Jonathan Fields explains Sparketype, a framework hundreds of thousands use to identify work that makes them feel alive. The conversation covers how meaningfulness, flow, and expressed potential shape fulfillment in your career.
You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. 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, you know, I've been a nurse for 10 years and I'm a caretaker, which I think is one of the, 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, nurture.
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. And 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, for work that makes us come alive. And let me be more precise with the language too, because coming alive is like 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. You know, 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 are 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, you know, we all have an impulse for worth 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. And one of the things that we've learned actually is that these impulses are real keen. Hug. Now, in some preliminary data and 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 sparketype 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 are, have a feeling of profound meaningfulness and drop into flow. All those five things, if you're interested in the number side of it, you know, the R values or the correlation coefficients with those are anywhere from 0.5 to 0.8. So it's, 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 actually 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 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.
