What makes you feel most alive? Jonathan Fields is here to help you figure it out—and infuse it into your career in truly transformative ways.
Transcript
Debbie Millman:
If the pandemic has done anything positive, it’s allowed some people to rethink their work lives and ask, “What do we really want to be doing? What truly brings us a sense of pleasure and accomplishment?” For those of us on that journey, Jonathan Fields has a way to help us think about these questions. It’s outlined in his new book, Sparked: Discover Your Unique Imprint for Work That Makes You Come Alive. Jonathan Fields is the author of several books about professional and personal growth. And he’s the founder of The Good Life Project, which is also the name of his podcast. Jonathan Fields, welcome back to Design Matters.
Jonathan Fields:
It is so good to be back here with you in conversation, Debbie.
Debbie Millman:
Thank you. Thank you. Last time we did this, we were together in the studio I’m sitting in right now. And unfortunately, we’re a little bit further apart.
Jonathan Fields:
Exactly.
Debbie Millman:
So, our interview today is actually, as I’m mentioning, the second time that you’ve been on Design Matters. So I actually want to start today’s interview by asking you about something I seem to have missed completely in our first interview, which I’ve subsequently regretted ever since. So now nine years later, I get to ask you about the great 12-day Cool Whip experiment. Can you please tell our listeners what that was, and what on earth provoked you to do it?
Jonathan Fields:
Oh, wow. So when our daughter was a little, little kid, we were talking to her about food and different types of food, and natural food and food that was created in laboratories and how you can tell the difference. And she loves whipped cream, or loved whipped cream back when. She was probably 5 or 6 years old back then. And we thought it’d be fun to do this experiment one day. So we took two little glass ramekins, and we made fresh whipped cream in one and we put it in it. And then we got, I think, Cool Whip, and we scooped out an equal amount of Cool Whip on the other. And we just left them out, side by side, for 12 days. And it was this visual test of what would happen, nature versus science or laboratory.
Within a matter of about a half an hour, the actual whipped cream had just dissolved into a puddle. Twelve days later, the Cool Whip looked identical to the moment that we put it into the bowl, and we hadn’t touched it at all. On that day I was looking at it, and I took the little ramekin in my hand. I turned it upside down. Nothing happened. It stayed in it. And then I touched it, and it was rock solid.
So we got a pen and drew a little smiley face on it, and that was one of the first-ever blog posts that I put up, and it was just like a fun experiment. My recollection is that that post, probably much to the unhappiness of the people who created Cool Whip, ranked on the first page of search for Cool Whip for years.
Debbie Millman:
Well, I did have to go back to the Wayback Machine to find it. But I’m sure that our listeners can dig it up pretty easily. The pictures are quite extraordinary. And when I was looking at it, I thought, Well, there’s the origins of the visual proof of Jonathan’s Sparketype, and we’re going to talk about that, but I really did think that that Maker and Scientist combo was very appropriate in terms of how you’ve now designated the various parts of your personality. So, our interview today is going to be a little bit different from my usual interviews, in that we don’t really need to go back and do the deep dive into your origin story. But I’d still like to review a little bit of the highlights for our listeners that might not have heard that first episode from nearly a decade ago. Are you OK with that?
Jonathan Fields:
Absolutely.
Debbie Millman:
Oh, good. So you grew up in a suburb of New York in a town called Port Washington. And this is also something new that I learned in researching you for this episode. Your town was known as the East Egg from The Great Gatsby, which is a beautiful little water town, and your mom was a serious craftsperson and a potter. She, I think, gave you a little old wooden set of paints, which was your grandfather’s, or maybe you found it in your attic. And that’s when you first fell in love with painting. So, talk a little bit about the kinds of things you were painting back then as a little boy in East Egg, Long Island.
Jonathan Fields:
Yeah. So, it’s funny because the mansion that the legend is there was one mansion at the top of the egg that was the shape of our town, that The Great Gatsby was based on also, which is this stunning, stunning estate on the water. But yeah, I grew up in a family where the home was just very bohemian artisan. My mom lived that life. She embodied it with everything in her and brought me into just the creative Jones, the creative impulse really, really early in life, and recognized it in me at the same time and said, “that’s something, let’s feed it in some way.” So, the painting side of it probably came a little bit later.
My recollection is my grandpa passed, and in cleaning out all of his stuff … and he was a very successful trial lawyer. He was a litigator. He was the type of person where every hair was quaffed perfectly. He had his nails manicured with clear nail polish, always a beautiful suit. And in looking at all of his old stuff, we come upon this old wooden box with a latch on the front of it. Pop open the latch, and inside is this paint set. It’s oil paints and acrylic paints and brushes and wood pallets, and I was like, “Did anyone know he was a painter?” And, raised eyebrows—nobody really knew.
So my mom gave that to me, part of my inheritance, and her pottery studio was in the basement of our house. And it was this magical world of of kilns and giant wheels, and jars and jars and jars of chemicals that she would make glazes out of. But in the corner, there was a little space, and I took a bunch of clay boxes—50-pound boxes of clay. And I then took an old door and threw them on top of it. I got an old swing-arm lamp that we had and bolted it on, and taught myself how to paint, and that was … I just, I lost time doing that. I mean, you know that feeling.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah.
Jonathan Fields:
Almost everybody, I’m sure, listening to this knows that feeling. And for me, this was back in the day where some of the best art on the planet was album covers. It was amazing stuff. I mean, I remember trying to get as close as humanly possible to the actual album cover knowing absolutely nothing about paint, yet teaching myself, and I threw out so many canvases because I was a bit of a perfectionist. And if I was off by one line, I felt like it was just a disaster, and I would junk it and start over. But eventually I got pretty good. So I started making album covers on jean jackets, and that earned me my walking-around money in high school. My favorite of all time was Molly Hatchet, Flirtin’ with Disaster. I think it was Frazetta who did this just wild, wild intensely vivid. It looked like it was bursting off of the cover. It probably took me a couple of months to do that one. But I was so proud of it. I often wonder what happened to all those jean jackets, and I wish I had saved one.
Debbie Millman:
I wish you had, too. I was sure you were going to say your favorite was the Boston album cover?
