Transcript for “The Purposeful Leader” with Richard Leider
Join our host Don MacPherson and Richard Leider as they discuss purposeful leadership in Season Six of 12 Geniuses.
Richard is a best-selling author, coach, and keynote speaker who is best known for his work in helping people around the world find their purpose at work and in life. He has written 11 books, including three bestsellers. His PBS Special – The Power of Purpose – was viewed by millions of people across the U.S.
In this episode, Richard and Don discuss the health and performance benefits of finding your purpose, how leaders can help their people identify their purpose, and how rallying people around a common purpose is a key to a high-performing organization.
Richard also shares how he has been personally influenced by Viktor Frankl and Abraham Maslow. He talks about how the pandemic has exposed a desire for deeper purpose in the lives of many people struggling to find the right place at work.
Richard’s work has been recognized with many awards including a Bush Fellowship from the Bush Foundation, and the Outstanding Scholar for Creative Longevity and Wisdom award from the Fielding Institute. He is a Senior Fellow at the University of Minnesota’s acclaimed Earl E. Bakken Center for Spirituality and Healing and is a Public Fellow at the Notre Dame Institute of Advanced Study where he also partners with their Inspired Leadership Initiative and the Office of the Provost.
Don MacPherson:
Hello, this is Don MacPherson, your host of 12 Geniuses. I have the incredible job of interviewing geniuses from around the world about the trends shaping the way we live and work. Today we are talking about the power of purpose with Richard Leider. Richard has authored or co-authored 11 books on the topic of purpose. In this conversation, we discuss why the pandemic has exposed a yearning for purpose in the lives of so many people. The great resignation, or the great reimagining, as Richard calls it, has been an outcome of this realization.
We also talk about how knowing and living one's purpose builds resilience, generates positive wellbeing results and superior performance at work. My conversation with Richard is a must for anyone struggling to find their purpose at work or in life, and for leaders who want to build a purpose-driven organization.
Don MacPherson:
Richard, welcome to 12 Geniuses.
Richard Leider:
Thank you. Privilege to be on.
Don MacPherson:
Let's start out by talking about your background. Can you tell us where you got educated and how you became interested in the topic of purpose?
Richard Leider:
Well, I got educated in two different places, in psychology and counseling psychology. And after graduating from the University of Northern Colorado in counseling psychology, it was during the Vietnam era and they tried to get me out of school to draft me, et cetera. Eventually I got a job and got into an army reserve unit, and it was a psychological operations reserve unit. But I got a job in what was then personnel and is now HR.
While I was doing that work, I had what is called now a side-hustle, and my side-hustle was called Lunch Hour Limited. Lunch Hour Limited is just like it sounds; if you buy me lunch, I coach you. Because HR was the way I was making a living, but my real calling was in coaching or counseling or helping people with their lives and their careers. And along the way, two other things. I got a Bush Fellowship to study purpose and life, and it's the longest standing study of adult development. It's housed in the Harvard Business School. But I used my Bush Fellowship as an apprentice to that program which is still going on. It's been 80-some years of progressive study.
And the other thing that I think is important for your listeners is that along the way, I had fortuitous encounters with people who changed the game for me and my own perspective. Right out of graduate school, I spent a week with Viktor Frankl, who wrote Man's Search for Meaning, and I consider him kind of the godfather of purpose and meaning and things like that, and I learned a lot about ... I had to actually study him, but from him directly, really learned about choice, that the ultimate human freedom is to choose what you want your life and your work and your next moment to be about.
And so, we can talk more about that, but that's a little bit of a background and a quick thumbnail of how I got here. I created my own company, wrote my first book in 1978 called The Inventurers, and my company is Inventure - The Purpose Company, and here we are today.
Don MacPherson:
In what year did you meet Viktor Frankl?
Richard Leider:
1968.
Don MacPherson:
Okay. The most important book that I've ever read is Man's Search for Meaning, and it's the book that I've given away most frequently. I typically have 100 copies at home and when I meet somebody, I talk with them and I give that book away. And the quote that you've mentioned is the last of human freedoms, or, "Anything can be taken from a man but one thing, the last of human freedoms, the freedoms to choose one's own way in any given circumstance." And I didn't learn that until I was 30, and what that meant to me ... So that particular quote in his book, what that meant to me is that I get to choose if I'm going to be happy or not.
