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The paradox is being needed isn't the same thing as mattering.
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Being valuable to another person, mattering says you're valuable to that person, but your presence also makes a difference.
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And that is the cost of unmattering.
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When you don't realize that your presence makes a difference.
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Welcome to purpose-driven success with Mo Salami, where real journeys, mindset shifts, and strategic insights meet purpose-driven success.
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I'm your host, Mo Salami.
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Every week we dive into real conversations with high-achieving founders and leaders, uncovering the mindset, strategies, and takeaways that help you define and achieve success on your own terms.
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Welcome to another episode of Purpose-Driven Success.
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And I know I always say this, but you are in for an extraordinary episode today.
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This is one of those switch the TV off, put the book away, and focus on the book we're going to speak about and really focus in.
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Today's guest is John R.
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Miles, best-selling author, award-winning speaker, Navy combat veteran, and former Fortune 50 executive.
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And he's the host of the globally acclaimed Ash and Struck podcast, which has surpassed, wait for this, 85 million downloads.
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John has spent decades studying human performance, leadership, and what drives people to achieve at the highest level.
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But beneath the success, a deeper question began to emerge.
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Do I actually matter?
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That question became the foundation for his new book, The Mattering Effect.
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An exploration of what happens when performing, producing, achieving, and proving ourselves begins to disconnect us from what genuinely matters.
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And for anyone who's ever achieved something they thought would finally make them feel fulfilled, only to discover they were still searching for something deeper.
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There's a question at the heart of this conversation.
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John R.
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Miles, welcome to Purpose Driven Success.
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Mo, I am so honored to be here.
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You have such a great, fantastic podcast.
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Thank you so much for welcoming me with your arms wide open.
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My arms are wide open.
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You are welcome.
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And let's start here.
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John, you've done a huge amount of research for the Matrian effect as a book and as a as a movement, if you will.
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What was the central question or the problem that you were trying to understand at the very beginning when you began this research?
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I was given a calling.
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Years ago, I was taking this course at my church that completely altered the trajectory of my entire life.
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I suddenly felt called to serve the words that I was given were the lonely, the broken, the beaten, the battered, the disengaged, and the burned out.
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And put this into context, at this particular moment, I was an executive at Lowe's leading operations.
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I had no idea what to do with this.
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I didn't know who those people were.
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I didn't know how I was supposed to help them.
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I just felt this calling.
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I think, like a lot of us, we get so caught up in the day-to-day, our families, work that I put this on the back burner.
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And the call for me kind of happened in two moments.
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One was a moment with my son, and the other was when my best friend committed suicide.
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And I sat back from that terrible gut wrench moment and thought to myself, I'm gonna regret it for the rest of my life if I don't pursue this calling that I was given.
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Loneliness was one crisis, burnout was another, disengagement was another, rising despair and declining mental health was yet another.
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And for years I thought about them individually, but the deeper I went into the human condition, the more a different question began to haunt me.
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And that question is: what if we are ignoring an upstream wound sitting underneath many of them?
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Because when you peel back the layers, whether it's someone burning out at work, an employee checking out, someone spiraling into isolation, or someone who's in the depth of depression, you encounter the same unspoken question.
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Do I matter?
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And that forced me to do what I'm doing now.
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John, a lot of people listening to Purpose Driven Success, this podcast, they're ambitious, they're successful, and they're pursuing the next thing, the next win, the next checkbox, if you will.
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And your book, The Mattering Effect, suggests that achievement doesn't necessarily give us a sense that we matter.
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Why is that?
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So, Mo, I think it's extremely important for people to understand the importance of mattering.
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Mattering sits at the same playing field as our need for safety and our need for love.
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But to put this into perspective, when we are born, the first thing that we are trying to sense is our mattering instinct.
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When we go into new environments, such as school, before we're worried about learning, that mattering instinct kicks in again.
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How do I matter in this environment before you even think about what you're trying to learn, etc.?
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And so what has happened over time that became one of the most crucial gotchas for me is we have built environments, systems, and institutions that are extraordinarily good at measuring what we produce, perform, achieve, and deliver.
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But they're far less capable of reflecting who we are.
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And that's what makes mattering so important.
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Because mattering at its very core, it's giving value and receiving value.
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And what has ended up happening to humanity is we keep giving and giving and giving and giving and giving.
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But when you don't get that return, you sit in what I call the mattering gap because your whole sense of worth becomes distorted.
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And that's what I call systemic unmattering.
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So the mattering gap is the distance between what you give and what you receive back.
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And the systems around that that are extracting this from us is what causes us to experience antimattering, extended periods of where we feel insignificant.
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It is despair that is so profound in our lives.
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But underneath that, what is causing it is systemic unmattering.
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What would you say were the warning signs that someone's fallen into the gap, into the mattering gap, and they don't even realize it?
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Well, one of the ways I try to explain this is I use Surfside as a metaphor for this.
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And this whole condominium complex collapsed in twelve seconds and ended up killing many, many people.
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And what happened from an engineering standpoint is something called progressive failure.
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Progressive failure describes a sequence of small neglected stresses that in isolation appear insignificant, but become devastating once a critical threshold is crossed.
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And our human significance, our sense of mattering, erodes in much the same way.
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Because what ends up happening is we don't even realize at times that we're in what I call the slow fade.
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So many countless small adaptations that gradually shift us from feeling that we matter to becoming a utility in the very system that we exist in, the marketplace of mattering that we all live in today.
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So, John, you use the phrase the great erasure.
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What are we erasing and why does that happen?
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Erasing is so many of us are highly visible externally.
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But we're becoming more and more invisible to our self, that is what I consider to be the crisis of invisibility and the great erasure of so many people around the world.
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I want you to dive into that a little bit.
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You mentioned you're more visible externally, and whereas you're more invisible internally.
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If you could paint the picture for that a little bit, and I'm sure it struck a chord of people who were feeling that.
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The best way I can describe this is my life felt like I was wearing this pair of glasses, and gradually smudges started to appear.
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I started to realize over time that smudges started to occur more and more, and that nothing I could do was causing them to go away.
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I didn't have a cleaning cloth that was wiping them away.
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I was at this time, I was going to see therapists and other things because I felt like I am losing myself and I don't know what's happening.
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And what I was experiencing was this slow fade where my own voice, my own identity, my own needs and sense of significance began to recede.
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Cloud of emotional numbness started to engulf me.
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And then eventually, as similar to the way that condominium collapsed, I experienced the vanish from the slow fade to the hockey stick moment where your your life starts to feel dim across pretty much all areas of it.
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And that that moment of realizing this as I looked back was the very people I was called to solve.
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The conditions that people were experiencing that I was called to solve, I was one of those people.
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I was experiencing loneliness.
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I was broken.
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I had an identity crisis.
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And when I saw it in myself, the high achiever who had built his entire identity around constantly proven my worth, I started to see it everywhere.
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There are so many people who are needed, who are giving, who are contributing, but who is seeing them?
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Exactly.
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John, one feature of what you do, and we had a we mentioned this in a pre-call.
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I mentioned this to you in the pre-call, is it's so remarkable your dedication to research.
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You've spoken to a huge number of people and drawn on research from such a range of disciplines.
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John, take us to one piece of research that genuinely surprised you and what did you discover and why did it change your thinking?
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So one person I interviewed along the way was a gentleman, probably not very many people are going to hear or know Ken's name, but he is one of the foremost experts in the world on Henry David Thoreau.
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And I have to tell you, Mo, one of the things I learned in speaking to him is that I'd been mispronouncing Henry David Thoreau incorrectly for decades.
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It's actually Henry David Thoreau.
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But we started to talk about Thoreau's concept of quiet desperation.
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And a light bulb went off for me.
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When you think about the slow fade and how you can remain highly visible to the world while becoming increasingly invisible to yourself.
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When Thoreau was describing quiet desperation, he was describing that 200 years ago.
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The issue today is the world and the walls around us have become translucent.
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They become harder to see.
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So the mass of men no longer lead lives of quiet desperation, they lead lives of quiet disorientation.
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Because causing this environment that we sit in, and AI is only lighting a fire to it, where we are increasingly uncertain about where we belong, what gives our lives meaning, whether our presence acts, and whether we are receiving any signal at all telling us that we matter.
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So for someone listening to this point, what's the biggest lesson from that research?
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The paradox is being needed isn't the same thing as mattering.
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Being valuable to another person, mattering says you're valuable to that person, but your presence also makes a difference.
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And that is the cost of unmattering when you don't realize that your presence makes a difference.
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And again, keeping on the research theme, John, of all the people that you encountered whilst researching for the matcharin effect, was there someone whose story completely changed the way you understood matching?
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Well well, yes.
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So one of the people I talked to at length, we he has been so voracious of his time, is Gordon Flett.
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And more than anyone who's alive today, Gordon deserves so much credit because he is the father of the science of mattering at Lur Steve York, and he he recently retired.
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But if anyone has put their heart and soul into this topic, it is him.
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But the thing I learned from McGordon, it's something that he said in his endorsement of my book, the most important person who needs to know you matter is you.
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And I think that's what we don't realize.
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It's it's virtually impossible to feel like we matter or to make anyone else feel like they matter, or to express mattering to others if you fundamentally do not feel you matter.
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And another one that was eye-opening to me is I I happen to have Nobel laureate Alvin Roth on the podcast, and he's known for his research on markets, financial markets.
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Well, I had been speaking with Jamil Zaki.
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And as he and I were talking about my book, The Marketplace of Mattering came up, that we are living in a mattering marketplace where we are constantly having to prove every single day.
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And I brought this concept to to Al Ra, who had never thought about it in these terms before.
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And he he came back to me and he said, You are absolutely correct.
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The world we live in has become a repugnant marketplace.
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What you have to do when you think about this is think about what is happening to so many of the youngsters through the use of social media.
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It is a market of mattering because it completely goes into to extract more and more and more of you to feel accepted through its use, which is why Jonathan Haidt is correct that it has been an accelerant to so many of our youth who are experiencing increased mental health struggle.
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It's just one of the accelerants.
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The first place this unfortunately happens is in our homes, and then later in our primary schools.
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This is probably a couple of years before that.
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But I wonder if you could share, John, the story right at the start of your book, where you mentioned your experience as a single-digit youngster, and then why how that led me wondering about mattering, if you mattered, and then the epiphanies that that came from that.
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Yeah, Mo, when I was a youngster, uh five and a half, six years old, I was playing tag with my friends, and as those games often do, they they get more and more rowdy.
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And I got pushed from behind while running away from one of my mates and went headfirst through the basement window.
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I woke up in intensive care with tubes coming out of my head and machinery all around me, and it's it's one of those moments in life.
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I think we all have defining moments, but I at that young an age that something fundamentally was going to be different in my life.
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I had no idea the consequences.
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But what came out of that is I went from being a completely normal child to all of a sudden having tinnitus.
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It caused me to have ampliopia in my one eye and and field of vision issues, so I had to wear pack.
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Over my eye for the next five to six years, so you can imagine how much ridicule I got.
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But on top of that, I had a sensory processing disorder, and migraines whose onset would get magnified by the fluorescent lights that we all sat in in school every single day.
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So all of a sudden, all I wanted to do was be as invisible as I possibly could be, because I felt so small and I was getting bullied.
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And I think that besides the patch on the eye, except for the patch, I seemed completely normal when people would look at me.
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And that's that's the problem with an invisible illness.
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But what ended up happening is I experienced really the first concepts of mattering in my life.
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And um I had to go see a speech therapist um uh five days a week when I was in at school because my speech problems were so bad.
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Man, and I hated it.
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I hated every single minute of it because I would have to do this walk of shame across the classroom where all my classmates were sitting there watching me.
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And at first I hated it, but she started to get me to think differently about what had happened to me.
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And she said, really to me at that time, the early concepts of neuroplasticity before neuroplasticity was mainstream, that my mindset could be changed.
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And I had the power to do it.
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And that power really was with making a choice of was I going to have a fixed mindset or a growth mindset, as Carol Dweck would say too.
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And because of that, I chose the growth path and over the next eight, nine, ten years, was able to find coping mechanisms to overcome all of these ailments and became changing again in society.
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So, so great.
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Such a great part of your journey, John.
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And listening to this, you're probably wondering how do I go from where I am today to matron even more?
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And well, great news.
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John has distilled all of his research into the matter framework.
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So literally M-A-T-E-R.
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M-A-T-T-E-R.
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And John, these six elements, meaning autonomy, trust, time, energy, reciprocity, when these six elements came together as one, was there anything that surprised you about that when all six elements of your matter framework come together?
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So in the United States, the American Immigration Council put out this report called the Belonging Barometer.
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And it kind of measured across all elements of society how Americans felt about the environments that they exist in.
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Well, I was searching for when you when you think about what this book is trying to do, why are one in six people globally lonely?
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Why do 17% of us feel like an outsider everywhere among friends at work?
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Why does 64% of us at work feel like we don't belong?
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Why are 70% of employees not engaged?
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Why are we losing 12 billion workdays annually to depression and over a trillion dollars and loss of productivity?
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And so I was trying to figure out if feeling like you don't matter is the cause of loneliness, burnout, disengagement, depression, anxiety, and hopelessness, where does it start?
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And so that became the research question.
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And the more I started talking to experts and looking at empirical data, I found that there were six signals.
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We're either receiving those signals or we are not receiving them, and they turned out to be purpose or meaning, agency or our autonomy, feeling of safety or trust, how present we are in the given time that we're inhabiting, so time.
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Where is energy energy being extracted?
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So our vitality or energy.
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And then how are we losing care?
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Because so many of us are giving care, but we're not giving it back in return.
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And so those things kept coming up again and again and again.
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And when I switched mutual care from M to reciprocity, it spelled matter, meaning autonomy, time, trust, energy, and reciprocity.
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And then the next thing I did was you you can't just come up with something like this.
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I started to validate it.
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So I started to have individual conversations on the podcast with experts to see if I was on to something.
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So for instance, meaning, I interviewed Arthur Brooks, who just came up with the book, Meaning of Your Life, as an example.
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And that's how I ended up doing it.
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I started to go deeper and deeper and deeper into this.
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And the University of Chicago professor Shige Owishi, because I had talked to Sonia Lewirsky, who's one of the foremost experts on happiness, and she said to me, Are you familiar with psychological richness?
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Which is something that Shige has come up with.
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And what he discovered is that good life is not only about happiness or purpose, psychological richness comes from the very experiences of meaning that expand our perspective and deepen our understanding of life.
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So meaning is very, very important to us experiencing psychological richness.
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Oh no.
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Let's start with meaning.
