Discover Your ‘Sparketype’ and Meet Your True Self – Jonathan Fields : 872

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey, formerly Bulletproof Radio.

A state of high performance.

For 10 years across a thousand episodes and a quarter billion listens. My podcast has elevated what you knew about the capabilities of your mind and body. And because we're at the 10 year anniversary, I'm evolving Bulletproof Radio even further in my plan to upgrade humanity. And I'm evolving myself as well. I invite you to expand your knowledge, explore your performance, and embrace your possibility. With the Human Upgrade, you'll meet bright thinkers and radical doers who push the boundaries of science, technology, personal development, and human performance in every way imaginable. Every guest you listen to, every topic you learn about, every new idea you discover on this podcast is there to move you forward. And join me on this next evolution to upgrade your mind, body and life. And be sure that you're subscribed to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey on your favorite podcast platform so you hear every single episode. My commitment to you is that the time you spend with me on the Human Upgrade will always return more value to you than you spent on it. Today we have our live studio audience from the Upgrade collective, which has a lot of new members after the biohacking conference. Welcome new guys. It's super fun to be in the live audience and I think we're gonna have some time at the end of the show for you to ask some questions of today's guest. And it's really relevant because he's been on the show quite a while back and he came out with a new book called Sparked. Discover your unique imprint for work that makes you come alive. And if you've listened to me for a while, you've heard me talk about being an entrepreneur, you know that I tell you, don't spend time on stuff that sucks your energy. And I learned that from Dan Sullivan, one of our village elders who's been on the show, I think twice now, and a guy I really admire who's helped me on some of my entrepreneurial learning. Well, this goes deeper than that kind of work. And it's carefully curated book with even a quiz that tells you what's actually going to make you come alive. Because guess what, if you get paid to do some things to come alive, your outcome at the end of the day is going to be a lot better. So, with no further ado, our guest is Jonathan Fields, who is the author of not just this new book, Sparked, but also host of the Good Life Project podcast, which has done exceptionally well. Jonathan, welcome back to the show.

So it's good to be hanging out with you. Thanks for having me.

Why this topic now?

Man, I started into this topic two decades ago. The fact that the last two years have dropped literally the entire world into the biggest existential questioning in generations is not something that I saw coming. But we are in that place. Like, as we sit here, you know, depending on the research that you look at, anywhere from 25 to 50% of people are either have quit their jobs or in the process of quitting or seriously considering it. And while the current circumstance has certainly played a role in why people are doing that, you know, the level of pervasive systemic discontent is nothing new. You know, the level of misalignment between how we invest most of our waking hours and the things that truly nourish us has been there for a really long time. So this is a moment where I think it's all bubbling up to the surface right now and people are really reexamining. So many of us made a bargain in our late teens or early twenties when we stepped into our, quote, working life. And we're looking at that bargain now and saying, you know, okay, so that got me here. But is the way that my work is making me feel, is that the bargain that I want to keep going for the next 10, 20, 30, 40 years? And a lot of people are saying no. You know, they may not know what the bargain is that they want to step into, but what they're getting clear on is the fact that the way their work has made them feel has satisfied certain needs for sure. Security, safety. But the more existential needs, which tend to really become more important when we get a little bit further in life, those have generally been set aside. Part of that bargain was maybe later. Later is here isn't the reason we.

Pay people is to do stuff they wouldn't do for free? Who don't have to pay people to eat. We don't have to pay them to have sex. Well, not usually anyway. There's a couple people here in the Upgrade collective where I'm not so sure, but other. Just kidding, guys, I love you all, but the whole point there is kind of. Isn't work supposed to be unpleasant at least some of the time?

What if I reflect that question back to you? Do you wake up in the morning and think, I am looking forward to this day sucking and I'm going to get paid for that? There was a point in your life, like, we know your story, where, yeah, that was the way that you lived.

And dude, I loved Putting auto parts and boxes in a 95 degree warehouse in the middle of summer in central California. It was great. Man.

Was that then not the most purpose filled thing that you'd ever done? But, you know, even, even that, you know, we can parse it. You know, if you even go to that stuff and you look at some of the work that's been done around purpose in the workplace, you know, there are some fascinating things where, you know, I remember a study where they were looking at actually the janitorial staff in hospitals, and some of them experienced their work as really emptying and like they had zero sense of purpose and it was a responsibility that they had to do. And then others actually felt a profound sense of purpose in the identical job description, the identical work. The difference was not that they were doing something different. The difference was an overlay of they felt that they were actually part of the care team. They felt like they weren't just cleaning a room, they were actually an essential member. They were part of something bigger that gave them a stronger sense of purpose. And that reframe allowed them to experience a nearly identical task and process experience as something very different. So, yeah, at the end of the day, part of it is seeing if we can actually align those tasks, processes, cultures with something that truly makes us come alive. But even then, when there are things that we don't want to do, because no job is all stuff that we want to do, even the best job in the world, you know, there's a certain ability to reframe the parts of it that we, that we're not doing with a different context that allows us to experience them differently.

When I look at the way people treat. Treat you when you're working in food service now, guys, I scooped ice cream for what, two years at Baskin Robbins? My very early 20s, trying to make ends meet for college.

I was a dishwasher. And then ice cream.

You were a dishwasher. Okay, so that's probably even worse, right? Because you're back at the house, people don't even see you, but people come in and they unload on you and it's just not pleasant. And people seeming like, oh, Dave, entrepreneur, always successful.

No.

And so having lived through that, there was no purpose in that job. I don't think they treated me very well. And I'm sure I didn't treat them very well either, because a lot of times you don't have the maturity at that age. But the reality is that I look at where I am now. We've got the upgrade Cafe In Victoria and. And in Santa Monica. The one in Santa Monica has been open for almost eight years. We have people been there the whole time. And there is purpose in that job. I do everything we can to show why it matters, but the customers also do it, too. And given that we have a huge shortage of people doing what you would typically call grunt work, like washing dishes, scooping ice cream, driving trucks, stuff that actually should be getting gratitude all the time and doesn't. Is it a lack of gratitude that sucks the life out of the jobs, or is it just that no one's willing to do them?

