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The Long View
Jordan Grumet: The Purpose Code
00:57:45
The author and hospice doctor discusses the connection between wealth and happiness and shares tips for avoiding ‘purpose anxiety.’
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- [00:01]
Jackson Financial Representative
At Jackson, we've created a digital retirement planning experience with you in mind. Visit Jackson.com to explore our easy to understand resources and user friendly tools that are designed to enable financial professionals and clients to plan a path to financial freedom. Jackson is short for Jackson Financial, Inc. Jackson National Life Insurance Company, Lansing, Michigan and Jackson National Life Insurance Company of New York, Purchase, New York. Please stay tuned for important disclosure information at the conclusion of this episode.
- [00:33]
Christine Benz
Hi and welcome to the Longview. I'm Christine Benz, Director of Personal Finance and Retirement Planning for Morningstar. On the podcast today we welcome back Jordan Grummet. Jordan's latest book is called the Purpose how to Unlock Meaning, Maximize Happiness, and Leave a Lasting Legacy. His previous book was called Taking Stock A Hospice Doctor's Advice on Financial Independence, Building wealth, and Living a Regret Free Life. Jordan is a hospice doctor and he hosts the popular Earn and Invest podcast. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan and his medical degree from Northwestern University. Jordan, welcome back to the Longview.
- [01:13]
Jordan Grummet
I am so happy to be back here talking to you again, Christine.
- [01:16]
Christine Benz
Well, we're thrilled to have you here and congratulations on the purpose code. I have to say, I really enjoyed reading the book. I want to talk about the genesis of the book. What was the catalyst for you to write a book about purpose?
- [01:30]
Jordan Grummet
Believe it or not, it was completely unexpected. So I wrote my first book, Taking Stock. And the main premise of that book is that we should put purpose before our financial framework. We should think about purpose first. And I was out marketing that book and I would go to conferences and I would give talks about it and people would come up to me afterwards and instead of them being excited and happy, they were frustrated and angry. And so the first time this happened, I was very much questioning and someone said, look, it's great that you tell me to find my purpose, but I have no idea how to do that. In fact, I've been looking for my purpose forever and I'm getting really frustrated. I wish people like you would stop telling me to find my purpose. The first time I heard this, I was like, okay, it's a one off. But it kept on happening, conference after conference. And so I decided to do a deep dive into purpose and start looking at the data and the literature. And what I found found completely surprised me. I found a major paradox, a contradiction. Purpose seems to be one of the most important things to us, but also can be riddled with anxiety. And that's why I wrote this book.
- [02:34]
Christine Benz
Okay, and I want to delve into purpose anxiety. But before we go There. Let's just set the definition of purpose. How do you think about it, talk about it? When you say purpose, what do you mean?
- [02:47]
Jordan Grummet
So a lot of people think of purpose as the why we do what we do. But I actually don't like to talk about it in that way. And the reason I think purpose has more to do with action. And this gets into the difference between meaning and purpose. Meaning is much more about thoughts, and it's about our past, but purpose is about our present and future, and it's all about actions. And so when we're doing things that light us up, we're being purposeful, and it's all about the things that we do.
- [03:15]
Christine Benz
So I want to go back to the meaning and purpose, because I really liked that part of the book. I hadn't really thought about the distinction between those two things. But in the context of meaning, you talk about the importance of kind of understanding our personal stories, our personal narratives, as you call them, and understanding whether we are, as we reflect on our life's experiences. Are we thinking of ourselves in kind of the hero's role or the victim's role? Can you talk about that dimension of this? Because it seems like an element of kind of looking forward. You do have to understand where you've been. So maybe you can talk about that for us.
- [03:53]
Jordan Grummet
Well, there's a lot of disagreement about what happiness is. And so people have all sorts of ideas that it's like this really important thing. And some people think it's an ephemeral chemical phenomenon. A lot of people have really defining what happiness looks like in their life. And so I think happiness is made up of two components. It's made up of meaning and purpose. And so I think meaning is our cognitive understanding of our past. As you were saying, it is the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. Happy people tend to tell themselves heroic stories. They see that they had hardships, they had trauma, but they were able to get past those to the point where they are today. And they feel like they're a better person than they used to be. Unhappy people tend to tell themselves a victim story. So they see that they had trauma and difficulties in their past, and instead of feeling they moved away from those and became a better person, they see that those things thwarted them. But as I said, that's only one part of that happiness equation. Once we have a sense of meaning, it really answers the question, are you enough? And so when you look at yourself and tell yourself the hero story, you're basically saying, I am enough. And I always was Enough. And therefore you think you're going to continue to be enough in the present and future. Purpose, as I said, is all about the present and future, and it's about actions, and it turns out to be happy. We need both. And so I see this quite a bit that people really skip that meaning part and they try to jump right to purpose. But if you haven't established that hero story and you don't feel like you're enough as a person, it's really hard to purpose your way to enough. I always, always mention Elon Musk. He's a perfect example. Elon Musk has made more money than anyone, and he's created some of the coolest things, and yet he looks like a miserable person. I believe Elon Musk has a meaning problem based on the trauma of his childhood, his father, the peers that used to make fun of him. I think he's always trying to prove himself enough with purpose, and it doesn't work very well.
- [05:50]
Christine Benz
You had a great illustration of this kind of personal narrative idea in the book where you talk about twins, one of whom was dying and the other was still alive. But they had had sort of identical upbringings in a lot of ways, but had completely different stories about what had happened. Can you talk about that? Because I found that to be such a powerful illustration of how these things can go either way.
