Transcript
Brett McKay:
Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the AoM Podcast. People are told their whole lives how important it is to find their purpose, but many find the search frustrating. They feel there’s one true calling or one grand goal they’re supposed to be pursuing, but they can’t seem to discern what it is. My guest, Jordan Grumet, author of The Purpose Code, says that the search for what he calls big P purpose can be fruitless and even harmful, and that a better path is to embrace a life of little P purposes. Today in the show, Jordan explains the difference between big P and little P purposes and argues that the former can lead to anxiety while embracing the latter can be the path of meaning, satisfaction, connection, and even the legacy you’re looking for in the first place. We discuss how Jordan found his way to this philosophy after burning out as a doctor, practical ways to discover your own little P purposes, what he thinks we get wrong in making family our purpose, and what his work in hospice has taught about living a life without regret.
After the show’s over, check out our show notes at awm.is/purposecode. All right, Jordan Grumet, welcome to the show.
Jordan Grumet:
Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited for the conversation.
Brett McKay:
So you’ve got an interesting background. You started your career off as a doctor, but now you spend your time writing about money, finances, purpose, and meaning. So how does a doctor end up being a personal finance and purpose writer?
Jordan Grumet:
The story actually begins when I was seven years old. My father was a physician. I looked up to him quite a bit. He went to work one morning, got a severe headache. He collapsed and died. He had a brain aneurysm. And being a seven year old, I thought everything in the world happened because of me. So he must have died because I wasn’t enough, wasn’t smart enough, lovable enough, whatever it may be. And I eventually came to the conclusion that the way to make up for this horrible tragedy was I was going to become a doctor just like him. I would save lives. I would walk in his footsteps. It would fix everything. Many years later, I did just that, but it didn’t bring him back. And in fact, I found that you couldn’t save every life. It was a little bit more complicated than that.
And I very quickly burned out. Being a doctor was exhausting. There were parts of it that were wonderful. But I started looking for a way out and I never realized I could do anything else with my life. So the answer was make lots of money and use that money to fund your life so you never have to work again. Now, I tried that for quite a while and asked for all sorts of advice. And between my financial advisor and my accountant, I basically was told, “Hey, you don’t have enough money, so don’t even think about that yet.” But eventually I was writing a medical blog about what it felt like to be a doctor. And a guy called my office. His name was Jim Dolly, the white coat investor. He had just written a book about personal finances for physicians and he wanted me to review it for my blog.
And I read his book and it changed my life. It introduced me to this idea of financial independence. I realized it was probably already there, that I could leave my job whenever I wanted to, which was incredibly exciting for about a moment. And then I had a panic attack and went into really a depressive period of my life, which lasted about six months. Eventually I realized I couldn’t leave medicine, but I certainly could get rid of the things I liked the least. I got rid of my medical practice. I got rid of nights and weekends. I got rid of my nursing homework. And the one thing that was left over, I was a general internal medicine doctor. The one thing I kept wanting to do was to do my work with hospice. So I was acting as a hospice medical director, maybe 10 to 15 hours a week, no nights, no weekends, no call.
And as I realized I didn’t need to do anything else, I concentrated just on that. But because now I had a bunch of free time, I started to pursue the things that got me out of my burnout and that was personal finance. So I started a personal finance blog, eventually a podcast, and I was talking to all these brilliant people who were podcasters and authors and ran these big, hugely successful businesses. And at some point I’d asked them something like, “And so what is all this in service of?” Or, “How do you know when you have enough?” And I get a lot of blank stares. And after this happened a number of times, I started to think about it and I realized I already had the answers to those kinds of questions because I got them from my hospice patients. When I sat at the bedside with people who were dying, they often talked about regrets and things they wished they had and hadn’t done.
And so that really led me to write a book called Taking Stock: What the Dying Can Teach Us About Money and Life. And a big point of that was that we should be putting purpose first before we got to our financial framework. But then of course I got lots of people asking me, well, what is purpose and how do I pursue purpose? And actually I’ve been searching for purpose my whole life and it’s got me really frustrated. Will you please stop telling people to find their purpose? And that led me down the rabbit hole of purpose and basically how we get purpose wrong and how we can get it better.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. Well, that’s a fantastic summation of how you got where you’re at. So you kind of did the FIRE thing, financial independence, retire early. But then you got depressed because you realized you didn’t know how to fill your free time. And you realized you did want to work a little just doing that work you actually found fulfilling in hospice, but then you also got into writing and podcasting. And that kind of thing seems to happen to a lot of people. They put off finding their purpose until some future day when they think they’ll have time to think more about it. But when they get that time, whether because they retire or they sell their business, they find that they don’t know what to do with themselves. So that’s something you have to work on wherever you are in life.
Jordan Grumet:
The thing about it, Brett, I think is, and I’ll correlate this with financial independence. Before you understand financial independence, you think it’s the most complicated thing in the world. How could I ever possibly get there? How do I invest? There’s so many stocks and bonds and gold and all these other things. And you really almost look at it as if it’s this impossible thing. And for me, it was getting this book to white co-investor, but you may learn it through a blog or podcast or whatever. And all of a sudden you realize, oh, it’s pretty straightforward. I can figure out this financial thing. It may not be easy. I might have to work really hard. I might have to save. I might have to be frugal. All that can feel difficult, but it’s pretty straightforward. We’re kind of in the same place with purpose. There’s this idea that purpose is this big audacious thing and it’s like a needle in the haystack and it’s really, really hard to find.