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John, how does someone know whether they're pursuing things that are genuinely meaningful to them rather than simply becoming very good at achieving things that other people value?
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Sometimes I think we start in the wrong place.
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Oftentimes the advice we get when you think about meaning is start with why.
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I think it's the wrong question, no offense to Simon Senech.
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Before you can get to a why, I think you have to start with a because.
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And that because leads you to the problem that you feel called to solve.
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But underneath that, before I could even get to a why, I had to figure out what is it that those people are experiencing that is causing that.
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And it was them feeling invisible to themselves.
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Some of the research I look at was from Tom Gilovich, who, if listeners never heard of this guy, he's one of the most brilliant researchers in the world, came out of Cornell University, and he's found that 76% of us go to our deathbeds with the same regret, not becoming our ideal self, not becoming fulfilled.
00:32:03.640 --> 00:32:14.600
So I think part of the reason we don't become fulfilled is we've never gotten crystal clearer as which leads to the why.
00:32:15.080 --> 00:32:22.840
So when I think about meaning, I think about it from that context.
00:32:23.560 --> 00:32:31.160
Like if we are solving the problem that only we can solve through our superpowers, who's better off?
00:32:33.160 --> 00:32:35.880
I think that's where our meaning comes from.
00:32:36.920 --> 00:32:37.800
Autonomy.
00:32:37.960 --> 00:32:42.840
So jumping into autonomy, which is the A in matter, listening to this, taking notes.
00:32:43.160 --> 00:32:52.360
Who were some of the thought leaders you've spoken to, interviewed, researched in the area of autonomy, and what have you discovered?
00:32:54.279 --> 00:32:59.800
Marty Seligman, the father of positive psychology, just wrote a book on it.
00:33:00.120 --> 00:33:15.320
And as we were talking, our autonomy, the most vital things that we possess, especially with the advent of AI.
00:33:15.800 --> 00:34:44.119
So when I think about autonomy in the context of mattering, it's what decisions am I making deliberately, intentionally, to the person that I'm striving to become.
00:34:44.360 --> 00:34:48.360
And another person I interviewed about this was Angela Duckworth.
00:34:48.599 --> 00:34:56.920
Angela's first book, Grit, really talked about passion and perseverance being great grit.
00:34:57.240 --> 00:35:07.159
But when I was talking to her, I put the seed in her mind because if you've read her book, she talks a lot about West Point and Beast Pherrics.
00:35:07.320 --> 00:35:14.200
Being a Naval Academy graduate, I went through a very similar experience.
00:35:14.280 --> 00:35:19.880
I was trying to express to her is that you can have all the passion and perseverance in the world.
00:35:20.279 --> 00:35:29.799
But if you're not intentional about how you're deploying it, it's going to take you in the opposite direction of where you want to go.
00:35:29.960 --> 00:35:33.159
And that's why your agency is so important.
00:35:35.799 --> 00:35:41.000
Your agency can either move you closer to the person you want to become or farther away.
00:35:43.480 --> 00:35:45.960
Pick into the topic of autonomy, John.
00:35:46.119 --> 00:35:48.759
Can someone be extremely successful?
00:35:48.919 --> 00:36:01.319
And again, this is a place I'm very familiar with because I work with people who are extremely successful but are seeking fulfillment beyond that success.
00:36:01.879 --> 00:36:11.399
For example, speaking of autonomy, can someone be extremely successful and still have very little control over their life?
00:36:13.639 --> 00:36:15.719
I think it happens all the time.
00:36:17.239 --> 00:36:19.079
I think it happened to me.
00:36:21.079 --> 00:36:35.799
I think we fall into this trap where like I had my career path that I wanted to go on is I wanted to be a career warrior.
00:36:36.039 --> 00:36:38.439
That's the whole reason I went to the Naval Academy.
00:36:38.599 --> 00:36:49.239
My last tour of duty was at the counter-drug task force, that is the Mecca for the United States counter counter-drug interdiction efforts.
00:36:49.319 --> 00:36:56.839
And I got approached by all these three-letter agencies taking the opportunity to become an FBI agent.
00:36:57.159 --> 00:37:08.439
And then the carpet was pulled underneath my feet, literally 72 hours before I'm supposed to go to Quantico, and I had to go to a plan B.
00:37:08.759 --> 00:37:20.279
And that plan B led me into managing a path that I never intentionally went on, that became my journey.
00:37:20.359 --> 00:37:30.679
And before long, I started getting promoted because I was good at what I did, making more money, etc.
00:37:31.319 --> 00:37:36.919
But all along, I felt like a foreigner in the journey I was on.
00:37:39.479 --> 00:37:49.799
I just remember looking back, there are intervention points that when I look back, I could have made, but I was like a pinball.
00:37:50.039 --> 00:37:52.199
I I was just bouncing intions.
00:37:52.839 --> 00:38:01.799
And because I was making the money and the family was happy, and I was going further and further, I just flowed with it.
00:38:01.959 --> 00:38:04.519
And I think so many of us are doing that.
00:38:04.759 --> 00:38:18.039
And as I look back, a huge turning point for me was at Arthur Anderson at the epicenter of the Enron like situation in Houston.
00:38:18.359 --> 00:38:26.919
And I had another moment where the rug got pulled from out underneath me, and I had a choice at that point in time.
00:38:27.719 --> 00:38:40.119
I really wanted to go back to school and pursue getting a PhD in psychology, but I I couldn't see the path to doing it and supporting my family.
00:38:40.279 --> 00:38:44.199
So I jumped back into the rat race and continued forward.
00:38:44.439 --> 00:38:48.439
And I think we all have those defining moments if we look back at them.
00:38:49.799 --> 00:38:57.239
When we're operating more like a pinball than being intentional and focused about where we're going in life.
00:38:58.599 --> 00:39:00.439
Such a great share, John.
00:39:00.599 --> 00:39:06.759
The next part of the framework is one of my favorite, most important words in the whole world.
00:39:07.319 --> 00:39:13.639
One of my values is loyalty, and trust lives in there somewhere, I always feel for sure.
00:39:14.279 --> 00:39:22.679
Who were some of the thought leaders and what was some of the research that you found around this area of trust?
00:39:24.199 --> 00:39:33.399
So one of the things that's important in my definition of trust for people to understand is trust is not blind faith in other people.
00:39:34.039 --> 00:39:38.999
It's the decision not to abandon yourself in their presence.
00:39:40.119 --> 00:39:47.799
And that's what allows a person to remain open and not constantly self-protecting.
00:39:49.879 --> 00:40:00.279
Because what I think we don't realize is when trust collapses, we start monitoring danger instead of participating in life.
00:40:00.439 --> 00:40:04.359
We self-censor, we withdraw, we start editing ourselves.
00:40:04.599 --> 00:40:16.679
So as I started to go into this research, of course, I started with Amy Edmondson, who's who's a personal friend because she's written the book on psychological safety.
00:40:16.999 --> 00:40:20.759
But then I really went into the work of Claude Steele.
00:40:20.919 --> 00:40:21.479
Brilliant.
00:40:21.639 --> 00:40:29.639
He's at Stanford as well, but he was previously the provost of Columbia and then Cal Berkeley.
00:40:29.879 --> 00:40:34.279
And what he has studied for years is stereotype threat.
00:40:35.399 --> 00:41:05.799
So what he is really is trying to look at is how we receive signals, trust signals of our full humanity and how those signals can be discerned through the churn that we experience in life because of stereotypes that we experience.
00:41:06.439 --> 00:41:21.559
So in this chapter, I really explore his concept of wiseness, which really means to be seen in one's full humanity, not merely as a role title, stereotype, or utility.
00:41:21.959 --> 00:41:27.719
Because when people feel seen, they don't have to monitor for threat anymore.
00:41:27.959 --> 00:41:32.919
And the other person I really looked at here was John Godham's work as well.
00:41:34.039 --> 00:41:42.519
Why is trust such an important part of feeling that we matter, particularly for our leaders and people who are responsible for other people?
00:41:42.679 --> 00:41:46.519
So this could even be parents as well, for example.
00:41:48.599 --> 00:41:51.159
Well, let's take the home situation.
00:41:52.039 --> 00:41:58.119
So if you are a parent, how quiet is your house?
00:42:00.359 --> 00:42:10.199
I'm asking that question because we look at our home as us being the leadership over the environment in that home.
00:42:11.719 --> 00:42:26.439
And I grew up in a home where for us to feel our worth, we were encouraged to remain silent.
00:42:27.159 --> 00:42:36.599
The less noise we made, the less conflict we caused, the less disarray we brought.
00:42:36.759 --> 00:42:50.039
So so that is so because I didn't think that my voice was wanted to be heard, I lost trust.
00:42:50.119 --> 00:43:02.839
And I think another one that happens in households is you feel like trust is dependent on you earning your your right to it.
00:43:02.999 --> 00:43:10.999
So you feel like you have to to this magical college, you feel like you have to bring trophies home, whatever it is.
00:43:11.319 --> 00:43:28.999
But those are two different ways that I think trust can be diluted in a family, and we as parents don't even realize the magnitude of the trust that we're destroying when those conditions permeate the environment that we're creating.
00:43:30.039 --> 00:43:40.599
Such important distinctions, John, and to time, for example, there's so many different iterations of how we do time and productivity.
00:43:40.679 --> 00:43:44.279
And obviously, we're talking about time in the context of mattering.
00:43:45.399 --> 00:43:55.559
What were some of the insights that you gleaned, some of the research you found, some of the conversations you had around the sphere of time?
00:43:58.039 --> 00:44:10.119
So some of the people I I interviewed for this were were English writer Oliver Berkman, of course, Laura Vanderkam, and a number of others.
00:44:10.439 --> 00:44:26.199
But what what I was really trying to look at when people experience chronic time scarcity, we end up contracting.
00:44:26.679 --> 00:44:33.319
We become less present, less generous, more likely to withdraw from relationships.
00:44:33.959 --> 00:44:47.479
And so what I learned through this is mattering, is we're not using our time appropriately, we're losing ourself through reasonable postponements.
00:44:48.519 --> 00:44:52.279
We're postponing our life for the next thing.
00:44:54.039 --> 00:45:10.279
I'm arguing that whenever we do have agency, even in small spaces, what we protect sends a signal about what we believe deserves to survive the noise that's around us.
00:45:11.239 --> 00:45:15.479
It's the very container in which a life becomes visible.
00:45:17.159 --> 00:45:22.119
John, what's an example, like what's a real example of reasonable postponement?
00:45:24.679 --> 00:45:30.679
I I'll do this thing when I get done this.
00:45:31.079 --> 00:45:33.959
I'll change my life when I get done this.
00:45:34.839 --> 00:45:37.079
I etc.
00:45:37.559 --> 00:45:50.039
So the analogy that I always use is so many of us have spent our entire lives and we f feel completely empty inside.
00:45:50.679 --> 00:45:52.359
And we want to change.
00:45:52.839 --> 00:46:02.439
And so we know we want to get to Mount Kilimanjaro way, way, way in the distance if we're lucky enough to see it, but that gap is huge.
00:46:03.079 --> 00:46:11.479
And we have no idea because the mountain in the distance, how in the heck do we get from where we are to where we're going?
00:46:12.119 --> 00:46:16.759
And so instead of getting started, we make excuses.
00:46:18.599 --> 00:46:22.679
We become a visionary arsonist to the very thing.
00:46:23.639 --> 00:46:24.439
That we want.
00:46:26.999 --> 00:46:31.319
And so we do these postponements which become excuses.
00:46:31.719 --> 00:46:40.679
Like for me, a recent example of this is I have wanted to go back to get a master's degree in organizational psychology for years.
00:46:42.919 --> 00:46:47.799
And I keep just putting another postponement on it.
00:46:48.439 --> 00:46:51.319
I have to start the podcast before I do this.
00:46:51.479 --> 00:46:54.119
I have to write the next book before I do this.
00:46:54.359 --> 00:46:57.559
I have to do the next coaching call before I do this.
00:46:57.799 --> 00:47:07.159
Until I eventually just set a date and said, I don't care how if I keep making these excuses, I'm never going to do it.
00:47:07.319 --> 00:47:12.119
And now I'm enrolled in a master's in organizational psychology.
00:47:14.759 --> 00:47:19.559
And that's just a simple example of what we end up doing in our lives.
00:47:21.879 --> 00:47:22.359
Absolutely.
00:47:22.519 --> 00:47:30.839
I'm sure a lot of people listening to this can concur that they've seen it happen or seen examples of this.
00:47:30.999 --> 00:47:36.359
And you alluded to being efficient when it comes to time, John.
00:47:36.679 --> 00:47:44.599
And is it possible to spend our time very efficiently on the wrong things?
00:47:44.919 --> 00:47:46.679
Oh well, yes.
00:47:47.159 --> 00:48:03.239
Like what I remember my pastor at my church did this, did this great homily about the main thing, about the main thing, is keeping the main thing, and it's actually Stephen Covey saying.
00:48:03.639 --> 00:48:09.879
Like the main thing, how many of us lose sight of the main thing?
00:48:10.519 --> 00:48:12.519
Startups do it all the time.
00:48:14.919 --> 00:48:26.439
The main reason that most entrepreneurial lose their way is because they stop keeping the main thing the main thing.
00:48:26.839 --> 00:48:31.319
The main thing is the problem that you feel called to serve.
00:48:32.199 --> 00:48:37.639
It's typically what amounts to being your why.
00:48:40.039 --> 00:48:44.039
It's one of the easiest things that we lose track of.
00:48:44.199 --> 00:49:04.599
And I remember what he talked about during this homily is he didn't use the words Eisenhower Matrix, but that's basically what he was talking about of how you're spending your time and if it's diluting from the main thing, is what's on your calendar.
00:49:05.319 --> 00:49:10.199
And when you look at your checkbook, where are you spending your money?
00:49:12.279 --> 00:49:19.719
If it's not going against your main thing, that's the gap.
00:49:21.719 --> 00:49:22.599
There you go.
00:49:22.839 --> 00:49:27.239
And John, the next part is energy.
00:49:27.399 --> 00:49:35.319
I was in an environment of humongous amounts of energy for many years in a in a previous in a previous life, if you will.
00:49:36.679 --> 00:49:41.399
The next part is energy with mattering.
00:49:41.559 --> 00:49:44.119
And again, so fascinating to me.
00:49:44.199 --> 00:49:49.959
Who are some of the thought leaders that you've encountered in this sphere of space?
00:49:51.479 --> 00:49:55.239
Well, one of them is your former boss, Tony Robbins.
00:49:55.559 --> 00:50:02.519
So he is someone who epitomizes a proper return on energy.
