PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT

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How to Find Your Unique Superpower: A Guide to Self-Discovery

Chris Do and Michael Ventura reveal a framework for discovering your unique gift and aligning your work with a deeper purpose.

Chris Do

Founder, The Futur™ · March 8, 2023

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The Unplayed Tuba

You might be a tuba savant. You could possess a world-class, innate talent for the instrument, a gift so profound it could redefine your life. But if you’ve never picked one up, that gift remains dormant, a superpower undiscovered.

This is the core of what Chris Do calls his Tuba Savant Theory. “If we don't experiment, if we don't get out of our comfort zones, then that purpose, that Savant gift, that thing that comes naturally to you that doesn't to a lot of other people, may go undiscovered,” Do explains.

Most professionals go to their graves with the music still inside them. They follow a prescribed path, suppress their unique inclinations, and confuse a job with a calling. They live in a state of quiet desperation, feeling a disconnect they can’t articulate.

The problem is simple. We are taught to specialize early and optimize for safety, not discovery. This is a strategy for survival, not fulfillment.

Michael Ventura, author of Applied Empathy and a consultant who helps organizations navigate transformation, argues that finding this purpose is the most critical work a person can do. He defines his own mission as helping “move the block that stands in the way of you getting where you need to go.” Whether running design firms, writing books on leadership, or teaching in boardrooms, his work ladders up to one thing: diagnosis and removal of obstacles.

For anyone feeling that their own tuba remains unplayed, the journey to find it is not a mystical quest. It is a practical process of self-excavation, guided by specific clues and intentional choices.

Anatomy of a Purpose-Driven Professional

Our purpose is often a synthesis of our earliest influences. Ventura’s story is a clear case study. “If you put the two of them in a blender,” he says of his parents, “you'd kind of find someone who likes to care for people and their needs, likes to learn and teach and communicate ideas, and is a builder of something.”

His father was a second-generation owner of a small home heating and fuel oil business in New Jersey. He was an entrepreneur who managed a team but was not afraid to get his hands dirty in the field. His mother spent her career in education, moving from early childhood development to teaching and eventually to school administration, focusing on social work and guidance.

One was a builder. The other, a guide.

Ventura became both. The combination of his father’s entrepreneurial grit and his mother’s dedication to teaching and support created the foundation for his entire career. “When you pour that out of the blender,” he notes, “you kind of get me.”

This synthesis was refined at Babson College, a school renowned as the nation’s top institution for entrepreneurial education for over two decades. There, the curriculum enforces a critical lesson for any aspiring professional: breadth before depth.

For the first two years, students have little choice in their coursework. “I had to take intro to accounting and intro to marketing and intro to management,” Ventura recalls. “They want you to walk that buffet line and they want you to see where your interests lie.” He admits he was terrible at accounting, but the exposure was invaluable. It made him conversant.

The goal was not to create masters of every discipline. The goal was to build T-shaped people, a concept Ventura has championed ever since. This model holds that you must first develop deep expertise in one core area, your vertical downstroke. This is your foundation. For Do, it was graphic design. For Ventura, it was management. “For me, that's the perfect intersection of leadership, ideas, vision, problem-solving,” he says.

Once that deep expertise is established, you earn the right to go wide, exploring lateral interests and skills. “As long as you're exceptional on your downstroke, I have no qualms with you going as wide as you like,” Ventura clarifies. “It’s just if the downstroke suffers, you've got to tighten your breadth.” This framework prevents you from becoming a jack-of-all-trades and master of none, a common trap for creatives and entrepreneurs. To find your calling, you must first master a craft, as explored in Do’s guide to building a six-figure design career.

From Terror to Triumph: The Speaker's Secret

One of the most powerful comfort zones to break is the fear of public speaking. It is a nearly universal anxiety, and one shared by both Do and Ventura. Today, they command stages with an energy that seems effortless, but their pasts tell a different story.

“For the vast majority of my life, I was deathly afraid of public speaking,” Ventura confesses. In high school, his fear was so acute that when he ran for class president, he devised an elaborate scheme to avoid giving a live speech. “I convinced the school's principal to let us do speeches over video into homerooms so that I wouldn't have to stand in front of a couple thousand kids.”

Do admits to a similar strategy for his own oral reports, using pre-recorded video presentations to avoid the stage. It was a creative workaround born of sheer terror.

The turning point for Ventura came in a freshman rhetoric class at Babson, taught by a professor named Michael Bruner. Ventura immediately told him, “I am terrified about this.” The professor’s response changed everything. “He goes, ‘I want you to know what we're going to really do is help you find your style and find how you speak, not the way everyone else speaks, but what works for you.’”

This wasn't about memorizing rules. It was about discovering authenticity under pressure. The most profound lesson was learning to embrace silence.

One of the biggest mistakes novice speakers make is feeling the need to fill every moment with sound. This leads to filler words: the “ums,” “likes,” and “sort ofs” that dilute a message. Ventura recalls a speaking coach who offered a powerful reframe. She asked a colleague who overused the word “sorta,” “What if I told you you're sort of gonna get a raise next month? How much in confidence does that inspire you?”

The lesson is clear. Filler words deteriorate your integrity as a speaker.

The alternative is the pause. A moment of silence is not a sign of being lost. It is a tool. It allows you to gather your breath, choose your next words with precision, and give your ideas space to land. Research shows that American conversation patterns have one of the shortest gaps between speakers, often less than a second. In other cultures, longer pauses are a sign of thoughtfulness and respect.

“When you become comfortable with a gap, it's not that you're lost for words,” Ventura explains. “It gives you a little more permission to play with the meter of the delivery.” Mastering this skill is a cornerstone of effective communication, a topic further detailed in The Confident Speaker's Framework.

By finding his own style, Ventura transformed his greatest fear into one of his most powerful assets. His voice, once a source of anxiety, became the very instrument of his purpose.

Beyond the Golden Rule

At the heart of Ventura’s philosophy and his book, Applied Empathy, is a simple but profound shift in perspective. It’s the difference between the Golden Rule and the Platinum Rule.

Most of us are raised on the Golden Rule: treat people the way you want to be treated. It is a good starting point, a baseline for decent human interaction. But it has a fatal flaw. It assumes that what you want is what others want.

The Platinum Rule offers a more powerful alternative: treat people how *they* want to be treated. It requires you to step outside your own ego and perspective to understand the needs, desires, and context of another person.

Do shares a painful and revealing personal story to illustrate the point. As a kid in junior high, he was invited to the birthday party of a cool classmate named Robert. Deeply into Japanese anime and robots, Do bought his friend a complex model kit of a robot he himself would have loved. He was thrilled to give the gift.

As Robert opened his other presents, Do’s excitement turned to dread. His friend was into cars and sports. The cultural gap was immense. When Robert finally opened Do’s gift, his polite but confused expression was devastating. “It just really hit me,” Do reflects. “What I want has nothing to do with what he wants.”