Jonathan Fields:
That was pretty amazing, too, actually. It was probably between the two of them. The classic upside-down spaceship was pretty awesome.
Debbie Millman:
I kind of wish you had it so we can show it to Paula Scher.
Jonathan Fields:
Right.
Debbie Millman:
Well, you’ve been an entrepreneur then pretty much your entire life. In addition to selling jean jackets, you also were a self-described “lemonade stand kid.” You worked as a DJ through college but not only as a DJ, you worked building a DJ company. So, here’s the big disconnect for me, and something that I know we touched on in our first interview, but I want to go a little bit deeper. What made you decide to go to law school and become a big-time attorney for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission with this kind of arts and crafts, nearly hippie-esque upbringing?
Jonathan Fields:
Short answer, money, and not the right reason in any way, shape or form. It was those who knew me at the time I made that decision really looked at me and said, “Wait, what? This is what you’re doing?” But it was a little bit more than that, actually. I basically never went to class in undergrad. I was building this DJ and mobile lighting and music company the whole time there. So I was out Thursday to Saturday night to 4 a.m. DJing and moving stacks and speakers and equipment, and developing the art because it’s a real artform, which I love to this day. And I barely ever attended class. And when I graduated with a horrible grade point average, by the way, I was kicking around a couple of different jobs outside sales jobs.
I remember driving my car to a building, taking the elevator to the top floor and knocking on doors of small businesses where my required role was, “hi, I’m here to see the president to talk about your long-distance telephone service.” When I finally made the decision to go to law school a couple years after that, it was in no small part because I got really curious about what I was really capable of intellectually. I knew I had a Jones for building businesses and being a maker. But I also knew that I really slacked off in terms of really pushing myself in college, and I was really curious, and I was looking for a way to test that and see what I could do.
And then at the same time, develop skills that I knew would equip me to do anything in life. So, I figured if I went, it would make me a better analyzer of ideas and arguments, it would teach me how to write, and it would teach me how to speak. It definitely helped with the first, and I love the fact that I don’t have to write in any way resembling what I was taught to write as a lawyer now for the rest of my life. But it also taught me how to speak and understand arguments. And I knew at the end of the day, also, I was a kid who, money mattered to me. It was a symbol of status, a symbol of prestige, a symbol of accomplishment.
So, I got to law school, and I worked ridiculously hard. I was very fortunate, graduated pretty close to the top of my class, and then had an opportunity presented to me that started me out at the SEC, big federal government agency, and then landed me in one of the biggest firms in the world working in New York, relentless hours, and ending up in a place where my body effectively shut down. But it was a strange decision for me. But I think also, having grown up in a family where it was fairly bohemian … my dad had one job his whole life. He’s a research professor. And we grew up in a town that was actually, there was a lot of money in the town. And I never felt overtly that we were the poor family in town because we weren’t. We were sort of like middle class. But I was always surrounded by people who had more and could do more because of that. And it did something to me that it took me probably decades into life to really unwind.
Debbie Millman:
After working at the U.S. Securities Commission, you then went on to become a private equity lawyer where you raised and launched more than $1 billion in private equity funds. And you’ve said that you were fascinated with the psychology of how markets move. Has that influenced you the way you think about marketing now?
Jonathan Fields:
Oh, 100%. One of the things you learn really quickly in the world of finance and the markets of financial markets is markets don’t move based on the fact, they move based on people’s perception of fact, which is marketing, right? It’s all about human psychology. It’s you in the world of branding. This is what you’ve lived for so much. There’s the product, there’s the thing itself, and then there’s what wraps around the thing itself that creates the perception of the thing. So I’ve been fascinated by that. And I think my interest in the markets early on was really it was a bit of a red herring. My real fascination was human behavior. Why do we do the weird things that we do? And how do we craft experiences and language that might somehow move people to go a little bit here or go a little bit there? It’s a big part of why I’ve loved entrepreneurship, because it’s not just figuring out the problem of business. It’s figuring out the much more wicked problem of people.
Debbie Millman:
You said that when you’re surrounded by that much money all the time, and the stakes are so high, you get a really warped sensibility about the value of money and the value of life. Did they become intertwined for you at that point?
Jonathan Fields:
Yeah, there’s a … I probably lost myself in that for a short window. It was a pretty short window because my body effectively jettisoned me from the career pretty quickly. It’s very easy to get caught up in that swirl. I mean, I literally remember we were closing a deal, and there was an investor who had said that they were committing $25 million to this raise, and we were closing that evening. We found out that this person was about to get on a plane out at the airport, and we had to make a decision whether just to send me in a car over to the airport to go get his signature on a piece of paper that would lock in another $25 million. And somebody in the room was kind of like, “It’s really not worth it for that.” And you’re like, “Wait, wait, what?”
Debbie Millman:
Wow.
Jonathan Fields:
It’s just you really do. When you live in that world, I think it’s—at least for me, maybe other people find it much more easy to tether themselves to truth and reality—the fact that this is not the world, but only this one bizarre representation of a world. It’s very easy to lose sight. And I think for a short window, I probably did.
Debbie Millman:
And then your body gave up on you. And then you gave up on this career, you quit. You went from making billions of dollars and raising billions of dollars in private equity funds to making $12 an hour as a personal trainer. So, tell us about that trajectory.
Jonathan Fields:
Yeah, that was a bigger hit to my ego than anything else.
Debbie Millman:
But it seems like that’s what you sought out doing. It’s not like that was the last thing you could do. You went and actively looked for a job as a personal trainer.
Jonathan Fields:
100% true. And at the same time, I knew that even in the short time that I was in law, which is about five years or so, I had built a big chunk of my identity around being that person. So, when I go from that being able to show a particular business card and wear a particular thing, and there are certain assumptions that are made, to then exiting not just that job, but the entire industry, deciding I want to go back into entrepreneurship and the world of fitness and wellbeing. And I want to start at the ground up to really understand what was the dynamic from the most basic point of service.
I talked my way into a job as a personal trainer making 12 bucks an hour. And on the one hand, I was thrilled I was getting paid anything to learn an entirely new industry. This was a reeducation for me. And on the other hand, there was still something in me that that was struggling to let go of the fact that, “Dear God, what if one of my old clients walks by me and sees me stretching out a client in Central Park wearing my tights and running shoes and a ratty old T-shirt? What are they going to think?” Oh, the guy couldn’t hack it. Look what he’s had to do now. And it took a while for me to just really unwind that grasping at a certain identity and set of assumptions and say, “No, actually, it’s OK. I’m really good with this next journey that I’m going on.” But it wasn’t an instant thing.