And so it feels like this black box. It feels very, very ephemeral. My goal, why I wrote the purpose code and why I really started thinking deeply about this is because like financial independence, I actually started to realize purpose actually is also very straightforward. But you need someone to help you realize how you start to build that purpose in your life. And I think that’s why people are so surprised when they retire that it’s not that straightforward, that all of a sudden they have to figure out what to do with their life. A lot of the times we put purpose off because it’s scary, it’s difficult, it’s complicated. We don’t even know what that really looks like in our life. And so it’s really easy to decide you don’t have enough energy, you don’t have enough time, you don’t have enough money. You’re too busy working at that job or building your family or whatever you’re doing, but it becomes a little bit of a mirage.
And so if you get to this point where you’re getting rid of that mirage, you’re like, “I don’t want to work anymore. This doesn’t work for me.” The problem with that is then you have to see life as it is. And that can be difficult and painful because now for the first time, there is no excuse. You can’t say you don’t have enough time. Most likely you can’t say you don’t have enough money. What it actually comes down to is courage. And you’d be amazed at how much we do to avoid acting courageously. I think we use our finances sometimes to do exactly that. We make the excuse that, well, we’re not where we need to be. So we’re not going to live that purposeful life. And this is part of the reason why I always tell people like, I made a mistake. I thought I had to be financially independent to live a life of purpose.
What I’m actually trying to argue is that you can live a life of purpose regardless of what your finances are. But now that we kind of understand what purpose looks like in our life, let’s build a financial framework around it. But to do that, you’ve really got to start thinking about, well, what does purpose look like in my life?
Brett McKay:
You mentioned that when you started talking about people finding their purpose, you’d get people who felt frustrated and were like, stop talking about finding your purpose. And then you also found that when you give talks about purpose, sometimes people will come up to you afterwards and are actually angry with you. On the face of it, that seems kind of odd. What was it about hearing about purpose that made people feel frustrated or upset?
Jordan Grumet:
Well, I think it becomes clear when we start trying to define purpose, right? Because believe it or not, a lot of people don’t agree with what actually is purpose. When I meet these frustrated people, they define purpose as their why. And let’s just think about that. If you start defining purpose as your why, what you’re really saying is there’s like this one big important thing that I was supposed to accomplish in life. And it is like a needle in the haystack. There’s all these million things I could do. I could be a million different people, but there’s one that’s more perfect than the rest. And I’ve got to divine what that is and then be really, really good at it and build a life around that. The problem is that’s a really high stakes game. And most people don’t know what they’re good at and they don’t know what that quote unquote one thing should be.
And so they root around, they try a bunch of things. None of them feels important enough. Maybe there are some things they like, like I like to go play pickleball with my friends, but that’s not really important enough. That’s not the one thing I was meant to do with my life. So they discard the stuff they like because it seems too small, but they can’t find the one big earth shattering thing. And so it makes us anxious. And indeed, there is something called purpose anxiety. Larissa Reading, she’s a researcher. She studied people and found that up to 91% of people at some point in their life feel this purpose anxiety. It’s depression, fear, anxiety about finding their purpose. And I found it to be very, very common. Every time I would give this talk and say, “Hey, think about purpose first and let’s build a financial framework around it.” Almost always I get at least one person in the crowd who would be seething, literally angry that I was suggesting.
And it’s almost like a purpose nihilism. It’s almost like there is no purpose because I can’t find it and I’m not sure how to build it. And so we become a little bit nihilistic. And the studies are out there. It’s really, really clear. Having a sense of purpose in life is associated with health, happiness, and longevity. There are really enduring studies that show this. And so I’m a doctor, right? If I had a pill that could make you live 30% longer or make you 30% happier or have you be 30% healthier, I would be giving that pill to every single patient I saw. I think purpose does actually lots of those things.
Brett McKay:
So, okay. Most lay people have this idea of purpose as this one big thing that they have to accomplish or pursue in their life. When the researchers, these studies you referenced where people who have a sense of purpose do better in all these different facets of life, how are they defining purpose? When they say someone has a purpose in life, how are they figuring out this person has a purpose in life?
Jordan Grumet:
Well, so here’s the thing, and this is why it’s a dichotomy. When you look at the researchers, they’re really just looking for some sense of direction and some sense of goals. And so here’s the thing, and I think where everyone gets caught up, remember when I said we define purpose as our why? That’s what I call big audacious purpose. This is the idea that it’s this really big goal oriented, change the world. If you can dream it, you can build it type of purpose. And a lot of times that purpose is really, really hard to attain. And most people just don’t get there. But researchers say things like goals in a sense of direction. When they study people, especially they study people as they get older, they realize that their sense of direction, their goals are much smaller, what I’d call little P purpose. This is the idea of instead of goal oriented purpose, you’re really talking about doing things you like the process of doing.
Or if you have goals, you enjoy doing them enough that it doesn’t really matter if you make it to that goal or not. And so when they’re doing questionnaires with older people, it’s not, am I curing cancer? It’s, are you playing backgammon with a bunch of friends and having coffee? And does it seem exciting to you? And are you excited to wake up each morning? So we’ve lost sight of this idea that instead of defining it as our why or our big audacious goals, that probably purpose more is finding things we love to do. And we like the process of doing whether we reach the goal or not. So I always say purpose is not your why. Purpose is your what. It is the actions you take in the present and future that light you up. That’s it. It’s simple. It’s straightforward. Just like financial independence is straightforward.
