← 10% Happier with Dan Harris
10% Happier with Dan Harris
Are You Spending Your Life on Things You Actually Enjoy and Care About? | Jonathan Fields
01:18:25
And how to figure out what matters most to you. is the author of several books, including . He is also the host of two podcasts, and . In this episode we talk about: What a “sparketype” is and how to use it to help your guide your...
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- [00:00]
Jonathan Fields
Foreign.
- [00:05]
Dan Harris
It's the 10% Happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, everybody. How we doing? My big question when I was younger was, what should I do with my life? And honestly, this is a question I still ask myself quite frequently. It's why I've taken so many risks and run so many experiments in my professional and also in my personal life. Of course, if you're going to do this kind of thing, if you're going to take risks, you have to get pretty good at handling uncertainty, which is a whole skill set. I don't want to pretend I'm amazing at this because I'm a pretty anxious dude, but I have not let my anxiety stop me. So today we're going to talk about all of this. How to figure out whether you're spending your life on what you actually care about, and how to manage the uncertainty that comes from making change. We're gonna talk about all of this with a guy named Jonathan Fields. Jonathan is the author of several books, including Sparked Discover your unique imprint for work that makes you come alive. He's also the host of two podcasts, including the Good Life Project and Sparked. In this conversation, we talk about what a sparkotype is and how to use it to help you guide your life and work decisions. We talk about embracing uncertainty and skills for getting better at that. We talk about meditation and attention, training for uncertainty, the role of community in navigating uncertainty. And this is a bit of a digression, but I found it quite useful. How to make exercise meaningful. Just to say, this is part of an occasional series we do here on the POD called Sanely Ambitious. This is the third of three new episodes we are dropping this week. On Monday, we had the business school professor Sue Ashford on taking risks and running experiments. On Wednesday we had the Wall street lawyer turned very popular podcaster, Jordan Harbinger. And today it's Jonathan Fields. And we'll get started right after this. Before we get started, I want to make sure that you know about all the good things we've got going on@danharris.com that is my newish online community built in partnership with Substack, where paid subscribers get cheat sheets and transcripts for every podcast episode. Plus, I do regular live AMAs, that's ask me anything sessions where I take your questions and more. It's a lot of fun. You'll also get to meet virtually lots of other folks who take all of this stuff seriously. Go to dan harris.com and check it out. Jonathan Fields, welcome to the show.
- [02:39]
Jonathan Fields
Thanks for having Me.
- [02:41]
Dan Harris
Let's just start with a little bit of biography from you. You didn't come to personal development, like in the obvious way. In other words, you didn't like become a monk when you were 22 or something like that. You were a lawyer and a corporate lawyer at that. So can you tell me a little bit about how you went from Wall street to the good life?
- [03:02]
Jonathan Fields
Yeah, I, I don't know. I'm kind of thinking that the more obvious way is actually through having some sort of big career and then melting down and then finding yourself rather than the path of monkdom these days.
- [03:14]
Dan Harris
Yeah, you're missing, you're missing the cocaine piece, but yes.
- [03:16]
Jonathan Fields
Yeah, yeah. I started out as you described in the Path of Law. I worked for the sec and then I worked for a large law firm in New York City 100 hour weeks. I was on the security side, so doing big deals, huge amount of stress, huge amount of pressure. Ended up on one deal where we had to do an IPO in less than three weeks in a foreign country. And I was the new person on the team and there was no excuse. You just worked and worked and worked and worked and worked. Barely went home. About three days before the end of that deal, I started to feel a pain in the middle of my body that I couldn't quite understand. But with every hour it got worse and worse and worse. But we were the team that just did the impossible. So I kept doubling down, doubling down. Meanwhile, I'm doubling over and doubling over in pain. And that finally culminated in us hitting the button, filing the deal, me, going home, passing out, waking up, realizing something was desperately wrong, calling my doctor, seeing him immediately. And within hours was rushed into emergency surgery because my immune system largely shut down, letting a large infection just sort of mushroom in the center of my body, eat a hole through my intestines from the outside looking in. And thankfully, surgery was successful. I recovered fully. But I knew at that moment that the path that I had been traveling on probably wasn't for me. And in hindsight, I may have revisited that decision. But at least in that moment in time, I knew I was on my way out. And I started, literally, I went back to the office. Once I recovered, I stayed there for the better part of a year. But most of that time I was trying to figure out what comes next. For me. Entrepreneurship and mind body connection, somatics movement were always a part of my earlier life that I had completely abandoned. And I wanted to step back into that. So my next job, after leaving the, quote, dream career In New York City, working for this incredible firm was to make 12 bucks an hour as a personal trainer learning the fitness industry, which was probably a bigger blow to my ego than to my bank account at that particular time. I was just happy to be paid anything to learn an entirely new industry from the ground up. And that really led me back into the world of entrepreneurship. It led me back into the world of movement, of breadth, of really understanding people and what motivates you to make change in a lot of different ways. Ended up opening my own facility. Grew that for about two and a half years and was fortunate to be able to sell that. And then found myself on the eve of 911 in New York City signing a six year lease for a floor in a building for what I hoped would become a yoga center in New York City. And one that was opened the doors and was more accessible to more people. Woke up the next morning. Literally this was on the eve of 9 11. Woke up the next morning. We all know what happened in the city and through really understanding that we have one shot at this thing called life, decided to move forward with it. At that time I also, I was married, I had a new home, I had a three month old baby. Realized this was the thing that I couldn't not do. Especially because New York was never in more need for a place where people could just come and be and breathe and cry and move. I didn't know what I was doing at all. Thankfully I had a couple people surrounding me who did. We built that community into something that was really beautiful. And I'll keep going if you want. There's a long trajectory here. We grew that for seven years. It was in Hell's Kitchen, New York. The entrepreneurial impulse in me really was just sort of taking the lead. And again, fortunately, we not only had a fantastic community, but a thriving business. And I was able to exit that business as well. And I had really become deeply fascinated by the world. That yoga experience introduced me to a lot more Eastern philosophy. I went deep into a lot of study and I was teaching also I was teaching movement, I was teaching yoga, I was teaching meditation. And I wanted to learn a lot more about it. And I developed a love of writing and speaking, led me out into the world of ideas as sort of like taking the lead for me. And that basically started my career, my journey into the world of writing, books and speaking and then eventually entering the world of media, building Good Life Project and then a series of other endeavors from there.
- [07:38]
Dan Harris
Nice. One of the things you've been talking about recently, it ties directly to your Wall street story, your departure from Wall street story, which is you're trying to help people figure out what their spark is or their spark type is. So can you just say a little bit more what you mean by spark and spark type?