- [06:17]
Jordan Grummet
Yeah. So I talked about a brother and sister, and the sister was actually one of my hospice patients. And when I sat down and talked to her, she talked about her life in very heroic terms. So they were born to a poor family. Her mother actually died during childbirth of these twins. But she always looked at that as almost the strength that her mother gave to her. Right. Her mother died so that she could live, and that was the lens she viewed her life. So, of course, she grew up in poverty, and she didn't have all the advantages of a lot of people. But she saw this as a heroic story where she came out of that difficulty. She got married, she had kids, and as she was on her deathbed dying from cancer, she was able to look back at her life and say, I've lived a good life, and things happened the way they should. When I had a few moments, I sat down and talked to her brother, who is her caregiver at the moment. Her brother, who grew up in the same household, had the same tragic event of his mother dying during his childbirth. And the story he told about his life was a very different story about the difficulties of having his mother die, of his having his father Never being there, of dealing with being a product of the streets and getting in trouble legally. And the story he told himself about his life was very much a victim story, not a hero story. And so you have these two twins, one dying and feeling relatively fulfilled and happy, and the other remaining to live, and yet feeling that the world had thwarted them, and feeling no closer to happiness than ever. And so it was an interesting take on how meaning affects us, how the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves play such a pivotal role in our present and our future and our understanding of our own happiness.
- [08:04]
Christine Benz
So is there a way to reverse a negative narrative where someone kind of does view their history as one of victimhood? Is there a way to reverse that so that they can think of themselves in a more positive light?
- [08:18]
Jordan Grummet
There definitely is. And there's something called narrative therapy, which you can do with a psychologist, but there's also some steps that you can take on your own, and it means isolating those narratives. So thinking about out those big narratives in your life, especially the ones around trauma, going back, looking at that narrative, rewriting it in a much more positive way, where as opposed to being either a victim or a culpable, you were just a good, innocent person who these things happen to, and then reinterpreting the story, removing yourself from it, and certainly removing the blame and seeing things in a different light. And so you can see a therapist, and they can help you with this. There's some online tools, too, that talk about the different steps of narrative therapy, but it's really rewriting some of those stories in your life, those stories that we tell ourselves over and over again repeatedly about why we are who we are and how we got here.
- [09:13]
Christine Benz
Okay, so going back to purpose, which is the underpinning of your book, you mentioned that the data very much point to purpose being super important, that it contributes to better health, better longevity, happiness, which, of course is somewhat subjective, but maybe talk about what the data say about purpose and why it's important for us.
- [09:36]
Jordan Grummet
So there have been tons of studies on purpose, and hands down, the studies show that people who have a sense of purpose in life, live longer, are healthier and happier. Hands down, many, many, many studies. That contrasts to the other kind of study, which we may talk about more, that show that purpose can also cause some anxiety.
- [10:00]
Christine Benz
And you noted that in your work as a hospice doctor that your sense of whether someone felt that they had a purpose very much contributed to their satisfaction with their life at the end of their lives. Can you talk about that and how you kind of teased out that conclusion.
- [10:17]
Jordan Grummet
Well, we certainly do something called a life review with dying patients. So when a patient is on hospice. And we kind of get them comfortable and take care of all their medical needs. And make sure they're dying in the place they want to, like their home, or if they're in a nursing home or somewhere else, we go through something called the life review. This is a structured series of questions where we talk about their lives. And it gives people a chance to really process what happened to them. What were their biggest moments? What were their most disastrous moments? Who were the people that were important in their life? One of those questions is about regret. And so what I talk to people on their deathbeds sometimes about is what they regret never having the energy, courage, or time to do. And regret is really related to purpose. A lot of times in a person who's dying, regrets are kind of sad, right, because they're disappointed. They don't have agency at that point to do anything about it. But regret in a much younger person is actually another word for purpose, or what I call purpose anchors. These are these inklings of things we should build purpose around. So people who tend to feel like their life was very purposeful. They created a life of purpose around these important things in their life. They tend to have a lot less regrets when they're dying. Because they pursued those things that were most deeply important to them. People who do not think much about purpose. Or do not spend time thinking about what would light them up and what's important to them. And then don't pursue those things. When they realize that time is finite, they end up having a lot of these regrets. And so one of my big goals with the purpose code. Is to help people not end up with those regrets when they eventually meet a doctor like me. When they enter the hospice program, but start thinking about them much earlier and building a deeper, better life of purpose around those things that are important to them.
- [12:02]
Christine Benz
And similarly, you think we should take these life reviews earlier. That it's a good exercise to get us thinking about where we've been, where we want to go. Can you talk about that? Why you think it's such a valuable tool for people who are very much alive to consider doing so.
- [12:20]
Jordan Grummet
The biggest question I get about purpose is how do I find my purpose? And my answer, of course, is, you don't find purpose, you create it. Remember, I said purpose is about present and future, and it's about action. It's something we have to actively build. But it is true. We have to decide what are Those inklings or those beckonings, those things that are important to us to build purpose around. And I call those purpose anchors. So when someone comes and says, I'm frustrated, I don't know how to find my purpose in my terminology, what they really mean is I don't know what these purpose anchors are to build a life of purpose around. And so in this book, I talk about a number of ways of trying to find what those purpose anchors are in your life and then build on them. So one of those ways is the Life Review. And again, the Life Review really makes us ask fundamental questions about who we are and what's important to us and what our accomplishments are. But I like to distill it really to the regret question, because I think that sums up a lot of this is if you found out tomorrow that you only had a few days to live, what would you regret never having the energy, courage, or time to do? I think it's a really great way for us to start thinking about those purpose anchors, because if we know what those things are in our life right now, all we have to do is flip that around and turn it to a purpose anchor. For me, if I had died four or five years ago, one of my biggest regrets would be that I never traditionally published a book so I could think about that. Picture myself on my deathbed doing this life review, coming up with this idea that writing a book was super important to me and I never got to it. But since I had time and I wasn't dying, I could flip that around and start building a life purpose around that, which means it was time for me to start pursuing, start taking those purposeful actions that got me closer to that goal. And so that's what I think the Life Review can really do for us. Now. There are other ways also, also to find your purpose anchors, but I think the Life Review is a really valuable one.