Richard Leider:
I talk about purpose with a big P and purpose with a little P. I gleaned that, he didn't talk about it that way, but purpose with a big P is kind of a noble purpose. It's a cause or it's something that you dedicate your life to maybe. Purpose with a small P is the day-to-day choice like this that you make. To make a difference in the world or another person's life or even just the will to live yourself.
And so my purpose with a big P is to help others unlock the power of purpose. My purpose with a little P is every single day to make a difference in one human being's life. And Frankl talked about giving others in the concentration camp a kind word, a crust of bread, hope, a hug, something. And he said some people did that and others didn't, and those that did tended to do better and live longer and survive, perhaps, the concentration camp experience.
Whenever I talk about big P, little P, purpose, Don, I get a big sigh from the audience because they many times thought it was the big P and that someday when they had enough money or they retired or they've got enough of something, they would get at it. But as you and I know, purpose is not a luxury. It's fundamental to health and healing, happiness, and ultimately even to longevity, and certainly to productivity and leadership.
Don MacPherson:
Can you talk a little bit more about that? Because I heard you talk about Dr, I think at Johns Hopkins, Majid Fotuhi.
Richard Leider:
Majid Fotuhi, yeah.
Don MacPherson:
So can you talk about some of those very positive benefits that there are for individuals who know and pursue their purpose?
Richard Leider:
Well, I did a PBS Special shown in hundreds of cities across the country, and part of my training thanks to PBS for that was to visit neuroscience labs across the country. They were measuring purpose and Alzheimer's, purpose and heart disease, purpose and longevity. And they now can measure in the brain as well as other aspects of the body those that have that attitude of purpose and those that don't.
For example, Alzheimer's. It doesn't cure Alzheimer's, but it brings a quality of life when you have a reason to get up in the morning and you extend yourself to others. That people, when they study the plaques and tangles of someone who's deceased with Alzheimer's, they'll say, "One person had a high quality of life with the same plaques and tangles as somebody who did not have that high quality of life."
Another example is I taught a program with some people who wrote the book The Telomere Effect, and the telomere on the end of every chromosome in your body is a little telomere. And Elizabeth Blackburn won the Nobel Prize for The Telomere Effect, and what she discovered was that in addition to the obvious of healthy living and sleeping and all the things that you need to do to live a healthy life, telomeres grew or stayed healthy if there was purpose.
Don MacPherson:
I didn't even know that telomeres could grow. I thought they could only shrink or stay the same, and that is a fundamental element to aging, correct?
Richard Leider:
Right.
Richard Leider:
And aging as well as other diseases. I mean, it's one of those that they're still learning about all the time. But the point is that when we say it's with the measurements that are going on the University of Wisconsin with Richie Davidson, who studies mindfulness and wellbeing, and ultimately resilience. Like during the pandemic, they find people who have resilience, post-traumatic growth even, are people who have purpose and purpose is a central element to wellbeing in addition to mindfulness and compassion and some of the other things that they also ... the quote unquote softer things that they measure.
Don MacPherson:
Another thing that comes to mind is this concept of quality versus quantity, and we, as Americans, but all around the world we have really got good at living longer lives. I think the life expectancy was late 40s 120 years ago and now it's closing in on 80. So we've added almost another lifetime to our lifetimes, but we've not necessarily gotten better at living high-quality lives, and it seems like having this sense of purpose is the clearcut way of having a quality life.
Richard Leider:
Yeah. My new book, I'm on a book tour right now and my new book is about that very topic. It's about aging. When you were growing up, the question always was what you want to be when you grow up. This book is titled Who Do You Want to Be When You Grow Old?: The Path of Purposeful Aging. And what we know is that everybody's getting older, as you point out, but not everybody is growing older.
So if we don't keep growing in those three or four decades that we've added, we tend to decline. We don't do as well, and what does it mean to grow? Well, purpose is part of growing. The universal purpose is to grow and give. Every single day, how are your listeners growing and giving? That's the small P purpose.
