Episode 230
Purpose Isn’t Found, It’s Built with Aaron Hurst
In episode 230 of The Business Development Podcast, Kelly Kennedy is joined by Aaron Hurst, bestselling author of The Purpose Economy and a pioneer in the field of meaningful work. Together, they explore the idea that purpose isn’t something we find, but something we intentionally build. Aaron dives deep into his journey—from founding Taproot Foundation and catalyzing a $15 billion pro bono movement to launching Board.Dev, an initiative aiming to integrate tech leaders into nonprofit boards. The conversation tackles the psychological underpinnings of purpose, the flaws in waiting for it to “find us,” and why reflection, not perfection, is the true path to fulfillment.
Throughout the episode, Aaron challenges assumptions around career paths, generational mindsets, and community disconnect. He and Kelly explore how our modern culture often isolates us, despite unprecedented digital connection, and why genuine human relationships are the foundation for both business success and a meaningful life. The episode wraps with a powerful call to action—get to know your neighbors, build community intentionally, and remember that the smallest actions, like sharing a meal, can transform your sense of purpose.
Key Takeaways:
1. Purpose isn’t something you find—it’s something you build through reflection and intentional action.
2. Most people don’t need to change jobs to find purpose, they need to learn how to create meaning in what they already do.
3. Meaningful work is rooted in relationships, impact, and personal growth, not titles or salaries.
4. We’re not in the information economy anymore—we’ve shifted into the purpose economy, where emotional connection drives value.
5. Entrepreneurs are often driven by addiction to highs and rewards, making balance and mindfulness essential for long-term well-being.
6. The idea of a “calling” can be limiting—purpose should be flexible and show up across all areas of your life.
7. Pro bono work fuels fulfillment by combining service, skill development, and new relationships in powerful ways.
8. Most nonprofits drastically underinvest in technology, and tech professionals on boards can help close this gap.
9. Our hyperconnected world has created a loneliness epidemic—real community must be rebuilt through local, intentional relationships.
10. A purposeful life starts at home—invite your neighbors over, open your door, and lead the change you want to see.
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Transcript
Welcome to episode 230 of the Business Development Podcast.
Speaker A:And today we're joined by Aaron Hurst, best selling author of the Purpose Economy and one of the world's leading voices on meaningful work.
Speaker A:We're diving deep into why so many professionals feel disconnected and how purpose isn't something you find, it's something you build.
Speaker A:Stick with us.
Speaker A:You don't want to miss this episode.
Speaker B:The great Mark Cuban once said, business happens over years and years.
Speaker B:Value is measured in the total upside of a business relationship, not by how much you squeezed out in any one deal.
Speaker B:And we couldn't agree more.
Speaker B:This is the Business Development Podcast, based in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada and broadcasting to the world.
Speaker B:You'll get expert business development advice, tips and experiences and you'll hear interviews with business owners, CEOs and business development reps.
Speaker B:You'll get actionable advice on how to grow business brought to you by Capital Business Development, CapitalBD CA.
Speaker B:Let's do it.
Speaker B:Welcome to the Business Development Podcast.
Speaker B:And now your expert host, Kelly Kennedy.
Speaker A:Hello.
Speaker A:Welcome to episode 230 of the Business Development Podcast.
Speaker A:And on today's expert guest interview, I bring you Aaron Hurst.
Speaker A:Aaron is a visionary social entrepreneur whose transformative initiatives in technology, governance and social impact have revolutionized how businesses and nonprofits harness purpose.
Speaker A:As the founder of the Taproot Foundation Imperative and board.dev, aaron has consistently pushed the boundaries of corporate social responsibility, catalyzing a 15 billion pro bono service market and introducing the purpose driven strategies into boardrooms worldwide.
Speaker A:His groundbreaking work on employee purpose profiling and peer coaching platforms has empowered hundreds of Thousands at Fortune 100 companies to unlock their full potential and embrace a new paradigm of work.
Speaker A:A best selling author and a globally recognized thought leader, Aaron's seminal book the Purpose Economy predicted a seismic shift towards purpose as a primary driver of economic and organizational growth.
Speaker A:As a TED Prize finalist, LinkedIn influencer and keynote speaker, his insights continue to inspire leaders to cultivate more fulfilling careers and organizations that thrive on relationships, impact and growth.
Speaker A:Aaron's dedication to building communities that realize their potential ensures he remains a trailblazer in the ongoing quest to embed purpose at the heart of the modern economy.