- [07:57]
Jonathan Fields
Yeah. And this actually ties back to that time around 9, 11. You know, we knew people who went to work that day and didn't come home. One of them was the youngest partner in one of the investment firms that was at the top of the one of the towers where basically the entire firm didn't come home. That experience was profoundly upsetting and disruptive for me, but also really, really got me thinking. If we have one pass through this thing called life, and most of our time is spent doing that thing called work, how do we navigate that in a way where it not only contributes to the world, covers our basic needs, but allows us to really deepen into our aspirational needs? And kind of tucked that away and kept exploring it, kept developing ideas over it. And then 2018, I got super focused on the world of work and I got really curious and I started to wonder, do we all have a set of identifiable impulses or imprints that exist across all people that would give us this feeling basically behind the work that we do that would give us a feeling of coming alive? And I define coming alive as the overlap between five component states. One is a feeling of meaningfulness, that what we do actually matters. The second is energy and excitement. Corporate Speak often calls this engagement. Passion is also an overlay for that. The third is access to flow states, which has been well researched and how that makes us feel. The fourth is express potential feeling like there's nothing that's being sort of left off to the side. You're showing up fully and allowing it all to come out. And the fifth is a sense of purpose. More broadly, purpose in life. We started to really deconstruct just thousands of jobs and titles and industries to see if there were a common set of impulses across all of them that showed up in different patterns. And it pretty quickly distilled and surprisingly down to 10. And then in 2018, we spent the entire year building an assessment to one, see if we could validate ideas at scale, but also offer a tool for people to be able to spend about 15 minutes in discovery. What is my profile? We started calling these impulses sparketypes because also start to realize that each impulse had a pretty identifiable and repeatable pattern of tendencies and behaviors and preferences that wrapped around it that formed archetypes so sparketypes, as a fun shorthand for the archetype for work that sparks you, was not prepared for what happened when that assessment came out of beta and met the world. As we have this conversation. About 900,000 people around the world have taken the assessment, generating close to 50 million data points. And now serving is one of the largest ever global studies on work life fulfillment. We did a follow up survey that then looked for correlations. Is it actually true that the more you say you do the work of your sparkotype in your day to day work that you feel those five different things? And what we saw was that it most definitely is really strong correlations to those five component states. What we saw also being true is that the opposite was proved out. Which is that the less likely or the less that you say you're doing the work of those five component states, the less likely you are to feel or the work of your sparkotype, the less likely you are to feel those five different states critically. Meaning, excitement, energy flow, expressed potential, purpose. These are all things that are not just about good work, but they're about good life. Like these are the things that lead to human flourishing. And what we learned pretty quickly was that these are also the individual drivers for what a lot of organizations measure externally. So when you have high levels of energy and excitement and meaning and purpose, you also tend to have high levels of motivation and engagement and retention and performance. So fairly quickly we started getting tapped on the shoulder by big companies saying, hey, how does this apply to the work that we're doing? And now we just keep sort of like sharing this with the world in different ways through different processes.
- [11:57]
Dan Harris
People should go take the assessment. But given that right now they're not doing that, they're listening to us talk, what can you say generally about how we can plumb the depths here, figure out what it is that makes us come alive? Then we should talk about the subsequent moves of like, how do you organize a life around that and make money and all that. But let's start with what are the crucial questions we should be asking ourselves to figure out our sparketype. I realize I was mispronouncing that earlier.
- [12:24]
Jonathan Fields
It's all good. As you mentioned, the assessment is sort of like the starting point for most people. But let's say you don't have immediate access to that. What we did when we built the assessment was we were trying to look back in time and say what are the things that we've identified that aren't just of the moment? But if we look back to the time that we were nine years old. These seem to be trends in our lives. These are questions like, what would I love to do? Even if it's hard, what do I feel gives me a sense of energy? Even when I'm exerting myself intensely, I leave it feeling more full than empty. So when you look back when you were a kid, these are things often when I look at it. So my sparketype, what we call my primary, my lead impulse, is what we call the maker. This is about making things, it's about the process of creation. It's sort of this fiercely generative impulse that exists in me. I can look back at the youngest memories that I have. And I was perpetually building things. And that could be anything from a fort in a house, to painting album covers on jean jackets when I was in high school, to building businesses over the years, to brands, to books, to any kind of experiences. So you look back and I think a really interesting question to say is look back, sort of like in those late single digit years of your life, and ask yourself, what did you love to do? That actually took effort, but you just wanted to do it for no other reason than the feeling that it gave you and what was underneath that. So you can look at sort of like the superficial, the activity, and then you kind of like look at, well, what other things and then you look for the through line between those different things. And that's just like one of the ways that we sort of tease threads in the actual assessment. We're sort of looking back in time, we're looking forward and we're looking for these threads that have stayed with us for a really long time.
- [14:16]
Dan Harris
So there's something for all of us just to say that I think I know many people who say, well, I never had a passion. But what I think you're saying is for everybody, there have been activities that have turned you on and let's go back all the way back to your childhood and think deeply about what are those and why.
- [14:39]
Jonathan Fields
Yeah, I think it's a great starting point because we tend to focus entirely on jobs when we think about our different things. And you use the word passion also, which is so loaded for so many people. There's these ideas that you have to have a singular life passion or that this must be this thing that consumes you and stays with you all life rather than just. No, we have a lot of interests that sometimes grow into passions and we can have a portfolio of passions. And that's what the research supports as well, so you look there. You can also look at different domains of life. When I use the word work, I'm actually talking about four different domains. I'm talking about leisure interests. Those existed when you were a kid. I'm talking about the things that you get paid for your job. I'm talking about learning experiences. What have you actually invested energy in learning simply because of the feeling that it gave you, even if there was no obvious application of that learning. Devotions is the fourth one. Primary roles are devotions. And when you look more broadly and don't just focus in, like, what have I gotten paid for that I enjoyed in a really meaningful way? But, like, what are all the different ways that I've exerted myself that I've really enjoyed? I want to do more of, and I'd love to go back and do more of, and what are the common threads there? You know? So I think when we start to really look at those, the different parts of life and just stop narrowing ourselves to the domain of just the things we've gotten paid for in our adult lives, it opens up a lot more for us to really say, oh, I'm starting to see some commonalities here.
- [16:04]
Dan Harris
You said before it might be worth my reading. There are a bunch of different sparketypes. The maven, that's somebody who lives to learn. The maker, which you just described. Somebody who loves to turn their ideas into reality. The scientist, somebody wants to figure out the essentialist, somebody who can make order from chaos. The performer, the sage, somebody who can awaken insight in themselves and others. The warrior who, the leader, the advisor, the advocate. Somebody who's a champion for other people and the nurturer. Do we all fall in one of these categories? Have you come across people who don't fall in any of them or who fall in like eight of them simultaneously?
- [16:42]
Jonathan Fields
Yeah, and it's interesting because we have so much data now on this. So we've really looked at the data and parsed it pretty seriously. And what we see is that, you know, when somebody takes the assessment, we sort of like looked for an accuracy report, and the report back to us is that about 92 to 93% of people say the assessment feels very too extremely accurate. The way that the algorithm works in the assessment, though, actually accommodates the possibility that somebody might not be able to identify what these impulses are in them. And again, when you take the assessment, we actually offer you a profile which basically says, here's the strongest, here's the second strongest, and all the way on the opposite side of the spectrum, what we call your anti sparkotype. Here's the work that actually feels like the heaviest lift requires the greatest motivation, the greatest recovery to do so. The assessment is a really great tool, but what we do find is that on rare occasions somebody will answer all the questions and the algorithm watches you take the assessment and it will dynamically add questions to try and challenge you to sort of think harder and discern more. If it's not sort of like seeing the ability to tease this out for most people, it gets you to that place where it can sort of say this is what's going on. But on rare occasions, there are people that fall into what we call the shapeshifter bucket. That doesn't necessarily mean that you don't have these impulses. That tends to happen in one of two different situations. Either. You have lived a life to the moment that you've taken the assessment where it's been fairly homogenous, fairly narrow. You haven't run a lot of experiments, you haven't tried exerting yourself in a lot of different ways. So the depth and quality of your experience isn't quite there for you to have the data set to answer in a really well informed way. The second thing is your level of self awareness. We have profoundly differing levels of self awareness. Some people are really self aware at the age of 10, some people are deeply unselfaware at the age of like 60, you know, so those two factors will definitely influence whether we can assign one. In my mind though, it's different than saying we don't all have these impulses. The difference is I do believe that we have these, but sometimes we need to run some more experiments and deepen into a process of self awareness to really understand how do different things make me feel? Because a lot of us have never actually asked that question to pick up.
- [19:00]
Dan Harris
On something you've made mention of that there's a primary sparkotype, there's an anti sparkotype, and then you haven't mentioned this yet, but I know from researching that there's also a shadow sparketype. Can you just explain this architecture?
