Work that matters - Jonathan Cutrell

00:00

I truly do believe that if you find that why, it's like having a background process running all the time. You need it, we connect to it when we hear it. We connect to the idea that there's purpose and meaning and something more required for us to really buy in, right_ that we care about things as human beings. And if we don't resolve that, it's always running back here. And while we're working, we have this nagging feeling of like we haven't connected that work to it yet. We haven't found it. And I do think some of that is that one day, we'll arrive, one day, we'll find our purpose and the clouds will open up and it'll just hit us in the head.

00:58

So I guess I'd love to explore how you yourself have pursued your own best work. What themes would you like to touch upon and what would you like to explore together?

01:11

I think there's this quote that has stuck so hard with me, it's by Annie Dillard. And Annie says, I believe it's in a book of hers, "How we spend our days is of course how we spend our lives." And for me, it's a profound realization because for so much of my young life, I felt like I was preparing for something. And I think this is something that, especially at least in my journey through education, was drilled so hard in my head, which is learn, learn, learn, learn, learn, learn everything you can so that one day you can do something. And I think that's a hard pattern to get out of, to think that everything is somewhere in the future, that all of your life is still yet to be lived, or all of your purpose is still yet to be determined. All of these actualization moments are some abstract date in the future where you're going to arrive. And mixing that with the culture of work until you retire and then retirement is the ultimate celebration. I got to a place where I realized through a series of personal realizations that I didn't want to organize my life that way. I didn't want to work really hard for 50 years, 60 years of my life and then be done with it and never enjoy any of those days, spend the majority of my life doing something I didn't really have any passion or interest in doing and then retire and then live on a beach. That doesn't sound like a fulfilling career. It doesn't sound like a fulfilling way to end a career. So I think that series of realizations was for me maybe what most people call that midlife crisis, the awareness of mortality. It was one step in that process that, "Hey, you know what? I could get to 64-years-old, a year before I'm supposed to retire according to society, and die," right? And then what happens then, right? Not asking what happens then really, but what did I do all of this for if all I'm doing is preparing for retirement? And so-

04:27

And were there any-

04:29

Yes, go ahead.

04:30

Were there any moments that accelerated your realization?

04:37

I think a couple of moments. One was the retirement that I saw from my parents, the way that they prepared for retirement, the decisions they were making, it brought it more into focus for me. Some tragic losses in family and friends reminded me of that very true reality. When you're in college or when you're in high school, you don't really get exposed to all of that. A lot of your life is about this semester or this quarter or summer break and fall break and spring break, and they're all around the corner and that's all your whole focus is on the game on Friday night. When you get out of that, it's this expansive open... You're now a part of all of society. And so instead of being hyper focused on your subsection of society or your subculture, you now get this new realization that you're alone in a way. You're not totally alone, but you don't have that same subculture knitting you together that's hyper focused on this month. Now, you're designing your whole life. You've got a career in front of you.

05:59

Whatever your choices are about the structure of your life are up to you now, nobody's grading you, nobody's pushing you to the next thing. And so it's up to you and you're exposed to that. At the same time, now you have people who are in that same category, that open you're an adult living your life category that are going bankrupt, or that are losing their jobs or losing their parents or losing something really important to them that snaps you into that realization that things are temporal, that you don't really have a strong grasp on all of it. And bringing that into really sharp focus made me realize that what I do today really matters a lot, that today is not just a preparation for the future, today is actually a portion of my waking hours, a portion of my life now. And I can either live the way that I want to live now, find purpose in what I'm doing today, or I can roll the dice and hope that none of those tragedies land on me.

07:26

And prepare for some arbitrary date that once again I don't have anybody telling me when that date is. I've got to tell myself that, right? And so I opted for the former, recognizing that every day is an opportunity to shape what I wanted in life. And that there is no particular threshold that I reach where I've found meaning. The meaning is whatever I make it right now. And that was really important for me as my wife and I planned for children, we built a home, we've done a lot of things that would've been hard to make that decision if we were just planning for the future, right? If we were just optimizing for some arbitrary end goal. But instead, we thought you know what? Right now is the life that we're living. We're here today and so we want to take advantage of what we have right now. So yeah, that's not really direct guidance on how to find fulfilling work, but it certainly is strong motivation for me, if that makes sense.