Debbie Millman:
That’s a really hard one. I ended up quitting a job that I had right when I first started working out of college and had gone from working at a magazine, which I loved, to going to work at a real estate marketing company for twice the money and a car. And I hated every single day of it. Every single day, I cried every day, and knew that I had made this decision based on money. And when I quit, I ended up getting a job at Integral Yoga Health Food Store as a cashier, and I remember always being somewhat terrified that somebody was going to walk in and say, “Hey, are you that girl from the marketing agency? Why are you behind the cash register in a health food store?” No one ever did, so all that worry for nothing.
Jonathan Fields:
Don’t you wonder sometimes how many people have not risked stepping out and trying something entirely different just because of that fear of being socially judged by people who they want to be seen a certain way in their eyes?
Debbie Millman:
Oh, yeah. I mean, I still worry about that. I mean, that’s part of why I didn’t come out until I was 50. Just the fear and my own inner homophobia, how would I be judged? What would people think? I mean, I’ve spent most of my life primarily worried about that, but working on it, still working on it. This is about you, not me, so I want to continue talking about you. You ran a yoga studio for a while. And then very typical Jonathan Fields style, you sold it. You are just at heart an entrepreneur. And you sold it to pursue your own business, which is now called The Good Life Project, where you create media, you create tools, programs, experiences, podcasts, that help people live better lives. And so this is a super basic question, but I’m really curious about the answer. What does living a better life mean to you?
Jonathan Fields:
So, I’ve been asking that question to a lot of people for about a decade now. And I’ve probably been trying to figure it out for two to three decades. And while every person’s answer has been different, there are for sure some common patterns. But what I’ve distilled it down to, for me, is three buckets. Think of your life as three buckets. One is contribution, meaningful work. One is connection, the depth and quality of your relationships. And one is vitality, how you optimize your mind and your body. And to me a good life is really, it’s the ability to first recognize that those three things exist. Two, become aware of how helpful or empty any one of those domains are at any given window in time. And three, make the decision to allocate energy to try and top them all off and keep them topped off for as much as possible.
But that’s sort of like the big-picture model. There’s a mantra that tends to run in my head that I use to make decisions, that I feel like at the end of the day when I lay my head on the pillow will just result in a good life without having a long-term focus. And that is, when I’m looking at an opportunity, or the chance to invest myself in something, I’ll ask myself, “will this give me the opportunity to absorb myself in activities that fill me up while surrounding myself with people I cannot get enough of, and in some way, shape or form, making a difference to people who have no idea this thing is even happening?” If I hold true to that, then at this point I believe the good life side of it is just going to work its way out.
Debbie Millman:
One thing that I read that you’ve written that’s really stayed with me is the notion that a good life is not a place at which you arrive. It’s a lens through which you see and create your world. It reminded me a little bit of something that Seth Godin writes about in regards to happiness and pleasure, that pleasure is something that you always want more of, you can never seem to get enough of. But real happiness is being content with what you currently have. I love that in the context of thinking about what it means to live a good life. And that’s that sort of contentment with what you have. And I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit about how you see that lens of a good life. So, if it’s a lens through which you see and create your world, how do you sharpen that lens?
Jonathan Fields:
Well, part of it is how do you sharpen the lens? But also part of is where do you focus the lens? To me, a lot of emphasis has been on focusing the lens on happiness, and on what people would call capital ‘S’ Success—money, status, power, prestige. And on the former, like you said, happiness is a snapshot. It’s not the movie. It is something that we love to experience, but it’s also not a sustainable state. And research shows now that probably about 50 or so percent of anybody’s happiness is based on a genetic set point at a certain level. And that can be giddy, all day, every day. That can also be like a little bit melancholy.
Now, you can do things in your life to move that. But if the metric that we hold ourselves to is we focus our lens on happiness, and the goal is to be 100% happy all the time, it’s just not possible. And for many of us, the closest we come is when we’re no longer melancholy all the time. And we feel pretty good about that until somebody says that’s actually not good enough. You’re not doing OK, and you can’t stop there. And then all of a sudden we start to judge and shame ourselves, and then we drop back into a bad place. So, happiness, I think, is not necessarily the best place to focus that lens. Nor is money, power, status. I think they’re proxies for agency, and that is the thing that I think is worthy of exploring.
But at the end of the day, I really focus a lot on meaning. I want to shift the lens in the direction of meaning because meaning is the thing that sustains no matter whether you’re happy, whether you’re miserable. No matter whether you have power or control or you don’t. Meaning is the thing that can be derived from pretty much any and every experience, and the experience of meaningfulness is profoundly transformative to your ability to move through each day and say, “You know what, I matter, this mattered. It may not have gone the way I wanted, but because I can derive a sense of meaning I’m going to wake up and do it again the next day and feel OK about the way things are.” Victor Frankl’s classic work on logotherapy. It’s really, to me, that’s where we focus the lens.
In terms of how to sharpen the lens, the thing that comes immediately to me are Eastern practices on developing, cultivating self-awareness. So, I’ve had a mindfulness practice for over a decade now. It’s the thing I do first thing in the morning when I open my eyes. I started it initially because I was pretty much brought to my knees struggling with a health issue. And I needed to try and figure out how to find, how to touchstone until I figured out my way through it. And it’s blossomed out into this thing where a sitting daily practice then starts to grow out and its tentacles reach into just a persistent or semi-persistent state as you move through the day. And you gain the ability to zoom the lens out, and look down on yourself almost and say, “Huh, what am I actually thinking about? Where am I focusing?” And you can zoom the lens into yourself and say, “What’s happening in my inner world right now? What’s happening in the circumstances around me?” And then be intentional about whether you want to keep the lens focus there or not. So the sharpening side to me is about self-awareness.