00:50:02.679 --> 00:50:16.599
But I also looked heavily into the work of Judd Brewer, who's a professor at Brown, Corinne Lowe, who's a professor at Wharton, Emma Sapella, who's a professor at Yale University.
00:50:16.839 --> 00:50:19.479
Emma studies emotional suppression.
00:50:20.359 --> 00:50:24.839
Corinne kind of goes into invisible management.
00:50:25.159 --> 00:50:31.559
Like, does chronic vigilance impact us?
00:50:31.719 --> 00:50:40.199
And Judd Brewer really goes into how our behaviors undermine our long-term well-being, habit loops, and relief.
00:50:41.399 --> 00:50:42.759
So fascinating, John.
00:50:42.919 --> 00:50:45.319
Last but not least, reciprocity.
00:50:45.559 --> 00:50:48.519
Again, who are some of the thought leaders in this area?
00:50:48.999 --> 00:51:04.599
We spoke well a few days ago, and I had mentioned to you that I zoomed in on the M of matter of the framework, and I zoomed in on the R of reciprocity of the framework.
00:51:04.759 --> 00:51:08.919
Who are some of the thought leaders around this area?
00:51:09.319 --> 00:51:10.919
Yeah, Mof, it's just okay.
00:51:10.999 --> 00:51:16.919
I just for the listeners, I wanted to make sure they understood with energy what I'm talking about.
00:51:17.639 --> 00:51:22.519
And energy in my terminology is the felt of life.
00:51:24.919 --> 00:51:33.079
Because I don't think we realize that the deepest energy drain that we're experiencing is override.
00:51:33.719 --> 00:51:43.239
And that's the energy we keep putting out to suppress our emotions, manage our appearances, stay agreeable, remain useful.
00:51:45.479 --> 00:51:52.759
So many of us feel so exhausted because we're carrying so much of ourselves in hiding.
00:51:53.159 --> 00:51:57.479
So that that is why this return on energy is so important.
00:51:57.719 --> 00:52:14.759
But as you come to reciprocity, the two primary people I spoke to were Sonia Levermirsky, who is the predominant expert on happiness, and Harry Reese, who is the predominant worldwide expert on relationships.
00:52:15.239 --> 00:52:24.519
The important thing about reciprocity is it requires both giving care and being able to receive it.
00:52:24.839 --> 00:52:33.959
And I think what ends up happening where the Seesaw comes into play is being needed with being valued.
00:52:34.519 --> 00:52:42.759
And so many of us, myself included, we become the reliable one or the provider or the fixer or the person who carries everything.
00:52:43.079 --> 00:52:49.639
But a relationship in which care only moves in one direction eventually becomes an extract.
00:52:51.159 --> 00:52:55.639
And it extracts that energy that I talked about earlier.
00:52:57.399 --> 00:53:05.959
So, John, thinking about the opposite of a retraction system, what does a genuinely reciprocal relationship look like?
00:53:07.719 --> 00:53:16.839
So one of the people that I interviewed along the way who I had honestly never heard of Mo is a gentleman named Stephen Post.
00:53:17.399 --> 00:53:22.599
And he was talking about unconditional love.
00:53:24.359 --> 00:53:47.319
And like when he he's talking about this, it's not about the romantic idea of love to segue quite brilliantly with the conversation I had with Mark Nepo, poet, just weeks before I interviewed Steven, and they were both talking about love.
00:53:48.359 --> 00:54:01.799
But I want to put love in terms of if you were on your deathbed, who is the one person that you would want to see in front of you?
00:54:03.879 --> 00:54:05.879
And how did they why?
00:54:06.039 --> 00:54:22.679
How do they make you feel that's what I think of when I think of this reciprocity and and what we're missing so much of is that unconditional feeling of being loved.
00:54:23.159 --> 00:54:28.679
Because if you think about it from that term, it's not how much can I give.
00:54:29.559 --> 00:54:32.839
Those people don't make us feel that way.
00:54:33.239 --> 00:54:39.239
They also make it safe to ask, can I let you hold me when I need it?
00:54:40.199 --> 00:54:44.599
And I think so many of us are missing that element.
00:54:47.159 --> 00:54:58.919
I had a very interesting conversation, John, a few weeks back with a great friend of mine who I've known for well over a decade, more like a decade and a half.
00:54:58.999 --> 00:55:00.039
How about that?
00:55:00.519 --> 00:55:19.159
And it's speaking of romantic relationships, he mentioned that a lot of times when we choose our significant other, or when one chooses their significant other, what's the people are experts at looking for aesthetics, how good they look, and and all of that great stuff.
00:55:19.399 --> 00:55:34.119
And then he mentioned that for him, when he was, I guess, seeking out his wife, that for him the only criteria was that sort of value match.
00:55:35.159 --> 00:55:50.039
Having said that, without going too deep into that other conversation, where does that sort of thinking sit when it comes to reciprocity when it comes to mattering as well?
00:55:52.439 --> 00:56:34.359
I think it it comes down to do you feel secure enough that you can be your authentic self with that with that person and feel safe enough that you're willing to expose the deepest corners of who you are to them in a way that won't feel as if it's diminishing you or like cutting your light, that it makes you feel surrounded by care, if that makes sense.
00:56:35.559 --> 00:56:57.079
And that's that speaks to almost trusting yourself to give yours to give them that side of you, but then you're also trusting them to hold, receive, have that side of you, it's and then vice versa.
00:56:57.239 --> 00:57:00.839
It's what I sort of gauge from from that.
00:57:01.799 --> 00:57:09.959
John, so this conversation, the book, the movement, your research, your great work is about mattering.
00:57:10.279 --> 00:57:19.479
But here's the thing a lot of people use achievement as a substitute for mattering.
00:57:19.559 --> 00:57:27.559
What does it matter if I've achieved tons and tons of great things in all the different ways that we we score achievement?
00:57:28.279 --> 00:57:37.319
And attention that I found really interesting reading the book is is it possible to become a highly achievement-oriented?
00:57:37.959 --> 00:57:46.279
Because achievement, they give us like a temporary feeling and a temporary sense that yes, we're top of the tree.
00:57:46.599 --> 00:57:48.119
Who's done what we've done?
00:57:48.359 --> 00:57:49.319
We matter.
00:57:51.639 --> 00:58:08.919
Well, you have to do is look at some very famous people, billionaires, professional athletes, etc., who on the surface seem to have it all, feel like they have nothing.
00:58:09.079 --> 00:58:10.519
I will give you a great example.
00:58:10.679 --> 00:58:19.719
I'm not sure how prominent Josh Dumel is in in Europe, but he he's an A-listing actor.
00:58:19.959 --> 00:58:24.119
People probably recognize him because he was in all the Transformer movies.
00:58:24.279 --> 00:58:27.879
He's been the lead role in in several other movies.
00:58:28.119 --> 00:58:48.439
And I recently had a conversation with Josh, and as much as he has accomplished, as much as he has done, he still compares himself all the time to actors who he thinks are better than him, or what he hasn't accomplished, or what he wants more of.
00:58:48.759 --> 00:58:58.839
And he was going through and talking about the more that he punishes himself with that away from himself.
00:58:59.319 --> 00:59:30.599
And I think that's the core thing here, is when you feel like you matter to yourself, what you're really what your belief is does the life I am living have enough inherent worth that I will protect it, care for it, and remain present inside of it.
00:59:30.999 --> 00:59:38.759
And I think for too many of us, we don't feel that, regardless of how much achievement we have.
00:59:44.599 --> 00:59:46.359
But I will do a little bit.
01:00:15.799 --> 01:00:30.439
So when we arrive at as children at school, we're we're not primarily asking whether we can learn, we're asking whether we matter.
01:00:32.119 --> 01:00:34.359
You know, in that in that school environment.
01:00:34.519 --> 01:00:46.199
And that's where in the past play had such a profound role on what we were experiencing, because that's how we experienced the school environment.
01:00:46.519 --> 01:00:53.079
But now in so many of the school systems around the world, play has been taken away.
01:00:53.319 --> 01:01:03.799
And so our education systems have shifted from adapting institutions to children toward adapting children to the institutions.
01:01:05.959 --> 01:01:19.879
And and so you you can see just in those two examples how the environments are completely shaping us, and they're taking that very social immunity away from us.
01:01:20.119 --> 01:01:31.479
If you think about modern school systems, what we're teaching them is that they don't matter for who they are, they learn to matter for what they produce.
01:01:32.359 --> 01:01:36.279
We don't write the school system to fit the kid.
01:01:36.599 --> 01:01:39.799
We start medicating the kid to fit the school system.
01:01:40.199 --> 01:01:56.999
So we prescribe them AD ADD medicine, we do that, and we teach them more and more that they don't matter as they are, so they have to conform into the world that we want them to exist in.
01:01:57.239 --> 01:02:13.479
And that's exactly, you know, our you know, kids' attachment starts to wither away, and it's where their identity starts to get compromised into feeling that they can't be who they actually are because the world doesn't accept them as who they are.
01:02:13.719 --> 01:02:16.839
Now imagine me with all these deficiencies.
01:02:16.919 --> 01:02:26.919
That's exactly what I was going through and why I felt so invisible because I wasn't accepted into the world I was in.
01:02:27.159 --> 01:02:29.239
I had to conform my way into it.
01:02:29.559 --> 01:02:32.759
Social media is just an accelerant.
01:02:33.079 --> 01:02:43.799
When homes, schools, and communities fail to provide reliable signals of significance, what we end up doing is we naturally seek alternatives.
01:02:44.359 --> 01:02:56.199
And social media, what these platforms are doing is they excel at measuring, displaying, and the very indicators that human beings have always used to locate mattering.
01:02:56.599 --> 01:03:10.919
And what was once relational becomes quantifiable because feeling that we matter is tied to our engagement on these systems.
01:03:11.639 --> 01:03:18.759
And that's where the work of Sandra Motz and Jamel Zaki becomes so important.
01:03:19.479 --> 01:03:41.399
And Anna Lemke's research on dopamine really takes us to the next level because this whole reward system is attached to the very social validation that we need to activate the neurological systems, reinforce in our minds that we are worthy.
01:03:41.639 --> 01:03:50.279
So it is a complete accelerant that lays on top of the conditions that are already extracting this away from us.
01:03:50.919 --> 01:03:56.519
So that is why I call this the great erasure, because it's everywhere.
01:03:57.559 --> 01:03:58.999
It is so crazy, Mo.
01:03:59.159 --> 01:04:03.719
It's even in the consumer world that we live in.
01:04:04.759 --> 01:04:15.799
So when we fail to get stable signals of intrinsic worth, like markets like consumerism step in to try to fill the vacuum.
01:04:16.119 --> 01:04:21.399
So products sell belonging, aspiration, and status.
01:04:21.879 --> 01:04:25.239
We're not merely like buying products.
01:04:26.199 --> 01:04:34.999
We buy the stories that were being sold behind the products, which are teaching us we belong where we matter.
01:04:35.399 --> 01:04:43.639
Nike sells determination, Apple sells authorship, luxury brands sell self-distinction and recognition.
01:04:43.879 --> 01:04:47.079
It's all around us, yet we don't even see it.
01:04:49.319 --> 01:04:50.439
I love that so much.
01:04:50.759 --> 01:05:16.119
And this is and this is where that like when I started bringing this up to Al Roth and the markets that were around, comes back to that repugnant systems because when you think about consumerism, consumerism, like they benefit when we experience ourselves as perpetually unfinished.
01:05:16.599 --> 01:05:28.359
Our own feelings of insufficiency and insignificant creates the very demand for the products and experiences and identities that they're feeding us.
01:05:29.319 --> 01:05:32.999
To feel significant inside because so many of us don't feel it.
01:05:34.199 --> 01:05:36.359
We acquire it from the outside.
01:05:37.639 --> 01:05:40.359
It's crazy once you start thinking about it.
01:05:43.559 --> 01:05:50.919
The stable signals of intrinsic wealth that you mentioned.
01:05:51.239 --> 01:06:00.999
Or in in in terms of just those stable signals coming from that home environment or the school environment, you're absolutely right.
01:06:01.639 --> 01:06:16.679
If there's a really stable, healthy home environment, a stable, healthy school environment, all of a sudden, whatever's going on externally doesn't matter, so to speak.
01:06:16.919 --> 01:06:26.039
And it's only an accelerant if you don't have that stable cake, if you will, that's just the not so nice icing on the top.
01:06:26.119 --> 01:06:27.079
So I definitely concur.
01:06:27.159 --> 01:06:31.479
I'm such a fan of just that stability, especially for the youngsters.
01:06:31.799 --> 01:06:36.999
So important to start young from four years old, five, six, seven years old.
01:06:37.079 --> 01:06:51.079
And John, it's so interesting to me that this research around mattering matters to you to the extent that you've even gone the next level to start young.
01:06:53.479 --> 01:07:08.439
Let's talk you matter luma and your thinking behind that and the trajectory difference that will make for the consumer of you matter luma, and who is the consumer as well.
01:07:10.279 --> 01:07:17.479
That has been one of the biggest joys of my life, is writing a children's book, which I never thought I would ever do.
01:07:17.719 --> 01:07:20.519
But I came up with this idea.
01:07:20.759 --> 01:07:28.999
Came up with this idea because I was looking at what Gary Vaynerchuk was doing with his brand V V friends that he has.
01:07:29.079 --> 01:07:34.439
If people are not familiar with it, he he was trying, he's trying in his own way.
01:07:34.839 --> 01:07:47.319
He feels that when I interviewed him, he was telling me that he feels like we are not teaching kids so many of the core values that they need to learn that we used to learn as kids that aren't being passed down.
01:07:47.399 --> 01:07:56.999
And he feels that he could showcase these core values in into the characters that are part of the V Frame world.
01:07:57.239 --> 01:08:01.559
So it made me start thinking I could do something similar for mattering.
01:08:01.639 --> 01:08:07.079
So I came up with this concept that that I trademark called the Mattering Verse.
01:08:07.239 --> 01:08:18.519
And so what I'm trying to create with the Mattering Verse is is a world that's the opposite of the marketplace of mattering that we are existing in.
01:08:18.760 --> 01:08:23.079
Because if you think about the marketplace of mattering.
01:08:23.559 --> 01:08:30.439
That we are existing in, if you have fans of the Matrix movie, that is the Matrix.
01:08:31.239 --> 01:08:36.039
The problem that I that I got down to is it's not necessarily us.
01:08:36.279 --> 01:08:48.600
Similar to what I was talking about with consumerism, when the matrix is all around you and it's been depleting you for so long and distorting the signals that you're getting, you don't even realize it anymore.