Don MacPherson:
There's someone I call a mentor. I've only talked with him a couple of times. We've never met. But he has been influential on my life in a number of different ways. We email back and forth. He's 84-years-old. He's a retired basketball coach. I just email him every now and again and I say, "What are you reading? What are you learning about?" He's in his almost mid-80s and he is reading this book called The Future You, and I just love that he's thinking about his future and how he's going to grow and develop. I have great admiration for that. We don't know if it's going to be five years, if it's going to be 20, if it's going to be 25 years, but it's a great way to approach life.
Richard Leider:
Well, the other one that I met shortly after Frankl, just before he died, was Abraham Maslow. And Maslow and Frankl had an uneasy relationship because Frankl thought self-actualization was not the top of the pyramid. And that just before Maslow died, they came together and agreed that the top of the Maslow Hierarchy of Needs is self-transcendence. It's self-actualization for the sake of something beyond yourself.
And after he died, his wife took all his work and created a book called The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, which documented that they had come to agreement. So many leadership programs have self-actualization as kind of the top of the pyramid, and it actually isn't. Self-transcendence is really ... Self-actualization for the sake of what? For the sake of your impact on others.
Don MacPherson:
That makes a lot more sense to me. I've heard you talk about that in the past. I didn't think about self-actualization being so selfish, but certainly self-transcendence is selfless. And thinks about the greater body, humanity being one being, that sort of thing, which is far more appealing to me.
Richard Leider:
Yeah. The pandemic has really raised the existential question for so many people; what on earth am I here for? And when we look at what on earth am I here for, everyone listening has to come to their own conclusion. My conclusion and the conclusion of the studies I've done is to be of service, and that's what leadership's all about. You could call it servant leadership or not, but to be of service means to serve the common good or the greater good beyond yourself.
Don MacPherson:
We'll jump into leadership in a moment, but before we do, how does one go about finding their calling?
Richard Leider:
Well, finding your calling has a pattern. I say, Don, everybody's an experiment of one. Everyone has to do it their own way. There's not a universal ... although grow and give I say is kind of a universal. But it's the formula or the pattern is gifts plus passions plus values equals calling, and calling is another more vocational word for purpose.
Richard Leider:
So if you're using your most loved, most enjoyed gifts on things you feel curious, purposeful or passionate about, P, in an environment where you have a voice, where it's a good fit for you, then that equals your calling. And there's a pretty good chance you're going to be wanting to get up in the morning and go do that and you'll probably do it pretty well, and you'll probably continue to grow.
I used to teach all the time with the late Stephen Covey, and Covey just before he died came out with, for those who don't know, he wrote The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. It was a universal bestseller across the planet. But his eighth book was called The 8th Habit, and the 8th Habit is basically about what I just talked about, and that is discerning your own gifts and helping others do the same. He said that's the bottom line of all the other seven habits. Those are all in the service of the eighth habit, to help you discern your gifts and help others do the same.
And The 8th Habit is a big, thick book with a lot of examples in it, but it hasn't been read because most people just ... he died and he wasn't out there with it that long. But it's exactly what we're talking about here. So are you using your most enjoyed gifts, things you feel purposeful or passionate about, in environments where you have a voice that's a good fit for you and your values? That's the way into unlocking the power of purpose.
Don MacPherson:
And what's the leader's role in helping people identify their gifts, their passions, their values so they can reach their purpose?
Richard Leider:
Well, the starting point, like Carl Jung says, "The greatest damage you can do to others is your own unlived life."
Don MacPherson:
I see that a lot in youth sports. I don't know if you would agree with that or not.
Richard Leider:
So the starting point is to be your message, so to speak. And then help others unlock, starting with their gifts. There's a lot of tools out there. I've created one called Calling Cards. And I find that so many people did not get much guidance on the inner life of gifts, passions and values. More of it was, "Do this, go to law school, go to medical school, go to business school and it'll all work out at some point."
But then you get into midlife and you recognize you're not enjoying it as much, you're not as fulfilled, or you have ... Sometimes we're pushed by pain. Sometimes we're pulled by possibilities. Then we dig in and say, "So what's the exercise about here?" And we look at that. So leaders, three questions that I have found are essential to a greater leader today; what do you stand for? What won't you stand for? And who do you stand with?