- [14:08]
Christine Benz
Okay, so you've referenced what you call purpose anxiety a couple of times that people feel some anxiety discomfort with this idea that they need to find something to do with their lives that is going to have an impact. Can you talk about that purpose anxiety, what it is and why we see that in people?
- [14:30]
Jordan Grummet
Sure. I think we get purpose anxiety for two main reasons. One is we've been told by society that purpose is this ultimate important thing. And most of us think like we have this one big purpose and we either find it and are elated and life is good, or we don't find it and everything else is lost. So first and foremost, society kind of tells us that purpose is very high stakes. So that leads to a lot of anxiety, especially in people who haven't really identified what any of those purpose anchors are. That's number one. The other thing is we have a lot of forces in society today that are trying to sell us a version of purpose. They are trying to get us to co opt their version of purpose. So who are these people? Well, there are lots of people trying to sell us things. So if you look at influencers and if you go to TikTok or Instagram, you're going to see all these visions and images of people with six pack abs traveling to every country in the world, running seven figure businesses and just totally enjoying life. And the reason why they're creating these images usually is to sell us something. They want us to buy their product, they want us to follow their channel so they get more advertising revenue. They want to tell us that this is how we're supposed to live life. But the problem is most of us don't really have agency to do those things. A lot of us don't have the genetics to have six pack abs, nor the time nor the patience to figure out your diet and exercise, et cetera. Most of us are not going to travel all around the world and most of us are not going to run separate seven figure businesses. So not only do we have influencers, but we also have marketers and people who are trying to sell us products, who are going to sell us all these images of what living the good life looks like and convincing us that the way we get there is by buying their product. And so what this really does is this gives us this high stakes version of purpose that's very, very hard to achieve and makes us feel bad when we don't. And so purpose anxiety is a very real thing. And there are plenty of studies about purpose anxiety and most of them show that up to 91% of people at some point in their life have purpose anxiety. So purpose can really be a force of good. And we talk about that with the health, longevity and happiness. But it also can be very destructive and make us feel frustrated and lost. And that's purpose anxiety. And a big reason I think we get to this place is, is that we traditionally look at purpose wrong. I don't think purpose is just one thing. I think it's more likely two things. And one of those things actually is fairly destructive and the other is much more nurturing.
- [17:00]
Christine Benz
Well, let's talk about that then. Let's talk about both the positive and the negative destructive one.
- [17:07]
Jordan Grummet
So I've pretty much broken down purpose into two different concepts. One I call big P purpose and the other little P purpose. Now big P purpose is the more destructive kind and it's its big audacious purpose really based on goals. And a lot of these goals are very, very difficult goals like becoming a billionaire or being president or if you're looking at social media, getting those six pack abs or running that seven figure business. And part of the problem is we just generally don't have the agency to do that. So to do these things, you usually have to be the right person at the right time, saying the right things, have the right genetics, and then have a bunch of luck. And so for some of us, it just isn't meant to be. I loved baseball when I was a little kid, but the likelihood that I was going to become Mickey Mantle and lead the Major League Baseball batting average just, it wasn't likely. I didn't have the genetics, I didn't have the interest, I didn't have the infrastructure where I lived to develop the skills. So if that was my version of purpose, I most likely was going to at some point be disappointed. So big B purpose is goal oriented. It's usually audacious. A lot of times we don't actually have the agency to achieve it. A lot of times it's all or nothing. I either make the major leagues or I don't. There's very little in between and it's usually winner take all. So if you want to be president, you know only one person's going to be a president and everyone else loses. And so that's a very negative way to think about purpose. And if you are basing your happiness on that kind of purpose, most likely you're going to be disappointed. Let's contrast that to what I call little P purpose. Now, little P purpose is all process oriented process, not the goal. So it's doing things we love and enjoying the process of doing them regardless of the outcome. This is very much an abundance mindset. So I think of big P purpose as actually very scarcity mindset oriented. Little P purpose is very abundant because there are a million different things we could love doing. It's not winner takes all, it's not all or nothing. We don't have to worry about competing with anyone for scarce resources. And so it's very difficult to fail little P purpose. So I like to use podcasting as an example because it really makes it clear I love podcasting. And podcasting is my little P purpose. It means the minute I Sit in front of the mic to go interview someone. I enjoy that hour no matter what happens. It's some of the best hours of my day. It has nothing to do with the goal, like, I might have goals of getting that podcast out and having hundreds of thousands of people hear it. But regardless if they hear it or not, I enjoy the process of spending that hour doing that thing. So for me, there's no way to fail. All I have to do is sit in front of the mic and do it. And that fulfills me. But let's switch that around and say I decided to have a big, audacious purpose. I wanted to have millions of people download my episodes every month. If that became my version of purpose, I'm not sure I have the agency to do that. I don't have a group of six people to run my podcast. I don't have six figures to spend on the podcast. I might not have the inclination or the time or even the skill to get my podcast to that level. So if that's my goal, most likely I'm going to feel upset and disappointed and I'm going to spend a lot of time doing things I don't love doing. To serve that goal, I might have to be on social media much more. I might have to interact with a team that I don't want to lead. These are all the kind of things I don't love doing. And if I'm lucky enough to hit that goal post, first and foremost, I spend a lot of my time doing things I didn't like to do to get there. So 90% of my time was getting to the top of the mountain. If I didn't enjoy it, that's 90% of my time I don't enjoy. And once you're there, a lot of times, the joy only lasts so long. We know there's this thing called hedonic adaption. Basically, after you hit this goal and you're really happy, within weeks, you kind of fall to your baseline level of happiness, and then you're looking for the next big goal or you're afraid that you're going to lose what you gained. But either way, the joy doesn't stick around very long and you're back to doing things you don't like doing to get to the next mountaintop. And so for me, podcasting very much has little p purpose because I'm also somewhat goal agnostic. If I happen to hit those millions of downloads a month, that's great. But if I don't, I still really enjoy the process of Doing what I'm doing. And I think most of purpose should really be that way.