01:08:48.680 --> 01:08:52.840
And that's part of the issue with the slow fade and why you don't recognize it.
01:08:53.079 --> 01:08:57.079
It's because it's everywhere, it permeates every bit of you.
01:08:57.399 --> 01:09:21.960
So if you think of this marketplace of mattering matrix, all the institutions and environments that surround us are optimized for efficiency, performance, engagement, and growth, not providing the signals of human significance that we require.
01:09:22.359 --> 01:09:46.119
And the issue that's happening is so many of the parents today feel depleted because they represent the lonely, the broken, the battered, the beaten, the bored, and out that the way that kids learn about mattering is be is through the witness of their elders.
01:09:46.359 --> 01:09:53.479
And when the parents themselves don't feel it, what do you think is getting passed down even if they don't realize it?
01:09:53.880 --> 01:10:00.279
So long story short, a children's book is both for the child and for the parent.
01:10:00.600 --> 01:10:06.680
So the complexity of it is that you have to write it with both lenses.
01:10:06.760 --> 01:10:38.119
And that makes it very difficult because you're trying to tell a story, and yet at the same time, I was building in underneath the surface behavior science, like topics such as sunk cost fallacy and attachment theory in the book in a way that a parent might recognize it or might not recognize it, but they're actually teaching it.
01:10:38.279 --> 01:10:48.759
And the important thing about the book is I was appealing to the child and the scary thing is 35% of kids three to eight don't feel like they matter.
01:10:50.359 --> 01:10:59.079
The bigger gap is only 8% of their parents believe that that could possibly be true, which shows you the huge gap.
01:10:59.319 --> 01:11:16.599
So, one, I was trying to teach kids in the wet cement years of their life before the cement starts hardening, but I'm also trying in the writing of the book to subliminally tell them how much they matter.
01:11:17.079 --> 01:11:39.559
So that's the trick of writing a book like this, is you're you're trying to teach these psychological concepts to both, and the difficulty is closing the gap between the child and the parent, and getting this to be a book that the parent wants to read to the child again and again and again for what it's trying to reinforce.
01:11:39.799 --> 01:11:46.039
And I also think you have another opportunity to intervene at the next stage.
01:11:46.279 --> 01:11:51.000
They start asking the deeper questions as they approach middle school.
01:11:51.239 --> 01:11:53.559
And but they're still in the wet cement.
01:11:53.639 --> 01:11:56.279
It's getting a little bit harder, but they can still move.
01:11:56.439 --> 01:12:05.399
But Manmo, if you don't teach them mattering then, then that's the jackhammer.
01:12:05.960 --> 01:12:19.639
And we're now dealing with people who have distorted self-images and lifetimes of identity damage that take years and years and years of therapy to reverse.
01:12:21.239 --> 01:12:23.000
John, that was such a great share.
01:12:23.159 --> 01:12:27.719
So listening to this homework, the matchman effect, John R.
01:12:27.880 --> 01:12:34.519
Miles and the and you Mattaluma, go get both of them is the task and the ask from me.
01:12:35.079 --> 01:12:42.599
And John, suppose someone listening to this recognizes themselves in what you're describing.
01:12:43.079 --> 01:12:49.639
So on their resume, the resume is like a Wikipedia entry, incredible.
01:12:49.960 --> 01:12:55.319
Been there, done the top 1% in many different parts of their life.
01:12:56.359 --> 01:13:01.479
And they finally realized what was the issue the whole time, this matching gap.
01:13:04.759 --> 01:13:08.920
Well, first I want to tell you how prevalent this is.
01:13:09.239 --> 01:13:19.159
So I was recently watching a video of Oprah Winfrey interviewing Sean Acor.
01:13:19.319 --> 01:13:24.519
Sean Acor, I think, is one of the best writers out there on positive psychology.
01:13:25.239 --> 01:13:29.479
And he was talking about, people aren't familiar with him.
01:13:29.719 --> 01:13:31.079
He has sold millions of books.
01:13:31.159 --> 01:13:33.079
He's a New York Times bestselling author.
01:13:33.319 --> 01:13:50.359
But he was telling Oprah that as he was launching his second, like it was his second or third book, and part of this was his wife was pregnant with their child, and there were some complications that went along with it.
01:13:50.679 --> 01:14:05.079
So all of a sudden, his his whole book launch is going into disarray, and his face were people who at that point were were doing amazing things.
01:14:05.239 --> 01:14:11.479
Like one of them was Adam Grant, another one was another person, and all he could do was compare himself to them.
01:14:11.559 --> 01:14:16.920
And he said, I comp like I didn't matter at all.
01:14:17.639 --> 01:14:34.119
And then he was in this car ride where he had to give a talk, and the person in the car, who he he never got the chance to meet again, mentions to him that one of his books actually saved their life by reading it.
01:14:34.359 --> 01:14:39.079
And it closed the loop for Sean feeling like he mattered.
01:14:39.319 --> 01:15:10.439
But in this discussion, Oprah says what she has discovered herself after doing all the interviews that she has done, and she she made the statement that all the presidents, all the world leaders, Beyoncé, all the athletes that she interviews, they get done, the interview says, Do you think that will resonate?
01:15:11.239 --> 01:15:13.479
Did did what I say matter?
01:15:14.359 --> 01:15:18.920
So it doesn't matter who you are, that's the point.
01:15:21.639 --> 01:15:31.079
We all strive for the mattering instinct, and when it disappears, we start to vanish.
01:15:32.039 --> 01:15:57.399
When we don't feel included, when we don't feel we control the outcome of our openness and the authentic ability to see others and relate to them, which gets really back to the work of Robert Waldinger's, we start putting on a mask, and that mask becomes who we are, and then we vanish.
01:16:04.359 --> 01:16:40.359
Looking in the mirror and working on our own version of the mattering effect, making sure that we matter, and perhaps I'm talking to the six to eight people in our immediate circle, spouses, kids, that sort of thing, but also just in general, the thank yous here, the well done there, the pats on the back there, are those parts, even though tiny, perhaps seemingly insignificant, are those parts really significant for helping us across a little piece of that cake of mattering across to someone else?
01:16:40.679 --> 01:16:43.319
Well, I think the important so two things.
01:16:44.359 --> 01:16:52.920
The first thing, Mo, in order to unleash the mattering effect in others, you have to restore the mattering dividend in yourself.
01:16:53.239 --> 01:17:04.759
The mattering dividend you get back when you stop having to prove yourself, earn your way, achieve your way to feeling self-worth.
01:17:05.399 --> 01:17:21.799
And to answer your second part, the health of any family is not revealed simply by whether unconditional love exists, but by whether each person's full self is allowed to exist within it.
01:17:24.359 --> 01:17:36.199
And so and I think that's what Steve, Stephen Post, and Mark Nepo were saying too when they were talking about unconditional love.
01:17:36.679 --> 01:17:43.639
Like when we are searching for that unconditional love at our deathbed, that is what we are searching for.
01:17:44.279 --> 01:17:58.840
Our full self being allowed to exist with that other person because they are the one who makes us feel like we are allowed to treat ourselves with the same care them.
01:18:01.559 --> 01:18:03.159
So outstanding, John.
01:18:03.719 --> 01:18:09.799
John, if you could strip away all the research, you're an amazing researcher and establish that.
01:18:11.960 --> 01:18:15.559
And the premium work itself, M-A-T-T-E-R.
01:18:17.399 --> 01:18:23.639
And we'd leave the listener with just one idea to start with on the matron effect.
01:18:24.840 --> 01:18:27.000
What would you want them to understand?
01:18:29.880 --> 01:18:41.000
You can be loved for a version of yourself that you have manufactured and still feel profoundly alone.
01:18:43.239 --> 01:19:03.960
And I think that's what so many of us are doing is we have manufactured this identity of ourselves that's so hollow by the time we've manufactured it that we have no idea how we've gotten there.
01:19:04.840 --> 01:19:09.079
And we we can't psychologically process it.
01:19:09.399 --> 01:19:13.639
It's that's where the invisibility kicks in.
01:19:14.519 --> 01:19:18.279
The book is The Match for an Effect by John R.
01:19:18.439 --> 01:19:19.000
Miles.
01:19:20.039 --> 01:19:23.799
The book is also You Mataluma by John R.
01:19:23.960 --> 01:19:38.920
Miles, and John, it has been such an honor calling you a colleague, a friend, a peer, whatever you want to call it, over the last few years and met in the same mastermind.
01:19:39.079 --> 01:19:39.399
Yeah.
01:19:39.639 --> 01:19:49.479
And John, if somebody wanted to learn more from you, where would we send them?
01:19:49.799 --> 01:20:01.000
Well, the the two most frequent places that they can hear from me are either my podcast, which they can get to by going to passionstruck.com, S-T-R-U-C-K.
01:20:01.799 --> 01:20:09.319
And if you're interested in my subset where I put out content on a weekly basis, uh it's called the ignited life.net.
01:20:09.719 --> 01:20:11.639
Awesome, awesome, awesome, awesome.
01:20:11.960 --> 01:20:13.319
John, such an honor.
01:20:13.479 --> 01:20:18.679
Have an amazing rest of today, and see you the next time.
01:20:18.759 --> 01:20:19.319
All the best.
01:20:19.399 --> 01:20:20.039
Ciao.
01:20:20.359 --> 01:20:21.880
No, thank you so much for having me.
01:20:21.960 --> 01:20:23.960
It was such an honor to be on your show.
01:20:24.519 --> 01:20:27.719
Thank you for listening to Purpose Driven Success with Mostalomi.
01:20:28.199 --> 01:20:32.119
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01:20:32.199 --> 01:20:35.319
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01:20:35.479 --> 01:20:39.559
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01:20:39.719 --> 01:20:46.439
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01:20:46.679 --> 01:20:54.039
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01:20:54.279 --> 01:21:02.920
Work on your mindset, work on your skill set, and always move in the direction of the result you want before you see the result you want.
01:21:03.079 --> 01:21:06.599
And until next time, do the best you can consistently.
01:21:06.920 --> 01:21:07.719
Ciao.
00:00:00.800 --> 00:00:04.799
The paradox is being needed isn't the same thing as mattering.
00:00:05.040 --> 00:00:14.320
Being valuable to another person, mattering says you're valuable to that person, but your presence also makes a difference.
00:00:14.560 --> 00:00:17.440
And that is the cost of unmattering.
00:00:17.920 --> 00:00:22.960
When you don't realize that your presence makes a difference.
00:00:28.399 --> 00:00:38.240
Welcome to purpose-driven success with Mo Salami, where real journeys, mindset shifts, and strategic insights meet purpose-driven success.
00:00:38.479 --> 00:00:40.799
I'm your host, Mo Salami.
00:00:41.200 --> 00:00:55.119
Every week we dive into real conversations with high-achieving founders and leaders, uncovering the mindset, strategies, and takeaways that help you define and achieve success on your own terms.
00:00:58.240 --> 00:01:02.479
Welcome to another episode of Purpose-Driven Success.
00:01:02.640 --> 00:01:08.000
And I know I always say this, but you are in for an extraordinary episode today.
00:01:08.239 --> 00:01:16.879
This is one of those switch the TV off, put the book away, and focus on the book we're going to speak about and really focus in.
00:01:17.040 --> 00:01:18.400
Today's guest is John R.
00:01:18.560 --> 00:01:27.359
Miles, best-selling author, award-winning speaker, Navy combat veteran, and former Fortune 50 executive.
00:01:27.599 --> 00:01:38.480
And he's the host of the globally acclaimed Ash and Struck podcast, which has surpassed, wait for this, 85 million downloads.
00:01:38.879 --> 00:01:46.159
John has spent decades studying human performance, leadership, and what drives people to achieve at the highest level.
00:01:46.400 --> 00:01:50.799
But beneath the success, a deeper question began to emerge.
00:01:51.120 --> 00:01:53.040
Do I actually matter?
00:01:53.920 --> 00:01:58.959
That question became the foundation for his new book, The Mattering Effect.
00:01:59.200 --> 00:02:10.400
An exploration of what happens when performing, producing, achieving, and proving ourselves begins to disconnect us from what genuinely matters.
00:02:10.800 --> 00:02:19.599
And for anyone who's ever achieved something they thought would finally make them feel fulfilled, only to discover they were still searching for something deeper.
00:02:21.919 --> 00:02:24.719
There's a question at the heart of this conversation.
00:02:29.919 --> 00:02:30.560
John R.
00:02:30.719 --> 00:02:34.159
Miles, welcome to Purpose Driven Success.
00:02:34.479 --> 00:02:36.240
Mo, I am so honored to be here.
00:02:36.400 --> 00:02:40.000
You have such a great, fantastic podcast.
00:02:40.159 --> 00:02:44.080
Thank you so much for welcoming me with your arms wide open.
00:02:45.439 --> 00:02:46.800
My arms are wide open.
00:02:46.879 --> 00:02:48.240
You are welcome.
00:02:48.560 --> 00:02:50.479
And let's start here.
00:02:51.120 --> 00:03:03.439
John, you've done a huge amount of research for the Matrian effect as a book and as a as a movement, if you will.
00:03:04.639 --> 00:03:13.280
What was the central question or the problem that you were trying to understand at the very beginning when you began this research?
00:03:15.120 --> 00:03:16.960
I was given a calling.
00:03:17.840 --> 00:03:28.240
Years ago, I was taking this course at my church that completely altered the trajectory of my entire life.
00:03:28.560 --> 00:03:39.680
I suddenly felt called to serve the words that I was given were the lonely, the broken, the beaten, the battered, the disengaged, and the burned out.
00:03:40.000 --> 00:03:51.439
And put this into context, at this particular moment, I was an executive at Lowe's leading operations.
00:03:51.840 --> 00:03:55.199
I had no idea what to do with this.
00:03:55.840 --> 00:03:57.919
I didn't know who those people were.
00:03:58.159 --> 00:04:01.120
I didn't know how I was supposed to help them.
00:04:02.159 --> 00:04:03.840
I just felt this calling.
00:04:04.080 --> 00:04:13.919
I think, like a lot of us, we get so caught up in the day-to-day, our families, work that I put this on the back burner.
00:04:14.240 --> 00:04:20.000
And the call for me kind of happened in two moments.
00:04:20.480 --> 00:04:27.920
One was a moment with my son, and the other was when my best friend committed suicide.
00:04:28.399 --> 00:04:44.959
And I sat back from that terrible gut wrench moment and thought to myself, I'm gonna regret it for the rest of my life if I don't pursue this calling that I was given.
