. I think the thing that enables growth is when you get to product market fit for your product and you have a formula that enables you to then build the infrastructure to start to scale up. And I think majority of startups never get to product market fit or theyve got something that fits at a clunky cottage industry level and they dont do the work to get to something to scale because they dont know how to do that. Ive always approached it people first. When I started taproot, before I did anything, I just put an ad on Craigslist, which used to be a thing people use 20 years ago, just saying, hey, I’ve got this idea, like anyone interested in joining me and just got flooded with tons of executives saying how can I help? And we just started meeting and trying to figure out how to solve for it. So I tend to as a style be a community organizer, as a leader, whereas other people I think are builders.

Aaron Hurst 00:11:02

They want to build something first, in which case it’s not people first. So I think a lot of it just has to do with that personality or leadership style of the founder.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:11:11

Yeah, like most things in business, unfortunately there isn’t a clear answer and both methods can work.

Aaron Hurst 00:11:16

The clear answer is to work in a way that’s authentic. To who? What your style is that don’t work for works for you.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:11:22

Ah, that’s a good answer, actually.

Aaron Hurst 00:11:23

If you’re a builder, build. If you’re a researcher, research. If you’re a community builder, build community. Like, don’t try to be somebody else.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:11:30

That’s a lesson that I keep hearing in various forms for so many of the leaders that we’ve had on. We always have this clip or this part of the interview where I ask you for parting advice, and I’m going to ask you that, too, at the end of the conversation. But I. The one that I’ve heard, there’s a bunch of things that have been recurring, but one of which was, don’t try and be someone else. You can learn how other leaders lead, but at the end of the day, to be authentic, you have to do it your way. That makes a lot of sense. And you just effectively said the same thing, too. So good to hear.

Aaron Hurst 00:11:59

Basic leadership 101, right?

Aydin Mirzaee 00:12:01

Leadership 101. Okay, so we talked about taproot, and so you started another company called Imperative. What was Imperative about so Imperative to start off with?

Aaron Hurst 00:12:11

I did a bunch of research and was able to determine that when people talk about their purpose statement, I don’t know if you ever created your own personal purpose statement. A lot of execs do it with a coach. They come up with a statement. If you actually look at all those statements, if you look at a thousand of them, they’re all unique and beautiful and poetic, but they actually have psychological patterns in them. And was able to create an online tool that enabled someone, in about ten minutes of answering questions to determine their purpose from a psychological perspective. It was basically like a strengths finder or Myers Briggs, but for purpose, built that out. And it was powerful because it enabled people to have that unlock, but also compare purpose, find people a similar purpose. And I saw that used by companies from PwC and Disney, Target, Microsoft.

Aaron Hurst 00:12:55

We had probably over 200 companies using that purpose profiling technology. And then similar to, I think, fellows journey, when Covid hit, what we realized was the connection was the thing that people were really missing. And I’ve always used executive coaches myself, and I’ve always had this idea in the back of my head that we don’t need coaches as much as we think we do. If we could actually be coaches for each other. 80% of coaching is just about good questions and listening, and there’s no reason why you and I couldn’t do that for each other. Like, why spend dollar 200 an hour for that. So we built a system that dynamically enabled two people to coach each other using prompts, questions and measurement throughout the process. So that basically disrupt the coaching industry and build connections.

Aaron Hurst 00:13:38

So really powerful just to see people across cultures, across the company coming together and becoming. We created so many best friends at work. It was truly amazing just to see what that created. I left that company though, about a little over a year ago, sort of gotten to the point where I was getting the itch and had new ideas for things I wanted to do. And it was at a scaling stage which was going to be more of like repetition.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:14:02

Got it? Yeah. I hadn’t heard of a purpose statement before, so I have an executive coach, but I guess we haven’t created one. If he’s listening to this right now.

Aaron Hurst 00:14:11

Yeah. Purpose statement is like a mission, a personal mission statement. It’s a statement of like what your core problem solving, how you solve problems, how you add value, a core statement about your actual values and then a component that’s about what elevation of impact matters to you psychologically. Do you want to make an impact on individuals, organizations or society? We found there’s actually different psychological patterns for each of those. You combine those together and you end up with a statement that can serve as a tool for you to be able to make decisions about your career, about how you want to develop, etcetera. One of the more powerful things I think executive coaches do is help people get that clarity.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:14:50

Love it. Is this the sort of thing that you would know by heart if I ask you what is your purpose statement? You just could recite it like an elevator pitch? Or is it two lines or is it two pages?