This is not just a lesson in gift-giving. It is a fundamental principle of business, leadership, and life. When you design a product, build a brand, or lead a team, applying the Golden Rule means you are building for an audience of one: yourself. Applying the Platinum Rule forces you to seek true understanding.

It was this principle that allowed Ventura to elevate his strategy and design shop. In a commoditized market where firms competed on price and execution, empathy became the differentiator. “Our work was being held up against other strategy and design shops who also did good work,” he says. “It started to feel like a race to the bottom.”

He realized they needed a philosophical approach that was uniquely theirs. By focusing on empathy, the process became as valuable as the output. It was no longer just about delivering a strategy deck or a brand identity. It was about the method of deep listening and understanding that informed the work. This is how brands build loyal followings, a principle that echoes the advice in What Successful Personal Brands Do Differently.

This shift from ego-centric to other-centric thinking is the key to unlocking not only better business results but a deeper connection to your own work. It moves you from transaction to transformation.

The Three Clues to Your Calling

The word “purpose” can feel heavy and intimidating. As Ventura suggests, “If purpose makes you feel a kind of way, replace it with meaning. Where do you feel a sense of meaning in what you're doing?”

The path to discovering this meaning is not found in a single epiphany but in a series of clues. Ventura highlights three specific signals to watch for. These are the breadcrumbs that lead back to your unique gift.

The first clue is the flow state. “What are you doing when time doesn't exist?” Ventura asks. “When you look up and you're like, ‘Oh, six hours have just gone by,’ what was I doing there?” This state of total immersion, where you lose yourself in an activity, is a powerful indicator that you are engaged in something that aligns with your natural abilities and interests. For some, it is designing. For others, it is something else entirely. Ventura finds flow in several activities:

Cooking: He cooks dinner every night, describing it as a methodical and peaceful way to decompress. It’s a creative act without a rigid recipe.
Taoist Meditation: For over 15 years, he has started his day with a practice including Qigong and Tai Chi. What began as a discipline has become an essential part of his being.
Physical Activity: Playing basketball or walking his dogs provides a physical outlet that quiets his cerebral mind.

Do finds his own flow states in different activities: scrolling Pinterest, experimenting with Midjourney prompts, and watching an endless stream of TikTok videos. Though different, the mechanism is the same: total absorption. The key is to identify these activities in your own life without judgment.

The second clue is a concept Ventura loves: Your Complaint is Your Calling. He asks, “What's the thing that you see the flaws in really naturally?” He offers the example of an architect friend who can’t help but point out the design flaws in every building he passes. He’s not whining; he is instinctively drawn to fix the problem. Your natural critique is a sign of your natural talent.

The third clue is its inverse: what problems land on your desk? “What do people come to you with help for?” Ventura prompts. “They might see something in you that you don't even recognize in yourself yet.” When friends, family, or colleagues consistently seek your advice on a particular topic, it is a powerful external validation of a gift you possess.

Together, these three clues form a diagnostic toolkit for self-discovery. They point toward the intersection of what you love, what you are good at, and where you can provide value. Answering these questions honestly is the first step in moving from a vague feeling of purpose to an articulated mission. This process of identifying your unique value is crucial for anyone trying to find their niche and turn passion into profit.

The Hero in the Mirror

Once you’ve started to identify clues, the next step is to build a clearer picture of the values that drive you. For this, Ventura offers one of his favorite exercises. It is simple, direct, and profoundly insightful.

He calls it the Heroes Exercise. It’s a pen-and-paper activity, intentionally analog to encourage deeper reflection. The instructions are straightforward:

List Your Heroes: Write down a list of people you consider heroic. They can be living or dead, real or fictitious. It could be two people or five.
Identify Their Heroic Attributes: Next to each name, write down what specifically makes them heroic to you. What qualities do they embody?

As you list these attributes, a pattern will emerge. You might write down words like “confident,” “visionary,” “trustworthy,” or “brave.”

“That stuff is the building blocks of what's inside you in terms of how you will realize your purpose,” Ventura reveals. “You see it in them because you know it's in you too. You recognize it.”

These qualities may not be fully developed in you yet. They might be muscles you need to strengthen. But their presence on your list is proof of their existence within you. You value these traits in others because, on some level, you value them for yourself.

The exercise is a mirror. It reflects your own aspirational identity. The people you admire are not random. They are signposts pointing toward the person you are meant to become. This is what the writer Jim Rohn meant when he said that success leaves clues. By studying the people we admire, we are studying ourselves.

This insight also reframes the nature of bravery. When asked who he would want to be stuck in an elevator with, Ventura chooses the musician and artist David Byrne. The question he would ask is, “How do you cultivate the bravery to do what you do?” Ventura admires Byrne for his relentless creativity and willingness to take risks. He sees it as an act of immense courage.

But when asked how he cultivates his own bravery, Ventura’s answer is a practical, repeatable question he asks himself before any major decision: “Will I regret it more if I do or I don't?” This simple calculus has consistently forced him to take the necessary leap, even when it was the harder choice. It is the operating system for living a life aligned with the values he sees in his own heroes.

The Finality Filter: Living with Memento Mori

The search for purpose often feels like a luxury, something to be pursued when all other obligations are met. This is a dangerous misconception. The final piece of the puzzle is understanding that this work is not just important. It is urgent.

Ventura brings this into focus through the ancient concept of Memento Mori: remember you will die. He practices a form of death meditation every morning, not in a macabre sense, but as a tool for clarity. “It's a helpful reminder,” he says, “of the importance of choices and my actions and that everything's finite.”

This awareness acts as a filter. It sharpens your focus and forces you to prioritize what truly matters. Ventura shares the story of a speaker who used an online life expectancy calculator to determine his approximate date of death. He went into his calendar, scrolled forward to that date, and wrote a single word: “Dead.”

From that moment, his perspective on time shifted. If he read 15 books a year, he could calculate that he only had about 200 books left to read in his entire life. Suddenly, the choice of which book to pick up next became immensely important. “He looked at his whole life that way and he saw the finality of all of these choices,” Ventura recounts. “When you know this is one of 200 left, that choice is so much more important.”

This is the finality filter. It forces you to stop following every shiny object and start making rigorous choices about how you spend your one finite life. It makes you question whether your work is truly aligned with the mark you want to leave.

Do shares a similar concept he learned from a speaker in the Philippines. The word “passion” can be rearranged to spell “I pass on.” The ultimate question becomes: what is it that you want to pass on? This turns a self-centered search for personal happiness into a legacy-oriented mission. It’s what drives a person to build something that lasts beyond them, a key theme in any entrepreneurial story, like those explored in this conversation with Simon Squibb.

When asked if he would feel his work was done if his life ended tomorrow, Ventura is clear. “There's always more work to do, yes. But I feel that I have used my time wisely, by and large.”