- [19:14]
Jonathan Fields
Yeah, sure. Basically your primary is your strongest impulse. This is the one where this shows up. This tends to take the lead when you're doing this. It makes you come alive. Your shadow is not shadow in the Jungian term, meaning the dark side, but we look at it as living in the shadow of your primary. It's generally a strong impulse also, and oftentimes you're skilled at it and you enjoy doing it. But when you're really looking at it, oftentimes you do it in the name of being able to do the work of your primary at a higher level. So an example of this is, as I described, my primary is a maker. I wake up in the morning and it's all about the process of creation, making ideas manifest. My shadow, or the runner up, is what we call the scientist. This is all about complex problem solving, figuring things out. So in the making process, I'll be in a fiercely generative state and then I'm going to hit a wall at some point. That's when I swap into scientist mode and I'm like, all right, how do I get through this? The minute I figured out what I need to figure out to get back to a building process, I'm back to that. Then all the way. On the opposite side of the spectrum, we have this thing that we identified and we updated this in the algorithm three years after launching, after manually calculating this, sharing it with the executive leadership team and one of the biggest companies in the world, and them all saying to me, can we just talk about this? This explains so much. This is the opposite side of the spectrum where it's the work that for no obvious reason just seems to be a heavier lift for you. So for me, that is what we call the essentialist. That's about creating order from chaos, process, systems, clarity, utility. I love that we have people on our team who love doing this and I benefit from the fact that we have incredible systems and processes set up. And I really love that I'm not the one who had to actually create them, that I just benefit from them because I want to curl up in a corner and cry when it's actually my turn to actually do that kind of work. So when I talk about a spark type profile, we're talking about sort of like those three different elements.
- [21:13]
Dan Harris
Yeah, I mean, I'm like right there with you. I would definitely say my primary is a maker. That is what I wake up in the morning thinking about. Probably for me, the shadow would be performer. I do like performing and absolutely. The anti spark type, the garlic to my vampire, the thing that makes me want to jump off a building is the essentialist. I hate details and when I get sucked into it, I get really unpleasant.
- [21:41]
Jonathan Fields
Yeah, I am the exact same way. We've built a lot of programs and things like that over the years and to do it right, you really have to spend a lot of time in instructional design and really saying, okay, so let's go from big idea to a lot of details and process and organization. And when you're not well resourced, especially in the early days of entrepreneurship, you end up just learning how to do it yourself. And so I've done a lot of it. It doesn't mean that you get to opt out of this work, it just means you understand that it's going to affect you differently than other people.
- [22:13]
Dan Harris
Okay, so once we've figured this out and it's kind of fun to think about, what is your sparkotype? How do we act on it? Because that seems easier said than done.
- [22:23]
Jonathan Fields
Yeah. And there are a lot of different things. There's the external things that we can talk about, tools and processes, but then there's the internal things. Discovering your sparkotype or your Sparketype profile for most people feels incredibly validating. It's not incredibly surprising because generally this is a mirror that reflects back to you something that has been innate to you, that you've known for your whole life, even though you may well have set it aside. Because culture, society, expectations, work has said this is not an appropriate thing for you to center in your life or this is something that you're never going to earn a living at. So just do it on the side. But when you discover it, most people, the word that we hear over and over is it feels incredibly validating. And depending on what it is, it can be deeply emotional also, because you realize this has been such an important part of you and you have not done anything with it. So then the question becomes, well, what do we do and what stops us from taking the next step? Externally, the process on our side is often. Well, now that we know this, let's look at what you're actually doing and do a bit of a reality check. How well aligned are the day to day tasks and processes and activities that you're doing with this particular profile? Do you get to do a lot of the work of your primary inner shadow? If you do, that's fantastic. Do you get to do very little of that work? If you do, there's a pretty safe bet you're going to feel a lot of depletion and friction in the work that you're doing. Then you look at the antisparchetype too, and we do a really simple reality check there. Ask the same question. How much of the work of your antisparchetype is a part of the work that you're doing? We see that if you're doing a really high level and some people literally spend most of their time doing that work, your likelihood for depletion and just Straight up burnout and overwhelm go up dramatically where if you kind of have it off to the side, you still have to do some of that work, and most of us still have to do some of that work. And that's the reality. But it's really offset by being able to do so much of the work that makes you come alive. That tends to be a much happier place. The next step is really to do this reality check and see how well aligned is the thing that I'm currently doing with the elements of my Sparketype profile. And then you make decisions from there. If it's really well aligned, fantastic. Keep on keeping on now, you're just better informed if it's not. Then the question becomes, we look at a series of different paths. Then we get into values. If you value security deeply and safety, or if you are existing more on sort of the sustenance side of your fundamental essential needs, then the question becomes, how can I keep the security of what I'm doing, but make subtle shifts to actually be able to do more of the work of my primary and less of the work of my shadow? And then there's a progression, like, how do I make slightly more shifts? How do I go into a process of job crafting? Potentially you get to a point where you've done all these different things and you say to yourself, you know what, it's better, but it's still not the way that I want to feel. And that's where we start to look at, okay, so let's look at bigger changes. We call that the reinvention process. Like, how do we actually build on this and look at new opportunities and then understand beyond the job description that's being told to us, which very often doesn't have a whole lot of basis in reality. How do we ask questions in an interview process? How do we really suss out whether this new opportunity will give us the opportunity, the chance to do more of the work of those things that make us come alive and less of the work that makes us empty out. And we wrap around a whole bunch of additional metrics on that side. So that's sort of like a super, super high level overview of the external process. Internally, though, the question becomes, once you know this, what's stopping you from taking action on it? Because a lot of people will actually discover this, think, wow, that was incredibly revealing and validating and true and real, and then they'll do nothing with it. This is sort of the story of personal development or behavior change through human history. We discover something Incredible. And then we walk away from it. And then the question always becomes, well, what's underneath that? What's stopping that? And it's always some blend of fear, fear of being outcast, fear of being judged, fear of loss of status, fear of loss of security or stability. And then you go through an internal process where you really start to question these things. And one of the huge fears is fear of stepping into a space of the unknown, fear of living in sustained high stakes uncertainty. We as human beings are horrendously equipped to be able to handle that. I mean, this is so much of your path and what you talk about on the show on a regular basis is how we can actually step into the abyss in the name of finding, as Joseph Campbell described, our treasure. Because being in the abyss without skills and practices tends to destroy most people.
- [27:10]
Dan Harris
Well, you've conveniently written a whole book about how to handle uncertainty and that leads us right to it. Because I, I think once you've just to reset for everybody, once you've figured out what you should be doing with your life, that's the easy part. The hard part is like how do you act on it? And that means managing fear and uncertainty. Before we get into that, because you do have a lot to say about how to manage it and to move forward even with uncertainty and fear is your accompaniments. Let me just ask a really kind of basic question. Is this a discussion only for people who, you know, have a certain amount of economic luck or advantage on their side? If I am working a job I hate because I need it, because I've got a bunch of kids and a bunch of bills and I'm just making ends meet, do I have the luxury to, to engage in this discussion at all?