Aaron Hurst 00:15:02

It’s a sentence. And then what we encourage people to do is then put it in their own poetic language. But to start with that core. So my poetic version is my purpose is to awaken lions so they can care for their pride. So to me its all about enabling leaders to find their courage so they can actually take care of each other, the community and the planet.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:15:23

Super interesting. And so the poetic version. So does that make it easier to remember or why is there a poetic version?

Aaron Hurst 00:15:30

Its more memorable to me that becomes personal versus feeling. Like what you produce out of a technology is much more structural, so its less inspiring, its more informative. And then youve got to convert that into what is a metaphor that is easy for you to remember, that’s vivid and that is evocative for you of the feeling behind it.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:15:48

Got it. And do most people, when you talk about the level of impact. Do most people say they want to impact society, organizations, their teams? Where does that normally land?

Aaron Hurst 00:15:59

What’s interesting about it is it’s almost exactly a third, a third, a third. A third of people get the most meaning from helping individuals. They want to be on the front line, actually feeling like it could be helping someone on their team. It could be a customer. Unless they’ve helped somebody, they don’t feel like they’ve really made much of an impact. It’s too abstract. Another third, it’s at the organization or team level, which is I want to make sure I’m building a sustainable organization that can make an ongoing impact. And then a third really need to feel like their work is tied to something that’s bigger than any one person or organization.

Aaron Hurst 00:16:28

So it’s really interesting. Just that in nature, it seems to almost perfectly be symmetrical on this continuum.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:16:33

I am surprised that that’s the case. I figure that the fact that it’s roughly equal is very interesting. And I think for everybody listening in, we went through Aaron’s background because a lot of this stuff is basically, to some extent, your life’s work, although we’re going to get to portfolio entrepreneurship as well. But this idea of purpose is something that you’ve spent a lot of time on, right? So obviously you wrote the purpose economy, but separate from that, you’ve done a lot of work around the science of purpose. And I’d love to just learn a little bit more. Or maybe you can explain to us some of the science behind why having a purpose is important and what kind of impact it can have.

Aaron Hurst 00:17:13

Yeah, I mean, the science is really more around, like, if we look at it from a psychological standpoint, what is purpose as a human being? What does that actually mean? So we did studies with NYU, University of Michigan, LinkedIn, PwC, sort of everywhere from, like, national studies to global studies, trying to really figure out what’s really going on. When we talk about purpose and some of the insights we had that I think are interesting, the first is that much of what people think purpose is is not what purpose is about. The most prevalent myth about purpose is that purpose is about a cause. You’re looking for a cause, and that’s going to be your purpose. Like, my cause is one legged kittens. Like, I’ve got to have, like, that cause. And so many people end up going and working in the nonprofit sector, education, healthcare, because I think being associated with a cause is going to give them purpose. But yet we found the majority of people in every sector are not fulfilled.

Aaron Hurst 00:18:02

So working on a cause is not a way to guarantee a sense of purpose in your work. Similarly, a lot of people think it’s something only for people with money. And we actually found there was very little economic correlation between people who are fulfilled versus are not fulfilled. There’s a lot of people at the very bottom of the economic scale who are more fulfilled than CEO’s, which is really important because I think we’ve got major myths in our society about purposes only for those who have money. Once you have your other needs, meth, which is a very classist view on this. What we found, and there’s other myths as well. Another one that’s a common myth that you may find interesting, is that people tend to think that it’s okay not to have your work be fulfilling because you’ll get your fulfillment elsewhere. Sports like winter sports, for example, family, faith, et cetera.