Speaker A:Aaron, it's an honor to have you on the show.
Speaker C:Ah, great to be here and I love your voice.
Speaker C:It's so great.
Speaker C:The world is so much better to have you podcasting, so it's wonderful to be on.
Speaker A:That is incredibly, incredibly kind of you.
Speaker A:And you know, before we get into this today, I want you to know that I really resonated with Your book, I absolutely love it.
Speaker A:I think purpose is the.
Speaker A:Is the thing of the moment.
Speaker A:And I feel like I really only realized this recently too, which is kind of scary.
Speaker A:And I think we can chat about that today.
Speaker A:I know we talked before.
Speaker A:I'm like, are we not in the information economy, but we might be shifting?
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:I've had the pleasure of interviewing so many amazing people, and I think Liz Ryan really, like, tipped me into this, like, new world where it's like, no, Kelly, the whole game is about to change and we're right in the middle of it.
Speaker A:And I think so many people are like, what is happening?
Speaker A:And so we're going to chat about that today.
Speaker A:But before we do, Aaron, who is Aaron Hurst?
Speaker A:How did you end up on this path?
Speaker C:You just did a pretty long bio.
Speaker C:I think you already answered the question, but no, I mean, I, I come from a family of social entrepreneurs.
Speaker C:My grandfather story usually starts with my grandf who was a naval officer in World War II and one of the first officers in Hitler's bunk.
Speaker C:When the war ended, he actually had.
Speaker C:Stole a piece of his stationery from his desk and his goal was to prevent World War Three.
Speaker C:And he really saw the way to do that was through meaningful, purposeful connection between people of difference and went on and wrote the original strategy for the Peace Corps and sort of conceived of that idea for President Kennedy and then ran the Aspen Institute for 25 years.
Speaker C:And, you know, both of those were about how do you connect people through purpose, Peace Corps.
Speaker C:You know, the idea being it's not enough just to be a tourist.
Speaker C:You need to go and actually roll up your sleeves and work together.
Speaker C:And Aspen Institute's you know, roots are really.
Speaker C:And bring people together from different vocations, different backgrounds, but who care about similar problems in the world and seeing if that diversity can help solve.
Speaker C:Solve challenges in new ways.
Speaker C:So that's sort of the backdrop.
Speaker C:My parents, though, were the exact.
Speaker C:In many ways the same, in many ways the exact opposite.
Speaker C:They were hippies.
Speaker C:I was raised Buddhist, moved around a lot.
Speaker C:And both of them were very social impact oriented, very mindful, very focused on mindfulness.
Speaker C:So that was a wonderful upbringing.
Speaker C:Went to the University of Michigan, which was a transformational experience for me.
Speaker C:Spent most of the time building a program to teach creative writing in prisons around Ann Arbor and turning that into a program that the university gave credit to Michigan students to do and then use the experience to reflect on not just creative writing, but also social justice and everything from teaching.
Speaker C:I mean, just sort of like every single topic you can imagine sort of put into this, and the sort of belief of mine is around education is why do we write papers that only one person reads like how can we turn education into producing value for the world, not just being sort of performative that way.
Speaker C:Then worked in inner city education for a little while and then got sort of this bug to sort of say, how can we do things on a bigger scale?
Speaker C:So moved to Silicon Valley and worked for two different very early stage startups that scaled up and blew up, but learned a ton through that process.
Speaker C:Got hired first as a front end dev, self taught and then in product management before starting the Taproot foundation, which was my first major enterprise.
Speaker C:And Taproot's focus was on taking the pro bono ethic from the legal profession and bringing it to marketing and tech and hr because nonprofits need access to more than just legal help and scale that across the US and then globally in partnership with BMW.
Speaker C:Really did a lot of work around movement building and understanding.
Speaker C:I'm less interested in building organizations organizations, I'm more interested in building movements and sort of understanding how do you go about building a movement and building that shift in how companies and how professionals were thinking about community.
Speaker C:Which led to the insights that created the Purpose Economy, which was a wonderful experience of writing that and touring the world and talking to people about what's possible.
Speaker C:And then raised venture funding and created a tech company based on the core insights in the book, which just was acquired three months ago.
Speaker A:Oh, wow.
Speaker C:But I left that venture about almost two years ago and I've been working on some new projects which you can talk about later.
Speaker C:I'm in Seattle and we moved here 10 years ago for my wife's job.