- [28:05]
Jonathan Fields
Yeah. And that's a question that had been asked so many times over the years. I think the first time it was asked of me, I had a very glib, quick answer like, of course not everybody's included, but let's be real. A lot of what we talk about, when we talk about the aspirational side of personal development or growth at first glance, seems to be the domain of people with a certain amount of privilege. And certainly people are going to have different decision options depending on what your life circumstances are. That said, this body of work in particular is designed to really try and normalize that and to level set and to accept people where they come. Which is one of the reasons why I don't define work as the thing that you get paid for. That's one of four different possible ways that we can do it. So for sure, you may have somebody who looks at the job that they're doing. Maybe they're working three jobs to put food on the table for their family, and these are jobs that they're not in love with. The question then becomes, are there very slight tweaks that I can make now that I know this thing about myself, this is less about necessarily changing the job itself. And in part it's about changing the mode. It's about changing how I bring myself to the exact same work. And we see this in even shifts in psychology. I know you're familiar with some of the work around reframing, where people would look at folks who were on janitorial staff in hospitals, and some of them would derive very little meaning and very little purpose and completely depleting by their work. And others seemed to really love their work. Identical job. And when you ask them to describe their work and why they do it, oftentimes the ones who would derive a strong sense of meaning and purpose and joy, they would describe their work as being part of the care team. Like, my job is not, quote, just to clean. My job is I'm part of the team that actually takes care of the healthcare workers. I'm part of the team that takes care of the patients to make things feel and go better. So part of it is a psychological reframe, but part of it is also this notion that you can do 100 tiny things slightly differently, and even though it doesn't feel like it would make a difference, it can. So that's just in the context of your quote, J, O B. But then we also look outside of that and say, let's say it's going to be really hard to do something really meaningfully different. You can bring yourself to it, you can reframe the purpose element behind it. But then we also look at. But what about outside of that thing that you get paid to do? The Sparkotype is not just the domain of paid work. It's the domain of any part of your life in which you exert effort in a meaningful way. This is parenting. This is caretaking, this is volunteering, this is coaching kids, like on the weekend. This is all the different things that even if we don't feel like we have a whole lot of agency in our job, where we do have these tiny moments in different parts of our lives where we can say yes to it. If you're a maker, what would it feel like to spend 15 minutes a day or a half an hour in an early morning in the weekend, before the kids wake up, to just pick a project where you're drawn to whatever the context is of that. It's painting, drawing, building models, whatever it may be writing, and do it for no other reason than the way that it makes you feel. So the question I think that you asked is so important and I'm glad you asked it. And the answer is nuanced. But the big picture answer is nobody is excluded from the opportunity to really understand these impulses and then find ways to let them be a part of their lives.
- [31:37]
Dan Harris
Yeah, that makes sense. You, Jonathan Fields, cannot wave a magic wand and make the world fair. It's not fair. And you recognize that some people are going to have more ability to diagnose and pursue their Sparkotype than others. But we can all do some degree of it. And that applies no matter where we find ourselves in our lives.
- [32:00]
Jonathan Fields
Yeah, indeed. And that's one of the things that excites me about just the whole body of work is that it is very inclusive, that sort of like anybody can discover what these things are inside of them. But then when you get to the question, what do I do with this? There's not a door that then closes to a certain person or a certain demographic or a certain community. You just have to figure out how do I open the door and what's the way that I need to uniquely step through it.
- [32:27]
Dan Harris
Okay, so let's go to uncertainty here because that will be most likely a non negotiable aspect of what comes after you figure out your Sparkotype. You've written a whole book about uncertainty and one of the things you talk about is what it does to us, why the human animal is so allergic to uncertainty. Can you just say a little bit more about that?
- [32:49]
Jonathan Fields
Yeah. And it's interesting, even since I wrote that book, my thoughts have evolved a bit. And what I've come to realize is that it's not uncertainty by default that tends to shut us down. It's uncertainty combined with stakes that are meaningful to us. So if we're watching a movie and we don't know how it's going to end, or we're reading a book and it's high drama and the protagonist is their risk of life and limb, we're good with that. We're totally cool with that because the stakes for us are basically zero. It's our time in watching the movie or reading the book when we become the protagonist and the stakes are actually high for us. That's when uncertainty absolutely destroys or has the potential to destroy us. And why that's the case, a lot of people have thought about. But the best estimate is that we have a negativity bias. We tend to focus towards what could potentially go wrong or what has gone wrong. And it's related probably it is a survival mechanism. So when our brains meet an opportunity where we have to make a decision and take an action and we don't have perfect information, that's pretty much anything that matters. Because if we had perfect information, the only way to do that is if we've done it before or somebody else has done it before, and the stakes just aren't all that matter y at that point. So when we put ourselves in a situation where it actually matters, where the stakes are high and we care about this thing, what tends to happen? And there are really interesting FMRI studies on this is the amygdala, the fear center in the brain, tends to light up. When we can't quantify what the risk is, it lights up even more strongly. There's this famous experiment that's been replicated so many times by Daniel Ellsberg, who a lot of people earlier knew as one of the original leakers the Washington papers, but was also a decision theorist.
- [34:37]
Dan Harris
The Pentagon Papers.
- [34:37]
Jonathan Fields
Yeah, exactly. The Pentagon Papers. And on the decision theory side, he ran this really interesting experiment. And it's simple to visualize. Imagine in one hand there's an urn with 50 black marbles and 50 white marbles. In the other hand there's an urn. You can't see through these urns, and there's 100 black and white marbles also. But you have no idea what the distribution is. And then you have to make a wager, and you have to wager your kids, college tuition or whatever it is that really matters to you a huge amount, and choose one of those different things and then tell me what the marble that's going to be pulled out on. So the question is, which urn do you choose? The one where you know it's 50 50, or the one where you have no idea? The vast majority of people choose the one where it's 50 50. Thing is, this is one of those questions that we all had in high school where it's like A, B, C, D and E is not enough information. This is a not enough information scenario. There's no way to actually make a rational choice here. There's uncertainty that's unresolvable. And what we see is that when we're faced with choosing a known option versus choosing a certain one that could be a lot better or could be a lot worse. We actually choose the known option for no rational basis. And the reason that we do it is because we're kind of wired to feel, experience adversity, to run from uncertainty when the stakes are high. This has been repeated so many different times in so many different ways. But there's a more nuance, actually repetition of this experiment that kind of blew me away. And that is if you essentially repeat this experiment and then you tell people up front, you have to make a choice, but nobody ever has to know. Write down a piece of paper, tuck it away, the bias away from uncertainty essentially vanishes. It gets eliminated. What that shows is that we're not actually wired for our amygdalas to light up in the face of uncertainty. It's not the results of the decision that we're really fearing. It's the social context that gets attached to that decision. It's the fact that if we choose the uncertain option, which is going to be suspect in the eyes of those around us, and then we're wrong, we're terrified of being outcast from that group. So when you remove the social context, you largely remove the bias away from it. So now when we are wired and so many of our decisions are public, and we're constantly sharing everything that we know publicly, the bias away from uncertainty goes up pretty dramatically. It's devastating. So many of us, we live in a world where the second we step into a place of high stakes uncertainty, we become paralyzed. We either stop, we pull back, or we rush through because we want to get it over with. Rather than doing all the things that you've been talking about for years now, which are developing the practices and the skills that would allow us to accept the fact that there is no uncertainty. That also is not a gateway to possibility. And if we want the possibility, we also have to accept the uncertainty. How can we equip ourselves to live in that space of uncertainty long enough for us to make the decisions and take the actions to bring us closer and closer to the possibility? And those are all the things that you talk about all the time, like that's the meditation. There are practical steps, but fundamentally it's a long term practice of rewiring your brain to find equanimity in the space of the unknown.
- [38:07]
Dan Harris
I want to hear more about meditation specifically, but let me first say that I've been meditating for 15 years, which is not like that long, but it's non trivial and I still hate uncertainty and don't deal with it. I mean, I Deal with it. Okay. Better than I used to. But it's not like I'm some Zen master at navigating turbulence. Does that negate anything that you've said?