08:43

Well what practical changes came about in your life when you had that realization? You said things like building a house, preparing for kids. At work, what did it mean to go from your professional circumstances before that realization to afterwards?

09:08

It's a good question because I'm really bad at turning theory into practice. I think the way that it affected my mindset probably affected small decisions that I made. For example, it's five o'clock, I still have work to do, do I stop? Or do I continue on? My child is asking me to play video games with him, what's more important? And this realization for me is there's no question in my mind that playing video games with my child is the most important thing for me to do in that moment. And that work having meaning doesn't just mean being so committed to it that every waking moment it's on my mind, I think it's more about the meaning period. Understanding and connecting to meaningful work is actually a holistic philosophy to apply everywhere. And so when I connect to my work well, I can more easily put it down for the evening which is just an oxymoron.

10:31

I think people imagine that being very connected to your work is going to drive you to overwork to these 80 hour weeks or to imagine that your life starts to become consumed by it. And there are times where you may feel like this sense of burnout because you're putting so much energy into it, you love it so much, right? But for me, the philosophy of finding meaning, actually it applies beyond work. It's a whole life shift in my opinion where you realize meaning more generally, what is the meaning of each moment in your life, work included, right? And instead of viewing work as something that you have to do, because it's what society says or because you have to pay a bill, those things may be true, but actually identifying why you connect to it. And then also why you connect to other things. Why do I take the time to exercise? Why do I care?

11:40

Well because I care about my physical health, right? I care about my ability to play with my children while I'm young and while they're young, rather than just saying, "Oh, I'm supposed to exercise because it's on some list of correct action, proper actions for adults to take in their day." I know the meaning, the real goal and purpose for that in my life. And the same applies in my personal life as it does in my professional life. And so I think it's easier for me to live a balanced life when I'm finding meaning in what I'm doing. Is that practical? I don't know. I ended up back in theory, didn't I?

12:22

No, that's all right.

12:25

I suppose the most practical things that I did as I started asking myself more directly what the purpose of any given action was, to really have a goal here. Am I just on autopilot? Am I coasting? Even more specifically, how does this fit into whatever pathway I'm trying to walk? I've been talking about living in the moment and living for now, but also recognizing that living for now means that you're very...

13:03

aware of where you're headed, right? That you're not just ignoring the future. How does this fit into a goal that I have for my future? I'm hyper aware of what I'm doing today and how it contributes to what I care about, both now and in the future, rather than just picking one, right? Just saying, oh, I'm going to be all about mindfulness, and my job, my life, my professional life just goes by the wayside. I'm working and enjoying my work, but I'm not necessarily planning. Well, that's not really wise.

13:37

I expect to continue working and to keep growing. And so I want to be very aware of how my work today is contributing to that growth. So asking myself every day, every meeting that I have on my calendar, do I need that meeting? How is it contributing to what I care about? Both for myself and what I'm doing at my work. And that changed a lot for me. It actually pushed me to move to a different role at a different company. Those were the kinds of, I guess, thought processes that made me inspect what I was doing more closely.

14:16

How did you know what it was that you wanted to connect with? Because, anyone could go through that experience and find connection and meaning, they could find it in this, they could find it in that, there's multiple different places you could find it. It sounds like there are certain things in your life that you really want to connect to. Sounds like the meaning of your work is one of them, playing with your kids is the other. How do you know what parts of your life you want to connect with?