He is not afraid because his daily practice of remembering his mortality ensures he is already living with intention. He is not waiting for a future date to start living a life of meaning. He is doing it now.

That is the final challenge. Stop waiting. Recognize the clues. Embrace the fear. And start playing your tuba.

TRANSCRIPT

there's a phrase that I have talked about my tuba Savant Theory which what I mean by that is you you might be Chris might be a tuba Savant but have you ever tried to play the two but maybe not if we don't experiment if we don't get out of our comfort zones then that purpose that that Savant gift that thing that comes naturally to you that doesn't to a lot of other people may go undiscovered [Music] now it's becoming a trend that we're speaking to several people who spoke in Australia at the no BS conference you're just in in a line of many great people that I want to talk to so just to kick things off and I have an idea on how to do this a podcast video episode with you that's a little bit different based on some of the things I've learned about you first for people who don't know who you are can you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit of your story sure yeah and thank you for inviting me to have a chat I've been looking forward to chatting with you as well um you know I started my story I guess by saying typically that I am a lover of ideas and I am a big fan of helping move the block that stands in the way of you getting where you need to go and throughout my whole career I've sort of spent my time doing that whether I ran design firms or strategy consultancies uh writing books about empathy and Leadership and then teaching it academically uh and as well as teaching it in organizations you know all of this stuff kind of ladders up to the same thing for me which is what are you trying to get to what's standing in the way can we diagnose that can we understand it and can we help you get around it or through it so that you can get where you need to be just out of curiosity what is your background what did you study in school um so I applied to 11 colleges because I uh was a masochist but also because I really I wanted to keep my options open and I applied to some big schools but I also applied to a lot of schools where I could play D3 basketball because that was the thing I really loved to do at one time in my life and uh still love to play basketball just uh less less competitively and so through like a weird set of college visits I ended up at a school called Babson which is the number one school in the country for the last 20 plus years for entrepreneurial business educations and so uh I went there you can only major in business there so everyone graduates with a business degree with some form of concentrations and mine was kind of a self-created one that spanned strategy design marketing and Entrepreneurship and so I thought when I graduated that I would go work for a consulting firm and I graduated in the.com bubbles burst uh and so there weren't a lot of jobs for people with zero experience and I ended up in a marketing and advertising firm instead and learned a good deal pretty quickly being part of a a a sort of a utility player on their team and after about a year in change uh was no longer there and was trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life and started a digital agency in 2004 doing you know a lot of flash micro sites and things like that that people wanted in sort of the first wave of interactive sites like that what a wild kind of Meandering path of different things of interest I'm I'm just kind of Blown Away that you had the wherewithal to focus on on Business and Entrepreneurship and thinking about being some kind of Management Consultant because that is not even a term that I was aware of well into my 30s and 40s what was it about your specific background your parents how you grew up maybe your friends that you knew that that your mind was even trained on things like this that's a good question so uh my folks are a big influence for sure my dad is uh now retired but ran the second generation of a small family business in New Jersey which was a Like Home Heating and Fuel Oil Business um light blue color job in many ways right like you know there's a small team that he that he had uh so he would work at his desk and do the business management side but he was also you know out in the field at times visiting customers when he needed to and things like that so real entrepreneurial not afraid to get his hands dirty kind of guy and then my mother was in education she's also now retired um but has been in education her whole life started in early childhood development then moved into being a teacher and then moved into the administrative role in schools particularly around social work and guidance so not in high schools but more in grade schools which was more about like making sure people had the right path and the right support at home and all of that kind of stuff so I guess if you put the two of them in a in a blender so to speak you'd kind of find someone who likes to care for uh people and their needs uh likes to learn and teach and communicate ideas and is a builder of something and likes to you know be on the ground floor kind of managing folks but also getting my hands dirty and that's kind of when you when when you pour that out of the blender that you kind of get me thank you it's it's amazing sometimes how when we learn about what our parents are who they are what they do that we wind up becoming the synthesis of these two people and these influences in their lives and sometimes for people it's like they got nothing to do with our parents and it and it's kind of random at least on the surface but as you explain your parents and who they are everything that I see from you now makes total sense from writing books from teaching producing videos from lecturing on stage just your general energy now if you're listening to this on a podcast you may pick up on some of Michael's energy but I want to describe it to you from the perspective of an audience member seeing Michael for the first time walking on the stage he is a tall guy lanky athletic build he's he's bearded he's got a wavy dark hair but he has this energy that is both like a person who knows what he's talking about but is very warm and inviting and pulls you in it's the voice it's the body language it's the choice of words and I think we're gonna hit on a bunch of those topics today you graduate from a business school that is top 10 or top 20 in the nation for entrepreneurs what are some of the big lessons you learned in this from from going to this University for this college the first two years you go there they don't really let you pick very much in the way of your course load and so you get 50 of your course load is going to be business every year and in that first two years you have to take everything so I had to take intro to accounting and info intro to marketing an intro to management and you know a whole host of different things because they want you to walk that Buffet line and they want you to see where your interests lie and I sucked at accounting um you know it may not may not come as a surprise to anybody but um but I'm really glad I took the class because it allowed me to be conversant right and I think that was the the point with the method that they that they brought to the students was you may not choose to pursue a career in accounting but if you're going to be in business the ability for you to sit down and look at a p l to be able to understand how a balance sheet functions to be able to have those kinds of meaningful conversations will help you whether you're a CEO a CEO uh you know a CMO it doesn't matter somewhere down the line so yeah so I guess that's probably a a big thing that taught me was that that diversity of of knowledge and that that sort of breath before depth was important and I've always been a big believer in the idea of t-shaped people right and this idea that you've got to be good at your downstroke and if you can be good at the downstroke you can go wide and you can go wider into other interest areas and other lateral places you can play a role and I've always tried to cultivate that and folks I've worked with where like the as long as you're exceptional on your downstroke I have no qualms with you going as wide as you like it's just if if that starts if the downstroke suffers you've got to tighten your breath there's an expression that some people will be familiar with instead of going a mile wide in an inch deep where you have surface level knowledge and go a mile deep in an inch wide and you're saying once you have that depth you can go as wide as you want because there's always going to be that core part of the T the vertical stroke as you you talked about that's going to be your foundation for me it was graphic design what is your vertical stroke if can you describe that yeah I think it's management is such a you know it's for me I've always that that's the perfect intersection of leadership ideas vision problem solving like that's kind of what I like to do the most and you know it's funny I don't have a team at the present time after 20 years of running teams so Management's kind of like a funny word to use but it but it is it's the management of ideas it's the management of bringing things into reality it's the management of time which all of us struggle with so for me knowing that was a strong suit and I've always believed like the best CEOs are the ones who do for the team what the team can't do for itself and so as a leader what I always tried to do was not solve everyone's problems every day but give them the tools and resources to