Now, building a life of purpose is a little harder, right? Because then you’ve got to actually decide what lights you up and start building a life around that. But the concept of purpose I think is very simple. It is what you do in the present and future and it’s action oriented.
Brett McKay:
Okay. So you make a distinction between big P purpose and little P purpose. And you think the big P purpose can be problematic. Would you say your experience of burnout as a doctor, was that the result of you trying to pursue big P purpose?
Jordan Grumet:
For sure. So if you go back to my story, remember when my father died, I thought I was responsible. And so my big audacious goal was to make up for his death, to relieve me of being responsible for his death. And oh, by the way, on top of that, I was going to save everybody’s lives. And so it was very easy for me to become burned out because guess what? I became a doctor and it didn’t bring my father back. It didn’t even make me feel less culpable. And also, by the way, most patients you can’t fix, right? If you’re a doctor practicing out in the real world, lots of people die. Everyone eventually dies. And so burnout often happens when people pursue Big P purpose relentlessly. One reason that burnout happens when you pursue Big P purpose is most likely most people just don’t ever get there.
If your goal is to be Elon Musk or Babe Ruth, most likely you’re just not going to be that successful. So it’s easy to burn out because you fail. Also, it’s easy to burn out because you end up doing things you don’t enjoy the process of doing. So I didn’t nearly enjoy being a doctor as much as I enjoy being a writer, podcaster, things that I’m probably a lot more suited to do. And so if you don’t enjoy the process of what you’re doing and you’re going after big audacious goals, it means you’re going to spend 90 to 95% of your time doing things you don’t love. And guess what? If you happen to be lucky enough to get there, like I was lucky enough to become a doctor, you feel that joy briefly, but then usually it’s back to, well, what next? Now that I’ve done this and I felt good for five minutes, feeling good usually fades away.
And then you start thinking, well, how can I double down? What’s the next thing I can do? Or you get afraid that you’re going to lose all that you gained. It’s like, well, I’m a doctor now, but what if I’m not good at it? What if I get sued? What if I get fired from my job? And so that’s loss aversion. So the point is it’s really easy to get burned out when you’re going after big, audacious goals, whether you reach them or not.
Brett McKay:
And then little P purpose, it’s the what? It’s like the actions that you can take now that give you direction and joy.
Jordan Grumet:
Yeah.
Brett McKay:
And the difference between little P Purpose and Big Purpose reminds me of a distinction that a podcast guest of ours made. Kieran Setiya is a philosopher who wrote a book about midlife between telic and atelic pursuits. So big P purposes are telic. They have an aim, a telos. And I think it can be useful to have sort of an overarching telos that guides your life and decisions. But then little P purpose is atelic. There’s no end goal you’re trying to achieve. You just do the thing because you like doing the thing and you would do it even if you never achieved greatness at it.
Jordan Grumet:
I like to compare it to podcasting to really help people understand the difference between big P, little P, and the role of goals. I love to talk about podcasting. I love podcasting. When I get on the mic and interview someone, that hour is just magical to me. And even if I forgot to hit record and that recording disappears and I can’t even put it on my podcast, it was still well worth that hour. So to me, that’s little P purpose. Now, I can thoroughly enjoy podcasting and it can be my little P purpose. And I can decide, you know what? I’d really love to get a million downloads a month on my podcast. That is a goal. In fact, in some ways that’s a big audacious goal. So the question is, did I turn my little P purpose into big P purpose by having a big audacious goal?
Well, it depends. If I start looking around and saying, well, all the people who get a million downloads a month, they spend a lot of time on TikTok and Instagram and they’re making all sorts of reels and they’re making all this content. And guess what? I really don’t like doing that. I don’t enjoy that at all. I don’t enjoy the process of doing that. So if I decide to meet my big audacious goal, I’m going to start doing those things that I don’t enjoy the process of doing and spend all my time engaged in such activities. Then I’ve really turned my little P purpose, my joy, my love, the thing I enjoy the process of, and turned it into big P purpose. On the other hand, if I say, boy, I’d love to get a million downloads a month and I don’t really want to do TikTok or Instagram because I don’t enjoy that.
But boy, I really love listening to Terry Gross on NPR. So I’m going to start listening to more of her interviews because I really like her interview style and I could become a better interviewer. And you know what? I think I’m going to go to Toastmasters because I’ve always really wanted to learn how to public speak better. And when I’m on the stage, I feel this magical feeling like I’m affecting people. And so I’m going to go ahead and sign up for Toastmasters. I’m going to listen to Terry Gross. Maybe I’ll study a little bit or take some classes on how to be a more effective communicator. As long as I enjoy the process of doing those things, then that’s the little P purpose. And if I hit my million downloads a month, great. But if I don’t, also great because I loved what I was doing this whole time.
I enjoyed the process.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. I’m similar to you. I mean, I’ve been doing this podcast thing for, man, close to 18, 17 years now. And I don’t do the TikTok short form video stuff. In fact, I used to have a YouTube channel that got really big. It was like 1.4 million subscribers where we’d make videos. This is about 10 years ago. And I stopped making it because I just did not like doing it. I did not like it at all. And so I stopped. And people were like, “Why’d you stop? That’s crazy. Why would you do that?” But it filled me with dread when it was like video day. I like to write, I like to do podcasts. And so that’s what I do.