14:56

I think there are two schools of thought, and both of them have informed my way of finding that for myself. The first school of thought is, who do I want to be? What do I want to care about? I want to care about being a healthy person because I'm somehow attracted to that identity, right? I want to be a person that cares about their health. I want to be a person who is considered a good father. I want to be a person who's considered a good friend. And then conversely on that same, I guess, axis, on the flip side though, I don't want to be somebody who overworks, or I don't want to be somebody who takes advantage of other people just to get a promotion, right? So there's this guiding, who do I want to be? What is my identity that I aspirationally am shooting for?

16:06

Then the other school of thought on this is, what does my experience tell me is fulfilling? And these sometimes fill in two different buckets, or answer two different types of questions. So, I want to be a good father. Well, what are some experiences that I've had in the past that I connected to really well, that energized me, that made me feel like I was being a good father, right? Or that I got that feedback, and it really connected with me?

16:42

An example of this is, or one way to do this, I suppose, is to do a review, a retro of your last week, or of your last month, your last year. Write down the things that were fulfilling, that gave you energy, that you got excited about, that you wish you could repeat if you were to have a time machine, what moments would you revisit? What would you like to do again? What were the best moments? And you can't just pick vacation every time, obviously. We all would. But actually, I don't know that we all would just pick vacation, there's moments in our work that are fulfilling enough that we'd rather do that than go on another vacation.

17:29

For me, some of those moments are... One of the core moments, one of the reasons I have a podcast, right? Where I talk about this stuff is, when somebody says, "You've changed my mind about something," or "I've never thought about it that way," that's like gold. It's like fuel for me. When somebody says, "You've given me a new angle, a new perspective, that's helpful." I don't even have to solve a problem for a person, just them having a new way of thinking about something, or having a moment of enlightenment or insight, that to me, is very fulfilling. And so when I recognize, okay, there's all these things that are fulfilling, these experiences that are fulfilling, right? So I'm going to take that, and combine it with that other school of thought of, what is the identity that I care about? What do I want to become? And using those to triangulate, okay, so what are my values, right? That's how I learned what my values are,

18:30

looking at things that both I have actually valued, right? Things that I believe that I connected to in some way, in a positive way, and then who I want to be, what are my aspirations to become? And then combining those to figure out, okay, what is this overlap telling me? Right, I care about being highly transparent with my coworkers. I also want them to have moments of enlightenment. Looking back, do I care about solving really complex technical problems? That's like a five out of 10 for me. Do I care about solving people problems or coaching? Oh my gosh, that's like a nine out of 10 for me, right? So as an example, moving from a software engineering role into a software manager or a engineering manager role, that gave me that clarity of recognizing what I connect with, I really actually care about helping other engineers.

19:29

And so that helped me make that very practical transition from the IC route to a manager route, right? There's a lot of ways that you can define your values, I guess, but it really does come down to values.

19:45

And it can't just be, will I value other people, right? Everybody values other people in differing degrees. What makes you different from someone else? What do you value that your coworker may not value? Defining that list, getting down to, let's say, three to five of those, right? That's a very practical thing to do. If you've never done a values exercise where you say, here's something that I value that my coworker may not. Do that exercise. I mean, that's one of the most productive exercises that a person can do for themselves, but also for their careers. Because then they can start to say, okay, well, if I value this, what jobs, what role responsibilities, what teams, what domains do I want to work in that match up with these values?

20:37

Mm. You previously said that career growth doesn't just depend on competency. What did you mean by that?

20:52

That's a great question.

20:57

So I believe that competency, we have this, especially in engineering. Well, I say, especially, I assume this is true in other domains as well. We have this picture that your mastery just continues to increase, increase, increase, increase. And that at the top of the organizational ladder, CTO, or VP of engineering, or whatever that role is that is considered the top in your organization, that they know everything that and more. That each competency increase has given them that ladder jump. And this intuition is built off of an older model of, I guess, continuous improvement or skill trade-based model, right? Where you have an apprentice, and the apprentice is taught by a master to become a journeyman, and then eventually they... So each of these skills being... Increasing skill level gets you to where you go, gets you to the top of whatever that ladder is.