00:04:45.279 --> 00:04:54.480
Loneliness was one crisis, burnout was another, disengagement was another, rising despair and declining mental health was yet another.
00:04:54.959 --> 00:05:02.959
And for years I thought about them individually, but the deeper I went into the human condition, the more a different question began to haunt me.
00:05:03.600 --> 00:05:10.399
And that question is: what if we are ignoring an upstream wound sitting underneath many of them?
00:05:10.639 --> 00:05:28.000
Because when you peel back the layers, whether it's someone burning out at work, an employee checking out, someone spiraling into isolation, or someone who's in the depth of depression, you encounter the same unspoken question.
00:05:28.800 --> 00:05:30.399
Do I matter?
00:05:30.879 --> 00:05:36.240
And that forced me to do what I'm doing now.
00:05:38.480 --> 00:05:54.720
John, a lot of people listening to Purpose Driven Success, this podcast, they're ambitious, they're successful, and they're pursuing the next thing, the next win, the next checkbox, if you will.
00:05:55.839 --> 00:06:02.720
And your book, The Mattering Effect, suggests that achievement doesn't necessarily give us a sense that we matter.
00:06:03.439 --> 00:06:04.399
Why is that?
00:06:06.800 --> 00:06:13.279
So, Mo, I think it's extremely important for people to understand the importance of mattering.
00:06:13.759 --> 00:06:23.519
Mattering sits at the same playing field as our need for safety and our need for love.
00:06:24.480 --> 00:06:34.399
But to put this into perspective, when we are born, the first thing that we are trying to sense is our mattering instinct.
00:06:34.639 --> 00:06:44.000
When we go into new environments, such as school, before we're worried about learning, that mattering instinct kicks in again.
00:06:44.399 --> 00:06:52.879
How do I matter in this environment before you even think about what you're trying to learn, etc.?
00:06:53.439 --> 00:07:19.120
And so what has happened over time that became one of the most crucial gotchas for me is we have built environments, systems, and institutions that are extraordinarily good at measuring what we produce, perform, achieve, and deliver.
00:07:20.000 --> 00:07:23.519
But they're far less capable of reflecting who we are.
00:07:23.680 --> 00:07:25.839
And that's what makes mattering so important.
00:07:26.000 --> 00:07:30.959
Because mattering at its very core, it's giving value and receiving value.
00:07:31.199 --> 00:07:40.000
And what has ended up happening to humanity is we keep giving and giving and giving and giving and giving.
00:07:41.920 --> 00:07:53.040
But when you don't get that return, you sit in what I call the mattering gap because your whole sense of worth becomes distorted.
00:07:53.279 --> 00:07:56.240
And that's what I call systemic unmattering.
00:07:58.160 --> 00:08:05.279
So the mattering gap is the distance between what you give and what you receive back.
00:08:06.160 --> 00:08:23.839
And the systems around that that are extracting this from us is what causes us to experience antimattering, extended periods of where we feel insignificant.
00:08:24.000 --> 00:08:28.639
It is despair that is so profound in our lives.
00:08:29.120 --> 00:08:35.039
But underneath that, what is causing it is systemic unmattering.
00:08:37.519 --> 00:08:47.120
What would you say were the warning signs that someone's fallen into the gap, into the mattering gap, and they don't even realize it?
00:08:48.000 --> 00:08:58.559
Well, one of the ways I try to explain this is I use Surfside as a metaphor for this.
00:09:07.679 --> 00:09:15.840
And this whole condominium complex collapsed in twelve seconds and ended up killing many, many people.
00:09:16.080 --> 00:09:22.720
And what happened from an engineering standpoint is something called progressive failure.
00:09:22.960 --> 00:09:37.919
Progressive failure describes a sequence of small neglected stresses that in isolation appear insignificant, but become devastating once a critical threshold is crossed.
00:09:38.159 --> 00:09:45.200
And our human significance, our sense of mattering, erodes in much the same way.
00:09:45.519 --> 00:09:54.000
Because what ends up happening is we don't even realize at times that we're in what I call the slow fade.
00:09:54.399 --> 00:10:16.720
So many countless small adaptations that gradually shift us from feeling that we matter to becoming a utility in the very system that we exist in, the marketplace of mattering that we all live in today.
00:10:19.039 --> 00:10:23.039
So, John, you use the phrase the great erasure.
00:10:25.039 --> 00:10:28.240
What are we erasing and why does that happen?
00:10:30.480 --> 00:10:39.600
Erasing is so many of us are highly visible externally.
00:10:41.840 --> 00:10:57.840
But we're becoming more and more invisible to our self, that is what I consider to be the crisis of invisibility and the great erasure of so many people around the world.
00:10:59.360 --> 00:11:01.120
I want you to dive into that a little bit.
00:11:01.200 --> 00:11:06.639
You mentioned you're more visible externally, and whereas you're more invisible internally.
00:11:07.840 --> 00:11:13.120
If you could paint the picture for that a little bit, and I'm sure it struck a chord of people who were feeling that.
00:11:14.720 --> 00:11:29.519
The best way I can describe this is my life felt like I was wearing this pair of glasses, and gradually smudges started to appear.
00:11:47.200 --> 00:11:59.039
I started to realize over time that smudges started to occur more and more, and that nothing I could do was causing them to go away.
00:11:59.120 --> 00:12:02.480
I didn't have a cleaning cloth that was wiping them away.
00:12:02.799 --> 00:12:15.519
I was at this time, I was going to see therapists and other things because I felt like I am losing myself and I don't know what's happening.
00:12:16.320 --> 00:12:29.279
And what I was experiencing was this slow fade where my own voice, my own identity, my own needs and sense of significance began to recede.
00:12:30.720 --> 00:12:35.679
Cloud of emotional numbness started to engulf me.
00:12:36.960 --> 00:12:58.960
And then eventually, as similar to the way that condominium collapsed, I experienced the vanish from the slow fade to the hockey stick moment where your your life starts to feel dim across pretty much all areas of it.
00:12:59.279 --> 00:13:08.159
And that that moment of realizing this as I looked back was the very people I was called to solve.
00:13:09.840 --> 00:13:16.480
The conditions that people were experiencing that I was called to solve, I was one of those people.
00:13:16.960 --> 00:13:19.360
I was experiencing loneliness.
00:13:19.679 --> 00:13:20.960
I was broken.
00:13:22.639 --> 00:13:25.120
I had an identity crisis.
00:13:26.399 --> 00:13:40.320
And when I saw it in myself, the high achiever who had built his entire identity around constantly proven my worth, I started to see it everywhere.
00:13:40.480 --> 00:13:48.399
There are so many people who are needed, who are giving, who are contributing, but who is seeing them?
00:13:51.039 --> 00:13:51.919
Exactly.
00:13:53.120 --> 00:13:58.639
John, one feature of what you do, and we had a we mentioned this in a pre-call.
00:13:58.879 --> 00:14:05.759
I mentioned this to you in the pre-call, is it's so remarkable your dedication to research.
00:14:06.559 --> 00:14:13.519
You've spoken to a huge number of people and drawn on research from such a range of disciplines.
00:14:13.919 --> 00:14:22.399
John, take us to one piece of research that genuinely surprised you and what did you discover and why did it change your thinking?
00:14:24.240 --> 00:14:41.759
So one person I interviewed along the way was a gentleman, probably not very many people are going to hear or know Ken's name, but he is one of the foremost experts in the world on Henry David Thoreau.
00:14:42.480 --> 00:14:52.879
And I have to tell you, Mo, one of the things I learned in speaking to him is that I'd been mispronouncing Henry David Thoreau incorrectly for decades.
00:14:52.960 --> 00:14:54.879
It's actually Henry David Thoreau.
00:14:55.440 --> 00:15:00.720
But we started to talk about Thoreau's concept of quiet desperation.
00:15:01.039 --> 00:15:03.600
And a light bulb went off for me.
00:15:04.559 --> 00:15:12.639
When you think about the slow fade and how you can remain highly visible to the world while becoming increasingly invisible to yourself.
00:15:13.519 --> 00:15:22.080
When Thoreau was describing quiet desperation, he was describing that 200 years ago.
00:15:53.200 --> 00:15:59.919
The issue today is the world and the walls around us have become translucent.
00:16:00.080 --> 00:16:02.000
They become harder to see.
00:16:02.480 --> 00:16:09.759
So the mass of men no longer lead lives of quiet desperation, they lead lives of quiet disorientation.
00:16:11.279 --> 00:16:37.519
Because causing this environment that we sit in, and AI is only lighting a fire to it, where we are increasingly uncertain about where we belong, what gives our lives meaning, whether our presence acts, and whether we are receiving any signal at all telling us that we matter.
00:16:38.320 --> 00:16:43.919
So for someone listening to this point, what's the biggest lesson from that research?
00:16:46.080 --> 00:16:49.600
The paradox is being needed isn't the same thing as mattering.
00:16:50.240 --> 00:16:59.679
Being valuable to another person, mattering says you're valuable to that person, but your presence also makes a difference.
00:17:00.159 --> 00:17:08.480
And that is the cost of unmattering when you don't realize that your presence makes a difference.
00:17:10.400 --> 00:17:27.440
And again, keeping on the research theme, John, of all the people that you encountered whilst researching for the matcharin effect, was there someone whose story completely changed the way you understood matching?
00:17:28.960 --> 00:17:29.839
Well well, yes.
00:17:34.559 --> 00:17:41.519
So one of the people I talked to at length, we he has been so voracious of his time, is Gordon Flett.
00:17:41.599 --> 00:17:56.319
And more than anyone who's alive today, Gordon deserves so much credit because he is the father of the science of mattering at Lur Steve York, and he he recently retired.
00:17:56.559 --> 00:18:02.400
But if anyone has put their heart and soul into this topic, it is him.
00:18:02.799 --> 00:18:18.960
But the thing I learned from McGordon, it's something that he said in his endorsement of my book, the most important person who needs to know you matter is you.
00:18:19.279 --> 00:18:21.359
And I think that's what we don't realize.
00:18:21.440 --> 00:18:37.759
It's it's virtually impossible to feel like we matter or to make anyone else feel like they matter, or to express mattering to others if you fundamentally do not feel you matter.
00:18:39.519 --> 00:18:53.119
And another one that was eye-opening to me is I I happen to have Nobel laureate Alvin Roth on the podcast, and he's known for his research on markets, financial markets.
00:18:53.359 --> 00:18:57.599
Well, I had been speaking with Jamil Zaki.
00:19:04.319 --> 00:19:24.720
And as he and I were talking about my book, The Marketplace of Mattering came up, that we are living in a mattering marketplace where we are constantly having to prove every single day.
00:19:24.960 --> 00:19:34.000
And I brought this concept to to Al Ra, who had never thought about it in these terms before.
00:19:34.319 --> 00:19:39.920
And he he came back to me and he said, You are absolutely correct.
00:19:40.160 --> 00:19:44.480
The world we live in has become a repugnant marketplace.
00:19:44.720 --> 00:19:52.720
What you have to do when you think about this is think about what is happening to so many of the youngsters through the use of social media.
00:19:53.200 --> 00:20:21.680
It is a market of mattering because it completely goes into to extract more and more and more of you to feel accepted through its use, which is why Jonathan Haidt is correct that it has been an accelerant to so many of our youth who are experiencing increased mental health struggle.
00:20:22.000 --> 00:20:24.000
It's just one of the accelerants.
00:20:24.480 --> 00:20:33.119
The first place this unfortunately happens is in our homes, and then later in our primary schools.
00:20:35.839 --> 00:20:38.000
This is probably a couple of years before that.
00:20:38.240 --> 00:20:55.119
But I wonder if you could share, John, the story right at the start of your book, where you mentioned your experience as a single-digit youngster, and then why how that led me wondering about mattering, if you mattered, and then the epiphanies that that came from that.
00:20:56.640 --> 00:21:10.160
Yeah, Mo, when I was a youngster, uh five and a half, six years old, I was playing tag with my friends, and as those games often do, they they get more and more rowdy.
00:21:10.400 --> 00:21:17.279
And I got pushed from behind while running away from one of my mates and went headfirst through the basement window.
00:21:17.519 --> 00:21:30.240
I woke up in intensive care with tubes coming out of my head and machinery all around me, and it's it's one of those moments in life.
00:21:30.400 --> 00:21:40.079
I think we all have defining moments, but I at that young an age that something fundamentally was going to be different in my life.
00:21:40.240 --> 00:21:43.839
I had no idea the consequences.
00:21:44.160 --> 00:21:53.119
But what came out of that is I went from being a completely normal child to all of a sudden having tinnitus.
00:21:53.519 --> 00:21:59.680
It caused me to have ampliopia in my one eye and and field of vision issues, so I had to wear pack.
00:22:00.480 --> 00:22:05.200
Over my eye for the next five to six years, so you can imagine how much ridicule I got.
00:22:05.440 --> 00:22:22.640
But on top of that, I had a sensory processing disorder, and migraines whose onset would get magnified by the fluorescent lights that we all sat in in school every single day.
00:22:22.960 --> 00:22:38.000
So all of a sudden, all I wanted to do was be as invisible as I possibly could be, because I felt so small and I was getting bullied.
00:22:38.480 --> 00:22:45.440
And I think that besides the patch on the eye, except for the patch, I seemed completely normal when people would look at me.
00:22:45.519 --> 00:22:48.799
And that's that's the problem with an invisible illness.
00:22:49.279 --> 00:22:55.599
But what ended up happening is I experienced really the first concepts of mattering in my life.
00:22:55.839 --> 00:23:06.400
And um I had to go see a speech therapist um uh five days a week when I was in at school because my speech problems were so bad.
00:23:06.720 --> 00:23:08.000
Man, and I hated it.
00:23:08.160 --> 00:23:17.599
I hated every single minute of it because I would have to do this walk of shame across the classroom where all my classmates were sitting there watching me.
00:23:17.920 --> 00:23:25.200
And at first I hated it, but she started to get me to think differently about what had happened to me.
00:23:25.279 --> 00:23:37.680
And she said, really to me at that time, the early concepts of neuroplasticity before neuroplasticity was mainstream, that my mindset could be changed.
00:23:38.000 --> 00:23:39.599
And I had the power to do it.
00:23:39.759 --> 00:23:49.039
And that power really was with making a choice of was I going to have a fixed mindset or a growth mindset, as Carol Dweck would say too.
00:23:49.440 --> 00:24:07.519
And because of that, I chose the growth path and over the next eight, nine, ten years, was able to find coping mechanisms to overcome all of these ailments and became changing again in society.
00:25:21.480 --> 00:25:22.680
So, so great.