You know, it's probably somewhere. It's probably a yes and and not an either or with something like that. And there are probably other factors as well, you know, that go into it. But, you know, I think also especially now, because two years ago we didn't have the same problem. And I think a lot of it really has to do with we are in this very, very altered state right now where people are just deeply reexamining every part of their lives in a way that we haven't before. And there's a willingness and an unwillingness to step into certain decisions, certain relationships, certain investment of energy that's just changed. People are really. They're asking different questions. And that's going to take, you know, there's a bunch of disruption and some reshaping of the landscape of business and work and careers.

It is going to require reshaping. And I want to ask you this because your Good Life Project work that you've done for what, 700 episodes, we've interviewed some similar people. You've done a lot of personal development. People haven't, but Gretchen Rubin, James Nestor, and Bishop Michael Curry are examples. Part of me feels that we're kind of at a. An energetic point in society. You know, humans are.

Are.

We're both individuals, but we're also part of a complex organism that can shift. Like, you know, a beehive or a herd of sheep or whatever. You know, there's individuals, but the. The herd goes somewhere to eat. For some reason. I'm getting a pretty strong sense that, that we're at a big inflection point. We're going to go in, you know, one of a couple different ways. And part of that inflection point is people reassessing their career and saying, I got to do something that matters, or at least something that doesn't suck the life out of me. Do you feel like this is a societal movement? Is this caused by sunspots or caused by bad algorithms banning stuff from YouTube or, like, what. What's behind it all?

You know, I think there are a couple things. I think one thing is that, you know, so if you look at an individual level, what are the things that normally make somebody make a profound change in behavior that is not just, you know, you know, bj Fox and someone we both know. It's not just a dot change, but it's either a span change or a lifetime change. Like, this is really big and different on the individual level. It's rare that somebody makes a really big, profound change without some sort of big, profound disruption dropping into their lives that has them question their existence, their mortality, the way that they spend all their waking hours, the fundamental nature of how they interact with the world. That's what's happened at scale. You know, so we're in a moment where, like, that level of disruption is happening not just to individuals, but it is literally happening to hundreds of millions of people all simultaneously. Like, you know, it's sort of like the cosmic ground has been ripped from underneath us, and now we're all just kind of like floating here and waiting for it to return and then realizing, like, oh, it may not be coming back so fast. So how do I want to be in this place? And then when it comes back, do I want to keep feeling the way I felt for the last 10, 15, 20 years? And that happens on an individual basis. The classic midlife crisis is a crisis of meaning. Not a crisis of money or power or sex or love. It is a crisis of meaning. We're all dropped into that now at scale, in a level that we have not seen in our lifetimes. And my sense is that you add that to a level of profound discontent and lack of satisfaction that has been brewing underneath the surface for three generations now. And a change in the assumptions about what people want and expect out of the way that they show up and devote themselves. It's all kind of mixed into this soup of reexamining and reimagining that we haven't seen before. And that's why I think you've got so many people quitting jobs, often without something else lined up to go to, which would have been unheard of 10 years ago. And you've got a whole bunch of other people also who were working probably more sustenance jobs, like what you were talking about earlier, who are also choosing to kind of say, let me reexamine this place. Literally, at every end of the spectrum, this is happening. And like I said, I was in New York City for 9, 11. And there was a profound shaking in the year surrounding that, but it was much more localized and it wasn't at the level that we're seeing now. And there was a local reexamining and there were pockets of it. But this is something that's much bigger.

It is a big societal shift. It's multi generational. And what I find impressive is that you've had about half a million people now use your tool called Sparkotype, that's part of the book, to figure out what they want to do. Because it's a little bit scary if you're saying, oh, I've been a nurse for 10 years and I'm a caretaker, which I think is one of the archetypes or the Sparkotypes that you have in there, or it's probably a slightly different word from that. I didn't.

Yeah, nurturer.

Nurturer. Thank you.

Yeah.

But they're saying, okay, I'm not doing that job anymore. Because even though there's an alleged shortage of nurses, will fire all the ones who don't, you know, take a treatment that they don't want to protect other people, which is a violation of the medical ethics course they had to take to get their license to be nurses. But I won't rant about that, just that there are literally a million nurturers looking for work right now. Like it's, it's a once in a lifetime change for actually, you could do this anytime individually, but as an employer or as someone who's thinking of starting something, there's more people, good people who think for themselves available right now than you could ever hire ever, as long as you actually can match up what you ask them to do with what they ought to be doing. So what have you learned from half a million people?

Yeah, and as we have this conversation, it's probably closing in on closer to 600,000 people now, probably about over 30 million data points from all that. So we got some really fascinating, both quantitative and qualitative intel from this over the last four years or so. One is that we all do have this unique imprint for work that makes us come alive. And let me be more precise with the language too, because coming alive is a really nebulous phrase. Right. So when I talk about that, I'm talking about the confluence of five different states, each of them well researched and critical to human flourishing. One of them is meaningfulness, the feeling that what we're doing actually matters and that in doing so, we matter. The second one is access to flow States, which I know you've talked about a lot and had different guests on covering that. The third one is excitement, enthusiasm. The org world calls this engagement. I like to use human words. So it's like you wake up in the morning and even if it's really hard and it's a lot of work, you're actually excited to do it and it energizes you. The fourth is what I'd call expressed potential or the feeling that you're not stifling anything, that all of you is being brought to the task, that there's no sense of repression happening. And the fifth one is purpose. And that operates on two levels. One is a more immediate sense of purpose. You're working towards something that you're clear about and it matters to you. But then more broadly, purpose in life that you've kind of had this feeling like you're doing the thing that you're here to do. So when I say we all have an impulse for work that makes us come alive, I'm talking about we have this thing inside of us that compels us to invest effort in a way that gives us those five feelings. One of the things that we've learned actually is that these impulses are real. Now in some preliminary data in a secondary study, a phase two study that we're working on, I'll share, we've got about a 93% accuracy rate reported back to us with the assessment that we developed in 2018. But also we've got really fascinating correlation data coming out of it. So those five states, we basically asked people, how often do you feel like you're doing the work of your sparkotype in your work on a day to day basis. And we've seen really strong correlations. The more people say they're doing that work, the more likely they are to tell you that they have a feeling of profound meaningfulness and drop into flow. All those five things, if you're interested in the number side of it, the R values of the correlation coefficients with those are anywhere from 0.5 to 0.8. So it's strong correlations. We can't make claims about causation yet. That'll be a down the road project over the next couple of years. One of the things that we know is that actually with a big data set that we are really seeing a powerful correlation between doing this work, following this impulse, this red thread that exists inside all of us. And I see all of these five critical states for human flourishing, the ones that we aspire to, the ones that make us feel like that, feel good. And then the follow on effect of that, which I'm fascinated by and is where there's a stronger tie into your work over the last decade, is when we hit those states. What does that actually mean? What's the tumble on effect between feeling of meaningfulness and purpose and inflammation and disease risk and anxiety and depression and your physiological states. And in addition, that's a way down the road thing, but I'm excited to sort of push it there over the next five, 10 years and see that.