22:23

And while it's true that increasing in competency is correlated with growth in your career, it's more accurate to say that as you get to those higher levels in that ladder, you begin to focus your competency improvements on how you can affect that for other people. This is especially true if you're moving into like people leadership levels.

22:57

It's almost guaranteed that CTOs in large companies do not have all of the technical skill of every engineer in their organization, right? These are not just skill leadership positions, they have different competencies. And so when we imagine that we're stacking every competency up, and trying to climb all of the... We can easily end up feeling like this is an impossible hill to climb, that we're never going to make it there. I can't imagine learning 10 times the amount of information I already know, how could I possibly become a CTO?

23:38

Well, because these are totally different roles. Growth in your career is not just about adding new competencies, sometimes it's about changing your responsibilities. Letting go of one responsibility and adopting a different one, right? Learning how to leverage your energy, learning how to leverage your time, stopping doing some things so you can start doing another thing. So this idea that competency is the only lever you can pull to grow in your career is something that causes a lot of imposter syndrome. It's something that causes people to feel like they're not allowed to apply for a job because they don't have the right qualifications, or they may feel like there's no way they could ever get to that level. The truth is that level isn't really all that different from what they do other than just different responsibilities. We all have the same amount of time in our days, right?

24:42

There are plenty of executive level positions, with people who are much younger than I or then you, then whoever's listening to this. There's probably somebody in that role that's succeeding that's younger than you. And they're not necessarily just a virtuoso, it's not a rare occurrence. It's because those people are choosing different responsibilities, they're choosing different competencies, and not just going in one direction. So that's what I mean by that, is the competency is one tool in the toolbox to think about for career growth.

25:22

That's good way of busting some imposter syndrome.

25:25

Hopefully. That's a hard one. I deal with it all the time. I don't think anybody ever stops dealing with imposter syndrome.

25:34

No. But it certainly makes it easier if you imagine people in a position of authority, and you recognize that they are no smarter than you, or they just, like you said, they have different competencies. It's not that stack rank against what what you currently got.

25:55

Exactly. And their job is not to grade you. This is another-

26:00

I think it's a latent belief that we have from the old trade based organizations and from the way that our education systems typically run. Because those education systems are still based on that old model of that trade education, where everybody above you is supposed to grade you. They're supposed to tell you how to do everything, they're teaching you everything. That's not what an organization is supposed to be. Organization is a composition, not a ladder. And we're composing our functions, we're composing our skills.

26:48

And so your manager or your manager's manager, their job is not to grade you, their job is to make you successful. That's the whole point. We want our coworkers to be successful. I want my reports to become a better engineer than I could ever be.

27:08

And so when you shift that mindset from thinking, oh, I'm being tested every day to, ah, we're supposed to working together, we're actually collaborating, somebody wants me to succeed. That's a huge mindset shift. It definitely helped me with imposter syndrome, especially when I was younger in my career.

27:31

Has imposter syndrome ever stopped you doing the work that you really wanted to be doing, but you didn't do it.

27:44

I think people who are experiencing imposter syndrome may not know it. So yes is the answer. But I don't know when. I suspect that I have been intimidated by the industry, I've been intimidated by the titles, the responsibilities. I may have felt out of place at times when I didn't even realize that that's why I avoided doing something or avoided applying for that job. I think it absolutely could be a stumbling block.

28:24

I think less now, because I've seen more of the opposite side of the fence, of the hiring side where I sit, where I don't even care what the qualifications on your list are realistically. That's not what I'm making all of my decisions on. I look at them, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying experience doesn't matter, but it's changed the way I think about hiring and the way I think about role filling.

28:58

We like to imagine that the hiring side is more intelligent, like a super computer. That we all have this perfect algorithm for hiring and that we know exactly how to determine who is the most qualified and what exact moments in their career. That's not true. It's not even close to true.