And the starting point of what do you stand for is some sense of what it is in your leadership that matters that you're going to help others get better at or do better at. If you're going to coach them, what are you going to coach them about? So gifts, passions and values. What if we had an organization and teams where everybody hypothetically was turned on to using their gifts, passions and values? That would be an organization in what they call flow, where there's real energy and there's real passion for what's going on.
Can that always happen? No. But one of the most dangerous questions, Don, as you know is, "Well, what do you do?" You're not what you do. You're who you bring to what you do. I'm not a box on your chart. I'm a person who's bringing all this here. Can you help me activate that? One of the big breakthroughs for me around purpose was that action precedes clarity. When we start acting purposefully, we get clarity about purpose. When we get up every day and do something purposeful, there is a felt sense that there's real energy in this and there's real productivity in this and creativity and all of that. So action precedes clarity, and so great leaders help with the action, but it's action towards both the individual's purpose and the organization's purpose.
Don MacPherson:
So how would you define a purpose-driven leader?
Richard Leider:
Well, a purpose-driven leader is clear about that the aim of the organization is not just the bottom line, that the aim of the organization is to make a difference in the customer, the numbers out there and to keep their eye on that. And they're trusted because they listen. They listen to their own gifts, passions and values and help bring those out in others. I know that organizations I work with now, but research I've done in the past where I would watch a leader talk to a new group of ... or an orientation group in their organization, and they fail so often because it was all about themselves. They thought that these people were really interested in them.
And they were up to a certain point. They wanted to know what do you stand for? What won't you stand for? Who do you stand with? But they really want to know who are you? What are you all about? Do I trust you? And so oftentimes people fail, and I would coach them and they just couldn't ... eventually they would get that. I think a purpose-driven leader is one who lives with that kind of mindset.
Don MacPherson:
What do you say to someone who says purpose is a luxury?
Richard Leider:
Well, I mean, I said, "Well, if you don't think you have a purpose then you don't, because you're not going to activate it. You're not going to bring action to it." But I try to say the facts and my third edition of my book, The Power of Purpose, was can science explain purpose? And both science and faith agree on purpose being fundamental. It's not one or the other, which we start to look at health and wellbeing and fundamental. We start to look at leaders that are trusted. Purpose is fundamental. We start to look at aging. People live longer.
The facts are in. Every new idea, Don, goes through, as the philosopher Schopenhauer said, three stages. First is ridicule. That's, "It's a luxury," type of thing. Second is opposition, "Well, I don't really believe this until there's evidence." Now there's increasingly plenty of evidence. And the third thing is it's self-evident. Well, I think it's self-evident, and purpose is age agnostic. I find as many people who are young are interested in working in purpose, want their life to matter and work in purposeful places, as midlife people who are re-looking at some crisis, perhaps, or something in their life or older people.
And so it's age agnostic, and I learned this when I did the PBS Special and I had to go out to six cities afterwards, after it was viewed in TV, and whole families would show up and I would say, "What are you doing here?" And they'd say, "Well, we're all at a what's next moment. We all are trying to figure out how to live purposeful lives." So we had the grandparents, the parents, the kids and sometimes the grandkids.
And so you know what? I think sometimes it takes a crisis for people to really look at what matters. I know one other thing I would say about that, Don, is that I've been interviewing people over the age of 60 for many, many years, asking them if they could live their life over. And 100% of the people, they say that if they could live their life over, they'd be more reflective. They'd take more risks in work and relationships. And third, they would earlier in life understood what really gave them joy and fulfillment was their relationships, their connectivity with others. And that connectivity comes from not just being a nice person, but from really being engaged with these people, getting who they were, reinforcing that and et cetera.
Don MacPherson:
Yeah. I have a lot of comments. The first comment I have is the big P versus little P, and when you understand that, it demystifies purpose for me. Because I think about the big P being Bill Gates is going to eradicate polio and combat climate change. Well, that's a luxury, right? He's a 10 times multi-billionaire. Just ridiculous wealth, and he can pursue that. But when you break down what little P is and I can do that today, it's an action that I can ...
Richard Leider:
Yeah. 1440 purpose moments in a day.
Don MacPherson:
What does that mean? I've heard you say that before.