- [21:27]
Christine Benz
Yeah. Going back to the treadmill, in the book, you had an example of another of your hospice patients, a very successful attorney who was. It sounded like very much on a treadmill, that that one giant achievement led to some other quest. Can you talk about that? Because I do think successful people sometimes fall into that a little bit where they have succeeded a lot, but just kind of continue being success junkies.
- [21:53]
Jordan Grummet
Yeah. So Ricky was a very, very successful lawyer. And he started out at the bottom of his law school class, Just barely made it out. Couldn't get a job in big law, so had to start his own firm, built it up, became one of the biggest law firms around. And even to his dying day, when he got a terminal illness, it wasn't good enough. He still had to sell it for the most amount of money. He was an achievement junkie. And this really gets back to that discussion of meaning and purpose. A lot of times, if we don't do the meaning step and we don't fulfill ourselves with the sense of enough, we don't tell ourself a heroic story in which we are always enough. Even when we were young and went through these traumas and we got through them, so we were enough. People like Ricky never came to terms with their sense of meaning. They never felt enough. So then they move into purpose in such a way that they're trying to use purpose to prove that they're enough. And so these achievements become goalposts because they're desperately trying to prove that they're good enough, that they're a wonderful enough person. But every time they reach this achievement, it doesn't last long because you can't purpose your way to enough. That's really a meaning problem. And again, that gets back to people like Elon Musk, who's achieved, you know, maybe more than anyone else in the world, but he doesn't seem like a particularly happy person. Those people are trying to achieve their way to enough, achieve their way to happiness, and it just doesn't work. That's a meaning problem. It has to do with your thoughts and your interpretation of your past.
- [23:21]
Christine Benz
Yeah, it seems hard to untangle. I think for a lot of people, a lot of us, you know, you do things that confer prestige and untangling whether they really matter to you can be difficult. It can be difficult to disentangle, you know, prestige and money from things that really have meaning and give you purpose. Can you talk about that? Because it seems like kind of an issue for a lot of us.
- [23:49]
Jordan Grummet
I think it's actually a really simple question. We have a limited amount of time on this earth and winning the game is spending as much time as you can doing things that are purposeful and that fill you up and doing as little time as you can doing things you loathe. So here's the question. When you're going after prestige and you're going after money, do you enjoy the day to day activities you're doing while you're making it towards that goal? If you enjoy the activities, then you're really in the midst of little p purpose and you're doing it exactly right. But if you're not enjoying your time, if you're loathing the work or at least finding it not particularly fulfilling, then you're probably on the wrong path. Now, I'm not Pollyanna about this. Sometimes we do have to get a job we don't love to make money to support our life. But as we get older and we get more financially stable, we should be minimizing those activities that we loathe and maximizing those activities that we love. So the calculus is how can you continuously improve over a lifetime till you get to that point where most of your calendar is filled up with these little p purpose joyful things that fulfill you and as little time as possible is spent doing these things you don't like doing in service of something else like money. And so I think we have to ask ourselves that basic question. Am I enjoying myself on the way to this achievement? If I'm not, then something's probably wrong. We should be more goal agnostic. We don't have to be goal phobic. We can still have these great goals. But our joy, our happiness, our sense of purpose can't depend on whether we reach that goal or not.
- [25:22]
Christine Benz
You had a super interesting section in the book about the connection between money and happiness. There had been this often referenced piece of research that pointed to happiness kind of tapping out at a fairly low level of income. I think it was like 75,000 doll, probably higher if we adjusted for inflation today. But can you talk about, you know, sort of what the data say when we look at it in totality? It's not quite that simple, right?