00:25:22.840 --> 00:25:25.880
Such a great part of your journey, John.
00:25:26.759 --> 00:25:36.040
And listening to this, you're probably wondering how do I go from where I am today to matron even more?
00:25:36.360 --> 00:25:38.519
And well, great news.
00:25:38.759 --> 00:25:43.720
John has distilled all of his research into the matter framework.
00:25:43.960 --> 00:25:47.960
So literally M-A-T-E-R.
00:25:48.600 --> 00:25:50.680
M-A-T-T-E-R.
00:25:51.640 --> 00:26:17.320
And John, these six elements, meaning autonomy, trust, time, energy, reciprocity, when these six elements came together as one, was there anything that surprised you about that when all six elements of your matter framework come together?
00:26:19.160 --> 00:26:29.640
So in the United States, the American Immigration Council put out this report called the Belonging Barometer.
00:26:30.200 --> 00:26:40.920
And it kind of measured across all elements of society how Americans felt about the environments that they exist in.
00:26:41.160 --> 00:26:51.960
Well, I was searching for when you when you think about what this book is trying to do, why are one in six people globally lonely?
00:26:52.920 --> 00:27:01.640
Why do 17% of us feel like an outsider everywhere among friends at work?
00:27:02.360 --> 00:27:07.160
Why does 64% of us at work feel like we don't belong?
00:27:07.320 --> 00:27:10.279
Why are 70% of employees not engaged?
00:27:11.160 --> 00:27:18.680
Why are we losing 12 billion workdays annually to depression and over a trillion dollars and loss of productivity?
00:27:18.920 --> 00:27:32.840
And so I was trying to figure out if feeling like you don't matter is the cause of loneliness, burnout, disengagement, depression, anxiety, and hopelessness, where does it start?
00:27:33.320 --> 00:27:35.880
And so that became the research question.
00:27:36.040 --> 00:27:47.000
And the more I started talking to experts and looking at empirical data, I found that there were six signals.
00:27:48.519 --> 00:28:13.400
We're either receiving those signals or we are not receiving them, and they turned out to be purpose or meaning, agency or our autonomy, feeling of safety or trust, how present we are in the given time that we're inhabiting, so time.
00:28:14.279 --> 00:28:17.800
Where is energy energy being extracted?
00:28:18.279 --> 00:28:20.920
So our vitality or energy.
00:28:21.320 --> 00:28:25.960
And then how are we losing care?
00:28:26.600 --> 00:28:30.440
Because so many of us are giving care, but we're not giving it back in return.
00:28:30.600 --> 00:28:35.080
And so those things kept coming up again and again and again.
00:28:35.240 --> 00:28:45.880
And when I switched mutual care from M to reciprocity, it spelled matter, meaning autonomy, time, trust, energy, and reciprocity.
00:28:46.120 --> 00:28:51.720
And then the next thing I did was you you can't just come up with something like this.
00:28:51.800 --> 00:28:53.720
I started to validate it.
00:28:53.960 --> 00:29:00.519
So I started to have individual conversations on the podcast with experts to see if I was on to something.
00:29:00.680 --> 00:29:10.440
So for instance, meaning, I interviewed Arthur Brooks, who just came up with the book, Meaning of Your Life, as an example.
00:29:10.759 --> 00:29:12.759
And that's how I ended up doing it.
00:29:12.840 --> 00:29:15.800
I started to go deeper and deeper and deeper into this.
00:29:15.960 --> 00:29:30.279
And the University of Chicago professor Shige Owishi, because I had talked to Sonia Lewirsky, who's one of the foremost experts on happiness, and she said to me, Are you familiar with psychological richness?
00:29:30.600 --> 00:29:34.279
Which is something that Shige has come up with.
00:29:34.360 --> 00:29:54.360
And what he discovered is that good life is not only about happiness or purpose, psychological richness comes from the very experiences of meaning that expand our perspective and deepen our understanding of life.
00:29:56.120 --> 00:30:02.920
So meaning is very, very important to us experiencing psychological richness.
00:30:33.480 --> 00:30:33.880
Oh no.
00:30:34.120 --> 00:30:35.560
Let's start with meaning.
00:30:36.279 --> 00:30:48.440
John, how does someone know whether they're pursuing things that are genuinely meaningful to them rather than simply becoming very good at achieving things that other people value?
00:30:51.160 --> 00:30:54.600
Sometimes I think we start in the wrong place.
00:30:55.640 --> 00:31:00.680
Oftentimes the advice we get when you think about meaning is start with why.
00:31:00.920 --> 00:31:05.240
I think it's the wrong question, no offense to Simon Senech.
00:31:05.400 --> 00:31:10.759
Before you can get to a why, I think you have to start with a because.
00:31:11.800 --> 00:31:17.560
And that because leads you to the problem that you feel called to solve.
00:31:28.519 --> 00:31:37.960
But underneath that, before I could even get to a why, I had to figure out what is it that those people are experiencing that is causing that.
00:31:38.120 --> 00:31:41.000
And it was them feeling invisible to themselves.
00:31:41.320 --> 00:32:02.680
Some of the research I look at was from Tom Gilovich, who, if listeners never heard of this guy, he's one of the most brilliant researchers in the world, came out of Cornell University, and he's found that 76% of us go to our deathbeds with the same regret, not becoming our ideal self, not becoming fulfilled.
00:32:03.640 --> 00:32:14.600
So I think part of the reason we don't become fulfilled is we've never gotten crystal clearer as which leads to the why.
00:32:15.080 --> 00:32:22.840
So when I think about meaning, I think about it from that context.
00:32:23.560 --> 00:32:31.160
Like if we are solving the problem that only we can solve through our superpowers, who's better off?
00:32:33.160 --> 00:32:35.880
I think that's where our meaning comes from.
00:32:36.920 --> 00:32:37.800
Autonomy.
00:32:37.960 --> 00:32:42.840
So jumping into autonomy, which is the A in matter, listening to this, taking notes.
00:32:43.160 --> 00:32:52.360
Who were some of the thought leaders you've spoken to, interviewed, researched in the area of autonomy, and what have you discovered?
00:32:54.279 --> 00:32:59.800
Marty Seligman, the father of positive psychology, just wrote a book on it.
00:33:00.120 --> 00:33:15.320
And as we were talking, our autonomy, the most vital things that we possess, especially with the advent of AI.
00:33:15.800 --> 00:34:44.119
So when I think about autonomy in the context of mattering, it's what decisions am I making deliberately, intentionally, to the person that I'm striving to become.
00:34:44.360 --> 00:34:48.360
And another person I interviewed about this was Angela Duckworth.
00:34:48.599 --> 00:34:56.920
Angela's first book, Grit, really talked about passion and perseverance being great grit.
00:34:57.240 --> 00:35:07.159
But when I was talking to her, I put the seed in her mind because if you've read her book, she talks a lot about West Point and Beast Pherrics.
00:35:07.320 --> 00:35:14.200
Being a Naval Academy graduate, I went through a very similar experience.
00:35:14.280 --> 00:35:19.880
I was trying to express to her is that you can have all the passion and perseverance in the world.
00:35:20.279 --> 00:35:29.799
But if you're not intentional about how you're deploying it, it's going to take you in the opposite direction of where you want to go.
00:35:29.960 --> 00:35:33.159
And that's why your agency is so important.
00:35:35.799 --> 00:35:41.000
Your agency can either move you closer to the person you want to become or farther away.
00:35:43.480 --> 00:35:45.960
Pick into the topic of autonomy, John.
00:35:46.119 --> 00:35:48.759
Can someone be extremely successful?
00:35:48.919 --> 00:36:01.319
And again, this is a place I'm very familiar with because I work with people who are extremely successful but are seeking fulfillment beyond that success.
00:36:01.879 --> 00:36:11.399
For example, speaking of autonomy, can someone be extremely successful and still have very little control over their life?
00:36:13.639 --> 00:36:15.719
I think it happens all the time.
00:36:17.239 --> 00:36:19.079
I think it happened to me.
00:36:21.079 --> 00:36:35.799
I think we fall into this trap where like I had my career path that I wanted to go on is I wanted to be a career warrior.
00:36:36.039 --> 00:36:38.439
That's the whole reason I went to the Naval Academy.
00:36:38.599 --> 00:36:49.239
My last tour of duty was at the counter-drug task force, that is the Mecca for the United States counter counter-drug interdiction efforts.
00:36:49.319 --> 00:36:56.839
And I got approached by all these three-letter agencies taking the opportunity to become an FBI agent.
00:36:57.159 --> 00:37:08.439
And then the carpet was pulled underneath my feet, literally 72 hours before I'm supposed to go to Quantico, and I had to go to a plan B.
00:37:08.759 --> 00:37:20.279
And that plan B led me into managing a path that I never intentionally went on, that became my journey.
00:37:20.359 --> 00:37:30.679
And before long, I started getting promoted because I was good at what I did, making more money, etc.
00:37:31.319 --> 00:37:36.919
But all along, I felt like a foreigner in the journey I was on.
00:37:39.479 --> 00:37:49.799
I just remember looking back, there are intervention points that when I look back, I could have made, but I was like a pinball.
00:37:50.039 --> 00:37:52.199
I I was just bouncing intions.
00:37:52.839 --> 00:38:01.799
And because I was making the money and the family was happy, and I was going further and further, I just flowed with it.
00:38:01.959 --> 00:38:04.519
And I think so many of us are doing that.
00:38:04.759 --> 00:38:18.039
And as I look back, a huge turning point for me was at Arthur Anderson at the epicenter of the Enron like situation in Houston.
00:38:18.359 --> 00:38:26.919
And I had another moment where the rug got pulled from out underneath me, and I had a choice at that point in time.
00:38:27.719 --> 00:38:40.119
I really wanted to go back to school and pursue getting a PhD in psychology, but I I couldn't see the path to doing it and supporting my family.
00:38:40.279 --> 00:38:44.199
So I jumped back into the rat race and continued forward.
00:38:44.439 --> 00:38:48.439
And I think we all have those defining moments if we look back at them.
00:38:49.799 --> 00:38:57.239
When we're operating more like a pinball than being intentional and focused about where we're going in life.
00:38:58.599 --> 00:39:00.439
Such a great share, John.
00:39:00.599 --> 00:39:06.759
The next part of the framework is one of my favorite, most important words in the whole world.
00:39:07.319 --> 00:39:13.639
One of my values is loyalty, and trust lives in there somewhere, I always feel for sure.
00:39:14.279 --> 00:39:22.679
Who were some of the thought leaders and what was some of the research that you found around this area of trust?
00:39:24.199 --> 00:39:33.399
So one of the things that's important in my definition of trust for people to understand is trust is not blind faith in other people.
00:39:34.039 --> 00:39:38.999
It's the decision not to abandon yourself in their presence.
00:39:40.119 --> 00:39:47.799
And that's what allows a person to remain open and not constantly self-protecting.
00:39:49.879 --> 00:40:00.279
Because what I think we don't realize is when trust collapses, we start monitoring danger instead of participating in life.
00:40:00.439 --> 00:40:04.359
We self-censor, we withdraw, we start editing ourselves.
00:40:04.599 --> 00:40:16.679
So as I started to go into this research, of course, I started with Amy Edmondson, who's who's a personal friend because she's written the book on psychological safety.
00:40:16.999 --> 00:40:20.759
But then I really went into the work of Claude Steele.
00:40:20.919 --> 00:40:21.479
Brilliant.
00:40:21.639 --> 00:40:29.639
He's at Stanford as well, but he was previously the provost of Columbia and then Cal Berkeley.
00:40:29.879 --> 00:40:34.279
And what he has studied for years is stereotype threat.
00:40:35.399 --> 00:41:05.799
So what he is really is trying to look at is how we receive signals, trust signals of our full humanity and how those signals can be discerned through the churn that we experience in life because of stereotypes that we experience.
00:41:06.439 --> 00:41:21.559
So in this chapter, I really explore his concept of wiseness, which really means to be seen in one's full humanity, not merely as a role title, stereotype, or utility.
00:41:21.959 --> 00:41:27.719
Because when people feel seen, they don't have to monitor for threat anymore.
00:41:27.959 --> 00:41:32.919
And the other person I really looked at here was John Godham's work as well.
00:41:34.039 --> 00:41:42.519
Why is trust such an important part of feeling that we matter, particularly for our leaders and people who are responsible for other people?
00:41:42.679 --> 00:41:46.519
So this could even be parents as well, for example.
00:41:48.599 --> 00:41:51.159
Well, let's take the home situation.
00:41:52.039 --> 00:41:58.119
So if you are a parent, how quiet is your house?
00:42:00.359 --> 00:42:10.199
I'm asking that question because we look at our home as us being the leadership over the environment in that home.
00:42:11.719 --> 00:42:26.439
And I grew up in a home where for us to feel our worth, we were encouraged to remain silent.
00:42:27.159 --> 00:42:36.599
The less noise we made, the less conflict we caused, the less disarray we brought.
00:42:36.759 --> 00:42:50.039
So so that is so because I didn't think that my voice was wanted to be heard, I lost trust.
00:42:50.119 --> 00:43:02.839
And I think another one that happens in households is you feel like trust is dependent on you earning your your right to it.
00:43:02.999 --> 00:43:10.999
So you feel like you have to to this magical college, you feel like you have to bring trophies home, whatever it is.
00:43:11.319 --> 00:43:28.999
But those are two different ways that I think trust can be diluted in a family, and we as parents don't even realize the magnitude of the trust that we're destroying when those conditions permeate the environment that we're creating.
00:43:30.039 --> 00:43:40.599
Such important distinctions, John, and to time, for example, there's so many different iterations of how we do time and productivity.
00:43:40.679 --> 00:43:44.279
And obviously, we're talking about time in the context of mattering.
00:43:45.399 --> 00:43:55.559
What were some of the insights that you gleaned, some of the research you found, some of the conversations you had around the sphere of time?
00:43:58.039 --> 00:44:10.119
So some of the people I I interviewed for this were were English writer Oliver Berkman, of course, Laura Vanderkam, and a number of others.
00:44:10.439 --> 00:44:26.199
But what what I was really trying to look at when people experience chronic time scarcity, we end up contracting.
00:44:26.679 --> 00:44:33.319
We become less present, less generous, more likely to withdraw from relationships.
00:44:33.959 --> 00:44:47.479
And so what I learned through this is mattering, is we're not using our time appropriately, we're losing ourself through reasonable postponements.
00:44:48.519 --> 00:44:52.279
We're postponing our life for the next thing.