Debbie Millman:
A lot of your understanding of what it means to live a good life is articulated in your two previous books, your two bestselling books, How To Live a Good Life, and your second book, Uncertainty: Turning Fear and Doubt Into Fuel for Brilliance, which we talked about at length in our last interview. So today, I really wanted to focus on your brand-new book. It’s titled Sparked: Discover Your Unique Imprint for Work That Makes You Come Alive. Firstly, I want to say congratulations. I know you’ve been working on this book for a really long time, and congratulations on bringing it out into the world.
Jonathan Fields:
Thank you. I’m super excited. Yeah, I’m just … so, I’ll share something that’s interesting, and it’ll land in an interesting way with you. This is the first book of four books that I’ve written where I’m actually excited about the physical object of the book itself.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, it is a beautiful book.
Jonathan Fields:
Thank you. And I was reflecting on why that’s true. And I went immediately back to a conversation that I had on the podcast many years ago with somebody who you had the opportunity to sit down with and become friends with—Milton Glaser. I remembered him saying to me, “The impulse to make and the impulse to create beauty are related but separate impulses.” I had been so focused just on the impulse to make and never really honored the fact that the impulse towards beauty actually really mattered to me as much. I didn’t want to just make stuff. I didn’t want to put things into the world. I want to put things into the world that evoke something both for me and for other people.
As I started to realize that matters, when it came to this book, for the first time I said, “You know what, it needs to be something different. The actual physical object of the book needs to be beautiful in a way that I’ve never paid attention to before.” So we put a lot more energy into doing that, and it all goes back to that moment with Milton where that light bulb went on, and it took me years to actually act on that.
Debbie Millman:
Well, I’m looking at the book now and I see a really pretty spot varnish, beautiful endpapers. You accomplished your goal. Congratulations.
Jonathan Fields:
Thank you. A little secret, I actually designed the cover for the book.
Debbie Millman:
I was wondering about that. Well done. Who knew you had all these secret talents?
Jonathan Fields:
Thank you.
Debbie Millman:
We’re going to have to start talking about design a little bit more in our next interview.
Jonathan Fields:
Maybe.
Debbie Millman:
Jonathan, you start your book with this statement: “Type ‘what should I do’ into Google, and there’s a decent chance it’ll finish your sentence ‘with my life.’” Why are so many people so unsatisfied by what they do?
Jonathan Fields:
That is the question. With so many ideas, so many books, so many offerings, so many solutions, so many potential ways to solve the problem. There are so many people who are still in a state of anywhere from genuine suffering to just what Adam Grant is now calling “languishing.” It’s like, not so bad, not so good. But is that the state that you want to bring through the rest of your life? I think a lot of it has to do with two things. One, the circumstances around you, and that includes circumstances that you may be born into that are incredibly helpful to your ability to thrive and also really layer on a whole lot of constraints and societal limitations that you grapple with. We don’t all step into the planet in equal position.
But the other thing is our inner world. I think it gets back to that notion of self-awareness. I think we try and line up the thing that we want to do in the world with expectations and with values, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing if the expectation and values are helpful to us. But we very rarely do the deeper work and say, “What actually nourishes me? How do I exert myself? How do I wake up in the morning? How do I invest myself? How do I invest my energy in a way that gives me the feeling of meaningfulness, that gives me the feeling of energy and excitement, that gives me the feeling of expressed potential and purpose that lets me lose myself in flow?” We don’t do that work.
There aren’t many classes in universities or colleges or high schools or grad schools that say, “Can we just stop for a second and take some time exploring who you actually are? What matters to you? What fills you up, and what empties you out?” So, how could we ever make decisions about what to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to, especially in the context of work, and have that actually let us show up and have all those feelings we still want to feel if we have no idea what the work is that gives us those feelings in the first place? I think some of us just randomly stumble into it. And then we’re like, “Wow, this is amazing. This is incredible.” And then they have the run at it. And then five years later, yeah, it ends, and they can’t replicate it because they never understood why they felt that way underneath it.
Debbie Millman:
I mean, I think that this book is also helpful for people that suffer from the opposite syndrome, which is to not feel spark or passion about any particular option, and feel stuck and not know which way to go and just feel trapped by that feeling, which is a real dilemma to be in. I’ve been there.
Jonathan Fields:
Yeah, I mean, I think we’ve all been there. I think at different moments in our lives we feel trapped sometimes for different reasons. And some of us may hold a very deep value of financial security. Maybe we came up in a home that was very unstable, or for whatever reason, we enter adulthood, and that becomes this thing where it becomes the solitary driver of effort. And it may actually make you incredibly successful in the field that you’re pursuing and rise up to the top and then you get there. And you look around, you’re like, “Why don’t I feel the way that I wanted to feel?” Not that honoring that value doesn’t matter, but it’s not everything.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I know. I mean, certainly it matters. But if it becomes your lead gene, it infiltrates everything. And because that type of lead gene is heavily metabolized very quickly. It’s never enough, never ever enough. And you just keep spinning and spinning and spinning on that hamster wheel trying to accumulate more and metabolizing at nearly the same speed. Your book is fueled by the work you’ve been doing at your company. And the most recent is Spark Endeavors, where you are the chief architect and driving force behind the Sparketypes that you’ve developed. But I believe, and I might be wrong about this, so correct me, please. But I believe the foundation of this work really began in your first book, where you identified your first five primary sparks, which have transitioned and evolved since. But it seems like you’ve been doing this research now for quite some time.
Jonathan Fields:
Yeah. So, the truth is, the foundation for this work actually goes back about 20 years. As we’re having this conversation it’s right around the 20th anniversary of 9/11. You and I were both in New York, and that day, that experience, changed me in a lot of ways. It exists in my DNA, and it will for my entire life. And the experience of knowing somebody who went to work one day and never came home who was young. He was the youngest partner in the firm, at the top of one of the towers with a 2-and-a-half-year-old and a six-month-old kid, married with a new home, and never came home.
That moment really brought home to me the fact that we have one pass through and it really … I believe it planted the seed for me to go deeper into my exploration of not just what it means to live a good life, but how do you invest yourself in a way that makes you come alive? What are the components of that? And I’ve been dancing around it, I’ve been researching and I’ve been asking questions, running experiments, ever since, and the ideas did begin to coalesce in my last book.