Jordan Grumet:
It’s a perfect recipe for burnout. And again, this gets back to exactly what we said. You could have kept pushing YouTube. You could have tried to build it and grow it. And you could have said, “Well, I don’t love doing it, but it kind of meets my overall goal of getting my word out to people or having a bigger brand.” But you probably eventually would have burnt out. And then maybe you would have completely quit. And actually, that is the explanation of what happened to me in medicine. I mean, I still practice hospice medicine, but I was a doctor who was working 50, 60 hours a week and now I work 10 to 15. It’s a market difference because I burnt out, because I didn’t understand that difference between process and goal.
Brett McKay:
As you’re describing Little P purpose for these small things that you pursue that are action oriented and you just do it because you enjoy it. I was thinking about my grandfather when he retired from the Forest Service. He had a good pension, so he didn’t have to work. But I was always impressed by him, how he stayed busy well into his 90s. He found all these different things he did. He took on this one thing. He took on this cause of helping this squirrel in this certain part of Utah and Arizona, the Cayabab tassel ears squirrel. It was like this little species, but he just loved this squirrel and he wanted to be on the endangered species list. And he started a foundation and he started advocating for the squirrel. He started taking up repairing old phonograph players. He’d buy these junker things and he’d fix them up and then he would sell them. That was another little P purpose that he had. He did Meals on Wheels in his 80s, even in his 90s. The guy was still driving in his 90s. I remember he drove from New Mexico to my wedding in Tulsa, Oklahoma and he was like 90 something.
Jordan Grumet:
Wow.
Brett McKay:
But he did Meals on Wheels because he just liked chatting and visiting other older people who couldn’t get out of the house. And it was this really altruistic thing. I think he did it because he thought it was a good thing to do, but I think he just genuinely enjoyed talking to people.
Jordan Grumet:
And this is what I love about that story. One of the biggest arguments I get against this dichotomy, the little P purpose and the big P purpose, and I say Big P purpose is always bad and little P purpose is always good. And people say, “But Jordan, I want a legacy. I want to change the world.” And at first, people think that pursuing big P purpose is the way you’re going to have a legacy and the way you change the world. But I love to bring up people like your grandfather. You see, when you do things that are little P purpose for you and they light you up and they excite you like a moth to the flame, other people take notice. And if they have similar interests, they want to be around you. They want to collaborate with you. If they have something to teach you, they want to teach you.
And if they have something to learn from you, they want you to be their teacher. This is where you start getting community and connections. And this is where I actually think you really build your legacy. I would bet, without you having told me the story before, that your grandfather probably interacted with lots of interesting people. He probably had some interesting collaborations and he probably left a mark on this world with all the people he met and knew and connected with during the time he did these passionate things for him that, believe it or not, it probably created quite a nice legacy.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. It’s an amazing legacy. I mean, even after he retired from the Forest Service, he was still involved in conservation. He would go to range society meetings where they talked about, I guess it’s like for the farmers or the ranchers who graze on forest service lands. And he wants the land to be useful, but he’s also interested in conserving it so that future generations could take part. And he went to these meetings in his 70s and 80s and 90s and he would contribute things. I mean, he rubbed shoulders with senators, both on the national and state level. Yeah. I mean, he definitely, definitely left the legacy.
Jordan Grumet:
And here’s what’s also cool. We always talk about generational trauma. What is generational trauma? It’s when your ancestors go through trauma, they develop poor coping mechanisms to deal with it, and then they hand those poor mechanisms down to generation after generation after generation. It’s a bad thing. We know it’s a bad thing. We think it even may affect your genes. They call it epigenetic changes. But we rarely talk about the exact opposite. When people like your grandfather pursue little P purpose, it lights them up. They model behavior for the next generations, people like you who grew up seeing this. And that might have given you permission to pursue your little P purpose. Why did you avoid doing YouTube, something you didn’t like, even though it was very successful? Because you had the courage to go and do something that lit you up and you had the courage to say, “Well, that might be wonderful, but I’m not enjoying the process of doing that.
So I’m not going to do that anymore.” You probably learned that from generational growth, the opposite of generational trauma. And that’s also part of the legacy we rarely talk about is that other people model your behavior and you just literally change the people around you when you pursue little P purpose.
Brett McKay:
I love that point you made about little P purpose because at first blush, you look at it and people are like, “Oh, backgammon, what’s going on there? That’s just selfish.” I mean, you talk about this one guy who got really into baseball cards, this older guy. He worked in an antique store. And you’re like, “That’s not doing anything.” But as you said, eventually those things can build a community on the ground level that can affect a lot of people’s lives in important ways. Even though it’s not huge and very visible, you can have an impact. It sort of causes ripples that can eventually lead to a big P purpose.You didn’t intend for that to happen, but by pursuing your little P purpose, you can get to Big P purpose unintentionally.
Jordan Grumet:
Yeah, and again, I prefer not to use the term Big P purpose because I really do always feel it’s bad because it’s so goal oriented. But what you get to is impact and legacy.
Brett McKay:
Yeah, okay.
Jordan Grumet:
And that’s what the example I talk about in my book, the guy who owned the antique store and sold baseball cards. The short story is that there are a bunch of little kids who went to that antique store, including me, who are kind of the geeks and the misfits and the ones without friends. And that became our community. And this guy’s love of baseball cards turned into a community of kids who bonded together, who had that extra bit of confidence, and who probably went out into the world and became doctors and lawyers and merchants and carpenters and pursued their lives because they had that extra little piece of confidence and connection and community because this guy existed and he loved baseball cards. And so again, this idea that when you do things that light you up, you connect to other people. And those connections, we’ve done and looked at tons of studies about happiness.