29:24

We don't even have standardization for leveling, for different levels in different companies. They might map totally different from one company to the next. So what you might expect a title to mean in company A could be a totally different title in company B. And you're feeling imposter syndrome over something that doesn't even exist. So I think there's a lot of that kind of struggle, especially if you've never had a chance to see the hiring side.

29:54

Here's a very practical career tip for anybody who's listening right now. Get involved in a hiring project, get on that side of the discussion. Or watch it happening. Ask if you can be a part of that discussion of that interview, whatever your company's process is. It will be enlightening for you. I promise you it'll be enlightening because you'll realize that side is just as human as the other. It's just the same kind of problems that you face anywhere else in an organization, except it's in the hiring process.

30:31

It feels mystical until you get behind the curtain. And I think that'll help people feel more comfortable and confident when it's their turn to be back on the candidate side. You know how it works a little bit better if you see that side.

30:48

I feel like in some ways, this is also related to what you said earlier, when you said that experience doesn't necessarily equate to knowledge.

31:03

Yes. It does relate. Hopefully the people who are listening to this right now, you know that three years as an engineer at one company is not the same thing as three years as an engineer at another company. So the things we experience, or I guess more directly, the problems we solve, the work that we do, we have an opportunity to solve something that in the moment is valuable or novel.

31:52

In the seventies or the eighties, something that we built today wasn't even possible, and that's true even for the simplest stuff we're building today. The simplest things today are, in terms of the actual products that we're building, the simplest things today were not possible to do even as short ago as the 2000s.

32:23

The app store didn't exist until, what, 2010 I think. It's around that. So we're building things that we could never have built then. On the flip side, there are people who are industry leaders, the forefathers of this industry, of software engineering at least, who when they were building software, they were solving problems now that we've solved in a thousand new ways. The problem is no longer a problem. If they were to set out and actually solve that problem today, it would be obsolete before they released it, because it just doesn't matter anymore. We don't need another calculator, we've got that covered.

33:10

And so we have to look at experience and the different problems that we're solving in the context that we're solving them in, and start to think more about what does it mean that we solved this this way? Or that we solved it in this context? What experience did we gain that's actually applicable now?

33:33

I'll give you a simple example that'll hit more to home. A lot of my young career as a software engineer, I wrote a bunch of stringy jQuery JavaScript code. This is stuff that if I released it today, I would be mortified. And does that mean that I was a bad developer? No, not at all. It means that the experience that I had was contextual with the problems I was solving. So when you look at a resume or you look at a list of experience or of products worked on, you can't think about it through the lens of today. Our experience is like bullet points of experience. We can't just look at it as a flat list of things that we've done as if we did them today. We have to look at it through the lens of what does this mean about what this person knows about the world, about teams, about working with other people, about collaboration and the history of the industry? What did they actually take away from this that's useful today? Are there patterns that they've learned? Are there habits that they've developed? What kinds of working processes do they use, that they used then that are still valid now?

34:55

The problems themselves, the actual experiences that they worked on is essentially irrelevant. Essentially. Not always, but essentially. So, I think we have to think more abstractly about our experiences.

35:12

How could someone do more to embrace that and use it in their pursuit for their best work? Because it strikes me that a lot of people may spend a prolonged period of time inside a company to acquire experience. But in some ways you're saying that it's not as important as someone might think.

35:38

I'm going to approach this from their perspective of someone who is trying to grow in their career. Which is most of us. Someone who is hoping to take the next step, get the next promotion. Think about your accomplishments less in terms of what did you build and more in terms of why did it matter? Why does it matter to me as the hiring manager or your personal manager today? The thing you built, what did it do in the world? What were the struggles that you overcame with it? Why do I care? Why do I care? Always think about this from that opposite perspective. Why does this matter?

36:38

If it matters because, hey, you know what, this person now knows how to work with this really important industry standard protocol, put that on your list of skills. Whatever it is. But usually the why is, hey, I took a hard problem and I solved it effectively.