- [25:51]
Jordan Grummet
Well, it's interesting because there have been a number of studies about money and happiness. So one of the first that people always talk about was Kahneman and Deaton. And I think this was like 2012, 2013, but they took a bunch of data that was gathered for something else and retrospectively went through that data and tried to answer the question, does money bring happiness? And they found that indeed, up to a certain point of salary, increasing money increase happiness. But when you got past, in their case, at that time it was $70,000. The returns were much more minimal after that. Now, that was followed up by Matthew Killingsworth, who did another kind of study which was a little bit better. It was prospective. But what they did is they took a bunch of respondents and they sent them texts and emails multiple times a day and had them answer these questionnaires. And they did it for weeks or months. And then they took the data and did all their calculations and said, well, it's not exactly right. People's sense of happiness can increase with more money if they were the right kind of person who really valued money. And the incremental improvement wasn't as great the higher you got. So finally, believe it or not, Kahneman and Killingsworth came together and they looked at all the data together and came up with similar conclusions to what Killingsworth came up in 2016. Here's my problem with this data. Data. This data is very short term. Some of it's what I call retrospective, right? Looking at the past as opposed to studying it into the future. A lot of times, their assessment of someone's income and their assessments of someone's wealth were very short term. It might have been just one assessment or just a few. There is some amazing data about happiness which is just much deeper and long term. So there's something called the Harvard Developmental Adult Developmental Health Study. This started in the 1900s. It started with like, like, I don't know, 500 Harvard students. Eventually they included a bunch, a few thousand of their family members. And after that, eventually they included some people in Boston as controls who are not part of Harvard. They started with just questionnaires every other year. But over 80 years, they not only did questionnaires, they did MRIs, they did EEGs, they did blood tests, they did questionnaires of their family members, and they took all of this data. They took data about wealth and income, and after 80 years, they came to a really bold conclusion about happiness. They found that the biggest thing associated with happiness was not wealth. It was not money, it was not position, it was not achievements. And believe it or not, I'm going to almost contradict myself here. It wasn't even purpose. What they found was most connected to happiness was interpersonal connections. Interpersonal connections. Now, my argument in the purpose code is that little P. Purpose is one of the greatest ways to develop community and interpersonal connections. And that's why I also think a lot of the purpose data shows that purpose is also associated with happiness. Happiness. But ultimately I think it's the people we connect with. And the thing is, when you're involved in little p Purpose, it lights you up. And when you become lit up doing something you totally love and enjoy like a moth to the flame, you attract other people and they want to collaborate with you. And if they have something to teach you, they want you to be their student. And if they have something to learn from you, they want you to be their teacher and you become mentor and mentee. And this is how we build community and connections, which ultimately brings us interpersonal relationships, which I think is what causes happiness. So honestly, we know this intuitively that money and happiness aren't connected because we know that some of the happiest countries in the world are actually countries in which people don't have a lot of money. And there actually have been other studies that show if you take underserved communities and you give everyone the same amount of money, it increases their happiness for a short period of time, but then they fall back to their baseline. Interestingly enough, what probably causes money when it comes to happiness is having more money than those around you. So it's much more comparative as opposed to money itself increasing happiness.
- [29:48]
Jackson Financial Representative
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- [30:15]
Christine Benz
You make an astute point in the book that people sometimes cling to financial matters, building up wealth because it's quantifiable. Like you're telling me that I need to identify my purpose. That seems really squishy. How much I have in my investment accounts is much easier to get my arms around. Can you talk about that and how that can kind of trip people up if they're focusing on that as kind of the sum total of what they want to accomplish?
- [30:44]
Jordan Grummet
Well, I think I wrote the purpose code to solve this problem. So we have wonderful people like you out there who can teach us about personal finance, who can write books like how to Retire so we can figure out how to retire and what's the best way to do that. That so there is a roadmap for financial issues. And there are many points along the way that we can measure ourself and see if we're measuring up. And so it's a very easy, straightforward thing. Now, it's not easy to make lots of money. It's not easy to necessarily be financially independent, but it is very knowable. The problem with purpose, like you said, is up to this point, I think it's been very squishy. And so no one really gives you a roadmap of how do I identify what purpose looks like in my life and how do I build a life of purpose around it? And so that's what I really wanted to do with the purpose code is get really granular and say, okay, I want to make this as straightforward as how to invest or how to retire. I want to give you a roadmap that gives you specific steps forward. This is what purpose could look like in your life. This is how we find those purpose anchors. This is how we then build a life of purpose around them. That was my goal, and I just don't think it's really been out there. I think we do speak about purpose in these very ephemeral terms that make it very difficult to get more granular and understand what the actual steps are to building a life of purpose.
- [32:11]
Christine Benz
Okay, so I want to delve into finding small P purpose, how to do it, because it seems like that's what we should be going for. We shouldn't be giving ourselves a lot of angst about not having the big P purpose. So how should people go down this road? What's the starting point? It sounds like it's kind of an exploratory thing. How can I get myself thinking about what is my maybe suite of small P purposes?
- [32:40]
Jordan Grummet
So the key to little P purpose is finding what your purpose anchors are. And let me give you the first caveat. Before we even talk about how to do that, I believe that most people actually know what little p purpose is in their lives. I think most people, if they really quieted themselves down and thought about what the last thing they think about right before they fall asleep, that thing that is oh, so important to them that they never had the courage to pursue. My bet is those inklings and those beckonings are probably there and people just aren't in touch with them or are very afraid to start thinking about them. But all that being said and done, there are a number of exercises we can do that help us really get in touch with these purpose anchors so that we can start building a life of purpose around them. So we already talked about the first one life review distill that down into regrets. Like, what would I really regret if I found out I was going to die soon? And can I turn that regret into a purpose anchor to an activity that I build purpose around? So that's the first is the life review. The next is something I talked about in my other book, the Art of Subtraction. We should look at our workplace activities. A lot of people, unfortunately, like you and I, Christine, don't necessarily love their job as much as we do. A lot of people don't like their jobs. But if they really look at their jobs and their activities, they might find one or two things they enjoy. Maybe it's that hour a week that they're doing something that they really like doing. So if we use the art of subtraction and subtract out all we don't like about work, is there something left that is purposeful for us? I found that with being a doctor, when I subtracted out everything I didn't love about being a doctor, there was one thing I would do even if people weren't paying me for it, and that was hospice work. So I used the art of subtraction to find a purpose anchor, which was hospice work. And then I built a life of purpose around it by doing more and more of that. So the first is the Life review. The second is the Art of Subtraction. The third are the joys of childhood. So most of us, when we were a little kid and we didn't have restraints and we hadn't looked at social media yet, no one was telling us who we were supposed to be. Most of us had joys and passions that we pursued and didn't even worry about the goals. We just wanted to spend our time doing these things. So I say, think back to your childhood room. What were the posters? What were the drawings? What were the medals? Those things might hold the key to a purpose anchor, something you loved as a kid, but don't give yourself permission to do as an adult. So the joys of childhood can be another way of finding a purpose anchor. And last but not least, the fourth thing I'll talk about is the spaghetti method. So if you can't find anything you love at work, if. If you don't have any joys of childhood, one thing you can do is just throw a bunch of spaghetti against the wall and see what sticks. What that means is you can basically try a bunch of things, things you normally wouldn't do, and see if you like them, right? Talk to people you don't normally talk to, do activities you don't normally do maybe do something that causes you to feel a little uncomfortable. And if you spend the day doing a few of these things and you enjoy doing one of those things, that might be a great purpose anchor to build a. There's lots of straightforward exercises we can do to start identifying these purpose anchors. And here's the thing, it doesn't have to be earth shattering, it just has to be something you like doing. What's going to really give you that benefit is when you do things you love doing, it's going to eventually connect you to other people and you're going to form communities. And that's going to bring you not only happiness, but I also would argue will bring you impact and legacy. Legacy.