solve their problems and support them on their Journey were there any instructors that stood out looking back that really shared something with you that you hold dear to this day than you think it's a profound lesson that you learned for the vast majority of my life I was up until sort of getting into my own businesses I was deathly afraid of public speaking and so there was a teacher at Babson named Michael Bruner and Michael taught rhetoric and it was a class that I took in my freshman year and I walked in and I told him after the first class I just want you to know I am terrified about this I have I like I figured out a way in high school to run for class president without having to give a speech I convinced the school's principal to let us do speeches over video into homerooms so that I wouldn't have to stand in front of a couple thousand kids in the school because I was terrified of doing it so I've gotten I've gotten away with not speaking in public for a while but now I know you're going to make me and he goes oh we're going to make you that's for sure but he goes I want you to know what we're going to really do is help you find your style and find how you speak not the way everyone else speaks but what works for you and he stands out because as I've grown as a communicator I've learned that you've got to be able to feel comfortable in your own skin even when you're not terribly comfortable with the material and you have to know how to deliver information in a way that's digestible and understandable and adoptable and you know you do a great job of that too Chris and so like I know that it's it's something that that you've got in Spades but for me it was something I really had to learn in practice that is so fascinating Michael a person who's on stage who seems very comfortable up there and you and I have this in common where in high school I did everything I could to get out of public speaking and and I'm not even as ambitious as you for running for class present or anything I'm just talking about the oral reports that you're required to do I would pick the last day and I would have nightmares and lose sleep up into that moment heart racing pounding out of my chest and I also figured out a little cheat and asked the teacher if I can give a video presentation so I can be off camera narrating something using my design skills and very crude editing skills by showing things in front of the camera and talking about it and got away with that well it's kind of interesting was my teacher actually gave me extra points for doing extra work and being creative when I was like I was just trying to get out of this this is neat so it's kind of like fascinating that you did the 10x version of that by broadcasting into the homerooms and becoming the president were there any practical things exercises or something that your instructor said to you that you're like wow that was really good and I would share that with someone else or was it just a general experience of the class I think probably one of the early lessons I learned was that negative space is okay and I think when you become comfortable with a gap it's not that you're lost for words or something else it's just that you're giving some space and we all tend to have what's called filler right some people use um some people say sort ofs and they just use it to kind of fill the gap or kind of like I just did there and I had a friend who's a great speaking coach and I was talking with her about this once and she said we were referring to a particular colleague of mine who used sorta as his filler word for a lot of stuff and she said to him what if I told you you're sort of gonna get a raise next month how much in confidence does that inspire you versus I said you're gonna get a raise next month and so when you realize that that filler is actually deteriorating your integrity as a speaker and you can instead step into a comfortable pause so that you can gather your breath you can swallow if you need to swallow you can do whatever you need to do it gives you a little more permission to to play with the meter of the delivery I think in modern culture we're so uncomfortable with those moments of Silence where we're looking for the exact right word that we feel like we have to fill it up with so much stuff when in fact by just breathing giving yourself time to think and process and choose your words you add emphasis to things that you're going to say versus the things that you're saying all the time so that's pretty wonderful 100 and there was a study I can't remember who did it but someone did a study about different cultures around the world and how little time there is between someone finishing their sentence and someone else saying something and Americans are among the fastest where it's it's less than a full second between someone finishing and someone else saying something but then when you look at indigenous cultures around the world um also some Eastern cultures long pauses are very much part of the conversation and to not have a pause where there's some space for ideas to land and people to process feels less thoughtful based on some of the things I've learned about the concepts you shared in video on stage things you get asked asked about a lot which is from your book applied empathy and there's something there that you talk about that we mostly live with this golden world the golden rule is a pretty good standard standard to begin with everybody and if you could hit the Golden Rule I'm really happy and the Golden Rule as most of you know and I learned this from my dad is treat people the way you want to be treated but I heard you talk about the Platinum rule which is treat people how they want to be treated because what you want has little to do with them I'll share a personal story it's kind of embarrassing when I I used to be a terrible Gift Giver for birthdays for important dates and moments because I got people what I wanted and this sounds terrible one of my friends from school Robert invited me to his birthday party and he was one of the cool kids and I was so excited to be there and I was thinking about what should I get Robert and I was really into robots and and Japanese anime and manga so I got him a model kit of like this super cool robot that I would just die for wrap it up I'm super excited and then you can almost see the blood drain from my face when he was opening up one present after the other how off my present was he was into cars and sports and things that I was not into at all and then by the time he was going to open my present I I wanted to like a redo but it couldn't this is in junior high and then he opens it up and he gives this expression like oh and then it just really hit me like what I want has nothing to do with what he wants or what he wants has nothing to do with I want and applying empathy has a lot to do with that so having said that normally I lead these conversations so I'm going to try to apply the Platinum role as you've talked about you and I are talking what do you want to talk about that's going to be valuable to you that's going to fill you up today and I would like to construct the rest of the conversation based on that oh wow that's beautiful I love that I think one topic that's that's always interesting to me and is something that no matter where you are in your career Journey you're always thinking about at points and and perhaps struggling with sometimes accelerating through is aligning yourself to a a purpose that feels meaningful and it's something that I've particularly spent a lot of time thinking about these last few years as I've moved into a different sort of stage of my own career and understanding and digging into the idea of of what drives us from a purpose standpoint and how to dance with that as it evolves as we grow older and learn more is something I'm Keen I'm Keen to chat about if you are so first of all the word purpose has a lot of weight to it how would you define it and how do we know if we're getting close to it or if we're actually really far away from it so I would Define it as the the thing the mark you want to leave the thing you want to be able to have done and done well and that doesn't mean like solving world hunger maybe that is right but it might just be like being a great dad you can have a lot of different Pursuits and this is a thing that I think a lot about because I'm someone who is more of a generalist than a specialist and so I have a lot of stuff I spend time doing but they all ladder to something we said at the very beginning of this conversation which is helping you move forward helping you move through a moment of transformation finding that block and moving through or around it to get you where you need to go and so whether I look at my Consulting work my public speaking stuff things I'm doing on boards alternative medicine stuff that I do all of these things is about pushing through the growth moment to get you or myself to the other side is that the purpose is that your purpose yeah okay so long after Michael's expired the Legacy he leaves behind is the people he's able to help move forward and how they're able to help other people move forward is that about right yeah I would be very happy if that's the way I'm remembered and is there a metric in which you'll measure this against do you want to help your families and your friends a bunch of strangers how deep and wide do you want to go with this so part of why I have chosen despite my uh earlier childhood Tendencies to not speak publicly uh to do public speaking and to write books and to share my thoughts more candidly is because of its ability to help scale some ideas and some Frameworks and some tools and some mindsets that ultimately