- [38:29]
Jonathan Fields
I don't think so. So I actually feel the same way. I've been meditating regularly for about 15 years. Also part of it for me, as I described, like, I'm a maker. So, like, literally from the time I was a kid, my impulse is to create something that doesn't exist, which means that I have to live in this space of the unknown. And for years, that would destroy me. I would wake up and know I have to do this. This is my impulse. This is why I'm here. This is kind of my why. And yet I'm so poorly equipped to handle the decisions and the stakes and the uncertainty. I mean, I literally opened a yoga studio eight weeks after 911 in Hell's Kitchen, New York City. The stakes were very high. Starting a business is generally a losing proposition for 90 to 95% of the people within five years. And in this context, wild uncertainty. And I've repeated things like this over and over because it's where so much of my joy is. It's where I feel most alive. And yet, because I wasn't equipped with the practices that allowed me to kind of breathe through, would brutalize me. At the same time, there was a lot of blood in the water of my creative process. Now, has that entirely gone away because I've been meditating for a similar time for you? No. But is it a lot better? Yeah. I can pull myself out of the spins a lot faster. I can see more clearly. I can reconnect with what matters. I can, on an interventional basis. I can go from breathing really short, shallow breaths, like on the verge of anxiety, to getting myself back to a place where I feel like I can cut stone more quickly. So I don't think it ever goes away entirely. But to me also, I don't know if I want it to, because that sensation, to me also, I've translated into a signal that what I am doing actually matters to me. The day where I think I don't feel any of that is the day where I ask myself, like, am I making something that I really just don't care about because I should feel something?
- [40:27]
Dan Harris
No, that makes a lot of sense. Madupa Akanola is a stress researcher at Columbia Business School, and she sometimes talks about how stress can be a feedback from your body that you're doing something that counts. And actually, as I listen to you Speak. I realize that I'm maybe not giving myself enough credit. You know, I, I live with a lot of that creative uncertainty that you do. I'm. I've whined about this a lot, so I'll keep it short. But I'm six years into my next book and it's not uncommon that I wake up in the morning or pull myself away from the computer and, you know, worry about the fact that I could be dedicating a gigantic chunk of my life to something that sucks and that people don't like because it's hard for me to know whether people are going to like it. And yet actually the practices I've learned over the last 15 years, including meditation, including self compassion, even something as simple as breathing deeply, physical exercise, which I know is another thing you talk about as a way to weather uncertainty, have allowed me to do what you just described, which is pull out of the spin, keep it going. I mean, here I am six years in and I'm. I haven't quit. And so that does seem to be a testament to the power of these practices and my stubbornness.
- [41:38]
Jonathan Fields
It's all wrapped up in the same thing. One of the other things that was really interesting, I remember back when I was doing the research on that book, I was interviewing tons of different creators from all different domains, from business to art to science, all these different places. One of the patterns that I found repeating that I thought was really interesting because the question that I had was, is the ability to operate in the context of high stakes uncertainty for long enough to create amazing, to create magical things. Is it innate or is it trainable for some people, for a very small slice of people, they're just kind of good with it. Those are the weirdos in my book that is not the typical person. Most of the people who we even identify in culture as the ones who've done incredible things, they don't have the ability to be okay in that space, but they do a lot of things. And one of the patterns that I saw that was fascinating to me is a huge amount of ritualization and repetition in the areas of life where you're not charged with stepping into the space of the unknown and doing something amazing. So people would eat the exact same thing for every meal every day. They wear the same thing every day. Any decision that basically doesn't have to be made, they just, they automate and they ritualize. And it's almost like I describe it as they're dropping certainty anchors, they're dropping a hundred little micro certainty anchors all Day long that tether them down so that when they know they have to go into this space of the unknown where like, this is my job, I am here to create, to make a new book, to make a new offering, to make a new app, to create an experience, a new body of work or a show at a gallery. That is where my job is to go into the place where I do not know how it's going to end. And I cannot know how it's going to end because if I did, it would be boring to all of us. And what we see is like they drop all these certainty anchors in all the day to day parts of their lives that give them a little bit of a tether to being able to breathe so that when they have to step into that, you know, into the abyss, it gives them a little bit more equanimity. I'm curious whether like in your life, like, do you do that?
- [43:44]
Dan Harris
I mean, I'm so smiling because as I'm hearing you describe it, I mean, I do this. I mean, I didn't, I didn't know what I was doing. But I have the same thing for lunch every day. A smoothie that I make and my wife and our nanny also have it with me, but I make it the same thing every day, Wear the same clothes pretty much every day. Sweatpants and a sweatshirt. I exercise and meditate at the same time every day. And it basically is the scaffolding of my life so that I am girded to step into the difficult stuff. You know, making this podcast, making books, trying to build my business, all of which is very hard and just shot through with uncertainty. But I'm the suit of armor comes from knowing I have these practices that are supporting me. And also it reduces the amount of decisions I need to make. I'm not like wondering what's for lunch.
- [44:34]
Jonathan Fields
Yeah, I think that's a huge part of it. And it was amazing for me to see that pattern occurring so many times across so many different people and so many different domains of work also. And I was like, huh? And then eventually I stumbled upon research that basically said, yeah, there's actually sort of a psychologically stabilizing effect that happens when you do this.
- [44:54]
Dan Harris
What is the mechanism by which meditation, which is where we started this part of the discussion, what is the mechanism by which meditation and other, what you call attention training, inner technologies allow us to handle uncertainty.
- [45:10]
Jonathan Fields
So to me, it probably also depends on what you mean by meditation. Yeah, it's funny, like back when I wrote that book, I used the Phrase, attentional training. And this was a dozen years ago now, because the word meditation was kind of not okay, especially in the world of business and the world of work. But when you look at it and when you look at all the research, I know you've talked about this and had people on talking about this. What does it do to the brain? It allows you over time, like, certainly not. You're not going to drop into meditation in one session when you're in the middle of some sort of big bout of uncertainty and you have no idea what's going on. You're trying to launch something new, like, let me meditate one time. It's just going to completely fix everything, but it's the way that it changes your brain over time. And for me, mindfulness in particular, a seated mindfulness practice, is the thing that has made such a huge difference for me, in part because it trains you to do a couple different things, persistently come back to the moment so that it pulls you out of the spin cycle of anxiety and regret, which is so much of what happens when we step into that space of uncertainty. Because I don't know how it's going to end. I don't have the information I need. I can't get the information I need. But I still need to take action. The thing that freaks you out is, what if this ends up in disaster? It's a story you're telling yourself, the doomsday story that you're telling yourself about it. And what mindfulness does for me at least, is it pulls you back into the moment, says, let me just operate in the moment. It also teaches you the process of thought dropping, which basically says, okay, so that doomsday scenario that I'm spinning, is it on the table? Yeah, it is on the table. It has to be on the table. Is it the likely outcome? Probably not. So let me just drop that thought, because is it constructive? Is it actually helping me through this moment or not? And if not, let me let it go. And the process of identifying thoughts and emotions during a mindfulness practice and then intentionally just letting them go is really, really good practice for then stepping off the mat, stepping into your life, into those moments where it's deeply uncertain and the stakes are high, and it lets you thought drop and focus. The other thing that I think has been amazing for me is how it trains metacognition or meta attention, because you can't do any of these things until you actually have the ability to zoom out and then look down and kind of say, oh, wait, where am I right now, like, where's my mind? What is it thinking about? Is it helpful or is it not? And the ability to do that for me has gone up exponentially. And it just helps you step into those moments and kind of pull yourself out of them, bring yourself back into the moment, pull yourself out of the doomsday and the regret spin cycles and just show up in the moment and take the next step. Does that completely eliminate the feeling, like we said? No. But does it keep you coming back to a space where you feel more grounded and able to breathe and take action and make decisions? Yeah, I mean, it does for me and research shows that it does for most people. So would you have the same effect if it was a mantra based meditation or if it was a different approach to meditation? It trains you differently, it trains your attention, it trains your focus, which I think are fantastic skills as well. But in my mind, mindfulness is the practice that has been really my go to for stepping into the space of the unknown when the stakes are high and not completely freaking out, at least most of the time.