Richard Leider:
Well, if you take sleep out of it, it would be less, but there are 1440 minutes in a day, so every minute is a chance to, like Frankl would say, to make a difference in that moment in certain ways. One of the other things that fortuitous encounters for me is a lot of people talk today about how stressed they are, how overwhelmed they are, et cetera. The guy who coined the term stressed is a recently deceased neurologist named Hans Selye. He was actually not studying stress. He was studying eustress, spelled E-U-S-T-R-E. Eustress is positive stress, what gives us energy, what gives us aliveness, what keeps us alive. He was actually a student and Frankl was involved with him in eustress is the positive that comes from purpose.
Don MacPherson:
Yeah, you can't grow without stress, right? You go to the gym and you're breaking down your muscles to enable them to grow back. You talked about resilience much earlier. No Navy SEAL is walking into the first day of training without having put their bodies through incredible levels of stress to try to make it through training. So yes, it's just the-
Richard Leider:
And that's why grow and give go together. The American essayist E. B. White said, "I arise in the morning, torn between a desire to save the world and a desire to savor the world. This makes it hard to plan the day." Well, saving means growing and giving. It doesn't mean saving the world per se. We all want to savor. We all want a life that has joy and fulfillment and health and wellbeing in it, but if it's just about savoring, think about retirees who just savor, savor, savor, it doesn't last long and they don't last long.
Don MacPherson:
I read a book by Tony Hsieh. I'm not sure if you know who he is or-
Richard Leider:
I do.
Don MacPherson:
He was CEO of Zappos for quite awhile and he unfortunately passed away a few years ago. He was a young guy. But he broke down three levels and three Ps. He talked about pleasure, passion and purpose, and I thought this was a really good way of looking at things. I knew people who never could get beyond pleasure. They liked to drink. They liked to eat. They just found great enjoyment out of that. But then eventually, that gets old or you become addicted or bad things can happen.
And then there are people who move onto passions. They're passionate about a football team, or passionate about a lover or partner, things like that. But then that fades as well. But purpose energizes you, and I thought this is a great way of looking at it.
Richard Leider:
Well, Frankl in Vienna was part of a brain trust, if you will, of Freud and Adler, Jung and self, et cetera. Freud was all about the will to pleasure. Adler was all about the will to power. And Frankl was about the will to meaning. And he said, "People are meaning-seeking. Mattering matters."
In medicine, because I work a lot in healthcare, et cetera, and do different programs, and the question in healthcare is, "What's the matter with you?" Well, the flip side of that is, "What matters to you?" It's not going to be long before doctors, I find from even discussions at UnitedHealth Group or Mayo Clinic or Johns Hopkins, they're going to say, "What matters to you is an important part of our prescription for you. We need to figure that out."
Don MacPherson:
Yeah, every person over the age of 70 I know who's living a vital life has a purpose. There's no doubt about it. And then you can see the ones who don't and they're ...
Richard Leider:
Well, I'm 77, and one of the words that you need to delete and get out of your ... push the pause button, push the delete button on, is the word still. "Oh, Richard, you're still whatever, writing, speaking, doing a podcast with Don MacPherson, doing a ..." And it's like, who gets to write the rules for a long life? That's looking in the rearview mirror in certain ways.
And so the chapter in my new book that gets the most attention is how do I stop living a default life? Many people are living a default life that maybe was okay at one point but now it's a default meaning that they don't really choose it. They're on automatic. How do they get out of that and start living the good life? Or their version of the good life, rather.
Don MacPherson:
I'm glad you brought that up because I wanted to ask you about it. What advice do you have for someone who is stuck outside their purpose? And I'll bring this back to 2009, 2010. I was an entrepreneur at the time, and I had hundreds of meetings with people who were stuck. People who, in their 40s, maybe a family, had made a nice living working a corporate job. But they saw what I was doing, being a company owner, and they just couldn't move. They couldn't get out of that allure of working for a corporation, that safety. So how do you get them unstuck?
I would tell them, "If you want to start your own business, one, how confident are you in you? Two, how much money do you really need and are you going to be able to find it? And three, can you sell?" Those were the questions that I asked, but what would you ask-
Richard Leider:
Those are excellent questions. I co-authored a book called Life Reimagined. It's a bestseller. And the guy who I co-authored it with was the editor of the Harvard Business Review, and then he left to found, to become an entrepreneur, to found Fast Company magazine, which became the highest-grossing business magazine in the history in the US. He sold that after 12 years. He's now just won his second term as mayor of Santa Fe, New Mexico. So he's my co-author. He's an example of somebody who wasn't stuck but got unstuck along the way.