I think will allow more people to to practice this kind of work and the fact that I've tried my best to bring it into a realm of language that's accessible in a business context was very intentional because you know as a human I am a little more on the spectrum of like candles and sandals than uh than suits and wing tips and so um so I like that but I but I know that like you can't be candles and sandals in the Goldman Sachs boardroom and be taken seriously and so to find ways to bring these ideas which are more EQ driven which do have uh emotion and vulnerability Tangled Up in them a lot of the time is not something that is readily accepted at every corporate culture so finding ways to to have the secret handshake that lets you into those rooms by using language that does feel quote unquote business appropriate let's you bring these ideas to a place where they can scale to hundreds of thousands of employees okay some some quick questions and then maybe some deeper questions for you at what age do you find this is your purpose your reason for being other than money I'm just curious in terms of Michael's timeline here I think it's a difference of something I've always enjoyed doing versus something that I could articulate and there's actually a pretty interesting McKinsey study that came out a few years ago about this that says 80 something percent of the people they surveyed which probably is biased toward more like white collar jobs but given the fact that it was done by McKinsey but nonetheless 80 of the people they surveyed said they have a purpose but only about 60 percent could tell you what it was and so I think that's true for a lot of folks is that we have kind of a sense sometimes it's an intuition of what we're here to do but if you know push came to shove could they put it in a sentence and so I think I've always kind of known that I I want to help and that I'm a Helper and that I want to support people through the work they're doing but it really wasn't until probably about five or six years ago that I realized that was my management style that was what was governing the choices I was making in the Pursuits I I gave time to and uh and ultimately as I stepped away from my time running the Consulting business that I had been running for the last decade or so started to really think about what it is that that I want and how do I leave the world in a better place and I had to go through that work for myself to kind of find that language that that made sense to me here's some things that I'm thinking about I believe everybody's purpose in life because you're using the word purpose I use purpose like just slightly differently is to discover their gifts I think each one of us is such a unique combination of different variables from the way that we look our height our width our hair color our lack of hair that we have some kind of unique combination that makes us very special I I refer to as a gift or your superpower and to discover that is your life's purpose to find that and I find that more in alignment that you are with your gift the happier the healthier you'll be and sometimes the more successful you'll be whatever Dimension you want to measure success on and that the opposite of that being out of alignment creates depression anxiety frustration and and probably low financial success too I couldn't agree more I think you're you're 100 on the money and uh there's a there's a phrase that I have talked about with with folks along these lines where I refer to it as and I mean this in a funny way but I'll explain it it's like it's my tuba Savant Theory which what I mean by that is you you might be Chris might be a tuba Savon but have you ever tried to play the tuba maybe not right and so if we don't try enough stuff if we don't experiment if we don't get out of our comfort zones then that purpose that that Savant gift that thing that comes naturally to you that doesn't to a lot of other people may go undiscovered right so we've gotta everyone's got some dormant laying Savant gift inside of them it's just a matter about exploring enough to find out what it is yes and in very practical terms I have two boys my my oldest when he was much younger he would only eat foods that are white he'd only eat white food rice bread butter cheese nothing that had color in it and he limited his palette and it's created some problems for him now but all of a sudden when he went to away to high school and to college he experiments with our food with his friends because it's cool to eat it with your friends but not with your parents he comes back eating all kinds of things he deprived himself for a big part of his life but not even be willing to try so part of this whole journey in life as you say is try more things because you'll be surprised sometimes what you like and what you're good at then you said something which is a clue because if you're listening to this my feeling is some people spend their entire life never finding their gift never figuring out what their purpose is and they'll go to their grave not knowing some as you say will kind of feel it but they won't know how to articulate it and that's a problem too an even smaller group they can articulate it but they don't have a strategy or a plan of actions that they can achieve it so we're talking about many rungs on the ladder towards understanding your gift and then being able to share the gift because like all gifts it's meant to be given not kept so the clue that you said was you always knew it because you enjoyed doing it so that's going to be a clue there because I felt the exact same way if somebody is listening to this and thinking to themselves my gosh what they're saying is really important I'm vibing with this I get it sandals and candles and all I get it all what are some tips on how we could possibly find and be find what it is that we enjoy doing so that we can then articulate it to someone let's let's take them back to Step One what are you doing when time doesn't exist right when you're in that flow statement like when like you look up and you're like oh six hours have just gone by what what was I doing there and that's a that's a clue you should definitely pay attention when those things happen when you lose time in the in the immersion of a particular thing I know a lot of designers who will just like kind of look up and realize five hours went by and they went deep down the rabbit hole of something that's that means you're on to something right one of the phrases I love is your complaint is your calling right and so like what's the thing that you see the flaws in really naturally like I have a friend who's an exceptional architect and if you walk around the city with him he will point out all the flaws of every building that he walks around not because he's like a whiner or because he likes to complain but because he's like oh you see how they did that if they had just done it like this or like he sees the problems he's drawn to fix it and in the inverse what problems land on your desk what do people come to you with help for like what do they say hey can you help me out with fill in the blank they might see something in you that you don't even recognize in yourself yet excellent those are super practical I've often described who my non-designer friends like what does it mean to be a designer and the way I explain is you notice things that no one notices you geek out on weird stuff so if you're really into designing typefaces well that's what you care about the ear of the letter form whether it's a two-story or single story G those are things you geek out on and that's what makes it really special and unique okay so these are good Clues many of us will suppress these things because we feel it in our heart but for whatever reason our parents our culture our education system told us that's impractical do not do that that's the path towards misery at least that was my case like being an artist and a designer meant being broke and starving and I didn't want to starve or be broke and it wasn't until I saw someone else doing it that it allowed that I allowed myself permission to pursue this thing so for you you already have two great examples right in front of you from the time in which you were born an entrepreneurial father an educator and a mom explains so much about your love for teaching and sharing and writing and and helping others that it makes perfect sense when did you give yourself permission like this is it I have this thing in my heart I know I can articulate it now I'm ready to go was there anything that happened that opened that door for you that final step um so I don't know if it was uh switch as much as a fader and the fader for me really started around the time that I began to unlock this idea of empathy as a as a central sort of Cornerstone to the work I do because up until then I was running strategy and design shops that were doing good work but our work was being held up against other strategy and design shops who also did good work right and so it started to feel like a commodity business in some way it's like as a buyer as a client it was sort of like who does the best work at the most affordable price and I will take that partner and I will go make this thing with them and that felt like a race to the bottom in terms of being able to feel empowered to do our best work if we were just always going to be cost cut by someone who could do just as good for a little cheaper and so we realized and I realized at that point if we were gonna be successful and be able to continue to pay people Market wages and grow and all of that other stuff that we had to have something more than just the commoditized side of our work which gave us something unique