And I’m in the personal finance world. So they’re always talking about, does money make you happy? And there’ve been a bunch of actually what I think of as lousy studies that suggest it does to a point, but maybe it doesn’t after that point, but then maybe it does after that point. But when you really look at the best studies about what causes people to be happy, like the Harvard Adult Health Study, after studying people for like 80, 90 years, they found that it really wasn’t money and it wasn’t your job and it wasn’t your career. And none of that was what made people happy. It was the connections. It was the people. People make you happy. And my argument in the book is little P is a great conduit to connecting to other people. When they see you at your best, you can’t help but connect to other people.
I always challenge people. I say, do something that lights you up and get in a flow state. I promise you, no matter how hard you try not to, you will end up connecting to other people. No,
Brett McKay:
That’s true. I’ve seen that. I’d say a little P purpose that I have in my life has been barbell training. I’ve been doing it for 15 years now. And I mean, I work out alone in my garage mostly, but I have met up with other people who are also passionate about this. And I’ve made some good friends who I still stay in touch with, even though they’ve moved to different places. And then also it’s been interesting to see, I’m a leader at my church congregation for the teenage boys. Lately, I’ve had this one kid that I worked with, he’s in college now. I think he’s in medical school or he’s going to medical school, but he got into power lifting and he just reached out to me randomly. He’s like, “Hey, I know you’re really into this. I’m getting into it. Can you take a look at my form?” So he sent me a video.
I’m like, “Oh yeah.” And I love talking about barbell training and helping people with it if they got questions. And it was cool. I got to connect with this kid again that I hadn’t talked to in probably five or six years.
Jordan Grumet:
Yeah. And those connections matter. I mean, we talk about what’s the key to happiness and you start realizing the key to happiness is do a bunch of cool stuff and connect to the people that you’re going to connect to while you’re doing it. And I really believe stop worrying about legacy. Stop worrying about the future. It’ll happen. Just do the stuff you love. And I think that’s the best formula for happiness out there.
Brett McKay:
Because it gives you a sense of direction. It’s action oriented.
Jordan Grumet:
And if you’re healthy about it, you build in some goals. You don’t get too caught up on them, but you build in some goals. And whether you mean to or not, you change the world.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. I love that. Well, let’s talk about how we can figure out what our little P purposes are. I think when people talk about purpose, they always talk about finding your purpose. I got to find my purpose. But you argue that purpose isn’t found, it’s created. So how do we go about creating a purpose for ourselves?
Jordan Grumet:
I think that’s the biggest point of anxiety is trying to find your purpose. And again, I think that gives way too much credit to the ether and the world and way too little credit to you and your own agency. I don’t think you find your sense of purpose. I think you build or create it, but it is true. You have to kind of understand what those inklings, those beckonings, those whisperings are that light you up. But when you think of it that way, you start realizing, well, that’s kind of easy. I call those purpose anchors. They’re things we anchor our purposeful activities in. And so the question becomes really, how do I encounter or how do I figure out what my purpose anchors are? And really, there’s some very easy solutions and some very easy exercises to that. And so the first that I always mention is as a hospice doctor, we did something called a life review.
And I often call kind of the short form of this a regret audit. But if you can sit there and imagine that you are lying on your desk bed knowing you only have days to live, what would you regret never having the energy, courage, or time to do? And if you can start thinking about what the answer to that would be, you can turn that around into a purpose anchor. And so I’m a great example of that. About 10 years ago, I asked myself that very same question. And the answer was, I would really regret if I hadn’t traditionally published a book. Like that was something that was always deeply important to me. I love writing and I wanted to traditionally publish a book. So that became the purpose anchor. That was really easy. Deciding what to build a life and purpose around was really easy.
The hard part came next. Because then I had to take action. I had to find an agent. I had to build a brand. I had to decide what I wanted to write about. I had to eventually find a publisher. All those were difficult activities, but I enjoyed the process of doing them and I was very excited about it. And so the question is, how do you figure out your purpose anchors? Regret audit is a great way. And if you’d like to, we could talk about some other easy exercises you can do to start thinking about what are some of the things that light me up? Because once you figure what those are, it becomes really much, much easier to start building a life of purpose around them. And one thing you really have to do is let go of this idea that purpose has to be very specific.
Your purpose could be big or small. You could have one or many. Your purpose could last you a week or it could last a lifetime. You can have one overarching purpose in your life or something that feels purposeful, or you could have a million different ones and you certainly can quit one version of purpose and leap onto another. So once we kind of let go of all those rules, everything becomes much easier.
Brett McKay:
And what are some other exercises you do besides the regret audit?
Jordan Grumet:
So regret audit is the first. The next one I love to talk about are the joys of childhood. So you heard me or we talked about that story of the guy who sold baseball cards and I used to go to his shop. I loved baseball cards as a kid. And most of us have something we really love as a kid. And what happens? You get older, you go to school, you start thinking about how you’re going to make a living. You get really serious. And a lot of times you drop that thing you love, not because you don’t love it anymore, but because life moves on and you’re getting older and you’re getting more mature and life changes. So one of the easy things to do is to go back to your childhood room and think about what were the trophies and what were the posters and what were the drawings?