00:44:54.039 --> 00:45:10.279
I'm arguing that whenever we do have agency, even in small spaces, what we protect sends a signal about what we believe deserves to survive the noise that's around us.
00:45:11.239 --> 00:45:15.479
It's the very container in which a life becomes visible.
00:45:17.159 --> 00:45:22.119
John, what's an example, like what's a real example of reasonable postponement?
00:45:24.679 --> 00:45:30.679
I I'll do this thing when I get done this.
00:45:31.079 --> 00:45:33.959
I'll change my life when I get done this.
00:45:34.839 --> 00:45:37.079
I etc.
00:45:37.559 --> 00:45:50.039
So the analogy that I always use is so many of us have spent our entire lives and we f feel completely empty inside.
00:45:50.679 --> 00:45:52.359
And we want to change.
00:45:52.839 --> 00:46:02.439
And so we know we want to get to Mount Kilimanjaro way, way, way in the distance if we're lucky enough to see it, but that gap is huge.
00:46:03.079 --> 00:46:11.479
And we have no idea because the mountain in the distance, how in the heck do we get from where we are to where we're going?
00:46:12.119 --> 00:46:16.759
And so instead of getting started, we make excuses.
00:46:18.599 --> 00:46:22.679
We become a visionary arsonist to the very thing.
00:46:23.639 --> 00:46:24.439
That we want.
00:46:26.999 --> 00:46:31.319
And so we do these postponements which become excuses.
00:46:31.719 --> 00:46:40.679
Like for me, a recent example of this is I have wanted to go back to get a master's degree in organizational psychology for years.
00:46:42.919 --> 00:46:47.799
And I keep just putting another postponement on it.
00:46:48.439 --> 00:46:51.319
I have to start the podcast before I do this.
00:46:51.479 --> 00:46:54.119
I have to write the next book before I do this.
00:46:54.359 --> 00:46:57.559
I have to do the next coaching call before I do this.
00:46:57.799 --> 00:47:07.159
Until I eventually just set a date and said, I don't care how if I keep making these excuses, I'm never going to do it.
00:47:07.319 --> 00:47:12.119
And now I'm enrolled in a master's in organizational psychology.
00:47:14.759 --> 00:47:19.559
And that's just a simple example of what we end up doing in our lives.
00:47:21.879 --> 00:47:22.359
Absolutely.
00:47:22.519 --> 00:47:30.839
I'm sure a lot of people listening to this can concur that they've seen it happen or seen examples of this.
00:47:30.999 --> 00:47:36.359
And you alluded to being efficient when it comes to time, John.
00:47:36.679 --> 00:47:44.599
And is it possible to spend our time very efficiently on the wrong things?
00:47:44.919 --> 00:47:46.679
Oh well, yes.
00:47:47.159 --> 00:48:03.239
Like what I remember my pastor at my church did this, did this great homily about the main thing, about the main thing, is keeping the main thing, and it's actually Stephen Covey saying.
00:48:03.639 --> 00:48:09.879
Like the main thing, how many of us lose sight of the main thing?
00:48:10.519 --> 00:48:12.519
Startups do it all the time.
00:48:14.919 --> 00:48:26.439
The main reason that most entrepreneurial lose their way is because they stop keeping the main thing the main thing.
00:48:26.839 --> 00:48:31.319
The main thing is the problem that you feel called to serve.
00:48:32.199 --> 00:48:37.639
It's typically what amounts to being your why.
00:48:40.039 --> 00:48:44.039
It's one of the easiest things that we lose track of.
00:48:44.199 --> 00:49:04.599
And I remember what he talked about during this homily is he didn't use the words Eisenhower Matrix, but that's basically what he was talking about of how you're spending your time and if it's diluting from the main thing, is what's on your calendar.
00:49:05.319 --> 00:49:10.199
And when you look at your checkbook, where are you spending your money?
00:49:12.279 --> 00:49:19.719
If it's not going against your main thing, that's the gap.
00:49:21.719 --> 00:49:22.599
There you go.
00:49:22.839 --> 00:49:27.239
And John, the next part is energy.
00:49:27.399 --> 00:49:35.319
I was in an environment of humongous amounts of energy for many years in a in a previous in a previous life, if you will.
00:49:36.679 --> 00:49:41.399
The next part is energy with mattering.
00:49:41.559 --> 00:49:44.119
And again, so fascinating to me.
00:49:44.199 --> 00:49:49.959
Who are some of the thought leaders that you've encountered in this sphere of space?
00:49:51.479 --> 00:49:55.239
Well, one of them is your former boss, Tony Robbins.
00:49:55.559 --> 00:50:02.519
So he is someone who epitomizes a proper return on energy.
00:50:02.679 --> 00:50:16.599
But I also looked heavily into the work of Judd Brewer, who's a professor at Brown, Corinne Lowe, who's a professor at Wharton, Emma Sapella, who's a professor at Yale University.
00:50:16.839 --> 00:50:19.479
Emma studies emotional suppression.
00:50:20.359 --> 00:50:24.839
Corinne kind of goes into invisible management.
00:50:25.159 --> 00:50:31.559
Like, does chronic vigilance impact us?
00:50:31.719 --> 00:50:40.199
And Judd Brewer really goes into how our behaviors undermine our long-term well-being, habit loops, and relief.
00:50:41.399 --> 00:50:42.759
So fascinating, John.
00:50:42.919 --> 00:50:45.319
Last but not least, reciprocity.
00:50:45.559 --> 00:50:48.519
Again, who are some of the thought leaders in this area?
00:50:48.999 --> 00:51:04.599
We spoke well a few days ago, and I had mentioned to you that I zoomed in on the M of matter of the framework, and I zoomed in on the R of reciprocity of the framework.
00:51:04.759 --> 00:51:08.919
Who are some of the thought leaders around this area?
00:51:09.319 --> 00:51:10.919
Yeah, Mof, it's just okay.
00:51:10.999 --> 00:51:16.919
I just for the listeners, I wanted to make sure they understood with energy what I'm talking about.
00:51:17.639 --> 00:51:22.519
And energy in my terminology is the felt of life.
00:51:24.919 --> 00:51:33.079
Because I don't think we realize that the deepest energy drain that we're experiencing is override.
00:51:33.719 --> 00:51:43.239
And that's the energy we keep putting out to suppress our emotions, manage our appearances, stay agreeable, remain useful.
00:51:45.479 --> 00:51:52.759
So many of us feel so exhausted because we're carrying so much of ourselves in hiding.
00:51:53.159 --> 00:51:57.479
So that that is why this return on energy is so important.
00:51:57.719 --> 00:52:14.759
But as you come to reciprocity, the two primary people I spoke to were Sonia Levermirsky, who is the predominant expert on happiness, and Harry Reese, who is the predominant worldwide expert on relationships.
00:52:15.239 --> 00:52:24.519
The important thing about reciprocity is it requires both giving care and being able to receive it.
00:52:24.839 --> 00:52:33.959
And I think what ends up happening where the Seesaw comes into play is being needed with being valued.
00:52:34.519 --> 00:52:42.759
And so many of us, myself included, we become the reliable one or the provider or the fixer or the person who carries everything.
00:52:43.079 --> 00:52:49.639
But a relationship in which care only moves in one direction eventually becomes an extract.
00:52:51.159 --> 00:52:55.639
And it extracts that energy that I talked about earlier.
00:52:57.399 --> 00:53:05.959
So, John, thinking about the opposite of a retraction system, what does a genuinely reciprocal relationship look like?
00:53:07.719 --> 00:53:16.839
So one of the people that I interviewed along the way who I had honestly never heard of Mo is a gentleman named Stephen Post.
00:53:17.399 --> 00:53:22.599
And he was talking about unconditional love.
00:53:24.359 --> 00:53:47.319
And like when he he's talking about this, it's not about the romantic idea of love to segue quite brilliantly with the conversation I had with Mark Nepo, poet, just weeks before I interviewed Steven, and they were both talking about love.
00:53:48.359 --> 00:54:01.799
But I want to put love in terms of if you were on your deathbed, who is the one person that you would want to see in front of you?
00:54:03.879 --> 00:54:05.879
And how did they why?
00:54:06.039 --> 00:54:22.679
How do they make you feel that's what I think of when I think of this reciprocity and and what we're missing so much of is that unconditional feeling of being loved.
00:54:23.159 --> 00:54:28.679
Because if you think about it from that term, it's not how much can I give.
00:54:29.559 --> 00:54:32.839
Those people don't make us feel that way.
00:54:33.239 --> 00:54:39.239
They also make it safe to ask, can I let you hold me when I need it?
00:54:40.199 --> 00:54:44.599
And I think so many of us are missing that element.
00:54:47.159 --> 00:54:58.919
I had a very interesting conversation, John, a few weeks back with a great friend of mine who I've known for well over a decade, more like a decade and a half.
00:54:58.999 --> 00:55:00.039
How about that?
00:55:00.519 --> 00:55:19.159
And it's speaking of romantic relationships, he mentioned that a lot of times when we choose our significant other, or when one chooses their significant other, what's the people are experts at looking for aesthetics, how good they look, and and all of that great stuff.
00:55:19.399 --> 00:55:34.119
And then he mentioned that for him, when he was, I guess, seeking out his wife, that for him the only criteria was that sort of value match.
00:55:35.159 --> 00:55:50.039
Having said that, without going too deep into that other conversation, where does that sort of thinking sit when it comes to reciprocity when it comes to mattering as well?
00:55:52.439 --> 00:56:34.359
I think it it comes down to do you feel secure enough that you can be your authentic self with that with that person and feel safe enough that you're willing to expose the deepest corners of who you are to them in a way that won't feel as if it's diminishing you or like cutting your light, that it makes you feel surrounded by care, if that makes sense.
00:56:35.559 --> 00:56:57.079
And that's that speaks to almost trusting yourself to give yours to give them that side of you, but then you're also trusting them to hold, receive, have that side of you, it's and then vice versa.
00:56:57.239 --> 00:57:00.839
It's what I sort of gauge from from that.
00:57:01.799 --> 00:57:09.959
John, so this conversation, the book, the movement, your research, your great work is about mattering.
00:57:10.279 --> 00:57:19.479
But here's the thing a lot of people use achievement as a substitute for mattering.
00:57:19.559 --> 00:57:27.559
What does it matter if I've achieved tons and tons of great things in all the different ways that we we score achievement?
00:57:28.279 --> 00:57:37.319
And attention that I found really interesting reading the book is is it possible to become a highly achievement-oriented?
00:57:37.959 --> 00:57:46.279
Because achievement, they give us like a temporary feeling and a temporary sense that yes, we're top of the tree.
00:57:46.599 --> 00:57:48.119
Who's done what we've done?
00:57:48.359 --> 00:57:49.319
We matter.
00:57:51.639 --> 00:58:08.919
Well, you have to do is look at some very famous people, billionaires, professional athletes, etc., who on the surface seem to have it all, feel like they have nothing.
00:58:09.079 --> 00:58:10.519
I will give you a great example.
00:58:10.679 --> 00:58:19.719
I'm not sure how prominent Josh Dumel is in in Europe, but he he's an A-listing actor.
00:58:19.959 --> 00:58:24.119
People probably recognize him because he was in all the Transformer movies.
00:58:24.279 --> 00:58:27.879
He's been the lead role in in several other movies.
00:58:28.119 --> 00:58:48.439
And I recently had a conversation with Josh, and as much as he has accomplished, as much as he has done, he still compares himself all the time to actors who he thinks are better than him, or what he hasn't accomplished, or what he wants more of.
00:58:48.759 --> 00:58:58.839
And he was going through and talking about the more that he punishes himself with that away from himself.
00:58:59.319 --> 00:59:30.599
And I think that's the core thing here, is when you feel like you matter to yourself, what you're really what your belief is does the life I am living have enough inherent worth that I will protect it, care for it, and remain present inside of it.
00:59:30.999 --> 00:59:38.759
And I think for too many of us, we don't feel that, regardless of how much achievement we have.
00:59:44.599 --> 00:59:46.359
But I will do a little bit.
01:00:15.799 --> 01:00:30.439
So when we arrive at as children at school, we're we're not primarily asking whether we can learn, we're asking whether we matter.
01:00:32.119 --> 01:00:34.359
You know, in that in that school environment.
01:00:34.519 --> 01:00:46.199
And that's where in the past play had such a profound role on what we were experiencing, because that's how we experienced the school environment.
01:00:46.519 --> 01:00:53.079
But now in so many of the school systems around the world, play has been taken away.
01:00:53.319 --> 01:01:03.799
And so our education systems have shifted from adapting institutions to children toward adapting children to the institutions.
01:01:05.959 --> 01:01:19.879
And and so you you can see just in those two examples how the environments are completely shaping us, and they're taking that very social immunity away from us.
01:01:20.119 --> 01:01:31.479
If you think about modern school systems, what we're teaching them is that they don't matter for who they are, they learn to matter for what they produce.
01:01:32.359 --> 01:01:36.279
We don't write the school system to fit the kid.
01:01:36.599 --> 01:01:39.799
We start medicating the kid to fit the school system.
01:01:40.199 --> 01:01:56.999
So we prescribe them AD ADD medicine, we do that, and we teach them more and more that they don't matter as they are, so they have to conform into the world that we want them to exist in.
01:01:57.239 --> 01:02:13.479
And that's exactly, you know, our you know, kids' attachment starts to wither away, and it's where their identity starts to get compromised into feeling that they can't be who they actually are because the world doesn't accept them as who they are.
01:02:13.719 --> 01:02:16.839
Now imagine me with all these deficiencies.
01:02:16.919 --> 01:02:26.919
That's exactly what I was going through and why I felt so invisible because I wasn't accepted into the world I was in.
01:02:27.159 --> 01:02:29.239
I had to conform my way into it.
01:02:29.559 --> 01:02:32.759
Social media is just an accelerant.
01:02:33.079 --> 01:02:43.799
When homes, schools, and communities fail to provide reliable signals of significance, what we end up doing is we naturally seek alternatives.
01:02:44.359 --> 01:02:56.199
And social media, what these platforms are doing is they excel at measuring, displaying, and the very indicators that human beings have always used to locate mattering.
01:02:56.599 --> 01:03:10.919
And what was once relational becomes quantifiable because feeling that we matter is tied to our engagement on these systems.
01:03:11.639 --> 01:03:18.759
And that's where the work of Sandra Motz and Jamel Zaki becomes so important.
01:03:19.479 --> 01:03:41.399
And Anna Lemke's research on dopamine really takes us to the next level because this whole reward system is attached to the very social validation that we need to activate the neurological systems, reinforce in our minds that we are worthy.