But then they took on an entirely different life when I started to ask a slightly different question, which is, “are there a set of identifiable, mappable impulses for effort or for work that give you that feeling of coming alive or of being sparked?” Because if there were, and we could identify them, and then we could build tools to help people figure out what theirs are, maybe it would help people. Maybe it would help get them to that place of understanding faster, and that became my consuming passion over the last five years or so, is to first see if I could identify if these imprints even existed. And then if so, can I build a tool that would both help me research them and at the same time be helpful to other people?
That led to the identification of these 10 impulses. And once I figured out what the impulses were, then I started to realize, wrapped around each one of them were a set of really common patterns of tendencies, and preferences, and behaviors that formed archetypes. And the reason I call them Sparketypes is just a fun way of saying it’s the archetype for work that sparks you. I honestly didn’t know if I would be able to see these if they existed. So it was as much a surprise for me as it was for anyone else. And as I started sharing them with other people, and then we ended up building a tool, an assessment for basically the entire year of 2018 that’s now been validated by more than 500,000 people and 25 million data points. We’re at a point where it’s like, “Huh, OK, there actually is something here.”
Debbie Millman:
You decided to create this framework when other personality type descriptors already exist. What’s different about this methodology?
Jonathan Fields:
Yeah, so I looked at the universe of all these different indexes. And there’s some great ones out there like Myers Briggs, and strength, and DISC, and all these different things. And they all add little pieces to the self-discovery puzzle. What I didn’t see was a tool that was hyper focused on this one question: What is the fundamental nature of work that will give me the feeling of coming alive? So, it’s not about there are two different types of strengths assessment on the market right now. There’s Strengths Finder, which is largely about skills and talents. And there’s the VIA Strengths, which is largely about character. Great tools, but they don’t speak specifically to this one question.
There’s Myers Briggs, there’s the Big Five—really interesting, valuable tools that are much more generalized personality and relational style tests. And I think, again, they add to the puzzle of asking the question, who am I? But this is a very, very, very narrow focus. The focus of the Sparketypes is around work. Whether that’s the thing you get paid for or not is a different question. It’s about what is the thing that wakes you up in the morning and says, “I will work really, really hard for nothing other than the feeling that it gives me. And if I get compensated well for it, awesome. But even if I didn’t, I’m still going to do it because it gives me that feeling. And that feeling is what gets me through life. It’s what lights me up.”
Debbie Millman:
You mentioned that the understanding of these imprints is based on more than 25 million data points from your research. How did you take that data and develop the Sparketypes from what you amassed, the data that you amassed?
Jonathan Fields:
Yeah, so the Sparketypes started out as a hunch, as everything does. And then I started basically looking at lists of jobs and industries and titles and deconstructing all of them and saying, “What’s underneath that? What’s underneath that? What’s underneath that?” So, the early part of it, the early identification that goes from thousands of possibilities down to 10, was really my own internal work, and then showing it to different people, and talking to a lot of citizen-grounded theory research, basically talking to tons and tons of people and trying to code their feedback to me about what was valid and what wasn’t.
The reason we developed the assessment was because we had this core idea, and we had a lot of just early anecdotal validation. But I wanted to know if these are real on a much larger scale. So we built the assessment for two reasons. One, so that we could actually expose large numbers of people to the ideas, and have that help us understand if it’s really valid or not, and then how useful it is. I was open to the fact that it might actually show us that it wasn’t. I had to be. And the other part of it was if in fact this is helpful, then I wanted to know that we were creating something that could then be available to anybody, so that they could have a tool to get these insights pretty quickly. And that was the reason we developed the assessment and released it out into the world.
We’ve done a follow-on survey; it’s still preliminary. We’re actually looking to build a much bigger data set around it, but I’ll share with you in response to asking people how valid and how useful this was. We have 93% of folks telling us that it’s anywhere from very to extremely accurate. And then we wanted to know, what is the relationship between doing the work of your Sparketype, and markers for meaningfulness, for flow, for engagement, for expressed potential, and for purpose. And we’ve got actually really strong statistical correlation with all five of those states, which are the places that we all aspire to be. The sweet spot between those five states is how I define that feeling of coming alive or being sparked.
Debbie Millman:
How did you develop the questions in the first place? And how did you determine how specific answers would lead you to a specific Sparketype?
Jonathan Fields:
Yeah, so the questions were actually the prompts based on those five different markers. And this goes back to my obsession with language, this goes back to the understanding of psychology. What is the thought line in somebody’s head when they’re doing something that makes them feel this way? And then developing prompts around that, and there are ways to do it in a very dry way. The marketer in me, the citizen-human psychologist in me, was always taught to do everything you can to understand the conversation that’s happening in somebody’s head, understand the language that they’re using. And then enter that conversation rather than trying to pose your language, and ask them if it fits.
So a lot of it was tapping this deep obsession with language and psychology to try and figure out, what are those? What are those statements? What are those thoughts? And then link them back to the five different states. So the prompts in the assessment are all related to those different states. And then we’re trying to make them as longitudinal as possible, so that we have people reflecting on throughlines that have been with them for over a long window of time, rather than how they might be feeling just at the moment that they answer the question because we want some level of stability in the answers, we want them to be robust.
Debbie Millman:
How did you originally come up with the 10 Sparketypes, and why 10?
Jonathan Fields:
I honestly wish it wasn’t 10. It feels so slick. It feels so packaged to me. And so, I wish it was 13 or eight or something like that. But literally starting with giant lists of jobs and titles, and then making a list of when you keep asking the question, “what’s underneath that? What are the fundamental ways that you exert effort as part of this?” Making list, list, and list, and list, and list, and then seeing where the overlap was. And then conflating and conflating. “Is this just another way of saying this? Is this another way of saying this?” And then getting to a point where I’m asking the question, “is this a verb? Is this an adjective or an adverb?” Because I’m looking for the verb. “Is this just a way of doing things or is this actually a fundamental expression of an impulse for effort?” So, a lot of trial and error, and a lot of me just trying to figure out what’s real and what’s not, and then eventually exposing it to people, which is always a nerve-wracking experience.
Debbie Millman:
The 10 Sparketypes are, in no particular order, the Maker, the Scientist, the Maven, the Essentialist, the Performer, the Warrior, the Sage, the Advocate, the Advisor, and the Nurturer. So, I’m going to leave it up to you to tell us about a few of those archetypes and give us a little bit more juicy detail on what it means to be one of these Sparketypes.