Speaker C:She's the chief sustainability officer over at Amazon, so she's doing incredible work there.
Speaker C:And I'm also just really enjoying being home with my son, who's 16, and recognizing I've got two more years with him and just I think always knew as an entrepreneurial CEO that I put too much time into work, but once I slowed down, I just realized how real that was and it wasn't academic anymore.
Speaker A:Oh my gosh.
Speaker A:Yeah, I can totally resonate with that dude.
Speaker A:I.
Speaker A:We have four kids, I have three stepsons and I have one biological son who is eight months old.
Speaker C:Oh, that's adorable.
Speaker A:It's amazing.
Speaker A:It makes you just want to be a dad all the time whenever possible, right?
Speaker A:But it's flipping hard, man.
Speaker A:Like, I've talked with so many entrepreneurs on this show and finding balance in life Especially as an entrepreneur feels at times like a completely impossible, impossible task.
Speaker C:No, it is.
Speaker C:And you get sucked into this addiction.
Speaker C:I think entrepreneurship has a lot of addiction to it, and it's really hard to separate from that because you're rewarded for the addiction in the short term, not in the long term.
Speaker C:Yeah, I was always interested.
Speaker C:I forget his name.
Speaker C:There was a guy I met from the New school who'd done research on entrepreneurs.
Speaker C:And there's such a disproportionate amount of mental health issues with entrepreneurs that was created through the process.
Speaker C:But I think the people who are drawn to it.
Speaker C:Yeah, a certain type of person who's big on the highs and lows, someone who is generally tend to be more prone to depression, more prone to adhd, like a whole set of different dimensions that make someone sort of open to the stupidity of being an entrepreneur.
Speaker A:So.
Speaker A:Well, and it's like.
Speaker A:And it's like it draws you deeper as you go too.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:Like, as you go and you get more invested, it becomes more of a bit of a life drain on a certain level.
Speaker A:But you're right, it has just enough reward and just enough all the time to keep you.
Speaker C:It's always the hope.
Speaker C:It's always keeping.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker C:My grandfather's line was always keep the exhilaration in front of the exhaustion.
Speaker C:Which in my 20s sounded awesome.
Speaker C:And now that I'm older, I'm like, that's kind of dumb.
Speaker C:Like, is that really the way to live life?
Speaker C:So, you know, I think I've been.
Speaker C:I've been returning more to, like, my parents wisdom around mindfulness of being present and, you know, the cliches around, you know, living in the moment and appreciating today and not worrying about tomorrow as much.
Speaker C:Don't always succeed, but trying to.
Speaker A:Dude, what was it like growing up with.
Speaker A:With parents like that, like, and, and way ahead of their time, by the way.
Speaker C:Way Buddhism, actually.
Speaker C:I don't know if you know this Buddhism has been around for thousands of years.
Speaker A:Well, I knew Buddha.
Speaker C:They're way behind their time.
Speaker A:I knew that Buddhism had been around for a long time.
Speaker A: s, in the early: Speaker A:And like, it was still, like, it was still like, you know, don't cry, be tough.
Speaker A:You know, if you got feelings, we all have feelings.
Speaker A:Deal with them.
Speaker A:Like, that was the, that was the mentality.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:It kind of sounds like.
Speaker A:And especially from the book that Europe, your upbringing was a Little different than that.
Speaker C:No, it was.
Speaker C:I mean, the people who are drawn to Buddhism who were, you know, not, you know, originally from that culture and that tradition, tended to have something in their life that made them need that.
Speaker C:Right.
Speaker C:So I think my parents both had sort of areas of trauma in their childhood that caused them to go to that.
Speaker C:So, you know, I think my childhood was a mix of seeing them struggle with the demons of that trauma from their childhood and their, you know, life combined with their exploration of sort of this other path.
Speaker C:And it was, you know, I think it was a mixed bag.
Speaker C:I mean, I went to a Buddhist elementary school.
Speaker C:I've learned a lot.
Speaker C:I generally rejected it as a child because my parents were more focused on Buddhism than they were on parenting.
Speaker C:So there was a resentment that came from.
Speaker C:Came with that, to be candid.
Speaker C:And I think it's a lot of things as a kid, classical music, hiking, that you, like, complain about.
Speaker C:But then when you're an adult, you're like, actually realize you, like, and you're grateful that your parents exposed you to it.
Speaker C:So, yeah, I think that's, you know, that's how I came to.
Speaker C:I think there was also, within their Buddhist community, there was a.