I'm certain that having an inflamed brain means you're not making as much electricity in your brain. And that's just how it works. Wrote a whole big book about that topic. So could you not be showing up in your life the way you want or finding your purpose just because you didn't have enough electricity to do it? I see that at 40 years of Zen all the time we feed them the right stuff, they can actually raise voltage in the brain. It's trainable. So I think I don't have any doubts about that because I've already seen enough evidence, even though you don't need double blind clinical trials for that. But what I'd love to know is, and by the way guys, Sparketype S P A r k e type.com is the, the survey that lets you figure out what are the things that give you spark. And my answer there was terrorist disrupt. No, no, sorry, that's not one of the categories. My answer was a maker scientist. What I want to know because all the members of the Upgrade collective who are in our live audience, they're all doing the test right now. And it looks like we have Sage, maven, Maker scientist, Nurturer. What are the other possible answers that come out of. Looks like we have Sage, maven, Maker scientist, nurturer. What are the other possible answers that come out of this?

Yeah, so there are 10 possible answers. Maker, maven scientist, essentialist. And the impulse for the essentialist is effectively to create order out of chaos, clarity, utility. What we see though is when functioning at the highest level, they actually experience that not just as utility, but as beauty, as there's elegance that they'll associate with the outcomes. We have the performer, which is about animating, enlivening, interactions, moment or experiences. We have the. I think you referenced the Sage already, which is all about awakening insights about elimination. We've got the warrior, which is gathering, organizing, leading, and very often protecting. There's a very fierce energy to that state. And while we Talk about leading as a skill. Very often there's also an underlying impulse that some people have to do this from the youngest age. We've got the advocate. Um, the advocate is all about championing. It's shining the light on ideas, ideals, individuals, communities. Brutally hard impulse to stifle. And when it does, the release valve on that looks really big. The nurturer you referenced, the fundamental impulse there is lifting people up. It's elevation, giving care and taking care. Often when others either can't or won't. It's a deeply empathic impulse. Very often one of the triggers or the things that trips up that person is they don't take care of themselves because they can't conceive of them turning this impulse on themselves when so many other people know it.

Oh, man, that's a big statement right there. I'm a member of Jack Canfield's group called the Transformational Leadership Council. Are you a member?

I'm not, but I know what it is.

You're familiar with it. So this is a group of largely nurturers who give enormously. Many leaders in personal development, and it was a big honor to be invited in. But the reason he put it together is that no one ever, like, they don't take care of themselves, and they never take time for it. And even doctors get this caregiver fatigue. And sometimes if you have someone with Alzheimer's in the family, caregiver fatigue is an issue, but they were getting it. So Jack put the thing together 20 years ago. Like, get together twice a year and just take care of each other. And it's actually really fun. And it's been a path for me to meet somebody. Amazing elders and just a lot of wisdom. But the impetus for that is to solve the problem you just identified. In society, though we don't really recognize that too much.

Yeah. And each one of these different impulses has a readily identifiable set of tendencies, behaviors, and preferences that wrap around it. Thus, it forms an archetype, which are the things that I call sparketypes. And they also have dark. They have triggers. Similarly, they have warning signs. They have things which are unique to each one of them. So you're the maker scientist, for example.

Well, it's kind of accurate, man. I'm reading it. I did it in preparation for the interview. It says, interestingly, your creations may have a tremendous impact on others. You enjoy this. It's a beautiful byproduct that's essential if you want to turn making into your living. But when you're really honest, it's not the essential reason you do it. The fact that it moves people and the depth of the effect is more amazing, meaningful measuring stick of capabilities than why you're here. So I'm like, oh, that makes sense. And of course, when you're dealing with financially motivated investor types, they don't get it. And like, oh, you'll make a decision to make the most money. I'm like, no, my standards matter way more than whatever dollars might be involved. And it does for real makers who, when you nailed that. It really does. It really does. If you know that about yourself, create alignment. But if you don't know it about yourself and you think, oh, I was taught in business school, you know, to take the money and, you know, basically turn everything into Twinkies instead of quality food, well, then you're going to make decisions that don't make any sense to you because you have that pain, right?

Yeah. And it's also, you know, like that point that you just brought up is something that is generally not polite to admit in, you know, like in society. What?

That investors are typically douchebags or some other one.

Not that point. And I know some very fine investors.

Just kidding. Half my friends are investors, man. And by the way, if they were offended, that they're probably not really my friend.