Jonathan Fields:
So, I could just go down the list, but I’m actually curious about something. Do you know what your profile is?
Debbie Millman:
Yes, I do.
Jonathan Fields:
Were you planning on weaving that in after—
Debbie Millman:
I’m very happy to share. I am … Well, we also need to explain to folks that not only do people have a Sparketype, they also have a Shadow Sparketype. And so, that’s a secondary archetype that is woven into the personality profile, and then also an Anti-Sparketype. So, I will absolutely share all three, but I want to hear what you have to say first.
Jonathan Fields:
So, I’ll share mine. And then I’m curious about yours because that’ll talk about three of them. I have a feeling we may not be too dissimilar. My primary archetype is the Maker.
Debbie Millman:
Yes.
Jonathan Fields:
My fundamental impulse and the impulse for a Maker is to make ideas manifest. It is all about the process of creation. It is a deep, deep impulse to be generative, as much as you possibly can. You have the something from nothing, or a little bit of something to a lot of bit of something impulse has woken me up and driven me to exert effort from as young as I can possibly remember. As a little kid cobbling together bikes from a junkyard, painting jean jackets, building houses, renovating in college, it evolved eventually to building companies, building brands, writing books, building media, building experiences. There are a lot of different things that go into each one of those things. But the impulse for me that allowed me to come alive was the maker impulse behind all of that. Eventually, you bring together teams because you need people to assume all sorts of different roles and have different impulses to really make it work. But for me, that’s the thing that wakes me up in the morning.
My Shadow Sparketype, which you can think of as one of two ways … it’s either your next strongest impulse forever, or it’s kind of like your runner-up, or there tends to be a more nuanced relationship, which is that many people do the work of their Shadow in order to be able to do the work of their primary better. So, my shadow Sparketype is the Scientist. The impulse for the Scientist is all about figuring things out. I look at something and I’m like, “How does that work?”
But what I’ve learned over the years is for me, the fascination is less just about going deep into the burning question or the puzzle or the quandary. I tend to go there when I am in a making process and I hit a wall. And rather than just feeling like “I hit a wall, this is the end of it,” the Maker impulse kicks in and says, “OK, no big deal. It’s still kind of cool. Let me solve this problem. Let me create a whole new thing that lets me get through this moment in time.” And the minute I figure out the answer, I go back to the process of being just hyper generative, and building and making. So, it’s in service of my maker. I like doing it, I’m good at it. But at the end of the day, I don’t do it just for the fun of doing it. I do it because it makes me a better maker.
And then the last part of my profile, the Anti-Sparketype … you can think of the Anti-Sparketype as either your least strong impulse for work, or the thing that takes the most energy, the most effort, the most external motivation if you’re on a team, and tends to empty you out the most and require the greatest amount of recovery. So for me, that is what I call the Essentialist. Now, the Essentialist is all about creating order from chaos. It’s clarity, it is utility, it’s taking big datasets, it’s taking a huge amount of objects and things like this, and somehow organizing them and creating, making them usable and clean and streamlined. That is amazing work, it’s necessary work.
I love the fact that it’s done because that lets me function as a human being, and as an entrepreneur, and as a maker. But when I actually have to do that work, I just want to cry. And, of course, I’ve gotten good at it because when you have to do it, especially in the early stage, for example, of a company, you’re doing everything. So over time, you just learn to become skilled or competent at it. And that makes the experience a little bit better. But at the end of the day, making it a little bit better, and getting it over with faster and getting a little bit of the hit of competence, it still doesn’t make up for the fact that there’s something inside of me where that impulse is the most foreign, it’s the weakest for me, and it just doesn’t come close, and it never will, to the feeling that I get when I’m operating on the other side of my spectrum.
Debbie Millman:
OK, so I will tell you mine now because we’re very, very similar, Jonathan. Not exactly similar, but very. So, my primary Sparketype is the Maker, which I’m not surprised at all. What was really surprising to me was how accurately you described me being a Maker. Just without knowing me, you just describe a Maker, and I’m like, “Wow, that’s really me.” The Shadow Sparketype is the Maven, which is somebody who likes to learn, and I’d love you to talk more about that. And my Shadow Sparketype is also the Essentialist. I hate details. So, talk a little bit if you can a little bit more about the Maven.
Jonathan Fields:
Yeah. And that doesn’t surprise me at all. So, the fundamental impulse for the Maven is learning, it’s knowledge acquisition. You look around and you’re just like, “What can I learn?” So maybe what you learn has great application in all sorts of different ways. And that’s nice, you like that, that’s cool. But if that is your primary impulse, you’re not doing it because it’s going to let you do something else. You’re doing it solely for the feeling that pursuing learning, pursuing knowledge, gives you. So for you, because your Maven is your Shadow Sparketype, it’s something that you probably love doing, you’re really good at. And we know this from 16 years of ridiculous research of every person that you have ever talked to, and the stunning career that you built where you were encyclopedic about literally anything that you devote yourself to.
At the same time, I’ve also seen with you it makes a lot of sense. That knowledge acquisition to you, it really gets harnessed, and it comes out in the context of informing the way that you make, and allowing you to create at an entirely different level rather than just creating in the void based out of your own intuitive feel. Not that that’s a bad thing. But the Maker impulse is really often beautifully informed by the Maven’s quest for knowledge. There is a bit of an interesting dynamic there that can go a touch dark side, which is the Maven’s impulse to know can sometimes be so fierce that it overinforms the Maker. And then you end up getting a little too far down the road of replication instead of creation. Because you know so much about what everyone else is doing, what’s come before you, the paradigms, the histories, and everything, that it can sometimes be a little bit hard to get that out of your head and allow yourself to step out into the abyss of a place that you really don’t know and is genuinely new and uncomfortable. I’m wondering if that resonates.
Debbie Millman:
Oh, I was wondering if you were reading my diaries. That’s really spooky. One thing that I was really struck by was your caution about the quirks of any of the archetypes. So, the three quirks of the Maker are boredom with systems and scale, disconnection from output, disconnection from impact. And so for our listeners, I’m going to be very vulnerable here and say that I am … well, this part isn’t so much the vulnerable part, I am very much a Maker. I am happiest in my life when I’m making something. It could be a podcast, a lesson plan, a meal. I just love making things. Particularly, making things from scratch.