Aaron Hurst 00:18:47

But what we found was that of people who are fulfilled in life, only 1% are unfulfilled at work. What that basically means is that you’re either fulfilled or you’re not fulfilled. And it shows up throughout your entire life, not just in one dimension. And that really led to coining this term purpose mindset, which we’re finding is a very important part of how you to think about leadership and building cultures, which is some people have a purpose mindset and they create meaning out of everything they do. Other people have transactional mindsets, and no matter how meaningful something should be, they don’t create meaning out of it because they see everything as a transaction. So a big part of the work I’ve done is really trying to advocate for us as a society to think about how do we adopt more of a purpose mindset. Because people with a purpose mindset outperform their peers. In every single thing we measured, we found no benefit to a transactional mindset.

Aaron Hurst 00:19:34

Higher performers, higher tenure, higher fulfillment, everything. We looked at the case for being purpose mindset surpassed that of a transactional one.

AD 00:19:46

If you’re finding yourself in too many meetings, and I while still struggling for visibility in all areas of the business, the team at fellow developed an AI meeting assistant that records, transcribes, and summarizes your meetings. Now you can skip meetings altogether, knowing that fellow will give you the summary of what was discussed and decided. And for those meetings you actually need to attend, fellow will take detailed notes of the highlights and decisions so everyone can stay present during the meeting, knowing there will be an accurate and automated record of the outcomes and next steps. Fellow is helping organizations get more done with less. Start your free trial by heading to fellow app and start having fewer, more effective meetings across your organization today. Now back to the episode.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:20:34

So much interesting stuff to break apart there. So of the people that you found were fulfilled in life, only 1% of them were not fulfilled at work. So clearly it’s not just, say, one place or another place. And I love this term around purpose mindset. So these are people who find purpose in everything they do. So how do they do that? Are they just born differently? Were they raised differently? I mean, how is it that they are able to, it seems like such a positive outlook on life to just behave in that way.

Aaron Hurst 00:21:05

I think it is somewhat personality driven. I think a big part of it, though, is learning certain skills. So what’s important to understand about meaning and fulfillment? So nothing itself is meaningful, which I know sounds very philosophical and abstract, but nothing actually has meaning until we give it meaning. So you could be doing work that other people would think is meaningful, but if you don’t actually assign meaning to it, it has no meaning. So that’s why you have people who do jobs like saving babies all day. They get home and they’re like, I’m unfulfilled. You’re like, how could you be unfulfilled? And it’s because they’re not actually creating meaning out of that work. So what we find is that people who have a purpose mindset first believe that everything can be a source of meaning.

Aaron Hurst 00:21:44

And secondly, they take time to reflect on what they’re doing and actually assigning meaning to things. So it’s not necessarily they’re doing anything differently, it’s that they’re actually pausing and reflecting and saying, like, that was meaningful or that was the meaning of this. So they’re creating value where others are just going through the motions. And that’s a skilled anyone can work on. It was just simply building the reflection into your day where you’re, whether it’s in the commute, shower, bathroom, on the way, walking to a meeting, just taking a couple minutes and just say, like, what am I grateful for? What did I learn today? What impact did I make today? Those things change the way your brain’s wired.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:22:19

So that’s what you could do on an individual level. So it sounds like a lot of the self reflective questions around why you’re doing the things or what’s great about what you’re doing is a really good way to do that. What about at an organizational level? So say we’re going to go through all levels of the organization like what leaders in each level can do. But say you’re a first line manager. Let’s start there. What might you do knowing this information? Just, I mean, having the vocabulary of purpose mindset and transactional mindset just on its own, I think it’s super powerful. But do you start to hire differently? Do you start to coach differently? Do you start to storytell differently? Like, what kinds of things can you do as a first line manager?

Aaron Hurst 00:23:00

Well, three core things that matter. The first, which you mentioned, is hiring. So being able to discern, are you hiring someone with a purpose mindset or a transactional mindset? Because if you hire a transactional mindset, theyre not fulfilled. Shocker. Thats kind of what you bought. You need to be clear that you dont change people that much. So screen people for a purpose mindset. Second thing is as a leader yourself, do the work yourself, to do the reflection and to therefore be able to model fulfillment to your team and to be able to create stories about what fulfills you.