No, the fact that actually the thing that you make, that the byproduct of that may have profound effect. It may lead to tremendous business and industry and revenue and may have a huge effect on other individuals. Um, but at the end of the day, you think that's cool. You love that. You know, it's really good. And it may be the thing that allows you to actually earn a living doing it, but it's, it's not why you do it. You know, you do it because the process of creation, you know, like the generative process itself, is its own reward. You know, the two. So your wiring the maker, scientist are also two impulses that are very heavily process fulfilled. So these alternatives live on a spectrum between being process fulfilled and service fulfilled. The maker and the scientist are very heavily on the process side of things. So you can get lost in process. You can completely live there and create amazing things. The scientist impulse is about figuring things out, deconstructing problem solving. You can solve profound problems that may affect society and you think that's amazing and you love that it benefits other people and it may allow you to make a very nice living. But still, it's not why you do it. It's like the classic Richard Feynman response When he was awarded the Nobel Prize, he's like, prize means nothing to me. It was the kick in figuring the thing out.

Yeah, it's not about the accolades for real creators. It never has. Okay, I love it that you dialed in on that. But I'm really curious because there's also an Anti Sparketype and for me, the Anti Sparkotype was the advocate, which I'm assuming means I'll just never be woke enough or woke at all as the case may be. What is an Anti Sparketype?

Yeah, sort of the opposite end of the spectrum. We actually, we'd been gathering about 90% of the data to figure that out. And then towards the end of this year we came out with the 2.0 version of the assessment where we expanded the algorithm to be able to calculate effectively what is the work that empties you out. That's the heaviest lift that requires the greatest amount of recovery and very likely the greatest extrinsic motivation to get you to do it. That doesn't mean that you don't have to do it. It doesn't mean it's not part of your job description. And it also doesn't mean that you may have a strong value association with that work being important to you on a values level. And because of that you still are going to say yes to doing it. But what it means is that when you do it, there is something about the way that you're wired that is going to very likely leave you emptier than other people who may actually be called to do that work. And it may be incredibly nourishing for them. So it's interesting when people get either the advocate or the nurturer as their anti Sparkotype because one, when they get the nurturer, very often they'll say, does that just mean I'm an awful person, I just don't care about anybody. And of course not. But what it tells you is that when you step into that place of lifting others up, of taking care of them, it may take a lot more out of you than it than it takes out of somebody else. So you need to be aware of that. And also that comes with a certain level of responsibility for self care and also a sense of forgiveness to basically say to yourself, it's not that I'm a bad person, there's something inside of me that just makes this harder. And with the advocate the question often comes up, does that let me off the hook? Do I now not have to speak up about anything? The answer again is no, because most people actually have a strongly held value around actually quote, doing the right thing, like standing up, being an ally, all these different situations. It just tells you that it's going to come a lot less naturally for you, but it doesn't let you off the hook. You're going to have to take care of yourself differently in doing it.

Is there any bias in the answers based on sex, based on race, geography, height? What other patterns have you seen? Politically incorrect question. Because we're all supposed to be identical, but we're not.

Yeah, there may well be. And in fact, that's sort of like the next wave of work that we're going to be doing. So this all has happened astonishingly quickly. We worked on the original version of the assessment for about a year, came out of beta at the end of 2018. In the blink of an eye, hundreds of thousands of people were pouring through this assessment. And now, so now we've got this giant data set, but we haven't added in sort of like classic deeper level demographic stuff. And so what we're looking at doing now is like, okay, so can we actually now we probably have to split off or duplicate what we have publicly and then add in a bunch of much more nuanced questions and also probably look at, at this point doing more of a representative sample version of this, because, yeah, I mean, anytime that you have something where like you've got pretty big data coming in really, really quickly, you're always going to have some level of bias in that data, you know. So we're now looking at the next wave and saying we've gotten some really strong general things that we can pull out of this. But now let's see if we can actually tease out, like, are these are the answers different for different types of people from different walks of life and all sort of like different ways, measures, and I'm actually pretty excited for that next wave. It'll probably be the next couple of years before we around it.

Yeah, it's fun. Even the IQ test, it turns out, has a bias that's in it. Right? So if, if you didn't grow up in a White House, you might score with a lower IQ because you didn't know some of the things they assumed, you know, because of the people who wrote it, you know, whatever, 70 years ago. So you don't. And then your, your data set here is whoever clicked on it, whoever is attracted to your book. So you'd have to do some randomness. I get that.

Yeah, totally. Even the prevalence data, which we actually share in an appendix at the end of the book, we break down the prevalence of all 10 primary types, all 10 shadow types and all 91. I think it is pairings, but you got to imagine, if this is publicly available, who's most likely to actually take this assessment? Well, one of the types is the maven, which is all about knowledge acquisition. So you got to imagine there's some bias that skews towards that person in the prevalence numbers in the data. Interestingly though, it may be less than it appears on the surface because we've also done a bunch of work with teams and organizations now with this, where anywhere from seven to four or 500 people take it not because they want to, because they're curious, but because it's mandatory pre work for an engagement.

What if it puts out their spark to take surveys?

What if it.

Sorry, just messing with you.

Then they're going to be like, then the maven is probably their anti spark at that point.

I like your sense of humor, Jonathan. Always have that. That's funny. What's your score?

I'm the same as you on the top end, actually. I'm a maker scientist. Um, okay, I am. I wake up in the morning and my entire life I'm like, what can I create? And you know, the scientist is always sort of advising that, like whenever I knock up against something and I'm stuck, it's sort of like, let me go into figure it out mode. The opposite end of the spectrum for me is essentialist. That is a work that as, you know, like an entrepreneur a couple times over, like you, I love when that work is done. I love when we have systems and processes that work and humor. I love order and clarity with everything that I'm doing. And I want nothing to do with like actually having to be the person who does that work. I've gotten good at it because in the early days of any endeavor, you gotta do it. It's just what you do. So I've developed the skill of being good at that kind of work and that makes it a little bit better. You know, competence helps offset the feeling of emptying that sometimes you get from doing that work, but it doesn't completely counter it, it just makes it a little bit better. And the minute I'm resourced in any endeavor where I can actually sort of have that work done by somebody else who is literally wakes up in the morning and wants to do that work, I'll do it. In fact, the producer for the Good Life Project podcast is an essentialist. We have a massive spreadsheet with 40 episodes in production at any given time, probably similar to you. And. And I look at it, and I'm like, thank God this exists. And then my next impulse is, thank God I didn't have to create this.