However, I tend not to like to replicate or repeat the experience of making something. So, for example, one thing that is always surprising to people, and this is the vulnerable part, is that I don’t like to listen to my podcasts once they’re up and out. I don’t like the sound of my own voice. I don’t like to revisit. I don’t like to then be in a position where I’m critiquing what I’ve already done and made and put out there and then feeling really self-conscious about it. So I’ve found that I am much better off not listening, and just hoping and praying that Curtis, my producer, is putting out the best possible podcast he can from what we’ve made together. So, there’s that. And then in terms of the disconnection from our impact, and this is something I think a lot of people really suffer from—and that is feeling like what you make doesn’t matter. And no matter how hard you try, or no matter how much you work at getting better, you don’t really feel it. So there you have it, Jonathan. Help me.
Jonathan Fields:
So, a lot of that. So the one really interesting thing, and probably the single biggest thing that can make people feel OK if they’re feeling that and they have this Maker impulse, is the understanding that actually there’s nothing wrong with you. These are just quirks of the way that you’re wired. You’re not a sociopath. You’re not disconnected from other people. It’s not that you don’t care about them, or what the work does. It’s that for you, the Maker is an incredibly process-satisfied impulse. Whereas all of these 10 lie on a spectrum between being process-satisfied and service-satisfied.
The Maker happens to be very far over on the process-satisfied part, meaning it is the very act of creation that is the most satisfying for you. Now, the thing that you make could go out into the world and make a huge difference for a lot of people. You could get a ton of feedback, saying it’s incredible, and you like that. It makes you feel good. You love the fact that something that you’ve made is going out and making a difference in people’s lives. And at the end of the day, it’s also not the reason you do it. Society tells you that that’s actually not OK. Society tells you that the only valid way to have purpose in your life is if you devote yourself to a life where the preeminent driver is service to others.
And for Makers, and for a couple of others that are much more heavily process-satisfied impulses, that very often causes this underlying fabric of shame. Because you’re not measuring up to that proclamation even though you actually are completely satisfied and you love what you do. And you know that work you’re doing actually is making a difference in people’s lives. So, we’re getting comfortable with the fact that this is just really the way that I’m wired. The work that I’m doing is in fact probably making a difference, it’s moving others. And I would still do it even if it wasn’t because I loved the process. That doesn’t make you a bad person. You’re just wired in this way where that’s the thing that gets you up in the morning.
Debbie Millman:
One thing that really struck me about one of the aspects of the Maker is that you write that it tends to reveal itself early in life and without much effort. And I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit about how and why that is. I suspect quite a lot of people that listen to Design Matters are also Makers. So, I think it’d be really helpful for them to know more.
Jonathan Fields:
Yeah, I imagine you’re right. So, the Maker does tend to reveal itself. People often ask me, “is this a nature or nurture thing? Is it ordained by some spiritual being? Is it genetic? Is it environmental?” My answer is, I have no idea. But my experience, anecdotally, through a lot, a lot of people now in a pretty big data set, is that we all tend to have these impulses very, very, very, very early in life, but they reveal themselves at different rates. So the Maker tends to show up really early in life because we’re given opportunities to express it from the earliest age, and then we’re rewarded when we express an interest in it and then proficiency at it.
So, think about when you’re a little kid—how is a parent going to keep you occupied? They’re going to give you a set of finger paints or crayons, or they’re going to give you blocks so you can build something. Part of the way that you’re taught to actually teach a kid to learn manual dexterity, and also just keep them occupied, is through the process of making, through the process of creation. Then when you go to school, part of the learning process of almost any subject—it doesn’t matter what it is—many teachers will weave in making experiences. So, you’re in second grade and you’re studying science. And the teacher is going to say, “OK, the homework today is to make a diorama.” Right?
So we get exposed to this process. And then if we do it, parents love to see us doing it. And as a parent, it keeps you busy, too, which is always good. And then when you show up and you’re actually creating something, and people say, “Oh, that’s awesome, that’s great, you should keep doing more of that,” we get rewarded at a very early age. So it tends to be not just socially acceptable, but socially encouraged, and we’re given the opportunity to express it at the earliest days in life. Whereas other impulses, it’s actually the exact opposite. You may have that impulse. But you may socially feel like it’s being repressed until later in life because people may think it’s not an appropriate thing to be doing at a young age.
One of the Sparketypes that we haven’t talked about is the Advisor. And the impulse for the Advisor is to guide through a process of growth. This is the advisor, the mentor, the coach, the people who play that role. You’re creating a container of safety and trust, and then moving people through your knowledge of ideas and frameworks, through a process of discovery, growth and evolution. You may have that impulse from the earliest days. But you also may not have the wisdom, the frameworks and the insights to do it in a healthy way. And if 7-year-old you shows up and tries to play that role for other people, you’re probably going to get rejected both by the adults around you, and potentially by the other 7-year-olds, who think that you’re just trying to take over and be bossy. So it’s really interesting how they tend to reveal themselves based on cultural expectations at different rates.
Debbie Millman:
Talk about a few of the other Sparketypes, because I’ve read them all, and I’m so fascinated by them, but some of them feel really foreign to me—the Warrior, the person who is driven to organize and lead people. The Performer, who is a person who enlivens any interaction. Talk about some of those.
Jonathan Fields:
Yeah, so the Warrior, as you said, the fundamental impulse there is to gather, organize and lead. There’s something inside of you that says, “OK, I want to bring people together, and we’re going to go from Point A to Point B.” Very often that impulse comes from you being one of those people. So very often, you’re among the group that you want to actually then help navigate from Point A to Point B. That shows up very often early in life as well. So you’re the kid on the playground who’s bringing all the kids together and saying, “Hey, let’s go on an adventure or let’s go do this thing.”