What lit you up as a kid? I realized I’m on Facebook all the time and I see stuff about baseball or baseball cards and it lights my brain up. And so I know there’s a purpose anchor. I had a joy of childhood. And if I ever was really hurting and saying, boy, you don’t have enough purposeful stuff in your life, I could go and get more involved in baseball cards. And that might look like collecting. That might look like buying and selling. That might look like going to baseball card shows. That might look like becoming the head of the Cubs fan club. I mean, that could look like many, many different things. There’s lots of different options there, but at least then I now have an anchor that I can still start building purpose around.
Brett McKay:
No, I love that. I think I’ve done that. That’s how I got into barbell training because I played football in high school and I loved. We did barbell training.ou did squats, you did deadlift, you did bench press. I loved that way of working out. And then when I finished my football career in high school, I figured, well, I got to do other types of workouts. I’m not a football player. I don’t need to hoist big weight anymore. So I tried different workout programs like P90X and I would try Body for Life and these different bodybuilding type things. But I’d always see myself getting drawn back in to the barbell. I really like this. And I just followed it. And eventually I hooked up with this company or group called Starting Strength that teaches the barbell lifts and has a program for it. And it was off to the races.
I’ve been doing it, but I think I had that anchor in child or you can call it childhood teenage hood with barbell training. And I didn’t even see what I do now for my living. Growing up, I love to read books. I love to present ideas that I had or I got from these books to other people and how to improve your life. I love doing that. It lights me up. And that’s what I do for a living now. I get to read interesting books and show people how to do cool things that can improve their life in big and small ways.
Jordan Grumet:
Yeah. I mean, I’d argue anyone listening right now who’s listening to you and I are hearing two people talk passionately about the things they love to do. And so I would say that probably if you’re listening to this from the outside, you’re going, wow, those two guys sound like fairly happy people. We’re people who pursue little P purpose. No one probably taught us that. We just kind of naturally did it. What I’ve realized is that most people aren’t like you and I. Most people actually struggle to figure out what they’re supposed to do. They don’t look at the world as a menu of exciting things. They look at purpose as something scarce and hard to find. I think the difference is just kind of investing in doing some of these exercises, finding out what your purpose anchors are and then building a life of little P purpose.
Brett, you sound like you do that naturally. And I think I’ve been lucky enough that I probably did that naturally in my life too. I just realized just like you can be naturally frugal or you can learn to be frugal, a lot of people are not naturally practitioners of little P purpose. And so my goal is to teach those who are interested.
Brett McKay:
So okay. So you have the regret audit, you can do the look at your childhood, what lits you up in childhood. Any other exercises to figure out what could be potential little P purposes or purpose anchors?
Jordan Grumet:
Yeah. So there are two other great exercises to figure out purpose anchors. There are many, but two others I like to talk about. The first is the art of subtraction. What I tell people is go ahead and think about what you do at your job right now. And most people have some joy in their job, but don’t love their jobs. And so I say, write down every role and responsibility of your job and then take a pencil and start scratching out everything that you don’t feel excited about. And usually people write down 10, 15, 20 things and they’ll scratch out almost all of them. But occasionally there’s something left over. And what I call that is the art of subtraction. They’ve subtracted all they don’t like and they’ve realized, boy, there’s a kernel of something I do like there. And maybe either at work or outside of work, I can start building some sense of purpose around that.
Again, I’m a perfect example. When I realized I could walk away from my job as a physician, it was such a part of my identity and purpose at the time. I didn’t know I could walk away from the whole thing, but I did start subtracting out everything I didn’t like. And as I got rid of my office practice and the nursing homes and the nights and the weekends, there was one thing I would do even if you didn’t pay me for it. And that was doing my hospice work. And so through subtraction, I realized that I didn’t want to walk away from being a physician totally. I just wanted to concentrate on that one thing I really liked doing, which is hospice work. So then I kind of built a life where I could do that hospice work to the point where it brought me joy and was fulfilling for me, but not so much that it stressed me out or took up too much of my time from doing other things.
And so the art of subtraction is a great way to start thinking about how can I find the things I like that I already do and then start maximizing them. And then last but not least is what I call the spaghetti method. So if the regret audit and the joys of childhood and the art of subtraction, if none of that works, you can’t think of anything that lights you up, then you have to try the spaghetti method, which is try a bunch of things, throw a bunch of spaghetti against the wall and see what sticks. That usually means saying yes to people you normally don’t say yes to, doing things you normally don’t do, maybe doing an activity where you feel a little uncomfortable in the beginning. And you do a bunch of those things and you see how you feel at the end of the day.
And if there’s some joy or excitement or if you hit a flow state while doing something, that’s a pretty good sign that maybe that’s a purpose anchor and you can start building some purpose around it.
Brett McKay:
All right. So if you do the spaghetti thing, it could be, I’m going to sign up for an introductory jujitsu class at that place in my neighborhood. I don’t know if I like jujitsu, but I’m going to try it. And you’re going to lose what, an hour of your time? Big whoop.
Jordan Grumet:
Yeah. And that’s the great thing is you might do jujitsu and you may love it for the first two weeks. And then the third week you might be like, oh, this is no fun anymore. Then you just quit. You just go do something else. You find something else you enjoy the process of doing. It’s very, very low stakes. And I think once people start realizing it, they’re like, okay, I can try something. We’ll see what happens. And how many of us, I know lots of people and for me too, I thought I wouldn’t like something and then I tried it and I’m like, oh, I like this. But you don’t know until you try.