Speaker C:There was a degree to which there was a cult.
Speaker C:Cult feeling to it, which I think I early on just sort of had an allergic reaction to.
Speaker C:But Buddhism is.
Speaker C:I mean, the.
Speaker C:The fundamental ideas behind Buddhism, like, now neuroscience very clearly validates.
Speaker C:And I find a lot of the people I talk to who are, you know, introspective, thoughtful, wise leaders, whether they've adopted Buddhism fully or if they just really bought into some of the core of it, like, it's pretty.
Speaker C:It's become pretty prevalent to your.
Speaker C:To your point at this.
Speaker C:At this moment.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker A:It really does feel like when I read the Purpose Economy, it really just hit me that this is.
Speaker A:This is happening right now.
Speaker A:Like, right now more than ever in history before.
Speaker A: nd yet you wrote this book in: Speaker A: found a taproot in the early: Speaker A:Like, you were so.
Speaker A:And I, like, not just ahead, like you mentioned, you might have been the catalyst on a certain level for the Purpose Economy.
Speaker C:Well, there are a number of us that were sort of trying to, you know, starting to see these trends.
Speaker C: I actually wrote the book in: Speaker C:The first edition was in 14, so it was about 10 years ago.
Speaker C:And I read it now, and I cringe a little bit because I feel like, oh, like the world has changed in 10 years.
Speaker C:But it's just funny when you Go back and read your own book after a while when time has passed.
Speaker C:No, I mean, I saw it at that point a lot in the volunteers that we were recruiting to Taproot.
Speaker C:I mean, there were thousands of people applying to volunteer and they were busy people and they were still making time for service.
Speaker C:And it was clear they were literally willing to give their most precious resource time because they needed more meaning in their lives.
Speaker C:And you could see that there was something fundamentally wrong with the workplace and that the companies that were going to be able to attract the best people and retain them were going to have to find a way to make that work meaningful for them and that volunteering can't be the answer.
Speaker C:It's great, but we got to figure out how to make work itself more meaningful and help people with the skillset to do that.
Speaker C:So that was very clear.
Speaker C:And then you also just started seeing it at the time, you started seeing it in a lot of the types of services that were emerging for people that were around well being, that were around their ability to connect with others, these sort of sources of meaning in their lives.
Speaker C:They'd gotten to this point where they were seeing that the commercial success, commercial goods were not meeting their needs.
Speaker C:And with the millennial generation, there was a lot of desire for experience and for self work and investment there.
Speaker C:And you saw that those brands that were embracing that in services were starting to eclipse the others.
Speaker C:And I think the other thing is the information economy just commoditized the shit out of everything.
Speaker C:So for things to actually stand out in a commoditized, globalized world, purpose is the way you actually build connection at a sole level with a customer.
Speaker C:And if you can't do that, your product is just going to be in a downward spiral to the cheapest, whoever has got the cheapest solution, which is not sustainable business long term.
Speaker A:No, no, but it's like, you know, I mean, I grew up differently, right?
Speaker A:Like, I grew up where it was like, you go out, you got a good job, hopefully you like it.
Speaker A:Like that was the way it was.
Speaker A:It was like, go find a job, pays well, and hopefully you learn to like it.
Speaker A:That was essentially the way that I was raised to get a job.
Speaker A:It wasn't necessarily you didn't get a job because you enjoyed the work, you got a job.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker C:Where did you grow up?
Speaker A:Well, I grew up in, in Edmonton, Alberta.
Speaker A:Canada.
Speaker A:Yeah, so.
Speaker A: s,: Speaker A:Hopefully it's something you like.
Speaker A:You know, like they try to push you towards things you like.
Speaker A:But let's get real.
Speaker A:When you're like 19, you don't know what.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:I think making kids pick what they want to do for the rest of their lives at 18 is a stupid move.
Speaker C:Well, it's.
Speaker C:I mean, in Europe and someplace it's even worse where really you get locked into these.
Speaker C:So, Kelly, I would.
Speaker C:I think a lot of you had a specific experience and you have a lot of confirmation biases.
Speaker C:We all have or we see things and we sort of assume that that's the situation.
Speaker C:What I've seen in my research is parents have a specific psychological profile and experience and they tend to then share that with their kids.
Speaker A:Yes.
Speaker C:I would guess I would have found a lot of your peers in Edmonton who actually had a very experience of that.
Speaker A:Interesting.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker C:And yeah, I mean, does it change with time and.