37:03

If you take even the most basic, I guess, CV design recommendations, are going to tell you, list the OKRs, if you will, of your project. Don't worry about the specifics of what's inside of it. What is it functionally doing. Focus on, what is the impact that you had in creating value in the thing you were doing? Because all that experience has to mean something.

37:38

If you just coasted along, worked in the same kinds of problems, didn't really have an impact on the business, what does it mean? What does it mean to me as a hiring manager? Well, maybe it means that you were loyal. Maybe it means that you were able to deal with changing organization environments around you and you still stuck with the organization. That's valuable, but it doesn't really tell me much about your capacity for work or your capabilities in problem solving.

38:11

So I would say, if I had to sum it up, instead of focusing on what you've done in your experience, focus on why. Why did I actually do this work? And why do you care? You as the audience of my CV or my message on Cord. Why do you care about this? And I want to get to the core of that.

38:38

I wonder why it is that we lean into the what and the how far more often than we do the why?

38:47

I think because the why's harder.

38:49

Does that try make us jump to the ...

38:50

The why's harder. It's harder to understand. It feels less concrete, it feels more dangerous, because we're being more

39:03

definitive about something that we can't show. I can't show you my code. Or I can show you my code, but I can't show you why we made the decision the way we did.

39:16

I think there is a part to it too why isn't the logical answer that most people expect? Most people expect you to just tell me what you were doing. And they don't ask the the broader question that ultimately we're all actually asking, but there's an undertone, which is don't- cut the waffle out of this. Just give it to me-

39:53

Give it to me straight.

39:54

'Give it me straight what were you doing?' Whereas in reality, actually, no, what I want you to give me straight is why it mattered to you? That is the thing that I want straight.

40:04

I mean, think about it in that extreme example. If I put on my resume that I built a calculator. Okay. I built a calculator because it was the first one. Nobody had ever done it before. I built it on a platform that we didn't even know if it was possible to build a calculator on. That changes the story. There's why involved with the what there, and the outcome was a calculator either way. Doesn't matter that much. But the context and where I fit in that picture. This was a challenge that I overcame. It was difficult because X, Y, and Z. It was an accomplishment because X, Y, and Z. So I guess you could probably shift that language from just focusing on the why to the 'what did I do and why did it matter?' Why did what I do matter?

41:10

It's a little bit complex. Why am I even putting this on here? It's an accomplishment. It's something that if I were to go and accomplish something in a new role, you can expect this caliber or this level of ability in my accomplishment. I'm not going to go and build you a calculator. We don't care about that. You don't care about that. You care about my ability to accomplish hard things. That's it, that's what we're trying to communicate. I accomplished a hard thing. What was the hard thing? Building a calculator. Why was it hard? Well, because it had never been done before. So I think that's the missing piece is we don't think about the story that we're trying to tell here. The story that we're telling has the context, has the point. The hidden point in our resume is look at all of the accomplishments. These were hard because X, Y, and Z.

42:16

What's been the biggest upside and return on investment to you going to these depths and understanding the meaning of your work in your working life itself? What's been the biggest upside at work?

42:37

I think I have two answers to that question. The first one is I have a lot of clarity and peace about what I want, which is rare in my opinion. When talking to people about what they want in their careers. The most common and most obvious answer is, " I want a raise." That's a pretty easy turnkey one. But beyond that, what do you want in your career? Well, I want to just grow. Okay, in what direction? I don't know. It's a very common conundrum that people face. They expect that the industry will tell them what they want, or that their boss will, will direct them in the right path, rather than being the owner of their own careers, being the owner of their own direction. And that I've been able to find for myself. At any given moment, I know where I'm headed.

43:40

The second benefit, I guess, that I've gotten, is that I can be fully committed to whatever activity I'm participating in the moment. I'm not distracted. I'm not wishing I was off work. I'm there. I'm listening. I feel like I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing. And I think that's an underrated context to work in. If you have the sense that you're right where you're supposed to be, or you have chosen to be here, you've committed to be here, you have your energy and your attention, your focus, all of that is here with you, it will totally transform what you're... Try it just for one meeting this week. Or for for one activity, for one working session, a two hour session, try to do everything you can to be completely committed and focused, accepting that you're in the right place at the right time.