Brett McKay:
Yeah, just try stuff you might like. You don’t know if you’re going to like it or not. All right. Let’s say you have a purpose anchor. You got a hunch that, okay, I think this could be the thing for me, my little P purpose. You have a process that you can do to kind of see it through to really embrace it as your little P purpose. You call it the climb. What is the climb?
Jordan Grumet:
The climb is literally the actions you build around your purpose anchor. And so I do a lot of purpose coaching. And so we take them through those exercises. And believe it or not, and I’ve done this with, let’s say 50 people. By the time I’m done with my four purpose anchor exercises, I usually have at least 30 to 40 purpose anchors for everyone. I’ve never ever found anyone where we don’t find purpose anchors. But then you can take each purpose anchor out and you could start deciding how you want to build these climbs. And so again, for me, let’s start with the first one. My regret audit showed me that I wanted to traditionally write a book. Well, you could say, duh, your climb is going to be writing that book, but not necessarily. There’s lots of book writing adjacent activities that now presented themselves because I wanted to traditionally publish a book.
So I started a blog or you could start a substack. Or you could start going to a writing group. A lot of people go to writing groups where they take their pieces of writing and they discuss it with a group and then they work on it and they improve it. You can start going to author events or meeting your favorite author. Authors have book signings and readings all over the place. And so you could say, well, these are the four authors who I really think write the kind of book I want to write. Find out when they’re coming to your city, go meet them. Maybe you have a conversation, maybe you take them out for coffee. Believe it or not, occasionally that actually happens. Maybe you just write them on the internet and say, Hey, I really admire your writing and I’m looking to start doing the same thing.
You might get ignored 95% of the time, but 5% of the time people respond. So it’s a real simple process. Don’t worry about being perfect. Take these purpose anchors and start thinking, what types of things could I enjoy and what should I do with this? And so I know lots of people who wanted to be, let’s say, basketball players, right? And they were in high school and they were in college and they got an injury or they quit or it just never happened. They didn’t have enough talent. And they’re like, well, I can never go back and be a basketball player now. I’ll never be in the NBA. But I think when you start thinking about that way, you’re getting back to big, audacious goals. If you love basketball, maybe you could work for the organization. Maybe you could start a fan club. Maybe you could just start going to the games on a regular basis.
Maybe you could start a pickup basketball game in your neighborhood. There’s so many different climbs out there. It really becomes a question of courage. Do you have the courage to test out this purpose anchor, to maybe face failure, maybe face your own inabilities, put yourself out there, right? Put yourself out there to scrutiny or being embarrassed or who knows what? Do you have the courage to now build something that could be really exciting based on that purpose anchor? And I don’t explicitly talk about it or write about it as much, but I think our real goal is to hit flow, right? That state where you’re so excited and busy doing something that you like, that you lose track of time and you stop worrying about goals and just start having fun. Remember when we were kids and you could go out and you’d get on your bike and you’d start chasing around with your friends and you’d forget time and you’d forget to eat and you didn’t even know why you were chasing them.
You guys were just hiding and laughing and having fun. Kids know how to hit a flow state. And something happens to us as we get older, we get less and less good at it. The whole purpose of the climb is to build more flow into your life. Because I truly believe when we define happiness as this idea of having purpose in your life, I think the actionable part of that is doing things that put you in a little bit of a flow state. And again, Brett, going back to your life, my bet is when you go down to workout and you start lifting and your endorphins are kicking, you kind of lose track of time and get excited and you’re in that flow state. And we want more of that in our lives.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. And it’s interesting about my lifting. I’ve talked about this before on the podcast. There was a period where it was very goal oriented. I was trying to hit PRs. And it was fun for a while, but then I just kind of got burnt out and beat up because it does put a lot of stress in your body to go for this heavy weight. And so I had to make a shift and now I just lift because I enjoy it. I haven’t pursued a PR probably in three or four years, but I still enjoy lifting. I’m still going down there, just doing the thing and I like it a lot. And you have these rules of the climb. You’ve kind of been mentioning some of them throughout what you just said. The climb should never be goal oriented. The climb must bring you joy. Got to make you happy or just it gives you that flow state.
You cannot fail your climb. Climbs can incorporate incremental gain. And the monogamy is optional when it comes to purpose. You don’t just have to have one purpose. You can have a whole bunch. Like my grandfather, he had a whole bunch of different little purposes.
Jordan Grumet:
I think it’s much simpler than we make it out to be, right? It’s just give yourself some space, find what you enjoy doing, and don’t think too much about it. Just do it.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. And you also talk about how people make excuses about not having time or money to pursue their little P purposes, but they really don’t hold up because you can find creative ways to pursue little P purposes in a frugal way. And everyone’s got a little time every day. You just sub it in for some of the phone scrolling or TV watching you’re doing. Something else you talk about is that while you’re big on community and you think pursuing little P purposes can indirectly bring you community, you actually argue that people shouldn’t be your purpose. And I feel like a lot of people would disagree with that. There’s probably a lot of dads listening to this who would say, “My purpose is my family.” So what’s wrong with making your family and the people you love your purpose?
Jordan Grumet:
I think there are two main problems. And let’s focus on kids because I think it’s easier. So why is a parent should you not make your kids your purpose? Well, first and foremost, and we see this all the time, your kids are going to grow up and leave you. And at some point they’re not going to be around anymore. They’re going to have their own lives. They may not even live in the same city. And so to make them your purpose means that you’re setting yourself up at some point for them to fly away, which you want them to do because they’re growing up and becoming independent and you’re going to be left with nothing. But I’d even like to dive into an even more important and deeper argument. Here’s the thing, and remember we talked about generational trauma versus generational growth. What do we hand down to our children?