Speaker C:Yes, but I think you would find that it doesn't change all that much.
Speaker C:That actually a lot of it has to do with whether or not parents have more of a transactional mindset or a purpose mindset.
Speaker C:And I think there's people, you know, going back, you know, decades, hundreds of years who've had that purpose mindset where they.
Speaker C:They work fundamentally because they find it as a source of meaning.
Speaker C:There's other people who work because they fundamentally see it as ego or money or a game.
Speaker C:And that tends to then influence those around in terms of how they perceive it.
Speaker C:I think what I sense you're describing is it became more part of the zeitgeist to talk about work differently.
Speaker C:So it probably shifted sort of more people in that direction.
Speaker C:But there's always been people who love their work no matter what it is and raise their kids to just sort of appreciate the day to day of what they're doing and to be present in what they're doing and see their work as craft, see their work as service.
Speaker C:So I think that's always been been there.
Speaker C:I just think we've now gotten to the point where that's more in the zeitgeist and popular culture and schools are talking more about it.
Speaker C:I think schools tend to still be very transactional and I think the no Child Left behind in the US it was very detrimental to the educational system here, which just made it way more transactional.
Speaker C:And combined with, I think how the finance industry has taken over education just turned it into a debt machine.
Speaker C:And as a result, like so much of the narrative now actually is a lot of it is around professional Choice and money.
Speaker C:Because the debt's so insane that people are getting into here that in some ways you see some of our counterbalance.
Speaker A:When I was in high school, they were pushing the trades like, like hard down your throat, like, you should go work in the trades.
Speaker A:Because at least in Alberta here, oil and gas is like everything, right?
Speaker A:And so they want everyone to go and work in the trades.
Speaker A:And so even like for me, being pushed, like, I didn't want to do that.
Speaker A:I never went down that path.
Speaker C:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker A:But even my family was like, hey, Kelly, like, you should just go get a trade.
Speaker A:It's a great paying job.
Speaker A:You.
Speaker A:There's constant work.
Speaker A:It's never going anywhere.
Speaker A:That should be what you do.
Speaker A:And it was like, I don't want to do that.
Speaker A:I don't know what I want to do, but I know I don't want to do that.
Speaker C:Yeah, no.
Speaker C:Senior.
Speaker C:Depending on your background.
Speaker C:I'm of Jewish tradition.
Speaker C:A lot of our broader family, it's like, you're a lawyer or a doctor, that's what you do.
Speaker C:So it's just interesting.
Speaker C:Different cultures, different places are sort of these norms of like, if you can't figure it out, here's the default of what's expected in the family.
Speaker A:It's so funny because I think, I look at.
Speaker A:When I got out of school, I worked a number of jobs before I even went to college, right?
Speaker A:Like, I'd worked in car sales, I'd worked in sales, I'd worked in parts sales.
Speaker A:I did a whole bunch of stuff before I had ever, like, went into college and I went to college and I was like, well, what do I want to do?
Speaker A:And I'm like, I don't know.
Speaker A:I'm just going to go into business.
Speaker A:I'm going to go into business because I don't know what I want to do.
Speaker A:And in my mind, the.
Speaker A:The idea was if I go into business, I can get a job in operation somewhere and I can just do that and find something I like to do.
Speaker A:It's really funny because I.
Speaker A:I didn't find my purpose.
Speaker A:My purpose found me, Aaron.
Speaker A:My purpose found me.
Speaker A:So I always find it funny where people are out there searching for their purpose.
Speaker A:Where I think, like with me, I got offered a position in business development and it changed my life.
Speaker A:It became something that I totally fell in love with.
Speaker A:Even though I was completely running from sales going into college to go into business, and really ended up on a certain level right back in sales and marketing, but on a different type, one that fit me Better.
Speaker A:And I would say, like, my entire life was changed by finding that or by it finding me.
Speaker A:Maybe the other way around, ironically.
Speaker C:Yeah, no, I mean, it's great.
Speaker C:I'm glad you found it.
Speaker C:That's.
Speaker C:That's amazing.
Speaker C:But I always think it's interesting when people younger, like, I want to go into business, because I don't even know what that means.
Speaker C:Yes, like, go into business.
Speaker C:So, like, you want to go into, like, the sector of for profit.
Speaker C:Like, what is like, it's like, so broad below.
Speaker A:It was so broad.
Speaker A:That was the whole point.