Yep, I'm with you there. Thanks, Darcy, for having a spreadsheet I would dream in PowerPoint, not Excel, let's just put it that way. And I don't do any of my own calendaring because it takes my spark out, literally. My wife will be like, are you available? Then I'm like, why would you ask me that? I don't know. Look at my calendar. I don't manage the damn thing. I just do what's on it because it's kryptonite, right? And I learned that about myself the hard way. Right? I don't do stuff that takes my energy. I don't care what it is. Like, I will give everything that I own to someone else to do the things that take my energy, because my energy is the most precious thing. And when I set up my life that way, I sure can do a lot more. And it turns out there's other people who have these other things. The other sparketypes, they actually like doing the stuff that. That literally makes me weak. And that's such a big learning for everyone out there. Even if you're saying, I can't afford to pay anyone to do anything. There's people who love doing the stuff you hate. Like, there are people who clean because they like to clean. Like, what the heck?

I'll give you a funny example. I mean, there are people who hate being makers. So three years ago, at a time where I was hugely busy and I had no business doing it, I took a month off of work and I vanished out. And I lived on top of this sort of, like, partially renovated roadhouse in rural Pennsylvania. And I was working, basically doing manual labor 18 hours a day and sleeping on top of this thing with, like, a short little break. 13 hours, not 18 hours a day. And. And I was the happiest person that I could ever be. I. I paid for the privilege of doing that. I wasn't doing anything benevolent. I wasn't doing anything good for society. I was working with a luthier, a guitar builder, to work side by side with him for a month to teach me how to build a guitar. I. I paid thousands of dollars to spend probably five times more hours than it would have taken someone who's competent at making this instrument to create an instrument that was nowhere near the quality of what I could have Just like bought off the shelf for a fraction of the price, you know? And so literally there's somebody else who was doing this identical job five times better than me and getting paid to do it. And here I am living on the top of a roadhouse in rural Pennsylvania, paying thousands of dollars for the privilege of to do the exact same thing purely for the way that it made me feel.

Wow, so you're willing to just go for the experience there, which is really cool. I'm asking around with all of our live studio audience to see if we have any primary advocates. What was your anti like, your anti Sparketype.

Oh, for me? Yeah. Noah's essentialist.

Oh, that's right. You mentioned essentials. Okay, so yours was essentialist. We had a few essentialists, but I was looking to see if we had any primary advocates floating around. So it's interesting because I've gotten to know some of the people in the audience and we've chatted a few times. So I kind of have a sense for you. But it really does map quite well. It's a neat framework and it's a new one. And they've got enough data that I think it's quite real. And I want to go, and we're talking about what's quite real. Let's assume that when someone takes us, they go, oh my God, I am in a career that my parents told me I should be in and it's totally wrong for me. What do they do if you're in just the wrong career and you take the Sparkotype test and suddenly you realize, am I just screwed? It can be kind of not a happy place.

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If you're in just the wrong career and you take the Sparketype test and suddenly you realize am I just screwed?

And that happens with a fair level of frequency. So much so that actually the very beginning of the book, before I even get into the book, there's literally a five sentence personal note for me that says you may learn something that may ring as really true to you, but then may immediately make you feel like, but I'm not doing that in a really big way. And you may have this impulse to just blow everything up and start over. Please don't do that. You know, if you're 19 years old and the stakes are low and there's not a whole lot riding on it, sure, whatever, maybe that's okay. But for the average person who's further into life and you got responsibilities and you know, it's not just your decision, it's not your life and it's going to be really, really painful. The good news is that there's actually a tremendous amount that you can do to reimagine what you're doing. There's a bunch of research in what folks in positive psych and social sciences call job crafting, which essentially says what if you actually took the same job with the same on paper job description. But once you understood something that is more important about what you need and don't need, you look at that identical job and you look for opportunities to do more of the things you already do that give you that feeling of coming live. You look for new things that you're not even doing, but they are available to you, even if it means stepping outside of the confines of the job description for which you were hired. Maybe there's another project or another team that's adjacent to you and there's something where you could actually help out, or maybe your own team, but you've never actually said I can do this or I want to do this. Once people actually understand what it is that will give them the feeling that they want, you're profoundly differently equipped to start seeing opportunities to do more of it and to do less of the emptying side. There's data on this that shows that you actually can make really big changes very often enough so that what appears on paper to be the same thing is experienced in a really different way. And it makes you feel very differently. And even if you don't get all the way there, you know, you can almost always make it a whole lot better. And if you have, for example, a value around financial security, like let's say I have a really strong health value around supporting myself and my family, maybe I've extended family, cousins, parents, grandparents that are relying on me and that's really important to me. So I'm not just going to blow things up, you know, if I can honor that value, but then take this thing which feels really emptying and make it first a whole lot better. So now it's just kind of like fine. Or maybe you've been like, this is actually half decent. Like there are a decent amount of times where I feel like, yeah, like I feel alive and lost in flow that transforms sort of like the overall experience because now you get to honor a non negotiable value and you feel a whole lot better. And then you start to look outside the confines of the actual like J O B and say, okay, so what are the activities and the pursuits and the hobbies and the roles and the devotions that I can fold around this that will 100% give me that feeling and the blend of that experience, Very often honoring values, optimizing your central job and then building around it things which are truly steepening the expression of your sparketype. It gives most people almost everything that they need on the rare experience that somebody still gets to that place and they say, you know what? Still not there. You know, that becomes a moment where then you start to look out and say, okay, now does it actually make sense to take the nuclear career option now? Does it make sense to consider blowing it up? But when you do it from that standpoint and that state now you're doing it from a place of deeper self knowledge, of optimized well being and state of mind, of confidence, rather than from a place of emptiness, of futility, of victimhood, of. So when you step out and you actually look to create or find something that is much better aligned with that impulse and set of values for you, you do it in a very different state of being and state of mind. And the world tends to respond to you in a very different way. So it's a wholly different experience than if you just woke up one day and said, I'm tapping out, I'm just going to blow it all up and Then figure it out from here.