44:47

That is probably the most transformational change that I could ask for in my career. Talk about meaning. I have meaning by just believing that I'm in the right place, that I'm doing the right thing, that I'm functioning at my highest level in that moment. It's a flow state. I'm sure you're familiar with that. Actually having that on a regular basis, feeling like I'm doing the right thing. I know it sounds, again, not very practical, but it has practical implications. You are literally not distracted as a result of that. You're not-

45:25

Sounds like a weight of your shoulder.

45:26

Absolutely, yes. Instead of constantly thinking what could I be doing to improve and get better, and you know you're doing it, you're there, you're in the middle of it. There's less uncertainty. So I think those two, is I know where I'm headed. And because I know where I'm headed. I also know that I've made a very intentional decision to be where I am.

45:54

Someone might also worry that they might... If they focus on finding this meaning, that they might lose their edge. When you're talking about being with your kid and playing video games, someone might worry that, "Hang on a minute, what if I really connect with that, and then I really go and do those things. I won't be as professionally successful." And someone might worry that at work, if they focus more on the why, they'll be less focused on the detail. But what you're saying is by removing this layer of existential angst, you are able to enter this state of work that enables you to do the best work of your life.

46:38

And I'd extend that and say, number one, based on what? Are these fears? If you were able to disconnect from work and you think that you're not going to have an edge, what is that based on? Try to really track down what your reasoning is, because it's likely that if you were to do the five whys or do some root analysis on that feeling or that hypothesis that you're going to lose your edge, it's going to come down to something like, "Well, I'm not spending as much time as I was." Who's to say that that's insufficient? There's plenty of people who are successful in a four day work week. It's been proven through research that four day work weeks are actually a successful way of operating a company. So if the sheer amount of time... And in fact, on the upper end of that, let's say once you start getting at 60, 70 hours, especially for knowledge workers, which most people listening to this probably fit in that category, you start to wane.

47:43

In fact, you start to hurt the work you're doing rather than help it. Not only are you not as productive as you were in that first 30 or 40 hours, you're anti-productive, you're making mistakes, you're causing problems. It's counterintuitive. We think that more energy equals better. We think more time equals more growth or more investment. There are plenty of arenas where that's been proven to not be true. Simple example would be athletes. Athletes who work out seven days a week are not successful. They're just not. Athletes who take rest days are. And this is critical. It's critical to understanding that our intuitions about our careers are not always correct. We learned those intuitions from something else. We learned them from culture, from hustle culture, maybe. Wherever it came from, we need to interrogate those beliefs. Why do we believe that we would lose an edge by taking a break? If you interrogate it, you'll probably find that's not true.

48:57

The second thing that you mention, the idea that we would be less focused on the details if we focus on on the why. I don't think these are mutually exclusive. It's not a zero sum game. I actually think you can focus better on the details if you clarify the why. And not only that, you can focus on the right details. If you have six details that you were focusing on before and you incorporate the why and it cuts it down to four details. Now you put more energy into the four details. The reality of being very present with your work and knowing that you're doing the right thing is that you can throw yourself entirely into the right thing. You don't have to spread your focus across too many things. You can establish the why, put it on a sticky note on your computer, and use that as a frame. It's not that you're exiting the details. It's that you're actually zooming in. You're eliminating the wrong ones. You're using the why as a filter for what details you should be focused on.

50:19

I think if Annie Dillard is right and how we spend our days is of course, how we spend our lives, then understanding why our days matter is definitely at the heart of this question about how we find our best work. I'm so grateful that you've shared your insights, Jonathan. Thank you so much for breaking them down.

50:43

Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity, and I hope it was helpful. Thank you. I really appreciate it.

50:49

Really enjoyed it, man.

50:50

Appreciate your time, and we'll get the second round set up.

50:54

Drop me an email.