that felt meaningful to the client and to us and that's true in any business and and in any Pursuit there's always going to be like a a tier where you're all good and and looking at each other as peers and then there's a couple people that have a philosophical approach or an aesthetic that they've specifically leaned into right that like they people come to them for that and so when we started to unpack empathy as that for me it started to show me that my work wasn't just about the output it was about the process and it was about this stuff that I want to do that's bigger than this strategy deck that we've created after six months of getting to know this client's culture or this brand that we've created that is inspired by all these things we've learned but it was the method and the and the process that we went through that was scalable in a sense way more so than the work itself and when I got to a point in the business where the business had been acquired we were finishing the time there and I started to think about well what do I do next there was this really clear dotted line off of my job as CEO to be doing what I'm doing now because it was just an extension of it it was doing it for more people and in a different way but it was still doing the same thing it was practicing empathy as a tool for leadership development problem solving and growth you talked about Flow State and it's Eerie to me how you describe things and how like I think I've described things in the exact same way before really so there must be some universal truth we're both tapping into the speed force if you will I just wanted to ask you just side question which is what are some funny things that you lose I'm doing like I just want to know a little bit about Michael the human I'm very happy to answer that so uh there's a couple things that I do virtually daily if not absolutely daily where I lose time um one of them is cooking I may make dinner every night for our house and it's something I love to do it's something that gives me just like a lot of peacefulness to just be methodical and and I'm a more jazzless Orchestra kind of cook so I'm not really going off of a recipe I'm looking at what we have what we feel like eating and then something comes out but that to me is a great way to decompress at the end of the day um in the beginning of the day another thing that I do every day and haven't missed a day for over 15 years is I have a Taoist meditation practice that I do every morning and for me that practice which includes Qigong and Tai Chi and some meditation is it went from a thing that you had to do because it was like a thing that I was trying to get better at doing two thing I must do because it was a thing I was trying to really get rigorous about to a thing I do and once it flipped into a thing I do time stopped existing and I can spend 25 minutes 45 minutes in that state in the morning and feel like it was five seconds because it just is it's somaticized and it's a part of what makes me happy I'm gonna assume too playing basketball we were like hey I could play all day I I could play all day um you know there's a little Court not far from here when the weather's a little nicer I am out there doing it another one too is just walking the dogs man there's nothing better we have two big dogs and they've been a part of my life for a long time time and you just you get out and you're looking at them smiling and you're seeing them I call it taking them to read the paper because they just you know them sniffing everything and like reading oh Joe was walking by here earlier all of that you see that and you kind of just like you know you drift away I think there's a common pattern that I'm hearing from what you just described I'm gonna throw it back at you and if you don't like it throw the ball right back at me like no try again cooking a Taoist meditation tai chi chi Kong playing basketball walking a dog I think all those things are physical things that you do to clear your mind and then you're it they're all forms of meditation self-reflection and it okay so you're nodding is the word I'm 100 with you you nailed it that is that is because my job is so cerebral these things are not in inherently cerebral from either intuitive for me so I'd like to share some of the things that I do where I lose track of time they're not as admirable as yours are I'm just gonna throw this out there here's where I'm like oh my God what time is it now I'm on Pinterest I go down that visual black hole that I just can't get out of I'm on mid-journey just testing different prompts oh my god oh so I just came to the journey these days yeah right yeah it's so amazing text to images and directing the machine I lose time I hate to say this just watching Tick Tock videos I just can't stop I'm like okay one last pimple popping video and that's it one more blackhead that's it I promise that's it and then it's three in the morning like oh my God I have a call in four hours I gotta go to sleep now so they're not as admirable as yours but those are things I lose time track of time doing so that's a clue for everybody so Michael's thing was let's talk about how to get in alignment with our purpose and that's such a big heavy word and many of you are going to start just feel stressed out immediately just hearing that like oh I'm not close to my purpose I don't know what it is relax look into what you enjoy doing where you lose track of time those are really good Clues if if purpose makes you feel a kind of way replace it with meaning right like where do you get where do you feel a sense of meaning in what you're doing and sometimes that feels less intimidating than like capital P purpose but it's still kind of in the same in the same Zone here's a here's a wild question that no one can possibly know the answer to but it's more just eliciting your opinion on of the people that are working in America where they have some choices to what jobs do they work at how many people do you think are working at something that gives them meaning or they feel connected to a purpose fewer than we would think probably so there's a couple of responses to that the that same McKinsey study I mentioned earlier actually asked a a question similar to that and it it found that gen Z and Millennial Workforce members look to their jobs to deliver on their sense of purpose more so than their older Generations like a lot like my parents generation taking my dad because we've talked about him earlier like running a home heating and Fuel Oil Business was not his purpose right he had other things that drove his life forward that was his job and that job provided for a family which he cared about and gave us a you know a a life that he wanted to give his children and all of those other things right and so that was more his purpose right to to sort of grow a family and take care of and I and you know I couldn't tell you what my dad's purpose is in a sentence but I know that's a part of it for him it wasn't he wasn't getting that in his job and I think that's true for a lot of folks and you know it if you do you are among a privileged few who get to align work and purpose uh because not everyone does so if companies are in a space where they need to attract gen Z Millennials they need to really think about what their purpose is and how they're communicating that to prospects who would choose to work for them or someone else that's really important and I hear this all over the place so I don't I don't think this data is off at all yeah I think it's it's you know people vote with their feet right and so if if you're a person who is in a younger generation who knows that your life is going to be precipitously more impacted by climate change what is the likelihood you're going to go work for an oil and gas company probably pretty low you know so it but versus like if someone asks you to come work at Patagonia or a solar business or something else right if you were weighing those options you would feel pulled toward one versus the other because it has your destiny entangled in it in a better way I think this idea from a leadership point of view is true whether you're a two-person company or a 200 000 person company because let's face it your time is not infinitely scalable your ideas are so that means you need to attract people to you who want to show up and give you their best and you want of course the best versus anyone who's just showing up for a job a job and so understanding the purpose in your purpose communicating that will give you a competitive Advantage whether you're hiring your first employee or your your 1000th employee 100 and and as a CEO or as a leader at any rung because I don't think leaders just have C's in front of their titles it's also incumbent upon you to question that over time and to grow with your organization and your team and yourself and to say is my purpose still what I thought it was has that changed has new data forced me to see this in a different way uh which hopefully the answer is yes right I you know like we we should be growing and changing someone told me years ago and I've stuck with it because it just really resonated with me he said uh if we're not living on the edge we're taking up too much room and I loved this idea that like yeah you gotta push he was an 86 year old guy who I met at Burning Man okay right and and he's the dad of a friend of mine and he's a former dentist and he you know it was just sort of like we were having this deep chat about life and parenting and fatherhood and and I was like you know what's the secret Norman and he goes you got to live at the edge if you're not you're taking up too much room and I just like I loved the Simplicity of that like you got