It seems like if you're one of those people who has been illegally and unethically fired for not giving up your biological autonom, that this might be a good, and it's totally free, a good test to take to see what your new career direction is. And I want to tell a little story. From very early in my career, I was probably 25 before I went to the company that made me briefly a multimillionaire. In my 20s, before I lost it all, I was in an IT department at a company called Threecom that was once a challenger with Cisco for computer networking. And I decided I was going to get a certification in project management. This is the land of spreadsheets and Gantt charts. And I wanted to do it because I sucked at it. And my algorithm was I should make sure that I'm not weak at anything. So I put all this effort and time got my boss to pay for a course. I never even finished the course. I couldn't even say awaken the classes for the course because it was such a kryptonite sort of thing to do. And that was maybe the first time in, you know, my, my mid-20s when I realized, you know what, maybe I just suck at this. And there was, it's not that I suck at it, it's that it, it's so much resistance. And half the resistance that, that we have is, is from like trauma. Like something bad happened to me once when I did that. So I have this sort of like, I'll procrastinate, I'll do something else and then others. It's because it's just not in your nature and it's not a trauma based thing. How do we sort out when we feel resistance because it's unnatural for us. Which I think is where you're going with a sparkotype versus I have resistance because, you know, someone was mean to me in seventh grade.

Yeah, that is such a good question. It's one that I've been trying to like tease out. And a couple thoughts come to mind. One, I don't think there's a clear and obvious answer that's right for everyone there because we're not all one homogenous being with the same level of trauma and the same history. So it's going to show up differently for all of us. I have a bit of an unusual litmus test for me, which is for me things tend to show up physiologically. I look to my physiology as a really important tool for discernment. And it's Largely about where I feel it in an odd way. So I'll try and rationalize things, I'll make lists of how do I actually feel about this? What is, what are all the pros and what are all the cons? And like how is this landing for me? And I'll literally ask myself, what is the fear that's coming up involved in this? Is there fear? And what are my coping strategies? So I'll try and really deconstruct it with a little bit of a homegrown CBT approach at the end of the day. Very often I'm tapping into how something makes me feel.

And.

But whether something is a fear response or not, or a trauma response or not, it's an interesting thing. We had had a friend of mine in the very early beta testing of the assessment where I could, you know, the data was coming in slow enough where I could actually see who was, who was taking it and how they were answering. I saw somebody answer and, and they came up as a performer. But this is somebody who I knew to be sort of like very detailed, operated, meticulous operations person in a startup and very behind the scenes, like very intentionally, not forward facing, but absolutely meticulous with systems process documentation. And actually this person came up with their lead sparketype, their primary as a performer. And I was like, huh, that feels weird to me. So I reached out to her, I was like, does something go wrong with the algorithm here? Like, do we actually need to, Because I want to deconstruct it. And she's like, no, actually that's been me my whole life, I've been hiding it. And part of the reason that she was hiding it was that there was also a lot of anxiety associated with it. And part of the reason that her forward facing role and skill set had become being massively detail oriented systems and processes was because it was a coping mechanism. Because it allowed her to organize, it allowed her to sort of like say, this is the one place where I know exactly how things are going to be in my life. But part of it was also a coping mechanism for a feeling of like persistently knowing she's not showing up as the person who she really is. So the answer is it's complicated. And that's actually a really fascinating question that I've been starting to deepen into with our team and say, how can we continue to work on the language and the prompts so that without then having to take these metrics and then sit down with a coach or consultant and just spend like conversationally Work through this, which I think is actually a really good idea. How can we keep improving on the language and the ideas that we're putting into the tool itself to try and tease these things out at a higher and higher level? So I'm sort of like right in the middle of this question right now.

I think you'll find something really valuable in what you said there. And this is for everybody listening, that idea that where in the body is it? That's one of the questions that I've asked countless numbers of times during 40 years of Zen when people are sorting out this sort of stuff instead of trauma versus core attribute, et cetera. And yeah, you feel it in your gut, it feels different. But if you're not trained or you didn't hear it here or read a book or do some yoga class or something where, especially if you're an engineer or process driven to. Oh, hold on. That one was in my gut or my perineum or in my throat. Those mean something like there's, there's data in that noise. I had no idea there was any data below the neck until I was about 30. So your answer there was a little. It was actually very finely nuanced. Well, you can tell because if it's trauma, your gut course inches up or your heart closes down or something. And it doesn't do that if it's going against your core nature.

Yeah, no, that, that's, for me, that's always been a huge sell. But like you said, it takes a certain level of, of awareness to get to that place.

It's. It's one of those things that, that's on your life path. And if you're at the beginning of your career and you hear this, well, this is important because one thing you, you can do is, is, you know, in my job where I realized I suck at project management, like, well, I didn't have to do that to be successful in that job. Right. So you can almost always tune your job. And it's one thing, you know, if you're washing dishes or scooping ice cream, well, your job is to scoop the damned ice cream. But there's nothing that says that I couldn't come up with a, you know, new process for organizing things so I could do less work because I did that all the time because I was bored. And it's in my nature to do that. Right. They didn't pay me for it, but at least I was less bored. Right? So unless you have a very defined role, you can usually, once you know your sparketype Say, I'm going to do more of that. And this weird thing happens. One of the people on my team with Upgrade Labs and with bulletproof media and all kind of came in with that situation. I'm like, well, find a way to do something that's more valuable. That's how you increase your compensation and your role in the company and all. And so within a year and a half of saying, well, figure out something that you like doing that adds a lot of value, you. She exceeded her wildest dreams in terms of comp. Right. And it's because it was something that came natural instead of because she worked hard and pushed and struggled. And so I would just say, look, if you're, you know, under. Under 25, under 30, and you're not sure about this, this is one of those really important things that you don't want to miss. If you're retiring and you spend a whole bunch of time doing a bunch of shit works, you have a lot of money, you also should do this. Those seem like the two most important times, am I right?