- [48:39]
Dan Harris
Yeah, I would agree with that. I would personally add, I think sometimes lost or underemphasized in the mindfulness revolution of the last 10 to 15 years is a set of practices that were taught in the Buddhist tradition right alongside mindfulness, but don't get talked about in my opinion enough these days. Which bunch of names for these flavors of meditation? In Buddhism they're called the Brahma Viharas or the divine abodes. Now we call them Metta or loving kindness or compassion meditations. But there's this family of four types of meditation that train up qualities like friendliness, compassion, equanimity. And the fourth is something that's sometimes referred to as sympathetic joy, which means happiness for other people in their success, which is like the opposite of schadenfreude, which is actually sometimes described as the hardest thing to train, which brings to mind that expression every time a friend of mine succeeds, I die a little bit. And so it really is a hard thing to train. And I found personally to put a plug in for these practices that the mindfulness allows me to see things as they arise and let them go. And the friendliness allows me really to accept them instead of like thinking I'm being mindful. But there's actually like a some hidden aversion in there. I don't, I see it, but I don't want it. The friendliness just allows me to be cooler with it. And the other thing that it does is it improves the quality of my relationships, which we know is probably the most important variable for human flourishing. And that's something you talk about as a way to manage uncertainty. And we'll get to that. And I have found that as my own inner weather gets balmier, my relationships improve, and that improves my inner weather even further. And there's an upward spiral available to you there that can make stress, uncertainty, fear, anxiety much more manageable. Does any of that land for you?
- [50:33]
Jonathan Fields
100%. It's why I actually have the four immeasurables inscribed on the inside of my wedding band in Sanskrit.
- [50:41]
Dan Harris
There you go, There you go. That's the other, the divine abodes. The another way to say it is the four immeasurables. It is a little cheesy, but very, very effective. And there's a lot of data behind it as well.
- [50:55]
Jonathan Fields
Yeah, I mean, like cheesy or not, if it works, it works. Whether you're an N of one running these experiments to see how does this work in my life, or like now looking at the growing body of data, it's like these things have been around for thousands of years for a reason.
- [51:08]
Dan Harris
Yes, absolutely. So in the book on uncertainty, one of the things you recommend is building your hive. You know, like having good relationships and advisors and mentors and friends along the way. This can really arm you, equip you to handle life's inevitable ups and downs, the uncertainty.
- [51:27]
Jonathan Fields
Yeah. And I think when a lot of people look at that, what they're looking at is they're looking for mentors and teachers and people to sort of guide them and let them know that this is going to be okay. But more particularly when I was researching that and wrote about it, what I was looking at is what I would call your parallel playmates. People who are not necessarily on your team in your company, are all aspiring together to create the same thing. But everyone's going through a similar process. We see this became really big in Silicon Valley, in the world of startups about a decade ago, and it sustains to this day when things like Y Combinator and techstars and what we're calling seed accelerators became really vogue. And this was a group where a dozen founding teams of two to five people would all work in a 10,000 square foot warehouse and they'd each have their own little thing and they're working on their own companies, their own startup ideas. But everyone's working on a startup. Everyone is in the space of being exposed, having no idea if this thing that they're thinking about doing is Going to work in any way, shape or form, having limited resources and just pouring literally every waking hour into doing this. And you see this interestingly in different domains throughout history. Also, like artistic atelier programs where you actually have artists working, they're working on their own bodies of work, their own paintings, their own sculptures, but they're working in a studio space where there's 20 of them, each having their own studio space, and they're all co inhabiting the space of the unknown in a shared way. And what research tells us is that what that does is it creates what's called the normalizing effect. So that when you're the oddball who's out there living in this space and nobody around you is making the same decisions, you feel very exposed and very raw and very vulnerable. And you feel like you're the strange person. And the risk goes up dramatically because the risk of social judgment goes up dramatically in that context. And it stops you from doing the thing that you're here to do. Whereas if you're surrounded by people who are all saying yes to the same sense of uncertainty and possibility, it normalizes it. You are no longer. You have a community of people who see you and accept you for wanting to actually stay and operate in that space. And it allows you to be in that space much more easily and then to centralize and to really let more of what you want out. So that normalizing effect can be incredibly powerful. So building that hive is not just about finding the queen bee. It's not just finding the mentors and the teachers and the people who are going to help you along the way, and the coaches. Those can be incredibly powerful. It's about finding your parallel playmates. It's about finding the people who are stepping into the void along with you so that it normalizes the experience for you.
- [54:07]
Dan Harris
Yeah, I like that. This is a bit of an example from Rarefied Air, but just coming to mind. There's a person, you may know her personally. I suspect you at least know of her. Gretchen Rubin.
- [54:17]
Jonathan Fields
Yeah, sure, old friend.
- [54:18]
Dan Harris
She has her own podcast. She's been on this podcast many, many times. But she's very good at getting people who do what we do together. She will arrange a dinner with me, her and Esther Perel, or she's got some. You know, this will have already happened by the time this interview posts, but she's arranging a get together for a bunch of podcasters in New York City. She's just constantly thinking about parallel play so that we can learn from each other, even if we are I guess on some level competitive. She just doesn't view things that way.
- [54:50]
Jonathan Fields
Yeah. So I, I know Gretchen, I want to say for about probably close to two decades now. And the way that we met was originally in a little four person writers group in New York, long before she had written the Happiness Project.
- [55:02]
Dan Harris
That tracks. That tracks that. The fact that she would join a writers group is exactly what we're talking about here. Let me just tick through with a couple of the other things that you recommend for people to navigate uncertainty, which again is almost certainly going to be your companion once you've found your sparketype and figured out what it is you want to do with your life. Another you recommend is exercise. Many of us know exercise is good for us and yet we don't do it. And one of the things you've recommended is to try to make it better than sex. So the two part question, how does exercise help with uncertainty and how do we make it better than sex?