Aaron Hurst 00:23:29

And the third is we tend to, as frontline managers, plug every millisecond of our employees time with tasks, and then they’re not fulfilled because we’re not creating space for reflection. So one of the things I think works like a charm is at the start of each conversation or meeting, just start off with like, what was one win from today or last week or last month, whatever the timeline is. And what’s one thing you learned in that time frame? Those two things just at the start of a conversation change the tenor of the meeting, and over time, it actually changes the way people relate to work. So those three things of hiring, modeling, and then building in time to reflect, asking questions like what was a win? What did you learn? Makes all the difference in the world. So that would be my top three for a frontline manager.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:24:12

Yeah, thats super interesting and a great way to start it. Its funny. Just the question of what have you learned in the last week will cause you to reflect and realize that, oh my God, I actually did learn a bunch of things. This is so true. Sometimes things can be really great, other times it can be really tough, but no matter which one it is, you can always learn something. And I have noticed a lot of growth mindset type people are always thinking about, what can I learn from this? It really sucks right now, but what can we learn from this? And always looking to get something out of whatever the situation is.

Aaron Hurst 00:24:45

What if you also, when you start doing that, you realize most learning happens when you proactively take risk. Whereas if people don’t reflect. I tend to think learning happens when they’re given classes and books to read. So when you actually get people to reflect on, like, when did I actually learn? It’s always experiential, and it’s always when they got pushed out of their comfort zone. So it helped me realize. And that you did it yourself. Yeah, it just changes your whole mindset.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:25:07

This concept of reflecting and asking yourself these questions in order to make the most out of a situation, I feel like also applies to reading and books. You know, a lot of times you’ll read something, be intellectually stimulated, but. But if you don’t ask a question of, like, what am I going to do with this new knowledge? That might go to waste, too. So, very interesting. Now, let’s talk about organizational leaders. So your CEO, your VP, your director, there’s a large, you know, larger group of people knowing this information, what kinds of things would you need to do?

Aaron Hurst 00:25:39

So the same three things as applies to frontline. So it’s an additive piece. I think there’s a lot more responsibility for storytelling at that level. So really helping leaders identify their purpose, identify and work to define the organization’s purpose, and then learn how to tell stories about how their purpose operates at that organizational level. So they’re modeling, inspiring people on their team and externally by those stories because it gets to their why and it gets out of them just being functional, which functional leaders are not nearly as inspiring or motivating. So that’s a really big 1. Second one is three sources of meaning, right? Relationships impact, growth. That’s how we get meaning.

Aaron Hurst 00:26:15

Relationships, impact and growth. So as you think about performance reviews, as you think about surveys, as you think about your systems, as you think about how you share information, just to really organize your thinking around, what’s the impact on relationships, what’s the impact, and what’s the impact on growth? Those are the three things that matter. So just really thinking about that systemically throughout the organization, and then really doing work around alignment. How do you take the goals of each person, each manager, each department, and align those with the organization’s goals so that people feel like their work actually matters? Because one of the key things to being fulfilled is feeling like your work matters. And if you don’t know how your goals and work actually connect to the organization’s goals and purpose, it’s pretty easy to feel like your work doesn’t matter.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:26:58

Yeah, I had a experience like this once, and someone from our organization leave. And why did you leave? Well, in the early days, it was so clear and obvious what the work that we were doing, like, how it was directly impactful. I would make this change. There’d be, like, an immediate result, and I’d see that as a company grew, it was less obvious how my work related to the company’s mission. And so I personally took that to heart and realized that I need to get better at doing the work around connecting the dots and everything else. But all this to say is, this stuff matters. And when not done well, it has consequences. And so, yeah, I learned that lesson the hard way.

Aaron Hurst 00:27:39

It goes back to the point about learning, because you think about, who was it? Was it apple just sort of ditched their whole autonomous car product, right?

Aydin Mirzaee 00:27:46

Yes.

Aaron Hurst 00:27:47

So they probably had a team of God knows how many people working for a decade to build this thing, and then they were just like, the board was like, I don’t think we’re going to do that anymore. Ten years of work of hundreds of people, if not thousands, just completely got shelved. Never saw the light of day. That is so traumatic.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:28:02

It’s so traumatic.