As you grow up, very often it shows up as you being a captain of a team or leading a club or being student president. But it may not show up in those roles, but it may show up in all sorts of other ways in your family. I talked to one woman who is now a member of the executive leadership team at a giant global consulting firm, and even as a young a kid she was the one who was organizing all the family members. She was the youngest of all of her siblings, yet she would bring everyone together, figure out the trips they were going to go on, figure out the adventures they were going to go on. Whatever it was, she was the one where she just had this impulse to gather, organize and lead for no other reason than the fact that there was something in her that said, “I love doing this, it gives me the feeling of being alive.” So, that’s the Warrior.
The Performer, which it appears from the early data now that that may be the single-most prevalent Anti-Sparketype, is all about the impulse to energize, enliven or animate an experience, interaction or a moment. That tends to show up early in life in a lot of kids. But if the parents see it, they’ll usually channel it into performing arts, which is wonderful when you’re younger. But then at some point, a lot of times, a parent will then say, “Huh, the kid is latching onto that a little bit too much, and I’m freaked out about them wanting to make that their career. So let’s just pretend it’s not actually the central thing that matters to them.” And they’ll start to shun it. And they’ll recommend stifling it and push them in a different direction. So the performer is very often a very repressed impulse in a lot of people. It’s unfortunate because that very impulse shows up and can be expressed in so many different ways in a sales conversation, as a parent, in a group leader, at a board meeting, behind a bar. There are so many different ways to channel that to do incredibly good, and fun, and exciting work.
Debbie Millman:
Well, let’s hope that anybody listening that has children that are blooming in that archetype, Sparketype, encourages it, and helps it bloom. You mentioned a woman that you were referring to that you had written about in the book—how did you choose which people and case studies to focus on in the book? They’re so fascinating.
Jonathan Fields:
Part of it was trying to source really compelling stories that showed clearly these impulses. But part of it also was it was important to me in selecting the stories to tell a very diverse set of stories. So, it was important to me to tell a set of stories that represented all ages, all races, all gender identifications, all sexual orientations. And so when we looked at the stories that we were telling, I wanted this to be a book where when people read what’s in any given chapter, that they’re able to feel seen. And if we’re really homogenous in the way that we’re actually selecting the stories and the case studies, not only is that going to exclude people from it, it’s just not right. It was never the right way to be in the world as a writer. It’s something that I’m probably guilty of being way too ignorant of the need to really be expensive in understanding, how are we telling the different stories and showing broad representation in the work that I’ve been doing in the past? And for me I think I’m becoming much more aware of my responsibility to make sure that I really invest in that, because as a human being, it’s just the right thing to do. So that was a big part of the way that we did it as well.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, thank you for that. It is clear that you’ve done that, and that work is really important. Jonathan, I have one last thing I want to ask you about. And it’s something that you write about in the last chapter of your book. You state that reimagining and realigning your current work in a way that makes you come alive lets you get more of what you need without feeling the need to blow anything up. You also caution at the beginning of the book for readers to be aware of behaving in an overly disruptive way. I think this book has the ability to get people really excited, and then want to just make the change from that moment on. How do you recommend people approach change in their lives?
Jonathan Fields:
Yeah, I love this question, and you’re right there. When we figure out something or learn something really new that is deeply resonant, and we’re like, “Oh, this is right,” very often the next thing that we do is we look out at what we’re doing—in this case, the work that we’re doing—and if it feels horribly aligned with this thing that we now know is really important to us, we just say to ourselves, “Oh, well, I just need to extract myself from the situation immediately.” If you’re 18 years old and the stakes are really, really low and you don’t have a lot invested in it, it’s probably not a big deal.
I’m 55, I’ve got a family, I want to live a certain life. I want to be able to devote myself in certain ways, and financial security is a value that I hold dear. I want to make sure that I’m providing as much as I can a lot of ways for my family. So for me, if I decide, “oh, I’m just going to blow it all up,” that causes a huge amount of disruption and pain. And we tend to underestimate the pain of that disruption that will cause both on us and also those that look to us for some sense of security. And we overestimate how giddy we’ll feel when we blow it all up and then get the chance to move to the next thing. And we tend to be a little bit delusional about how long the process might take to figure out that next thing.
So, one of my big concerns right now, actually—we’re having this conversation where a lot of people are kicking around this phrase, “the great resignation.” We’re in a moment where, society-wide, people are asking the big existential questions, and they’re realizing the bargain that they made to get them to this place is not the bargain that they want to continue to make moving forward. So, there’s a lot of people resigning from jobs, many of them without knowing what the next step is. My big concern with that is that if you do that before actually doing the inner work to understand “what is the impulse for work that makes me come alive?” And then look at the work that you’re doing and say, “How can I make this as good as it possibly can be now? What are all the different ways that I may be able to reimagine or reorient the work that I’m doing maybe even outside of my job description, but there are opportunities within the place that I’m at to actually express this thing, to just really make it as good as it can be? How can I do that first, and maybe that actually gets me a lot closer there.”
If we’re not doing that work first, and then we just jettison ourselves from the place we are and we look for something else that just feels different enough without understanding why we’re actually saying “yes” to that new thing … there’s a really good chance we’re going to find ourselves, 18 months from now, sitting in an office with different paint on the walls, and new boss, a new team, a new product, a new brand, a new service, feeling the exact same way. And that’s a huge concern for me.
So I really strongly recommend, first do the inner work, then do the work of optimizing the thing that you’re doing now to allow that to come out as much as humanly possible. Very often, that gets you so much closer to the feeling that you want, that you’re actually pretty cool staying, and then you don’t have to go through the disruption and the pain of the big change. And even if it doesn’t, then look for all sorts of opportunities to do it on the side. Whether it’s a hobby, or devotion, or a passion, or an activity that you do because that can then blend with a much more Spark-optimized job to give you what you need.
If you get all the way there and you’re still not getting it, then at that point you start to do the exploration of, “OK, so maybe I have to do something more disruptive.” But if you do, you’re leaving that current thing not from a place of dejection and ignorance, but from a place of information and agency. And also, chances are, psychologically you will be in a much more emboldened and alive place.
Debbie Millman:
Jonathan Fields, thank you so much for putting so much good work into the world, and thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.
Jonathan Fields:
Thanks so much for having me. It’s been great.
Debbie Millman:
To find out more about Spark and about Jonathan Fields, go to his website, jonathanfields.com, or take the free Sparketype test free—free—at sparketype.com. This is the 17th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. Remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.