to keep pushing because that's where the gold is as I asked you before about getting in alignment with her purpose is there anything else you wanted to share with our listeners and the viewers today another tool or a question to help them get more in alignment yeah I have one that comes to mind immediately it's one of my favorite exercises and actually we did this when we were together in Melbourne so it'll be familiar to you but I want if you're if you're interested in knowing about this I want you to like legitimately take a piece of paper in a pen don't do it in your phone or on a screen I want you to write down a list of people in your life that you feel are heroic Your Heroes and I want you to write them down maybe you got two maybe you got five they can be living they can be dead they can be fictitious they can be real put them down and then after you write those names I want you to write next to those names what is it about those people that makes them heroic and you're going to see attributes emerge this person is confident this person is trustworthy this person has Vision whatever it is right there's gonna be stuff that you see pop up that stuff is the are the building blocks of what's inside you in terms of how you will realize your purpose you see it in them because you know it's in you too you recognize it it may not be strong yet maybe it's a muscle you need to develop but those skills are in there waiting to be brought to life and if you value them in other people it's because you value them for yourself those are good Clues and as Jim Rohn said success leaves Clues yeah if you pay attention you can actually teach yourself and be an auto died act I'm going to ask you a question it's a little bit meta I want you to imagine yourself in a position where someone that you've admired for a really long time some of that you've looked up to there's a weird chance encounter you're both in the elevator at the same time completely random and elevator breaks down and you have this golden opportunity to ask them any question that you want what question do you ask and who are you in that elevator with great question I love that uh I think it would be David Byrne um who I have just loved from the moment I've come across him and for so many reasons but I think the question I would ask is how do you cultivate The Bravery to do what you do and here's the question that I sort of ask myself in thinking about that he might not see it as bravery he might see what he does as a necessity or as just fun right but like to me the way he creates and the way he puts himself out there would take such a feat of Bravery for me to show up in that way that I wonder how he sees that how do you think he would answer that question I don't know he might just laugh um you know it's hard to say because I don't know what his relationship to his work with bravery is I don't know if he views it as Brave or if he views it as something else hmm But to me it's Brave David Byrne is one of those rare artists that is referenced a lot by different people outside of the genre in which he works in as a person who's a pretty free thinker who tries crazy ideas and makes them work somehow and he's admired for that so I want to ask you this question Michael how do you calibrate The Bravery to do what you do a question I often ask myself is will I regret it more if I do or I don't hmm and usually that answer gives me the answer I need to make a decision and sometimes that has been hard things because the thing that I will regret doing is a thing I really don't want to do but I know is the right thing to do and so when I ask you know in the in the in the Twilight of my years when I look back well I have will I regret doing this or not doing this more and then that forces me to take the leap typically besides public speaking which you've already shared with us something you don't want to do but you did it despite it because you knew it was going to lead to growth for yourself tell me something else that you don't like doing didn't think you would like doing but just went for it anyways it doesn't have to always have a positive outcome it could try it and suck or try it tried it and it worked yeah I still haven't found my instrument I'll tell you that I've tried a lot of musical instruments um my tuba is still out there on that front I mean I took piano lessons for many years it's probably the one I'm most passable in but um but yeah I mean I think I have a a desire to have a way to express my artistic side and I've been a creative director in organizations right let's say I'm a creative human I know what good looks like but as a tactician it's harder for me to do some of the work that other people do very naturally same with music I know what good music sounds like or at least what good music to me sounds like and I know the difference between this or that but um but to make it is harder which actually goes back to a thing you mentioned earlier with mid-journey I've been having so much fun because it lets me create with ideas and Words which are my first creative language you know as a writer as someone who cares about language and I have these pictures in my head and the game is like can I find the right assortment of prompts to actually get to that that dopamine squirt in my brain when I see this thing and I'm like oh yeah that's exactly what I've been imagining and so it's been fun to play with that that was a very visual way to describe that that dopa means squirt it's kind of like you cannot not think of a visual when you say that what you're saying when when you talk about this about regret to not regretting is if you want to be successful in life I believe this is you're willing to do the work that no one else is willing to do right that's what separates you from everybody else but I would take a small issue with you that you haven't found your instrument yet because I think your instrument is your voice oh thank you that's nice versus what you play right I mean your ideas get transformed through your vocal cords and singers will describe themselves as this is the most valuable instrument that that I have and that's for you your words and your ability to articulate that's beautiful thank you for that that's a really nice that's a great reframe I like that um anything else you want to share that gives you pause or fear where you're like you know do I really want to do this I guess I'm getting to a place where editing choices starts to become more important because time and I've got a lot of Runway hopefully but time is getting shorter for all of us and so I think the tendency to follow every shiny object is something that brought me a lot of Joy early in my life and gave me a lot of Clues to get more focused but shiny objects don't stop coming once you decide to get more focused and so you've got to get a little more rigorous about saying no to some of them so that you can use your time wisely there was a guy I saw give a talk a few years ago where he did like one of those online life expectancy tests whereas you know I'm a smoker I'm a non-smoker I'm I'm you know this body weight and this height all the stuff and it spits out a life expectancy says you know you're gonna die at 82 years old so he goes in his calendar and he just seeks forward to the year he'll be 82 and he picks a random day and he writes dead and then he says okay if that's the day thereabouts that this machine is telling me I'm gonna die how many books do I read a year I read 15 books a year that means I only have about 200 books left to read right and he looked at his whole life that way and he saw the finality of all of these choices he's making where today picking up this book versus that book might not mean too much but when you know this is one of 200 left that choice is so much more important so I think to answer your question you know there's there's a there's a sense about my choices now that have gotten a little different where now that I know what I want to leave here as a Mark I want to make sure that I make my choices wisely that is an excellent way to look at your life and to be able to prioritize what's important to you and Neville Madura wrote a book I think it's called you will die and he did some studies and I believe he said the average age of a healthy American male is uh 87 where you'll die so plan your life accordingly so the other person who smoked maybe he only shaved a few years off his life so if you love smoking maybe it's not that bad I don't know I'm not proponent for it but I'm just saying and so now you say and when you look at the finality of it all that if you can only read so many things experience so many moments you're going to be a lot more careful about what you pick and start to ask yourself those big questions about what is the meaning of my life and what it is what is it that I want to leave behind I was in the Philippines and this gentleman who's super soulful uh he's one of the few speakers who who shared what he did and what he wanted to do with his life that nearly brought me to tears I had to fight him back because I was going to speak you know like two speakers after him I was like yeah you gotta pull myself together but he said he heard this idea about like you know people always tell creative people find your passion do your passion he goes there's a complicated thing to understand and he said if you look at passion as an anagram and you mix the letters up a little bit same letters it's I pass on hmm what is it that you want to pass on and so we know what you want to pass on Michael so I'm curious you're 42. you're gonna get hit by a truck tomorrow have you done what it is that you set out to do or do you need a few more years to accomplish whatever