Aaron Hurst 00:28:03

Yeah. And it’s just the board’s like, yeah, we’re not doing it right. They don’t even, like, that’s so incredibly hard. Or a salesperson who, like, works forever on a deal and it doesn’t close. Like, we don’t recognize how much trauma is in that. So to really be a results oriented organization, but to really focus on. We’re a learning organization first. So the priorities on what did we learn? Whether or not we actually achieve is so important because otherwise, it’s incredibly demotivating and traumatizing.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:28:26

Yeah. This stuff is so important because sometimes I remember, like, in the very early days of many of the companies or a few the companies that I’ve been involved in, a lot of times, it’s harder to see progress. Right. You’re working on something and you’re trying, and it feels like you’re pushing this rock, but it’s, like, not. Or this boulder, but it’s not really moving. And so that can be hard. You need some serious storytelling there to explain. Yes, we’re finding all the things that are not working, or by doing this, we’re learning more about the customer or so on and so forth.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:28:58

I think this stuff really, really matters.

Aaron Hurst 00:29:00

It’s the stuff that matters. It’s the stuff that actually deals with the psychology of how we operate.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:29:06

Okay, so now knowing how important purpose is knowing a little bit more about the storytelling process. And as you said, the questions you can ask and the roles that you can play in ensuring that people have purpose. I’m going to ask you a question. So if you were going to, in an interview process, try and tease this out a little bit, try and figure out people who have a purpose mindset or a transaction mindset, what kinds of things might you ask? Let’s start there. And I do have a follow up.

Aaron Hurst 00:29:36

So it’s social science, so none of it’s binary. So I’m always also just putting huge asterisks. Like, you need to be really careful to put it in context. It’s one of many variables, like be careful about bias, et cetera. The things I look for, one is I just want to understand when they’ve made changes in their career, what motivated them. So it’s like, oh, I see you went from here to here. Why did you make that change? Answers you want are I want to make a bigger impact. I wanted to grow.

Aaron Hurst 00:30:01

I wanted to be able to connect and meet different people. Right. Those are good answers. I couldn’t get a promotion. I wanted to make more money. Those are things that are red flags. Theyre not necessarily wrong, but theyre red flags. If you see job after job after job, its always about promotion and economics, and theyre never talking about wanting to grow or to increase their impact.

Aaron Hurst 00:30:23

Thats a pretty big red flag to me. The second one is just really looking at asking them, what is it you like most about the most recent job? And having them just describe what they liked and just seeing whether or not, again, transactional type answers come up or more things around relationships, impact and growth tells you a lot about how they see it. And then I really would want to look at ownership and trying to really feel out when did they feel fulfilled at work and why. And if they’re sharing things that happen to them, that’s a red flag. If they’re saying, like, I created it, a sign that they actually have the skillset to create meaning.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:30:58

Yeah, those are really good questions. And I agree with you that with all these things, you have to watch out for bias and make sure you don’t implicitly do that. But really good way to be able to watch out for these things and try and understand the people that you’re bringing into the organization. Just make sure that they’re the right fit. And I think like, that’s ultimately what matters. One thing that I was going to ask you, just to go a little bit deeper on the purpose question. I’m thinking, as we’re having this discussion, I’m thinking about different people in our company right I can think about one of our head of marketing. She also produces, helps produce a podcast.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:31:34

Her name is Manuela. She is so much about growth, always about learning, and I havent had this discussion with her, but if I were to guess, I would think that one of her main purposes would be to learn and grow as much as possible. But my question is, do most people actually know what their purpose or at what age do you figure this stuff out? I kind of feel like sometimes a lot of people, myself included, maybe we were lost in our twenties, for example, and you really start to think about this stuff later on. So do most people figure out what their purpose is during their careers? Does this come later?

Aaron Hurst 00:32:12

Yeah, it’s one of the things that. So it’s a yes. And so it’s something that as you get older, you tend to sharpen, so you get more focused on it, and you also learn how to apply it in more places and how to show up authentically in multiple places. With that, there are people who at 16 are like crazy clear on who they are, and there’s people at 65 who still have no clue who they are. It is all over the map. What generally, though, is the more experience you have of yourself in different environments, the more you realize who you are. That’s the same regardless of the environment. And you start to realize, I thrive when in these environments.