- [55:36]
Jonathan Fields
So you're referencing a post. Back in the days when I was sort of like a young blogger, I think it was 2008, 2009, I wrote a long post called how to Make Exercise Better than Sex. Granted, the title was a little clickbaity. Okay, so maybe it's more than a little bit clickbaity. But the bigger idea there is. So let's talk about why exercise matters and then I'll address that. And I think it's pretty crystal clear now. We've both talked to people and interviewed people. The research is so crystal clear now that exercise affects not just your state of physical health and well being, but also your state of mind. If you talk to Ellen Langer, she doesn't use the phrase mind body connection anymore. She uses the phrase mind body unity. Implicit in that is that there are no two things that you're connecting. There's no connection. They are one thing thing. So what we know is clear as day is that if you're exercising on a regular basis, it has a very real and repeatable and measurable effect on anxiety, on depression, on state of mind, which then ripples out into your relationships, that then trickles back down into your state of physical and physiological well being. So because there's this mind body unity experience, that exercise we know just has a profound effect on your state of mind. So that's the why science is really crystal clear on the fact that we're not just exercising for our body anymore, we're exercising because of the effect that it has on our state of mind. And part of that is Allowing us to dissipate states of angst and anxiety that often come with living in that space of uncertainty. It basically creates a bit of a reset. Whether the mechanism is identifiable or not is still something that researchers are trying to figure out. A lot of people are pointing to this chemical bdnf, brain derived neurotropic factor as something that actually literally helps to regrow parts of the brain. But I think the mechanism mechanistically, there's still not a ton of clarity on exactly why exercise has this effect, but it is crystal clear that it does have this effect. Which brings us to the second question. How do you make exercise something that you actually look forward to doing that is a joyful part of your experience? And this tracks back to my long experience in the world of fitness and then yoga. And what I learned in the fitness industry very quickly is that is a profoundly broken mousetrap for the most part. Most of the industry is built around offering modes of movement that are centered around the desire to maximize revenue per square foot. What does that mean? That means putting in tons of repetition motion machines that are so endemically boring to us that the only way to get somebody to do it was originally to put up rows of televisions in facilities to distract you from how absolutely boring and monotonous this was and how much we didn't want to do it. And then now it's just like all those screens are built into the machines. How do you tune into the machines? Well, you plug in your headphones, which means that you've also now completely destroyed the possibility for community and interaction and engagement. There are great new players in that industry who are changing the paradigm in a meaningful way. But what we know is the primary way. When you think back to the time, let's go back to that nine year old again that we started our conversation with and think, okay, so when you're outside, so I know one of the things that you love to do with your kid is to play catch, right? Does that take work? Sure. Are you, in theory exercising when you're doing that? If somebody's strapped on all the biometrics to sort of see, can we measure the things and does this actually count as exercise? The answer would be yes. Right? Do you experience as exercise is something like that's boring, mundane? No. My guess is you probably love that time you're with like the kid that you love. Like you're doing this thing that's kind of fun, like, so what is it? It's about surrounding yourself with people who you love to Be around. But it's also about choosing activities where fundamental to the nature of the activity is that your brain must be engaged, not because you're bolting that onto the activity, but because it is intrinsic in the activity itself. The difference between exercise and play is that, you know, it's generally those two factors. One is that the fundamental nature of the activity requires your mind to be present in the activity. What happens if you're playing catch and you're basically, your mind starts drifting to work? Safe bet a ball is going to hit you somewhere, and then that's not fun to play anymore? So the activity itself requires you to actually be present in the activity that turns it into play. Add in doing it collaboratively with people who you actually love to be around, and that elevates it to a whole other level. A lot of people talk about the notion of flow. There are actually different types of flow. There's individualized flow, and then there's. I'm blanking on the word, I believe is autolytic flow, which is basically group flow. And what we know from the research is that the experience that we get, the highs that we get from the experience of flow are higher when we are doing it collaboratively with other people rather than just individually. So to me, when I think about activities that I want to do as, quote, exercise, I look less at what's going to be clinically effective. Check the box of exercise on a daily basis in a lab, and I basically look at ways that I can move my body that I can't wait to do. I am incredibly fortunate. After 30 years in New York City, I live in Boulder, Colorado now, in the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains. And seven minutes outside of my front door, I'm hiking on some of the most majestic trails in the world. And I do that often three or four times a day in the middle of the day, that's my exercise. When I'm filling out a doctor's form or something, and they're like, do you exercise how many forms a day? I'm like, this is kind of funny because I hike all the time, but I guess it counts as exercise. I mean, I wear my Oura ring. I see what the stats are, but those are the ways that you change those experiences. And I think if we could kind of break the paradigm of saying, what do I have to do? And how do I distract myself from how awful it is? And say, let me scan the universe of possible ways that I could move my body and find things that truly engage me in the moment and Potentially even do them with people I love to be around. It would profoundly change the paradigm of how we experience exercise in this country. Sorry, a little bit of a rant there.
- [61:39]
Dan Harris
No, no, I'm pro rants. We have time for a couple more questions. Let me ask about a specific form of uncertainty and anxiety or a certain form of uncertainty that can lead to anxiety. And I wonder what your thoughts are. And this is a bit of a bugaboo for me personally, which is money worries. I'll say in my case I'm been very lucky. All the advantages one can have, largely my money fears are irrational. But I don't think I'm alone. And I also think there are many, many people who have very rational money fears. So what kind of feedback do you have for people about managing this?
- [62:14]
Jonathan Fields
Yeah, and it goes back to that question you asked earlier about are these conversations for people who are just at a certain status or a certain level of privilege? And I think you're right to kind of bifurcate the question. Well, if you're somebody who has plenty of means and you're just fine financially and yet your mind is still going to. But I could be wiped out tomorrow or what might happen. The question is what's going on there? What's the story that you're telling yourself about it? And I think a lot of that is you look at the fundamental human need and it's for safety and security. Some people are in that place where this is a very, very real experience for them. They're living hand to mouth and the concern about not having enough money is 100% real. So I don't think that's what we're talking about because that is a very real, it's a lived day to day experience. What you're talking about is not being in that circumstance and yet still telling the story of potential gloom and doom, potentially getting wiped out. And there's so much to unpack there that I'm probably also not equipped to unpack. You know, I know for you, you have family history that ties you back two to three generations. So you have a story that you tell yourself about what money did to somebody who was in your family. And even if you didn't know that person, knowing that story is going to follow you. So to me, the role of the practices that we've been talking about are to bring you back to the present moment and to be able to actually zoom into that space of metacognition and say, what's the story that I'm telling myself? That's leading me to feel this feeling is that my lived reality right now, when I look objectively and what's the story that I can tell myself right now, that actually would be the story that would let me breathe and that's also very likely objectively more accurate. So I think a lot of it is really based in our own history and for some it's a very real reality. Like the anxiety is there for a reason because it's not just a fear. This is a lived day to day experience.
- [64:22]
Dan Harris
Jonathan knows my personal history because I went on his show, the Good Life Project and talked a little bit about how I had a great grandfather who took his own life after losing the family. I don't think it was a fortune, but losing whatever the money the family had and also getting himself into legal trouble. But so for people who, for whom these money concerns are are real, much more real than they are in my case. And that's holding them back from taking risks, from acting on what they have figured out about their life's passion and purpose, their sparketype. What do you recommend?
- [64:59]
Jonathan Fields
I think one of the things that we can think about doing is what I would call chunking risk and chunking stakes. So rather than taking the big risk. So for example, if we put this in the domain of considering leaving a job where it's really draining, it's depleting, you hate what you do. It's not fulfilling in any way, shape or form, but it is giving you enough to actually baseline cover whatever your expenses are, your fundamental needs. And then there's another opportunity. Maybe you want to start your own thing. You're like, oh, there's a thing that I want to do and I see other people making a ton more money doing it. Let me go and start this other thing. Maybe you want to be a coach or maybe you want to be something else. And then a lot of people will look at that ultimate goal and realize that it's a level of disruption that basically sends him into heart palpitations, that sends anxiety through the roof and says, but what if I'm giving up something that is depleting but relatively sustainable for something that is completely unknown but potentially deeply fulfilling and nourishing. But I can't do that. I can't take that risk. And it's completely understandable. You don't want to put your family at risk for something like that. So I think the much smarter thing to do is to actually not take what I would call the nuclear option. In most circumstances that would lead to just big Time anxiety and say, okay, so if this is a place that I'm curious about going, that I think I'm capable of going or something I'm capable of making happen, what are the steps from where I am now to there? How can I chunk it down into as many tiny steps as I possibly can and then say, okay, I'm going to hold that ultimate goal kind of out here in the distance, right, it's there. But my focus is what is the first tiny step that I can take. So we're chunking action, we're chunking exposure and we're chunking stakes. And what we find is this is sort of like the fundamental idea behind the Japanese management philosophy, Kaizen, is that you take it in tiny little steps and it changes the psychology of a really big quest. So that whereas it would be deeply anxiety provoking and paralyzing if you focus ultimately on that big thing, if you. But this first tiny little step, that's kind of okay and there's really not a lot of risk in there. And every time you take the next tiny little step, the fact that you've actually accumulated more knowledge and it's either validated or invalidated what you're doing or tell you maybe go a little bit to the left this time or a little bit to the right that time, you're gaining basically data points and proof that keeps telling you with each step, oh, this is actually possible and this is more possible and this is more possible and maybe even you start to step into something on the side. This is what happens with a lot of career change when people are starting their own thing or their own practice. Well, it's like, okay, so first let me just read a book on coaching. Let me talk to a couple of people who are in the space. Let me go to a free workshop, let me invest in a weekend training to really see how I feel about it. Let me experiment with a couple of friends to see if it's even something that I like. And then, wow, this is like everything is like turning into green lights here. Let me actually do a certification. It's definitely a risk of money and time, but I've now done the work to show me that this is something that's really meaningful. I think I'd be good at it. And people seem to responding well. So I keep validating along the way and eventually to me that's the way that a lot of things tend to happen for most people because most people aren't wired to just look at the, you know, Jim Collins BHAG big hairy, audacious goal and just go for it. That destroys most people. But if you really chunk the stakes and chunk the resources and chunk the steps, it changes the psychology of it.