Yeah, no, for sure. I think it's sort of like in the early days when you're really trying to figure out, like, the early path. And then, yeah, so many people when they're thinking about the Encore career, you know, and they're like, okay, so now it's time to do something for me. But what is that? Like, what do I. I don't even know what it is that gives me the feeling I want to feel. So, yeah, you're spot on. I think those are the two windows where this becomes really important.

Let's bring Joanne on to ask a question from the Upgrade Collective. And while Chris Dials are up here, guys, if you're listening, the Upgrade Collective is my mentorship and membership group. We meet every week. You get tons of time with me with my coaching team, and it's quite affordable, given all the support. And you also get a full course on every class or in every book I've ever written. There's a class that I teach and thousands of people working together on answering questions and all that. So it's called our upgradecollective.com and Joanne, what do you have to ask?

Okay, thanks a lot, Dave. And thank you, Jonathan. This question is for Jonathan. Jonathan, I want to ask you about the current changes in society, which of course you're studying by more people setting up personal life projects, whether setting up a private business, centering on something they're passionate about, or setting up some kind of a different private personal life.

Project.

My question is this. Is this chance for personal fulfillment threatened by maybe a cabal or small private number of people that is possibly attempting to corral people into mundane work they want done for their greedy purposes? So, kind of a big question.

Yeah, it is. It's a very big question, and one that. I don't know. I don't know if I can actually give you an answer to that because it would probably require me to know something about a lot more and on a lot more systemic issues than I do. You know, like, I confess that my focus is sort of so narrowly focused right now on really working with these types and focusing more on just our ability to express these. Whether it's in our work, whether it's in something that we're starting that's more meaningful and. Or whether it has nothing to do with what we're getting paid to do. But. So whether there are forces outside of, you know, our own agency and our own immediate communities is something that I probably feel not well equipped to speak to because it's just not really the area of focus for me.

Thanks. I particularly am kind of interested in. Dr. Mercola has pointed out that one person has purchased 242,000 acres land, farming land in the US that person's very interested in GMOs. I guess I kind of. I mean, hope it never comes to the fact that we can't get some of the things we want, like good food and, you know, other healthy things.

Remember, can't is a weasel word. There's always a way you can always go to change the laws of physics or you could just take it back. And we're about to reach that point. If things continue where they are and throughout all of history. Usually there's pitchforks involved. So I'm hoping the people who own the land understand there are some lines you can't cross. They're right on the edge of those lines. Fortunately, I don't own any pitchforks. I live in Canada. We just have maple syrup up here. But I'm. I'm gravely concerned with the stuff you're talking about. And let me ask you this. What Sparkotype is most likely to lead a revolt.

So.

All.

They'Ll just do it differently?

That is a really good answer. Do you have concerns if the NSA and CIA didn't already have access to your full database, or at least they had access that you knew about, could you do bad things knowing people's sparketypes? Like punish them by giving them work? That's the opposite of what gives them energy. Trust me, Amazon's already thinking of this.

I have no idea. But could you do worse than we've already done to ourselves by the choices that we've made based largely on external expectation than our own impulses? Not so sure.

Got it. So I like it that all of us are capable of creating change. And so when you say, I can't do anything about it, there are lots of things you can do. You just were not programmed to think about it, which means do your sparketype, see how you would solve the problem and just recognize there's other people on the team with the same goal, like you said, who would solve it different, differently. So let's move on to a question from Deborah. Deborah, you had a question, right?

Hi. Thanks. I just took the quiz and I'm a performer sage, which works out great because I'm a biohacking coach for actors. So I guess that works out perfect.

There you go.

But I wanted to find out if. Does this have implications beyond just employment? Like, is it like the five love languages or something for compatibility, for personal stuff? And can you use it to get out of housework or doing the dishes because it doesn't work with your spark type?

Yeah, I don't know if you can use it sort of like to negotiate getting out of certain things, because it's just not my organic impulse. But does it have larger implications beyond the domain of the thing you get paid to do? Yeah, very likely. We've had so many people come back to us and say, like, I took this. My romantic partner or my colleagues or my friends, we all took this. And there are two things that people tend to say which are really important far beyond the world of work. One is, I feel validated. And granted, no other human being can validate another human being, but what it is is effectively a tool that reflects back at you something which is a truth that exists beyond the facade of expectation. And then, in addition to that, a lot of folks feel. They feel seen. They feel seen for something that is not normally what they're seen for, for something that feels like a deeper truth to them. And they have language. They have language for that, both to explain themselves to themselves, but also to then talk to other people in their lives and say, this is me. Like, this is kind of who I am. This is a lot of the reason why I do what I do and why I am the way I am. And a lot of folks have shared with us that they've used that as jumping off points in a lot of personal relationships and conversations with Family. That has been really opening, where it opens a conversation to a level of understanding and mutuality that exists beyond the domain of work. So, yeah, I think you're spot on. That wasn't the original intention of doing the work, but what we're seeing as people run with the ideas and the learnings is that they are experimenting and seeing how it unfolds in all parts of life.

That was a cool question, Deborah. Thank you. I got to ask you, Jonathan, what's your love language?

It's the one that is Physical Touch. I think that's probably not the exact language, but it was.

I think that is it.

Is that the language?

Yeah. You want to hug? Basically, yeah.

Basically, yeah. Like, I could care less about gifts and. Or, like, words of appreciation, whatever that one is. It's like, nah, just give me a hug, hold my hand, give me a hug.

Not a. Not a stack of cash. Got it.

Exactly, yeah.

Kinesthetic is what Scott says it is. I'm gonna go with what Scott from Upgrade Collective says. I somehow remember mine being like physical touch, but who the heck knows? But it's. I'm trying to remember mine. It's acts of service and physical touch as well, if I remember. But I don't know which one was up front, but same thing, like, you know, gifts. Unless it's an active service gift. I just like, oh, thank you. It was really nice, but. So is there a mapping? The reason I'm asking, is there a mapping or would you. Would you predict a mapping between Love Language and Spark Attack? They're pretty different domains, but I bet there's commonalities.