- [36:13]
Christine Benz
So I want to follow up on some of those things, but first I want to ask about this art of subtraction where it sounds, you know, really interesting to look at my schedule and try to shed some of the things I don't like as much. What if you find that there's a mismatch there where the things that you like the least are some of the things that your employer most wants you to continue doing? What if you have an issue like. Like that?
- [36:39]
Jordan Grummet
Well, here's the great thing about it. Just identifying that thing will give you some margin in your life. And so here's a great example. And I talk about this in the book. I once dealt with someone, we talked a lot about purpose, someone I worked with in my coaching. And we talked about this idea of what were purpose anchors in her life. And she realized that she loved horses. As a kid she used to ride horses. When she became an adult, she kind of moved away from places that had stables. She stopped thinking about it and she got busy being a journalist. And she was no longer loving being a journalist. And she worked for a magazine that had nothing to do with horses. But now she had a purpose anchor. Horses were important to her and this gives her some options. She could continue doing her job and then on nights and weekends she can go ride horses in her free time. If she wants to write about horses, she could write a fictional story about horses. She could do some freelancing for other journals where she writes about horses. All of that's possible and she still is working at the same job and she hasn't changed anything there. So she's used the, what I call the joy of addition. She's added in purposeful activities to her life, even if it hasn't changed her work life balance at all. But she could also take it One step further, she could say, well, I'm a journalist and I've been really successful as she years, maybe I could change jobs and start working for an equestrian magazine. Maybe that could be my next job and I could use the skills as a journalist to do something that feels a little bit more purposeful. So we think that purpose has to ultimately change immediately our life or we have to be able to quit our job because of it. The truth of the matter is, if we're looking at our life and like I said, winning the game is really, really filling our life with as much purposeful activity as possible and doing as few things as we loathe. Even if you're still doing that job that you loathe, but you add in a three or four more hours a week of something purposeful, you're still improving your life. Now eventually, hopefully, you'll start being able to get rid of those things you loathe in your job and replacing them with other things. Now, that may happen just because you're getting older and you're more financially stable. That might happen because you start a side hustle doing that thing you love and it happens to give you a little bit more economic margin so you can cut back at your job. That might happen because you said, you know what, this is important enough to me. I'm going to move out of the country to a much lower cost of living place so that I don't need to make as much money so I can take a different job and I can start doing these things I love. The point is that just finding a purpose anchor isn't going to change everything, but it's going to give you a place to start working on and then you can use your tools. Money is one tool, but money's not the only tool. We can use. Our communities, our paths, passions, our skills, our families, these are also tools. And sometimes we can utilize some of those other tools in place of money to start living a more purposeful life.
- [39:44]
Christine Benz
So I want to follow up on the role of time in all of this. In the book, you delve into that a bit. You talk about, I think it's a Derek Thompson thing, the free time paradox, that wealthier, more successful people should have more time because they can delegate some things to others. But in practice, many such people are incredibly busy and time strapped. Can you talk about that issue? How very busy people who maybe do truly like their jobs but would like to find time to pursue some of these other passions, how they can go about finding time?
- [40:20]
Jordan Grummet
Well, it's interesting because we always complain about not having enough time. But the Bureau of Labor Statistics actually does the American Time Survey on a regular basis, and they found that, on average, Americans have about five hours of free time a day. And they actually found that people in lower socioeconomic status probably have an extra hour. So they're really talking about six hours of free time a day. But it is true, the more wealthy people tend to spend more and more time working, right? There's more emails to answer, more phone calls. They're doing more travel, et cetera. And so I think if we're going to really argue that we don't have enough time to pursue purpose, it certainly doesn't match the data. But I also think we have to go back and really get clear about why we are doing what we do and what happiness really looks like in our life. We are born one day and we die another day. And we have almost no control over how many days or how much time is in between. Right? We can take care of ourselves and exercise. We can wear our seat belts. But most likely, we have a set amount of time on this Earth, and time passes no matter what we do. And so we have no control over that. We can't buy time. We can't sell time. We can't trade time. Time just passes. So all we have is the power to choose what activities fill our time. And so there are a lot of people who are making a lot of money out there who say they're too busy and they're doing things they don't like in service of money. They're confusing money for a goal instead of a tool. See, money is a tool. And if you're working really hard and you're making lots of money, that tool should be able to help you improve that calculus of your skill schedule. How much time I love versus how much time I loathe. Money's a great tool to get rid of things you loathe and free up space to do things you love. And if you're not using it that way, you're kind of missing out on the whole point of it. We want as much happiness as possible. Happiness is meaning and purpose. Meaning is about getting therapy and dealing with your past. Purpose is about filling your life with action and activities and things you love. Money's a great tool to do some of that. And if you're not using your money to do that, then you've kind of mistaken your whole reason for doing things, I think. And this is why we get lots of people who are achievement junkies, who are making more and more money, but they're not necessarily filling up that time with things that they love and enjoy. And that time is finite. And I will tell you as a hospice doctor, I see many of those people on their deathbeds and, and they always have regret. It's never I wish I made more money. It's never I wish I worked more nights and weekends. Almost all of them, hands down, say I wish I spent more of this precious thing, this time doing things that were deeply important to me.