it is that you want to do there's always more work to do yes but I feel that I have used my time wisely by and large you know certainly some some years in my 20s that that were squandered but who hasn't um and so but I feel like a big part of my morning practice that we talked about one of the things I do in that practice is a a deaf meditation to actually like bring in some Memento Mori uh which is you know Latin for remember you're going to die uh because it's a helpful reminder not in a Macabre sense to like you know Ponder death every morning but more to remind myself of the importance of choices and my actions and that you know everything's finite and you've got to be precise to the extent you can with your choices and so um you know if if that were to happen I would lament that well I wouldn't do anything because I wouldn't have the opportunity to in that sense but I would but I would feel that I've gotten out a good deal of what I you know want to do and also that there's a lot more to still share when I was traveling more and I get into these periods where I'm speaking all over the place so I'm on the plane a lot and I see a reaction usually from people around me when there's turbulence and even before the plane takes off you can see some people are white knuckled like gripping onto their armrests I'm like my gosh the story that I tell myself is they're afraid today is going to be their last day that they're they they believe their best days are still ahead of them that they haven't done what they needed to do whereas I'm sitting there cool as a cucumber and I say a few things for myself one is I I think about my parents I think about my children I think about my wife and I I just think about how much I love them how much how grateful I am for them and and I know that if the plane were to go down hey I couldn't do anything about it so stressing out over it's not gonna do anything but B if that was the last day I lived a great life and I've done as much as I can with the time that I was given and I'm content I'm just 100 content not I don't want to die to everybody just please I Gotta Die but if that were the moment then that's the moment in my my ticket's up and so maybe this is a clue for everyone where if you imagine yourself on that plane you're gonna die and there's things that you want to do don't wait for tomorrow do those things today whether it's about mending an old relationship or looking into the eyes of somebody you really care about and telling them truly how you feel about them how appreciative you are of them and whatever it is that you wanted to do an adventure you wanted to go on a book that you wanted to read something do it today so you can be on that plane and be very peaceful with your untimely demise right I love that you know as as as dark as that might feel for some folks it is it is a perfect and I have been on that exact same situation where the plane starts rattling and you see all the different versions of humanity kind of emerge I love the way you put that thanks for sharing it like that thank you I think there's so many parallels the reason why I'm like Hey we're gonna Vibe and connect it there's more we talk it's like you know there's a lot that's in common between the two of us now I know you worked at an agency I know you ran an agency and you mentioned you're not in that state right now so as we're kind of winding down an hour here what is the next move for Michael Ventura I am very committed to being me professionally is sort of the idea I've put it you know I for a long time I was the CEO of this business that was my job and I was Michael from Subrosa and now I just want to be Michael and my Pursuits may be slightly different and the ways I show up might be dialed up a little more here or dialed down a little bit more here it was the first time in my professional life I've not had a team to manage that I've not had overhead to meet the needs of on a monthly basis and that instead it's just me doing my work and some days that means researching an idea or a premise some days that means writing some days that means speaking some days that means working with other people and their teams and uh you know I've decided that I'm not rushing to go build a new thing where I've got to run the the business because I actually really enjoy helping other people run their businesses right now and if I can prevent you from stepping in a pothole that I stepped in five years ago let's do it because I would rather you know see you get where you need to go and be a support system to you so in the last 18 months I've enjoying eight startup boards and I'm helping their Founders move through stuff working on a second book still doing speaking have a couple advisory clients and it's just nice to have that diversity in my day and also some days to be able to just say I don't have anything really pressing today I'm gonna go take a longer walk with the dogs I'm curious about this if I may ask this question one of your superpowers your t-scale is management and Leadership without a team to manage or to lead are you effectively taking away your superpower no so I think that I'm just broadening the team definition it's not my team anymore right it's it's the capital T team right it's all of us right and so some days my management and Leadership is about sharing an idea to an audience and some days it's about doing one-on-one work with a CEO that I believe in that I want to see succeed and some days I'm my client and I'm the one who needs management and you know I'll show you like a real perverse thing but like like this is like how I manage my life and I've done it this way for 15 years and you know there's no Trello board I just turned my camera to a bulletin board full of index cards because that's like everything that's on there is stuff I'm working on and there are various stages of completion and they're in different verticals based on what they fall into and for me that's like that's where I'm focused right now and those things up and down as as the day goes on it's old school Trello it's very Silicon Valley it's several Columns of things I imagine with sub things that you need to get done for each parent thing and it's like mind mapped right there super clear it's a lot more organized in my mind um I have a follow-up question which is if you're Imagining the team I thought you're going to say the team and the companies that you advise for but you're talking about like humanity is the team right I mean all of the above right sometimes it is the team that I'm working with at an organization right and and my job is to help them work through a moment you know any Consulting kind of work I've always done I've always believed it's you know it's my job to create the fastest path to my own obsolescence right how do we how do we help you to such a degree it's the teach of men to fish thing right how do we teach you how to do this so that you don't need the consultant to help you guide yourself through it the next time so uh so in that regard yeah sometimes it's a team but sometimes it's just gen pop and it's like me sharing an idea and seeing what sticks and where are you finding the most enjoyment a platform or format where you can actually reach uh like the masses the big audience so I think there's two platforms that I that I probably have the most fun with um one is sub stack and so I write a pretty long form read typically like a 10 minute read uh try to do a couple a month generally speaking it it probably hovers around 12 a year because they're pretty researched and sometimes they take more time could probably get better at popping out little shorter ones in between but right now that feels manageable and it's also fun it's stuff I like to write about um and then the other is Instagram which I don't really share my writing there as much as I share my uh my thoughts and ideas and I've often described like my juxtaposition between uh uh my LinkedIn and my Instagram as LinkedIn is weirdly professional and Instagram is professionally weird and somehow they both kind of coexist together for me if people want to find out more about you Michael besides well why don't you just tell them where to go I know there's a book it's called applied empathy I know there's Instagram account account and wherever else tell us how to get more yeah sure I mean so the best way to sort of track my comings and goings is at consolidatedx.com and the reason for that is because I needed a place to put all of my eggs in one basket to describe all of these diverse things I do and so that was the The Cheeky URL that I bought to tell that story and so it's it's kind of just an ongoing ever-changing block of text of stuff I'm working on today things I'm working on that I'm interested in ways to get in touch so on and so forth so it's a good place to find me nice so unlike most people Michael is putting all his eggs in one basket I love the metaphors uh it's very visual everything that you say I love that Michael's been a real pleasure talking to you today I really felt like I I met a kindred spirit and I just I just appreciate what you do in the energy and I wish you the best of luck and what it is that you're trying to help people with I think it's Noble to help provide tools Frameworks and ideas so that other people can be aligned with their purpose it's wonderful thank you thank you Chris I appreciate chatting with you too more to come absolutely

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“To discover that is your life's purpose.”

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Length: 58m
Views: 25,791
Topic: PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT

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