Well, when you make your children your purpose, you are modeling for them that exact behavior. And so your kids will grow up and they will see the model you’ve presented and they will think that their kids should be their purpose. But there can be problems with that. Maybe they’ll never find a partner and never have kids. Maybe biologically they can’t have kids. Maybe they decide they don’t want to have kids or fall in love with someone who doesn’t want to have kids. What will life then feel to them when all the modeling they’ve grown up with their whole life tells them that something is important, but they can’t do it? What you actually want to do, what I think is most healthy is you want to have things that just light you up that excite you that are yours and only yours. And you want to model that behavior for your children because when they grow up, you want them to pursue things that light them up.
You want them to pursue things that are exciting and purposeful and joyful for them, but how are they ever going to know how to do that if you haven’t modeled that behavior for them? We want generational growth. We want to give them permission to do really cool things that they love. And the way you do that is you have your own version of little P purpose. You demonstrate it for them. That’s the way you get your kids there. I think if your kids’ happiness is something you worry a lot about, demonstrating your own sense of happiness, little P purpose, joy and flow in an activity is probably one of the best gifts you can give them.
Brett McKay:
All right. So are you saying that kids can’t be your big P purpose or are you also saying they can’t be your little P purpose either? Because it’s true that the time you have with your kids at home, it’s temporary, but a lot of purposes are temporary. So I mean, couldn’t you say that for the time that your kids are with you, that’s going to be your little P purpose? I mean, and even when your kids leave the house and you’re older, I mean, you could still think of your kids as part of your purpose. Right now, my kids are at home. I think they’re one of my purposes. I have other purposes that I’m pursuing, but they’re a big one for me.
Jordan Grumet:
Yeah. And I think that the key is to differentiate. It’s not that your kids or your wife or your family can’t be purposeful or even be a version of Little P Purpose, but they can’t be your only version of Little P purpose. They can’t be everything. You still need to have other versions of purpose. I mean, look, I have two kids. I love my wife. I love my kids. I spend lots of time with them. I spend lots of time with my parents. There’s no question that those parts of your life are very important to remember. We said community and connections is what makes people happy, and those are a big part of your community and connections. But I want to make sure people pursue other versions of Little P purpose. I think that’s really important.
Brett McKay:
I want to talk about regret just a little bit because you end the book with this. So you’ve worked as a hospice doctor, and so you’ve got to see and talk to people who are at death’s door. When you talk to these individuals, what were their typical regrets that they had?
Jordan Grumet:
So everyone is a little bit different. So the answer was never exactly the same, but it does boil down to that regret audit question. What did you never have the energy, courage, or time to do? So for some people that’s writing a book, for other people, it’s pursuing that sport or pursuing that hobby. For some people, it is not reconnecting with that person that was important to them. But for each person, it’s different. And that’s why we have to ask that question. But it all does come down in a sense to courage. It’s that I didn’t have courage to be a better version of myself. If you’ve ever read Bronny Ware’s Five Regrets of the Dying, she makes the point, she gives five regrets in her experience as a palliative care nurse. But one of them is regretting not being a truer version of yourself or not having the courage to be yourself.
And most of it comes down to that. There was this thing that was deeply important to me and I didn’t have the courage to pursue it.
Brett McKay:
All right. So yeah, the thing about regrets and what you might regret at your deathbed, that could be a spur total P purpose. What would be that thing if I were about to die that I regret that I didn’t do? We’ll start doing it today. You talked about it. This really stuck with me about a patient who, his little P purpose was painting. He just wanted to paint. And he wasn’t like a great painter. He wasn’t known. He wasn’t making a living from painting, but the guy died and there’s all these paintings in his room and even unfinished ones that he was still working on.
Jordan Grumet:
And this is one of those cases, it’s funny. Remember I always kind of said this idea that I challenge you to follow your little P purpose and see if it won’t connect you to people. There are occasions where people really do love doing something solitary and it doesn’t lead to a greater community and it doesn’t lead to more connections. But clearly in this case, it led to joy and excitement and interest and a reason to get up in the day. And so yeah, I think when we carry out with intention things that are purposeful and joyful to us, we create, we build. Whether it’s a podcast or a painting or whatever it is that you are excited about, you create and make change.
Brett McKay:
Well, Jordan, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
Jordan Grumet:
So the easiest way to find me is to go to jordangrumet.com. That’s J-O-R-D-A-N G-R-U-M-E-T. There you can find all three of my books. Taking Stock is the first. The Purpose Code is the second. And just recently I wrote about our healthcare system called The Healthcare Heist, as well as you can find the places that create content, The Earn and Invest Podcast, as well as The Purpose Code Substack. You can get all of it at jordangrumet.com.
Brett McKay:
You’re everywhere except for TikTok and Instagram, it sounds like.
Jordan Grumet:
Yeah. I just don’t enjoy. I tried TikTok for a while. I do have an Instagram account and there are easy ways to post your episodes on Instagram without it taking much time. But yeah, I don’t spend a lot of time
Brett McKay:
That’s just fine. Well, hey, Jordan Grumet, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
Jordan Grumet:
Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.
Brett McKay:
My guest here is Jordan Grumet. He’s the author of the book, The Purpose Code. It’s available on amazon.com. You can learn more information about his work at his website, jordangrumet.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/purposecode, where you find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but to put what you’ve heard into action.