Aaron Hurst 00:32:46

And that starts to reveal what gives you purpose and what gives you a sense of meaning. So you tend to see, as people get older, they just have more experiences, so they have more opportunity to see how they show up and experiment with themselves. We found that people who know what their purpose is are more than twice as likely to be fulfilled at work. So one of the lowest cost, easiest things you can do as a CEO is to spend a half day and invest and bring someone in to help your team do the discovery work, to draft what their purpose is. Because once people have that, they’re much more likely to be able to take ownership of their job, and they’re also more likely to know how to optimize the day to day of their job to be meaningful. That’s one of the things I’ve loved doing over time, is just going in and helping groups of people have that aha moment. They should see the energy in the room. Man, when that happens, it’s unbelievable.

Aaron Hurst 00:33:36

Decades and decades of life just suddenly coming into clarity.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:33:40

Yeah, you have to do the work. And I can’t not also ask you about parenting. So how does this, you know, for all the parents out there, I feel like parenting and leadership have a lot of things in common, but anything that you would advise to parents to give their children purpose?

Aaron Hurst 00:33:56

Well, I think there’s a couple things. One, I would just say when we did studies on purpose, your purpose as a parent and at work, we found, are the same. So how you show if you’re working authentically, you’re actually operating the same way in both cases. And I also always make the comparison that work’s not about being happy. It’s actually much more like being a parent, where it’s an incredible source of meaning and fulfillment. If done right, it’s not always Disneyland. I find parenting a great example for that. So, in terms of parenting, if you want to cultivate purpose mindset in your kids, it’s getting them to reflect on a daily basis, getting them to take ownership of their own experience.

Aaron Hurst 00:34:30

One of the things I found that is a negative is, like, for example, if you have kids do chores and you pay them per chore, versus saying, like, we all contribute to the family, and if you get an allowance that’s separate from your chores, is an example of, like, the kinds of parenting that influence how a kid shows up. Another is just around grades. Like, focus on kids learning, not on the grades. If you focus on the learning, if you focus on the relationships they’re building at school, the impact they’re having on others, they will get good grades. But if. And they will learn how to be fulfilled. If you just focus on grades, they’ll likely become another one of these miserable 20 somethings who don’t have any idea how they work.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:35:04

Yeah. And grades don’t always mean learning. So that is also true.

Aaron Hurst 00:35:09

Yeah. Learning how to get the grade.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:35:11

Okay, so, Aaron, this has been really awesome. We’ve talked about so many different topics gone deep on the science and the myths of purpose. One thing I did want to ask you is, so you done? We’ve talked about your background. We talked about Taproot. We’ve talked about Imperative. We’ve talked about a little bit about your book, the purpose economy, which everybody should check out. Now you’re doing a little bit of something different. So you’re starting multiple companies at the same time.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:35:38

You mentioned to me, prior to us hitting record that you almost have, like, a portfolio approach to the companies you’re involved in. Would love to just hear a few sound bites on what you’re doing there and how you arrived at that kind of workflow for yourself.

Aaron Hurst 00:35:53

Having just turned 50, I’m just thinking about work a little bit differently and also just clear about what I can do that’s most fulfilling and has the greatest impact. And what I found is I’m really good at coming up with visions and products that have the potential to make a huge impact in the world. Operationalizing and actually being involved in operations is draining for me and not where I get my energy. And I also found that I’m the most loyal person you’ll ever meet. If I’m just in an organization operational role, I just won’t ever leave. It’s super hard for me to leave because I just feel like I’ve got to stick it out for the team. So I’ve been trying to figure out how to create a career for myself now, where I can be an inventor and an evangelist, where I can be curious, creative, courageous, and caring, but don’t necessarily get involved in the day to day operations. So right now I’ve got five different ventures that started.

Aaron Hurst 00:36:43

I don’t expect them all to succeed. I think that’s a also part of it. If you only have one, you need it to succeed. If you have multiple, it’s okay for them not all to succeed. So one, which I’ve just launched this week, which I’m very excited about, is called Storying.ai, where we’ve actually used AI to build a platform that enables parents, especially parents of kids of different cultures, to create custom children’s books that feature their kid’s name and their culture and their location in the story so that the kid can truly relate to it. Thats been just exciting to see how thats really inspired kids and families. Storying.ai. One of the things I realized was that the nonprofit sector has a huge technical divide.