- [68:47]
Dan Harris
That makes a lot of sense to me as a conservative person, not politically, but temperamentally. There's that expression, life. Inch by inch. Life's a cinch. Yard by yard. It's very hard. That seems to apply here. Before I let you go, we have a few more minutes, but I'd be interested in hearing I think this might be a good place to end. You have an unusual meditation trajectory personally, and it involves some a major obstacle or what appeared at first to be an obstacle, which is tinnitus, which I'll let you describe. And it kind of landed you at a place that might be a good closing sentiment for this podcast, this Buddhist notion of abandoning hope, which is not as dark as it may sound. So can you hold forth?
- [69:33]
Jonathan Fields
Yeah, sort of. My meditation origin story. So after teaching yoga meditation for seven years and secretly not really being able to do have any kind of seated practice myself, I would always just say like I'm a moving meditator. I move through, I meditate through movement, I meditate through mountain biking. All these different things and understanding the practice, understanding the instructions. A couple years, I GUESS it was 2009, a couple years after I left the what yoga world, I was getting off a plane in Austin, Texas and I had these weird fluttering sensations in one ear. Six weeks later, after it, not going away, having a whole bunch of medical tests and scans and realizing it wasn't something big and scary, I woke up in the middle of one night with this loud high pitched sound sort of like tearing through my head. And I realized that the sound was being generated from inside my head. And I just basically collapsed on the couch at two in the morning and started crying. And that sent me to the next series of interventions, got labeled with this thing called tinnitus or tinnitus depends who you ask. And what it effectively means is that your brain is producing a sound that doesn't exist outside of your brain, only you can hear. And we don't know really why it's happening. And there's no cure. There's nothing that we can tell you. There's a whole bunch of things you can try. So I tried a whole bunch of different things, everything from holistic things to like shamanic rituals to medical interventions and all sorts of different things. And about three months in I realized this isn't a good thing and it's not going away. And it was destroying me. A lot of people actually have this. Most people, their brains eventually habituate to it. For some people it is a much more brutal experience. And basically it's like 24 7. All you hear is this all consuming sound that's coming from inside your brain. And for me, the book that you referenced a couple of times, Uncertainty. I was writing that book at that time. So I was researching how people deal with high stakes uncertainty. That led me down a path of also understanding how people deal with chronic pain. Because there were some interesting correlations there that led me to mindfulness and mindfulness based cognitive behavioral therapy. And I began to wonder. I was like, huh? So I've tried everything. This is destroying me. I can't live, I can't write. I'm having trouble relating to people around me. I can't focus on anything but it. I wonder if this thing might be helpful for me. And that's where you use the phrase abandon hope. I had been taught that as part of me, like in the yoga world when I started studying Buddhism, there's this context of abandoning hope. And I always thought that is just really fatalistic. And like that's. I don't understand that. And what I came to understand, at least my interpretation, was that there's a certain grace, a certain freedom in abandoning hope, that something will change that allows you to be present in what is. And then do the work to deal with the fact that this is what it is. And by abandoning hope of a cure. And that doesn't mean that if someday there is a legit cure that comes along for this thing, that it won't be like, oh, that's kind of interesting. But by basically saying, if this is me for life, what do I do with that? That changed my stance and it started me looking at, are there ways to reorganize my brain so that this no longer consumes me, so that this sound essentially just becomes similar to all the other sounds that I'd been hearing around me in New York City for years and years and years that I didn't pay attention to and didn't bother me at all. And probably equally loud, but just from the outside in, not from the inside out. That led me to a mindfulness based cognitive therapist. And I said, basically said, this is what I'm thinking, could this work? And he happened to have been a former rock drummer who had tinnitus himself. And he said, it could, but you're not going to like what I say about the instructions. He's like, you know what I'm going to tell you. And I was like, I think I do. He said, you know, the classic instruction is you're going to sit and you're going to focus on your breath. But if something keeps coming back to you, then you make that your mantra for that particular session. And the thing that's going to keep coming back to you is the sound in your head. So the very thing that you're literally spending every waking hour trying not to hear is the thing that you're going to have to immerse yourself in. And intellectually, it made sense to me. I know the instructions. I had lived them and I had taught them, I had repeated them to other people. I sat down that night and I focused on my breath seconds in. The sound is the only thing I can do. So eventually I let that become the thing. I become so anxious that I start to shake and I turn to pranayama to sort of like different parts of my yoga training to just slow my breathing rate down to get, get me out of that anxiety state. And then I go back to my breath and then immediately the sound comes back. So I make the sound. So this cycle repeats itself over and over and over. But there was something in me that said, don't walk away from this. I have no idea if it'll work, but there's nothing else that I can think of right now that might. And there's nothing else that's being offered to me that might. So stay with it. So I kept staying with it and sitting with it. I would sit every night. And it was months into this process where I started to not need to use the breathing exercises because I wasn't freaking out as much. It was still anxiety provoking, but it was getting less and less so. And I remember to this day sitting one night, just allowing the sound to be everything to consuming me. And all of a sudden my mind drifted away to something else. And that was like a breakthrough moment for me because I realized that I could actually allow my mind to be somewhere else. I could sort of like co inhabit the space in my brain with the sound and everything else that made my life rich. So I just never stopped. And over time, over a period of years, that practice eventually made it so that my brain pretty much entirely habituated to the sound. And that practice brought me from a really dark place to being baseline. Okay. And now, many years later, has become, I think, the anchor for so much goodness in my life, for so much depth. It affects literally everything I do, every relationship I have, everything I say yes to what's interesting, somebody asked me recently, they're like, do you still hear the sound? And the second somebody asks me that, I look for it and it's there. But what I realized over time is that most sounds are being generated by external stimuli. And then the brain is the thing that says, oh, this is a sound. In my case, my brain is doing both. It doesn't exist outside of my brain. So the thing that makes it a sound and not just some brain stimulation is the fact that my attention is drawn to it when my attention is not drawn to it. For all intents and purposes, the sound doesn't exist. It's not that I hear it. It literally doesn't exist. And it was a really interesting sort of like, moment for me. And because anytime I look for it, I can hear it. It's also a constant reminder to me of the place that I can go should I at some point choose to just let go of my practices. So I think that's one of the reasons why it keeps me committed to my practice as well.
- [76:43]
Dan Harris
That's a great story. And abandoning hope, which you might just call surrender or acceptance. Non struggling with reality. I mean, it's useful in so many ways, but it certainly will be useful for uncertainty, which is one of the big things we've been talking about today. Jonathan, before I let you go, two questions. One is, is there something you were hoping to get to that we didn't get to?
- [77:07]
Jonathan Fields
No, I'm good. I feel complete.
- [77:10]
Dan Harris
I'd like to hear that. And finally, can you just plug everything? Just remind everybody of the name of your podcast and whatever books you want people to know about. Any. Anything.
- [77:18]
Jonathan Fields
Yeah, sure. Podcast is a good life project and the last book is called Sparked and it's basically sort of an overview of the entire Sparketype body of work. And for anyone who wants to take the assessment, it's just the website is sparketype.com and it's freely available for anyone. Spend 10, 15 minutes and you'll discover something pretty interesting about yourself.
- [77:37]
Dan Harris
We'll put links to everything, even the stuff Jonathan didn't mention in the show notes. Jonathan Fields, thank you very much.
- [77:43]
Jonathan Fields
Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks for having me.
- [77:47]
Dan Harris
Thanks again to Jonathan. I will put in the show notes a link to a playlist that includes all of our prior sanely ambitious episodes. Final thing to do here is to thank everybody who works so hard on this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan and Eleanor Vasily. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People, Lauren Smith is our production manager, Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn from the band Islands wrote our theme.