So, Jonathan, we touched on sparkotypes, right? Why did you, what is a sparkotype related to passion and purpose and why did you create it?

yeah so a spark type for me is based on um the belief that we all have a unique imprint or source code you can call it your dna that for work that allows us to feel like we're on purpose allows us to feel fully expressed in the world and allows us to drop into a state of flow where we become absorbed time fugues we can work really hard but it feels like almost effortless effort, right? And I think that state, that Venn diagram, purpose, expression, and flow, is the place where when you work from that place, whether it's the thing you get paid to do, whether it's the thing you do on the side, but when your primary contribution is at the intersection of that place, you come fully alive.

You feel like you're doing the thing that you're here to do.

And I was curious for a long time, can you identify this? Is there a set of universal imprints or archetypes or source code that crosses every culture, every age, and that stays with us for a long period of time? Because there's so many different ways that you can wander around and try and figure out what am I here to do.

And I see so many people hitting the middle and later years of their lives still having no sense for what that thing is.

The quest became, can we create a tool that allows people to identify this deeper level driver at a much earlier point in life so that then you can start from there and start to look out at all the potential ways you can contribute to the world and do it in a much more informed way by saying, okay, will this allow me to do the work of my, and I call these things sparketypes, the archetype that sparks you, basically.

will this opportunity allow me to do the work of my Sparkotype? If we deconstruct that, will this opportunity allow me to engage myself in work that gives me a strong sense of purpose, that allows me to be fully expressed on all levels, and work in a place of flow as often as possible? Because when we can do that work, what we get out of it is this feeling of just being utterly lit up, being sparked.

Sometimes they are aware of it, but it's buried down below a pile of other people's opinions and expectations and life conditions that happened when they were children, and it keeps them from their truest nature.

Mm.

Becomes so obsessive that it actually takes you down the rabbit hole of tearing your body apart instead of building it up.

You're doing it because it becomes something where you kind of feel like you've almost lost the ability to stop doing it.

It's this compulsion almost on the level of addiction, and it may even be isolating you from all the other activities and people in your life who you genuinely do love to be around.

So it's not necessarily a different activity, but they can-- it can express itself in a way that's constructive and also potentially destructive.

So that's one lens on what passion may be.

Um, it's a thing that where there's sort of a deeper internal compulsion to do it, and it can be expressed in a way that's, you know, both helpful and also harmful.

Yeah

Yeah.

Katie Milkman talks a lot about this in her work and her research on behavior change.

Um, and that it's not just about self-control.

It's not just about willpower, you know.

There's, there's a whole bunch of s- inner and outer scaffolding that you can create that make it so you don't have to wake up every day and use all this cognitive bandwidth to make the decisions, to make everything stay okay.

Some of that you do wanna be intentional, but there's also a lot of things that we can kind of put on autopilot-

Mm.

Um, obviously.

I know.

I have asked so many people.

I know you've asked similar questions also.

I've asked so many people over the years, you know, who have made these profound changes in life, you know, a- and went through, literally they were brought to their knees, they [laughs] and, and they had nothing on, on so many different, you know, different domains of life, and then found their way back.

Um, and I've asked so many people, and I've asked great philosophers, uh, great spiritual teachers, scientists, you know, um, "Do you think you can actually, like, get to the place where they were, um, without having gone through some big, profound thing like that?" And almost to the one, the answer has been no, which really bugs me-

Mm.

So the question becomes when we're talking about like an individual at work is, yeah, like nobody saw...

Well, you can't say nobody saw the last couple of years coming.

Let's get into it.

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So, Jonathan, we touched on sparkotypes, right? Why did you, what is a sparkotype related to passion and purpose and why did you create it?

yeah so a spark type for me is based on um the belief that we all have a unique imprint or source code you can call it your dna that for work that allows us to feel like we're on purpose allows us to feel fully expressed in the world and allows us to drop into a state of flow where we become absorbed time fugues we can work really hard but it feels like almost effortless effort, right? And I think that state, that Venn diagram, purpose, expression, and flow, is the place where when you work from that place, whether it's the thing you get paid to do, whether it's the thing you do on the side, but when your primary contribution is at the intersection of that place, you come fully alive.

You feel like you're doing the thing that you're here to do.

And I was curious for a long time, can you identify this? Is there a set of universal imprints or archetypes or source code that crosses every culture, every age, and that stays with us for a long period of time? Because there's so many different ways that you can wander around and try and figure out what am I here to do.

And I see so many people hitting the middle and later years of their lives still having no sense for what that thing is.

The quest became, can we create a tool that allows people to identify this deeper level driver at a much earlier point in life so that then you can start from there and start to look out at all the potential ways you can contribute to the world and do it in a much more informed way by saying, okay, will this allow me to do the work of my, and I call these things sparketypes, the archetype that sparks you, basically.

will this opportunity allow me to do the work of my Sparkotype? If we deconstruct that, will this opportunity allow me to engage myself in work that gives me a strong sense of purpose, that allows me to be fully expressed on all levels, and work in a place of flow as often as possible? Because when we can do that work, what we get out of it is this feeling of just being utterly lit up, being sparked.

Sometimes they are aware of it, but it's buried down below a pile of other people's opinions and expectations and life conditions that happened when they were children, and it keeps them from their truest nature.

And so let's define, first of all, what is passion? How do you define passion and purpose?

I think there's so much confusion around that, so I'm glad we're starting here.

I also think they're used interchangeably really often, which creates a lot of the confusion.

To me, they're two very different things.

Let's start with passion, because that's a trigger word for a lot of people.

I have my take on it, and also I'll share a bit of the research that's gone on around it.

When a lot of people think about passion, they think about, well, what is the thing that just leaves them breathless, that they can't not do when they wake up in the morning every day, they run out to do? When you look at the research, the research is still pretty new.

So can we talk a little bit about the benefits and neurological, physiological effects of finding your purpose?