Aaron Hurst 00:37:22

Theyre way behind the corporate sector and technology. And a big part of that is they dont have technologists on their boards. Built a new venture called Board.dev in partnership with some leading companies, including Okta, ServiceNow, CDW. Its about getting tech execs onto nonprofit boards to help close the digital dividend for the nonprofit sector. That’s been amazing just to see people joining boards and the impact that they can have. I been working on a joint venture in Latin America to take a lot of my thought leadership trainings, et cetera, to Latin America. And that’s been great just to apply this work in a different context with a firm that’s already down there. So that’s been amazing.

Aaron Hurst 00:37:59

And then I live in Seattle, and Seattle is known as one of the least friendly cities in America. One of the things that it’s really bothered me since I moved here was just how. There’s the Seattle freeze. So I’ve been working with civic leaders here around an idea for how do we in one generation, make Seattle the friendliest city in America? And developing a program that would help to fundamentally change the nature of the city. So that’s sort of the range of things I’m working on. So it’s fun because it’s like a use of the different parts of my brain, different relationships, keeps me always curious. It’s been awful.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:38:33

Yeah. Again, going back to the purpose, it sounds like over the various iterations, you’ve learned a lot about yourself, and this gives you the most purpose and fulfillment. So that makes a lot of sense to me. I have to ask, though, is there like, an actual rating of unfriendly cities, or is that just an anecdote that Seattle is?

Aaron Hurst 00:38:52

There’s some lists that people make. Bureau of Labor Statistics has a measure around it, and Seattle was in the bottom of that list.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:38:58

Oh, no.

Aaron Hurst 00:38:59

So I think a lot of it. I mean, there’s so many different reasons for it, but it’s super interesting. When we first moved here, we invited people over for dinner all the time and never once was reciprocated. For example, you walk the streets in Seattle, people do not make eye contact most of the time. It’s a really interesting culture, and I’ve met with now hundreds of people, and the experience is so consistent and universal for people moving here. So we’re really hoping we can create something that embraces new people who moved to Seattle and sets them up to not have that experience. And if we can do that over ten years, we can actually shift the whole culture.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:39:30

We believe you don’t choose easy goals. So this is awesome.

Aaron Hurst 00:39:35

What would the point be? Right? Yeah, that’s boring.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:39:38

I love it. So I guess, like, in your purpose statement, you probably want to change society. That’s probably the level that you’re.

Aaron Hurst 00:39:44

Yes, I am a society.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:39:46

Love it. Yeah. So, Aaron, this has been awesome. Again, so many different learnings. We’re going to link to your book, The Purpose Economy in the show notes. And as a final question that I kind of hinted that I would ask you at the end is for all the managers and leaders constantly looking to get better at their craft and improve their leadership skills, are there any final tips, tricks, or words of wisdom you would leave them with?

Aaron Hurst 00:40:10

Number one thing we haven’t talked about is don’t give advice. Ask questions that help people solve their own challenges. The people who studies show benefit the most from advice are the people giving advice. Not the ones receiving it. And then most of the time, people don’t act on advice. But if you ask them good questions that help them find their truth, they’ll act on that and they’ll be much better for it. So I think especially white men are the worst at it. But this is sort of this cultural tendency to give advice all the time, and we just, we need to move past that and just learn how to ask better questions.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:40:40

I love that. That’s, I was going to say that’s great advice, but also a great place to end it.

Aaron Hurst 00:40:48

I’ll give advice. So it’s kind of a funny little circle there, right?

Aydin Mirzaee 00:40:51

Love it. All right, Aaron, thanks so much for doing this.

Aaron Hurst 00:40:54

Aaron, my pleasure. My pleasure. Great to be part of your community.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:40:57

And that’s it for today. Thank you so much for tuning into this episode of the Supermanagers podcast. You can find the show notes and transcript at www.fellow.app/supermanagers. If you like the content, be sure to rate, review and subscribe so you can get notified when we post the next episode. And please tell your friends and fellow managers about it. It’d be awesome if you could help us spread the word about the show. See you next time.