- [43:04]
Christine Benz
I wonder if you can discuss the role of other people in this discovery process because you mentioned in the book that our loved ones might sometimes be resistant to changes we might wish to make as we go through this discovery process process. And that seems especially likely to be true if the changes we're thinking about might lead to less status or especially less money. Can you talk about that dimension?
- [43:29]
Jordan Grummet
Yeah, I mean, I think people are a double edged sword. The negative is that a big reason we have all these big audacious versions of purpose is often our parents, right? It's our parents who tell us that we have to be professionals and that we have to go to college and we have to do all of these things that are society's version of who we're supposed to be. But that might not fulfill us. I mean, my father was a doctor. He died when I was very young. I decided cosmically I could fix that fact by becoming a doctor myself. My family very much bought into that idea of me being a doctor and supported me all the way through that process. But at some point as I was burning out, I realized that that was more my father's vision of purpose and not mine. I co opted his vision of purpose because it fit with what society wanted. It fit with what my family wanted and it gave a little boy a chance to make up or have some control over something that was just very hard and traumatic. I think our families, our friends, they mean well, but I think they also have this vision of what they'd like to see us be. But that doesn't necessarily fit who we are. Now why I say it's a double edged sword is actually if you're searching for your purpose anchors, one of the ways to own also try to figure out what those purpose anchors are is to ask friends and family because sometimes they're the ones who can really identify what makes you most happy. Like if you ask your family member, when is the time you see me most lit up and excited? Sometimes they come up with an answer that you didn't See, and they actually can help you find a purpose anchor. So like I said, it's a double edged sword. But ultimately, whether they mean to or not, our family tries to produce a version of purpose they either think is best for us or some of it has to do with their own regrets of not becoming what they wanted to be. So they try to hand that down to the next generation. And I think we have to be very thoughtful and careful about deciding if we're doing things to make other people happy or if they truly fill us up on the inside.
- [45:26]
Christine Benz
So I wanted to ask about, relatedly, purpose and privilege. To me, it seems like potentially this is the domain of people who are well off. As I was reading your book, Jordan, I was mentally referencing a section of Michelle Obama's book where she was grappling with, I think, some purpose questions in her work as an attorney and kind of voicing these to her mother. And her mother was kind of like, what are you even talking about? Because she had kind of hit the pinnacle of her career and her mother didn't understand what was lacking. So can you talk about that, how privilege fits in here or doesn't? It seems like you think it does.
- [46:03]
Jordan Grummet
I think it doesn't. And so let's first look at common sense. There are people like Mother Teresa and Gandhi who never had much stuff but lived very purposeful lives. And we also know that there are many happy people who live purposeful lives in very, very poor countries. But here is my explanation of why. And I get this all the time. People say, look, you're a doctor. Not only you're a doctor, but you became financially independent. So it makes sense that you're thinking about purpose. But look at me, I'm 22 years old. I just got out of college. College. I couldn't find a job doing what I wanted to do. And so I'm doing something I don't want to do and I'm just making enough money to put food on the table. Here would be my argument to people like this. We concentrate on money as an important tool when it comes to being able to pursue purpose. But we make the mistake of thinking it's our only tool. The truth of the matter is we have lots of other things besides money that we can use as tools to pursue purpose. So what are some of those things? Well, we have our age, we have our energy, we have our communities, we have our skills, we have our friendships, we have our passions. Those are also tools in our toolkit. And if we're thoughtful about it, we can Use some of those tools to start building a life of purpose now, whether we have money or not. So let's go to that person who's working eight to six Monday through Friday. They're 22 years old. They have some tools that I don't have. They have their youth and they have their energy. At 22, you probably don't have a mortgage, you probably don't have children yet. So you might have the time and energy on Sunday when you're not working to spend three hours doing something you're passionate about, something really purposeful that maybe makes some money, something like a side hustle. So let's say you do this for six months if you're lucky, and you make a little bit of money doing this purposeful thing. That might give you some margin. Maybe the 8 to 6 becomes a 9 to 5. Maybe you work Monday through Thursday instead of Monday through Friday. Friday. Either way, you've spent three hours more doing something purposeful a week and it's giving you some margin to do a little bit less of what you loathe. Let's look at the other side. Let's say you work for six months at some kind of side hustle, something really purposeful and you don't make any extra money. Well, it's true you didn't make any money, but you did add in three hours of purposeful activity to your week every week. And so I talked about these tools. And the tools, as I said, are not only money, but your relationships, your passions, your youth, your energy. There's tons of them, but they're also levers. And we can use the tools and levers together. So what are the levers? The levers are the joy of addition. We can add in purposeful activity into our life. The art of subtraction. We can subtract out things we don't like, or if all else fails, substitution. So if we don't like our job, maybe we stay at the same company, but work for a different boss. Maybe we work for the same boss but take on a different position. Maybe we go from one company to the next company and we do the same things, but it's a better company. That's substitution. So if you look at your tools and you look at these levers, you can start building a life of purpose regardless of where you are economically. And I think we have to be really clear about this. It's action based purposes, which means you have to take action, you have to build this life. And so the question is, what tools and levers do you have available for you. So you could be that guy working 8 to 6. You're 22 years old and you don't even know what purpose looks like. So you can't find a side. Hustle, hustle. But maybe you live three miles away from your parents and you can stop renting apartment and live with your parents for free. And you've created some economic margin there, and maybe that allows you to work a little bit less at work. So instead of 8 to 6, you're now working 9 to 5. You've used the art of subtraction to get rid of a few hours every week of something you didn't want. And so you're moving forward, you're improving. And that's kind of the calculus wherever you are financially, as you move forward in life, you want to keep on doing that process over and over again using those levers, the joy of addition, the art of subtraction, substitution. Using those tools to basically fill your day with as many things you love and as few things you loathe. And as you get farther and farther, you want to get better and better at this.