I bet there is. I have no idea. But I've been asked. It's funny, I haven't been asked about love languages yet. I've been asked about most of the other major indexes, like strengths and enneagram, especially these days. And so we're kind of figuring out how could we actually explore the overlays? Because my gut tells me there probably are those overlays.

I think there are. Don from the Upgrade Collective just said his love language was no decaf, so I'm switching mine as well. Thanks, Don. That and Butter are my two love languages Tech. With all this physical touch. Now, Jonathan, this data set of 600,000, probably a million people soon, we have really helped them figure out, if not what's my purpose, but at least what are the areas to focus on that are going to give me enough energy that I'll just keep doing them, which is part of finding your purpose. Where do you See it going, where's the Sparketype ten years from now?

Yeah. I mean, it's funny because I never imagined we'd be here when I started this work. It's gained traction on a whole different level. It started out as a project, as so many things do. And I'm an entrepreneur, so I'm constantly running experiments and I never know which ones are going to gain traction. And that because of the response to it, we ended up splitting it into its own organization. Spark Endeavors. And then the goal now is to continue to develop more nuanced understandings and to continue to build tools that are helpful for people. So we started with the assessment. Three years later, we rolled out the 2.0 version of the assessment, which introduced the antisparkotype. Now there's a book which effectively takes a massive data set of more qualitative data through stories, use cases and applications that's been just building in my head for a really long time and like puts them all into one big thing that people can interact with. And now we're looking at what other tools can we build? What are the program can we build to help people both individually step into this space? And also organizations. There's a lot of interest in the context of leadership, engagement, learning and development. And my strong belief is that organizations now that don't in some way recognize and invest in not just maximizing shareholder value, but also developing the human beings that allow their shareholders to have value from the get go, they're going to lose out because I think a lot of people are going to want more from the things that they're showing up to do. And so I'd love to play a role in that. If we can create anything that is helpful and meaningful and then leverage the structure and the scaffolding and the logistics of organizations to help share ideas to me, that's a really interesting thing to be exploring over the next couple of years.

Wow. I think there's going to be some neat knowledge about humans that you end up unlocking here. Things that we didn't quite understand a lot like the love language. So I'm grateful that you're doing the work and that you're publishing it. And I was curious, so I asked the team while we were talking. We've got about 40, 45 people in the live audience, so I polled them and so far it looks like we've got Mavens is the dominant one with six. And then there's usually fours on stage and advisor and, you know, fewer. There's just one or none so do you find that, you know, if you go to a, you know, a football stadium in the audience, is it going to be evenly distributed across this or is that all warriors or. I'm trying to get a sense, like, do you form tribes around this or do you form teams that are highly, highly variable?

Yeah, in my mind you form teams that are highly variable because, you know, let's say you have a project, like almost any project is going to need a whole bunch of different types of, of things done, you know, so to the extent that you could actually align people or have people make choices that say yes to things where, you know, everyone's working not because there's some character stick being dangled in front of them or some fear that if they don't work, you know it's going to be bad, but they actually show up and doing the thing they want to do. You know, there's no project that just requires one thing to be done. Basically every project requires everything to be done. So the extent that we can have, you know, more complex, nuanced, diverse teams, I think we're all better for that. You know, and, and plus, you know, I mean, you know this from your own work. You know, if, if you're doing the thing that you wake up in the morning to do, the notion of classical motivation, it just, it goes away, you know, and like the age old question for leaders, how do I motivate people to show up as their best selves? You know, how do I move friction from the process? You know, you, you help them figure out what is the thing that they wake up in the morning that they feel like they can't not do simply because of the feeling it gives them. And the, the extent that you can align the work that they're doing with that, you know, you can't always do it 100%. We're always going to do some stuff that we don't want to be doing, but the closer you can get to that, it's not just good for them, you know, it's good for the outcome of the team and the project and the enterprise, at the end of the.

Day, I very much like that answer. And I think you've done some cool work to crack the code. And if I would have been able to go back in time to when I was 20 or 25 and understand this is different than follow your passion, this is actually way more scientific, but it's follow the stuff that's easy and feels good, which is different than your passion. Like you might be passionate about woodworking but suck at it. So you do that for fun, but it isn't what's easy for you. And so just that little bit of nuance on follow your passion is really important. I'm recording classes on all of the books that I've written for the Upgrade Collective and I just finished part of Game Changers where I do talk about following your passion. It's important to care about it, but this little nuance of removing friction by following you follow your passion, but you follow it via the mechanism, the Sparkotype. It's cool and I think it's really valuable. So guys, if you're anywhere at a point of transition or making a decision about what's next, where should you go using this? Not as a roadmap, but as a way to say if you go down that road, it's going to beat you up a lot less and there's probably multiple roads to get there. That's what this is for.

Yeah, it's a data point and hopefully it's a value data. It's not the only data point for sure. A lot of stuff goes into our decision making, but hopefully it adds some intelligence to the process. Nice.

Well, thank you for writing a book about it. The book is called Sparked and you can do the survey at Sparkatype. S-P-A-R-K-E-T-Y-P-E.com Jonathan, it's great to have you back on the show. It's been quite a while and we'll stay in touch now that I know that I'm a scientist maker and my anti anti one was Kale, so.

Well, thanks for having me, David. It's always fun.

A Human Upgrade, formerly Bulletproof Radio, was created and is hosted by Dave Asprey. The information contained in this podcast is provided for informational purposes only and is not intended for the purposes of diagnosing, treating, curing, or preventing any disease. Before using any products referenced on the podcast, consult with your healthcare provider carefully read all labels and heed all directions and cautions that accompany the products. Information found or received through the podcast should not be used in place of a consultation or advice from a healthcare provider. If you suspect you have a medical problem or should you have any healthcare questions, please promptly call or see your healthcare provider. This podcast, including Dave Asprey and the producers, disclaim responsibility for any possible adverse effects from the use of information contained herein. Opinions of guests are their own and this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests. This podcast does not make any representations or warranties about guest qualifications or credibility. This podcast may contain paid endorsements and advertisements for products or services. Individuals on this podcast may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to herein. This podcast is owned by Bulletproof Media.

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