But in Life Reimagined, we have six steps to getting unstuck, so to speak. The steps are first of all reflect, like your questions. Second of all, connect with a sounding board. Connect with people you can talk through this with, like they would talk with you. Not only that they could talk but the sounding board would also hold them accountable for doing something. And the third step after reflect and connect is explore. Go out there and do your homework. Don't just sit and reflect about it and connect. Open doors and see what wants to happen by just going out and talking, as you said, to other entrepreneurs.
And the fourth is to choose. Decide one door that you're going to experiment with and take a deeper dive into it. And then the fifth step is to repack. It's another one of my books, Repacking Your Bags for The Good Life. But repack means what do you need to let go of in terms of your work in the big corporation or financials or time? There's no free lunch. You have to do certain unpacking and repacking to get there. And finally, act. What's the first step you can take today and tomorrow and the next day? Those six steps are ways to get unstuck.
Don MacPherson:
A comment on this idea of “still.” You mentioned it before. "You're still doing this, you're still doing that." I just thought that the word still is really interesting, because there's nothing still about you. There's activity. I've known you a couple of years and I've known of you for decades, but there's an activity in you and so I never think of you as being still.
Richard Leider:
Well, and what drives a lot of this is curiosity. Curiosity about yourself, curiosity about the world, curiosity about what's possible, what the possibilities are in certain ways. I know that I ... you and I have talked about this before, I think. But I had a conversation with the founder of TED, Richard Saul Wurman. We were backstage in the green room and we were both going to speak to a large audience on the East Coast, and he said, "What are you going to talk about?" And I said, "Purpose."
And Richard Saul Wurman's kind of a curmudgeon in my mind. He's older than me by 10 years. He said, "Well, young man, what are you going to talk about?" I mean, I said, "Purpose." And I said, "What are you going to talk about?" He said, "Curiosity. Don't you think that curiosity is what really ignites people getting stuff done and purpose?" And he said, "TED was based on my own ..." his own personal curiosity about ... He's an architect. About technology, entertainment and design and how they all come together in these new models of entrepreneurship and other things, innovation and things like that.
And he said, "So TED was founded on curiosity and every year billions of people are curious enough to download a TED Talk or go to one or do one." And so I think curiosity is really ... It's hard to ignite curiosity in people if they're not that curious. I hate to go to any kind of a social event and sit next to a former anything. I say, "Well, what are you curious about now? What are you passionate about? What are you thinking about?" "Well, I used to be a duh duh duh. Now I play golf or do whatever it is." And it's okay but I said, "I'm out of here."
Don MacPherson:
I don't think people give themselves permission to do some of these things, to be curious or to ... Yeah. I think you know this and you've heard people do this, like what do other people need to change? Then what do I need to change? Well, I don't need to change anything. But well, let me tell you, I've got a long list of things that others need to change.
Richard Leider:
That's right. So purpose is a verb. It's an action. It's a path. It's a mindset that you choose what you want your life to be. Like Frankl says, "Say yes to life." And it's a practice. And great leaders, great parents, great coaches are only as good as their practices. And so we're always practicing something. Is it getting us what we want?
Richard Leider:
And so part of the purpose path that you asked about earlier is to get on the path, to choose that there is a path and to get on it, and then to create certain practices. One of which, grow and give, I'd just say a good practice for your listeners is to write that on a Post-it, a sticky, and put it on their mirror and tomorrow morning when they get up ask themselves, "With my 1440 purpose moments today, how am I going to grow and give today?"
And at the end of the day, before they go to bed, ask themselves, "How did I grow and give today?" At the end of about a week, if people actually do that, maybe they need a purpose partner to do that or someone to share the message with. After a week they'll have a felt sense of what living and leading purposefully is really all about.
Don MacPherson:
Yeah. I agree with that. And I'm one of those late bloomers. I didn't really truly understand my purpose until I was about 50, unfortunately. There were elements, and remarkably for 30 years, so from the age of maybe 22, 23 years old, I was contributing to my purpose.
Richard Leider:
Sure.