- [50:10]
Christine Benz
Okay, so we've largely been talking about people who are working, but I'd like to talk about the retirement period. It seems like a particularly rich period to think about exploring some of these small P purposes that may maybe I've had to back burner as I've been working on other things or have chosen to back burner. So can you talk about retirement as a life stage and why it may really lend itself quite well to the pursuit of some of these small P purposes?
- [50:42]
Jordan Grummet
Well, here's the thing about it. We are very, very busy when we're building our financial life through career. And so we're building our career, we're very busy. We don't have nearly as much time available to do things, things that don't serve that career. And so while I do believe during our career we should really be building a life of purpose, it gets even magnified when you retire. And first and foremost, one of the reasons it's magnified is a lot of people find a sense of purpose in work and they're ready to stop and they don't want to do it anymore. But once they stop, they find that they have a purpose vacuum and don't know what to do with themselves. But the other thing is we just have enough energy and now ability and time available to start really thinking about what feels purposeful. And usually by the time you hit retirement, you're also, sadly to say, closer to Death, Right? So you worry less about the stuff when you're 22, but when you're 62 or 72, you realize that time is even more finite. So retirement is a great time to think about little P Purpose because we really want to feel intentional and purposeful in whatever amount of time we have left. We have these time slots in our life these days, these months, these weeks, and these years, and they're passing no matter what we want to take advantage of. We have more open space in these time slots now that we're retired to really do these things that are important to us. And the joy of this is it doesn't have to be something big. It can be reading, it can be walking. Some of it can be bigger things like volunteering or writing that book you really wanted to write. The truth is, there are no rules except that you have to enjoy the process of what you're doing. You have to really go more for little P purpose than big purpose, because if you get too stuck on the goals, it's going to feel like another job.
- [52:25]
Christine Benz
So you previously referenced, Jordan, the connection between small P purpose and legacy. Can you talk about that? That seems like especially for people who are embarking on retirement, the idea of legacy becomes even more important, I think.
- [52:41]
Jordan Grummet
And this is the thing that actually people the biggest argument of people against my ideas about little P purpose and big P purpose. People say, well, I'm going to go after big P purpose because I want impact and legacy. And if I'm just doing little P purpose, that's kind of hedonism and selfish and won't change the world. So here's my argument for that and why I think little P purpose actually changes the world more. I guess the best way I could talk about this is to talk about my maternal grandfather. My maternal grandfather died in the 1960s. I never met him, but he had a joy in life, and that was math. His little P purpose was math. And because that was his version of purpose, he became an accountant. And back in the 1950s, when my mom was a little girl, she would sit on his lap and he would pull out his spreadsheets and fill in the boxes and explain to worker what he was doing. And this was very joyful for him. And so my mom, being a little kid, did what little kids did. She tried on that identity and decided that she loved math, too. So math became her little P purpose and she became an accountant just like him. And when I was a little boy, I had a learning disability. I had a lot of trouble reading in Fact, when everyone in my school was learning how to read, I was basically coloring and coloring books and all would have been lost. I would have thought myself completely stupid, except for the fact that I was really good at math. In fact, I was top of my class at math because, like my mom, I had this version of purpose. Little P. Purpose. Math was exciting to me, and so I knew I must be okay. And so I eventually overcame this learning disability. I became a doctor, which is a highly mathematical field. And at the beginning of my career, I was seeing a patient in the hospital who had been admitted over and over again for dehydration. And I recognized a mathematical connection between his lab tests and. We diagnosed him with a disease which was bringing him to death's doorstep, but was easily treatable with the right medication. He stopped getting dehydrated. He stopped. Stopped coming into the hospital. And he was a rabbi at a local synagogue. And he helped homeless people, runaways. He helped them get social services if they're old enough. He helped them get jobs. And so I can connect this version of little P. Purpose in my maternal grandfather 60 years ago, hundreds of miles away. There's a direct connection between that and some homeless kid who's getting help in my neighborhood all this time later. And so I say, it's like a stone dropped in the ocean. My maternal grandfather's version of little P. Purpose caused a little displacement of water. And over the years, that displacement, that small wave, added to other small waves to become mighty at times and then dissipated to become incredibly small at other times. Times. But that wave is still bouncing up on oceans and sandy beaches all these decades later and changing people's lives. And so I truly believe if you live a life of little P. Purpose, it will connect you to other people and you will change the world. People might not remember your name, you might not be in the history books, but that doesn't mean that what you did didn't impact people.
- [55:53]
Christine Benz
Well, Jordan, that seems like a lovely place to end. We so appreciate you taking time out of your schedule to be with us to discuss the book. Congratulations on it. It's terrific food for thought. Thank you so much.
- [56:04]
Jordan Grummet
Thank you so much for having me. It's been a blast.
- [56:12]
Christine Benz
Thank you for joining us on the Lawn View. If you could please take a moment to subscribe to and rate the podcast on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts, you can follow me on social media, hristinebenz on X or ristinebenz on LinkedIn. George Cassidy is our engineer for the podcast and Carrie Gretchik produces the Show Notes each week. Finally, we'd love to get your feedback. If you have a comment, comment or a guest idea, please email us@thelongvieworningstar.com until next time. Thanks for joining us.
- [56:50]
Jackson Financial Representative
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