01:03:41.639 --> 01:03:50.279
So it is a complete accelerant that lays on top of the conditions that are already extracting this away from us.
01:03:50.919 --> 01:03:56.519
So that is why I call this the great erasure, because it's everywhere.
01:03:57.559 --> 01:03:58.999
It is so crazy, Mo.
01:03:59.159 --> 01:04:03.719
It's even in the consumer world that we live in.
01:04:04.759 --> 01:04:15.799
So when we fail to get stable signals of intrinsic worth, like markets like consumerism step in to try to fill the vacuum.
01:04:16.119 --> 01:04:21.399
So products sell belonging, aspiration, and status.
01:04:21.879 --> 01:04:25.239
We're not merely like buying products.
01:04:26.199 --> 01:04:34.999
We buy the stories that were being sold behind the products, which are teaching us we belong where we matter.
01:04:35.399 --> 01:04:43.639
Nike sells determination, Apple sells authorship, luxury brands sell self-distinction and recognition.
01:04:43.879 --> 01:04:47.079
It's all around us, yet we don't even see it.
01:04:49.319 --> 01:04:50.439
I love that so much.
01:04:50.759 --> 01:05:16.119
And this is and this is where that like when I started bringing this up to Al Roth and the markets that were around, comes back to that repugnant systems because when you think about consumerism, consumerism, like they benefit when we experience ourselves as perpetually unfinished.
01:05:16.599 --> 01:05:28.359
Our own feelings of insufficiency and insignificant creates the very demand for the products and experiences and identities that they're feeding us.
01:05:29.319 --> 01:05:32.999
To feel significant inside because so many of us don't feel it.
01:05:34.199 --> 01:05:36.359
We acquire it from the outside.
01:05:37.639 --> 01:05:40.359
It's crazy once you start thinking about it.
01:05:43.559 --> 01:05:50.919
The stable signals of intrinsic wealth that you mentioned.
01:05:51.239 --> 01:06:00.999
Or in in in terms of just those stable signals coming from that home environment or the school environment, you're absolutely right.
01:06:01.639 --> 01:06:16.679
If there's a really stable, healthy home environment, a stable, healthy school environment, all of a sudden, whatever's going on externally doesn't matter, so to speak.
01:06:16.919 --> 01:06:26.039
And it's only an accelerant if you don't have that stable cake, if you will, that's just the not so nice icing on the top.
01:06:26.119 --> 01:06:27.079
So I definitely concur.
01:06:27.159 --> 01:06:31.479
I'm such a fan of just that stability, especially for the youngsters.
01:06:31.799 --> 01:06:36.999
So important to start young from four years old, five, six, seven years old.
01:06:37.079 --> 01:06:51.079
And John, it's so interesting to me that this research around mattering matters to you to the extent that you've even gone the next level to start young.
01:06:53.479 --> 01:07:08.439
Let's talk you matter luma and your thinking behind that and the trajectory difference that will make for the consumer of you matter luma, and who is the consumer as well.
01:07:10.279 --> 01:07:17.479
That has been one of the biggest joys of my life, is writing a children's book, which I never thought I would ever do.
01:07:17.719 --> 01:07:20.519
But I came up with this idea.
01:07:20.759 --> 01:07:28.999
Came up with this idea because I was looking at what Gary Vaynerchuk was doing with his brand V V friends that he has.
01:07:29.079 --> 01:07:34.439
If people are not familiar with it, he he was trying, he's trying in his own way.
01:07:34.839 --> 01:07:47.319
He feels that when I interviewed him, he was telling me that he feels like we are not teaching kids so many of the core values that they need to learn that we used to learn as kids that aren't being passed down.
01:07:47.399 --> 01:07:56.999
And he feels that he could showcase these core values in into the characters that are part of the V Frame world.
01:07:57.239 --> 01:08:01.559
So it made me start thinking I could do something similar for mattering.
01:08:01.639 --> 01:08:07.079
So I came up with this concept that that I trademark called the Mattering Verse.
01:08:07.239 --> 01:08:18.519
And so what I'm trying to create with the Mattering Verse is is a world that's the opposite of the marketplace of mattering that we are existing in.
01:08:18.760 --> 01:08:23.079
Because if you think about the marketplace of mattering.
01:08:23.559 --> 01:08:30.439
That we are existing in, if you have fans of the Matrix movie, that is the Matrix.
01:08:31.239 --> 01:08:36.039
The problem that I that I got down to is it's not necessarily us.
01:08:36.279 --> 01:08:48.600
Similar to what I was talking about with consumerism, when the matrix is all around you and it's been depleting you for so long and distorting the signals that you're getting, you don't even realize it anymore.
01:08:48.680 --> 01:08:52.840
And that's part of the issue with the slow fade and why you don't recognize it.
01:08:53.079 --> 01:08:57.079
It's because it's everywhere, it permeates every bit of you.
01:08:57.399 --> 01:09:21.960
So if you think of this marketplace of mattering matrix, all the institutions and environments that surround us are optimized for efficiency, performance, engagement, and growth, not providing the signals of human significance that we require.
01:09:22.359 --> 01:09:46.119
And the issue that's happening is so many of the parents today feel depleted because they represent the lonely, the broken, the battered, the beaten, the bored, and out that the way that kids learn about mattering is be is through the witness of their elders.
01:09:46.359 --> 01:09:53.479
And when the parents themselves don't feel it, what do you think is getting passed down even if they don't realize it?
01:09:53.880 --> 01:10:00.279
So long story short, a children's book is both for the child and for the parent.
01:10:00.600 --> 01:10:06.680
So the complexity of it is that you have to write it with both lenses.
01:10:06.760 --> 01:10:38.119
And that makes it very difficult because you're trying to tell a story, and yet at the same time, I was building in underneath the surface behavior science, like topics such as sunk cost fallacy and attachment theory in the book in a way that a parent might recognize it or might not recognize it, but they're actually teaching it.
01:10:38.279 --> 01:10:48.759
And the important thing about the book is I was appealing to the child and the scary thing is 35% of kids three to eight don't feel like they matter.
01:10:50.359 --> 01:10:59.079
The bigger gap is only 8% of their parents believe that that could possibly be true, which shows you the huge gap.
01:10:59.319 --> 01:11:16.599
So, one, I was trying to teach kids in the wet cement years of their life before the cement starts hardening, but I'm also trying in the writing of the book to subliminally tell them how much they matter.
01:11:17.079 --> 01:11:39.559
So that's the trick of writing a book like this, is you're you're trying to teach these psychological concepts to both, and the difficulty is closing the gap between the child and the parent, and getting this to be a book that the parent wants to read to the child again and again and again for what it's trying to reinforce.
01:11:39.799 --> 01:11:46.039
And I also think you have another opportunity to intervene at the next stage.
01:11:46.279 --> 01:11:51.000
They start asking the deeper questions as they approach middle school.
01:11:51.239 --> 01:11:53.559
And but they're still in the wet cement.
01:11:53.639 --> 01:11:56.279
It's getting a little bit harder, but they can still move.
01:11:56.439 --> 01:12:05.399
But Manmo, if you don't teach them mattering then, then that's the jackhammer.
01:12:05.960 --> 01:12:19.639
And we're now dealing with people who have distorted self-images and lifetimes of identity damage that take years and years and years of therapy to reverse.
01:12:21.239 --> 01:12:23.000
John, that was such a great share.
01:12:23.159 --> 01:12:27.719
So listening to this homework, the matchman effect, John R.
01:12:27.880 --> 01:12:34.519
Miles and the and you Mattaluma, go get both of them is the task and the ask from me.
01:12:35.079 --> 01:12:42.599
And John, suppose someone listening to this recognizes themselves in what you're describing.
01:12:43.079 --> 01:12:49.639
So on their resume, the resume is like a Wikipedia entry, incredible.
01:12:49.960 --> 01:12:55.319
Been there, done the top 1% in many different parts of their life.
01:12:56.359 --> 01:13:01.479
And they finally realized what was the issue the whole time, this matching gap.
01:13:04.759 --> 01:13:08.920
Well, first I want to tell you how prevalent this is.
01:13:09.239 --> 01:13:19.159
So I was recently watching a video of Oprah Winfrey interviewing Sean Acor.
01:13:19.319 --> 01:13:24.519
Sean Acor, I think, is one of the best writers out there on positive psychology.
01:13:25.239 --> 01:13:29.479
And he was talking about, people aren't familiar with him.
01:13:29.719 --> 01:13:31.079
He has sold millions of books.
01:13:31.159 --> 01:13:33.079
He's a New York Times bestselling author.
01:13:33.319 --> 01:13:50.359
But he was telling Oprah that as he was launching his second, like it was his second or third book, and part of this was his wife was pregnant with their child, and there were some complications that went along with it.
01:13:50.679 --> 01:14:05.079
So all of a sudden, his his whole book launch is going into disarray, and his face were people who at that point were were doing amazing things.
01:14:05.239 --> 01:14:11.479
Like one of them was Adam Grant, another one was another person, and all he could do was compare himself to them.
01:14:11.559 --> 01:14:16.920
And he said, I comp like I didn't matter at all.
01:14:17.639 --> 01:14:34.119
And then he was in this car ride where he had to give a talk, and the person in the car, who he he never got the chance to meet again, mentions to him that one of his books actually saved their life by reading it.
01:14:34.359 --> 01:14:39.079
And it closed the loop for Sean feeling like he mattered.
01:14:39.319 --> 01:15:10.439
But in this discussion, Oprah says what she has discovered herself after doing all the interviews that she has done, and she she made the statement that all the presidents, all the world leaders, Beyoncé, all the athletes that she interviews, they get done, the interview says, Do you think that will resonate?
01:15:11.239 --> 01:15:13.479
Did did what I say matter?
01:15:14.359 --> 01:15:18.920
So it doesn't matter who you are, that's the point.
01:15:21.639 --> 01:15:31.079
We all strive for the mattering instinct, and when it disappears, we start to vanish.
01:15:32.039 --> 01:15:57.399
When we don't feel included, when we don't feel we control the outcome of our openness and the authentic ability to see others and relate to them, which gets really back to the work of Robert Waldinger's, we start putting on a mask, and that mask becomes who we are, and then we vanish.
01:16:04.359 --> 01:16:40.359
Looking in the mirror and working on our own version of the mattering effect, making sure that we matter, and perhaps I'm talking to the six to eight people in our immediate circle, spouses, kids, that sort of thing, but also just in general, the thank yous here, the well done there, the pats on the back there, are those parts, even though tiny, perhaps seemingly insignificant, are those parts really significant for helping us across a little piece of that cake of mattering across to someone else?
01:16:40.679 --> 01:16:43.319
Well, I think the important so two things.
01:16:44.359 --> 01:16:52.920
The first thing, Mo, in order to unleash the mattering effect in others, you have to restore the mattering dividend in yourself.
01:16:53.239 --> 01:17:04.759
The mattering dividend you get back when you stop having to prove yourself, earn your way, achieve your way to feeling self-worth.
01:17:05.399 --> 01:17:21.799
And to answer your second part, the health of any family is not revealed simply by whether unconditional love exists, but by whether each person's full self is allowed to exist within it.
01:17:24.359 --> 01:17:36.199
And so and I think that's what Steve, Stephen Post, and Mark Nepo were saying too when they were talking about unconditional love.
01:17:36.679 --> 01:17:43.639
Like when we are searching for that unconditional love at our deathbed, that is what we are searching for.
01:17:44.279 --> 01:17:58.840
Our full self being allowed to exist with that other person because they are the one who makes us feel like we are allowed to treat ourselves with the same care them.
01:18:01.559 --> 01:18:03.159
So outstanding, John.
01:18:03.719 --> 01:18:09.799
John, if you could strip away all the research, you're an amazing researcher and establish that.
01:18:11.960 --> 01:18:15.559
And the premium work itself, M-A-T-T-E-R.
01:18:17.399 --> 01:18:23.639
And we'd leave the listener with just one idea to start with on the matron effect.
01:18:24.840 --> 01:18:27.000
What would you want them to understand?
01:18:29.880 --> 01:18:41.000
You can be loved for a version of yourself that you have manufactured and still feel profoundly alone.
01:18:43.239 --> 01:19:03.960
And I think that's what so many of us are doing is we have manufactured this identity of ourselves that's so hollow by the time we've manufactured it that we have no idea how we've gotten there.
01:19:04.840 --> 01:19:09.079
And we we can't psychologically process it.
01:19:09.399 --> 01:19:13.639
It's that's where the invisibility kicks in.
01:19:14.519 --> 01:19:18.279
The book is The Match for an Effect by John R.
01:19:18.439 --> 01:19:19.000
Miles.
01:19:20.039 --> 01:19:23.799
The book is also You Mataluma by John R.
01:19:23.960 --> 01:19:38.920
Miles, and John, it has been such an honor calling you a colleague, a friend, a peer, whatever you want to call it, over the last few years and met in the same mastermind.
01:19:39.079 --> 01:19:39.399
Yeah.
01:19:39.639 --> 01:19:49.479
And John, if somebody wanted to learn more from you, where would we send them?
01:19:49.799 --> 01:20:01.000
Well, the the two most frequent places that they can hear from me are either my podcast, which they can get to by going to passionstruck.com, S-T-R-U-C-K.
01:20:01.799 --> 01:20:09.319
And if you're interested in my subset where I put out content on a weekly basis, uh it's called the ignited life.net.
01:20:09.719 --> 01:20:11.639
Awesome, awesome, awesome, awesome.
01:20:11.960 --> 01:20:13.319
John, such an honor.
01:20:13.479 --> 01:20:18.679
Have an amazing rest of today, and see you the next time.
01:20:18.759 --> 01:20:19.319
All the best.
01:20:19.399 --> 01:20:20.039
Ciao.
01:20:20.359 --> 01:20:21.880
No, thank you so much for having me.
01:20:21.960 --> 01:20:23.960
It was such an honor to be on your show.
01:20:24.519 --> 01:20:27.719
Thank you for listening to Purpose Driven Success with Mostalomi.
01:20:28.199 --> 01:20:32.119
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01:20:32.199 --> 01:20:35.319
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01:20:35.479 --> 01:20:39.559
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01:20:39.719 --> 01:20:46.439
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01:20:46.679 --> 01:20:54.039
Next week we'll have another amazing guest, so stay tuned for even more real stories and actionable insights.
01:20:54.279 --> 01:21:02.920
Work on your mindset, work on your skill set, and always move in the direction of the result you want before you see the result you want.
01:21:03.079 --> 01:21:06.599
And until next time, do the best you can consistently.
01:21:06.920 --> 01:21:07.719
Ciao.