Don MacPherson:
But it was ... And kind of developing the gifts that you talk about and some of the passions, but I didn't really package it into a purpose and a conscious purpose where I could direct my actions.
Richard Leider:
Naming it's important because then we can measure it or practice it in ways that you couldn't if it was too broad or too vague or, "I'll get around to it someday." The pandemic has really put this up in front of people. Kind of funny story, but one of my colleagues, when you call him and leave a message, on his phone he says, "At the sound of the tone, please leave your answer to life's two eternal questions; who are you and what do you want?"
I think the pandemic has put the who are you and what do you want question up with some robust energy because people are saying, they could be sick. They could not make it. They know people who aren't. And all of a sudden, "I don't want to do this anymore. I don't want to live here anymore, or work here anymore or be in this relationship anymore," on and on and on.
Don MacPherson:
Yeah. I just have a couple more questions for you, but one final thought I have on this is we are going to live a lot, lot longer. And if you're 20 years old, likely you're going to work into your 80s. I have no doubt about that, just because we're going to live long, long lives. And figure it out early, right? Figure out what your purpose is, why you get out of bed in the morning.
Richard Leider:
Just a quick response to that, another book I wrote is called Work Reimagined, and the opening chapter is It's the End of Work As We Know It. What you talk about here from the 20s to the 80s, they're going to have to reimagine their work life over and over and the value they bring and want to bring along the way, no matter who they are today. My father worked in the same organization for four decades, retired, got the gold watch metaphorically, and died two years later. I hear that happen to a lot of people today, that they die psychologically.
What we're talking about here in this conversation really, Don, are life skills of the 21st century. Whether you think it's fundamental, purpose is fundamental, the life skills of deciding how you add value and where you add value and how your life's going to go in the workplace is no longer an option to postpone.
Don MacPherson:
So I assume that you're going to say everything that we've talked about applies to people who are in their 20s?
Richard Leider:
Yes, sure. Yeah, different levels of awareness, self-awareness and practice.
Don MacPherson:
But understanding our gifts, that might be a little challenging-
Richard Leider:
Not really.
Don MacPherson:
... when we're younger.
Richard Leider:
At a certain level, because we're experimenting to see what works for us, what we like and what we don't like. But when I ask people ... Because I do a lot of work on helping people discern their gifts. And so if I had a lot of people in front of me right now and said, "How many of you have brothers and sisters?" Many or most would put up their hand. Or kids or grandkids or whatever I said, "Are your brothers' and sisters' gifts the same as yours?" Loud laughter. "No, no, no." "When did you start to notice?" "Way back when. He was out fixing lawnmowers while I was playing the violin or I was reading."
And so gifts start to evolve. If you have young kids, you start to look at the differences. Some similarities, but the differences in gifts in the same household. We can know these things. We can get feedback on at least starting to work with those early in life.
Don MacPherson:
Just a final comment on that is there is nothing, no rule that says your purpose cannot evolve, right? I mean, as I think about my life, it's evolved. I've been thinking about it for the last 15 or 20 years and now I kind of settled on it for this period of my life, but I would imagine that that ... that we should give ourselves that permission.
Richard Leider:
Yeah, it goes through maturity. It goes through stages. And the first stage is it's about me. It's figuring out who I am and how I fit, what do I want? Secondly it's about us. And some people and some leaders and some politicians don't get there, because they're narcissists all the way along. And then the third level ... So it's about me, it's about us, and then the third level it's about all of us. That's the level that Man's Search for Meaning was at.
Don MacPherson:
This has been a great conversation. Thank you, Richard, for your time and thank you for being a genius.
Don MacPherson:
Thank you for listening to 12 Geniuses. In our next episode, Dr. Mitchell Kusy joins the show. Have you ever had a toxic leader? Someone lacking self-awareness who might behave maliciously? I've had one of those leaders and you might have too. Dr Kusy is going to share how you can survive your toxic leader while keeping your job, your dignity and your mind. That episode will be released March 22nd, 2022.
Thank you to Jonathan, Jay, Tony and the rest of the production team at GLPro in London. If you love this podcast, please let us know by subscribing and leaving us a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast app. To subscribe to 12 Geniuses, please go to www.12geniuses.com. Thanks for listening, and thank you for being a genius.
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