Speaker A:The whole point was it's so broad, I don't know what I want to do.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:And I think that that's, to this day, what.
Speaker A:What a lot of young people do.
Speaker A:And ironically, it was the perfect choice.
Speaker A:It was exactly the right thing that I needed.
Speaker A:Lead me down my path.
Speaker A:But, like, you know, it's just one of those things where I think so many people are out there working jobs that they're working simply because they pay the bills.
Speaker A:And, you know, talking with Liz Ryan and chatting about reinvention, roadmap, and her big thing is, you can do something different.
Speaker A:You can do something different.
Speaker A:People get roped into this idea where it's like, well, I've been in accounting for 15 years.
Speaker A:I can't do anything different.
Speaker A:Yeah, but it's like, yes, you can.
Speaker A:You 100% can, right?
Speaker C:No, it takes a joke.
Speaker C:It's a leap of faith and takes some creativity and just talking to folks, but, yeah, no, absolutely.
Speaker C:Especially if people are unhappy.
Speaker A:Yeah, well, you know, like, talk to me about Taproot.
Speaker A:Like, what was it that drove you to really change pro bono services forever?
Speaker A:Like, what was it?
Speaker A:What led you down that path?
Speaker C:Well, I think it's an, you know, it's an entrepreneurial journey.
Speaker C:So, you know, classic story of, like, working in tech in these startups and realized, like, I wanted to go back to more social impact work and started talking to nonprofit leaders.
Speaker C:And I was like, how can I help?
Speaker C:Like, what could a job be for me, the nonprofit sector now?
Speaker C:And they're all like, we don't want to hire you, but can you build a website for us?
Speaker C:Could you help us with our HR policies?
Speaker C:Can you help us with these projects?
Speaker C:And I was like, no, like, that's not what I want to be doing.
Speaker C:I'm asking you, like, what can I do for you?
Speaker C:Not what can I do for you?
Speaker C:And I Talked to, like, 1, 2, 3, 5, 10 nonprofits, and it was like, pretty much the same story.
Speaker C:It's like, we need help with these projects.
Speaker C:It was not.
Speaker C:And like we have no budget for them or next to no budget for them.
Speaker C:And it was just sort of one of those chocolate peanut butter moments where to sort of click like, oh, like I know dozens of friends and each of them know hundreds.
Speaker C:Like through the ripple effect hundreds and then thousands of people who are looking for more meaningful ways to contribute.
Speaker C:They don't want to do traditional corporate volunteering because it's generally uncomfortable or a waste of time and would be psyched to be able to help you build a website for a nonprofit if we gave them the right structure to do it.
Speaker C:And just that light bulb moment where you just realize, okay, so there's like actually a model here that if we could create a scalable process for high volume pro bono services, we could actually scale this to make it way more accessible to nonprofits and get many more business professionals exposed to the community in a meaningful way.
Speaker C:Not as tourists, but actually sort of rolling up their sleeves.
Speaker C:And it was great.
Speaker C:I was almost 25 years ago and it was using early technology, things like Yahoo Groups technology.
Speaker C:Like a lot of what we did wouldn't have been possible five years prior because you need to be able to have remote virtual work by teams who don't know each other for a sector they've never worked in.
Speaker C:So from a team development perspective, it was wildly challenging.
Speaker C:And it wasn't until Yahoo Groups came along where you could actually have a shared work online workspace that it was even possible to do this kind of pro bono work.
Speaker C:So it was just interesting.
Speaker C:The different technologies at different stages open up different possibilities.
Speaker C:So we did that, started in San Francisco, got venture philanthropy support, scaled it to seven cities.
Speaker C:We had offices in seven cities.
Speaker C:And we became the largest nonprofit consulting firm in the world and then realized, oh, like we're barely serving a fraction of the need.
Speaker C:And we're like, what if we double?
Speaker C:We're like 10x.
Speaker C:We're like, okay, we can't.
Speaker C:This is not going to be solved through programs.
Speaker C:We need to solve it through a movement.
Speaker C:And that's what really shifted from focusing on delivery to how do we actually bring the pro bono ethic to these business, to csr, to corporate responsibility, to these professions.
Speaker C:How do we build non profitability to use these resources?
Speaker C:And how do we think about this as a broader marketplace, not us as a service provider?
Speaker C:And that was a huge shift in our strategy and really opened up a whole other level of impact.
Speaker C:And I think it's one of the things nonprofits often fail to do is they're very protective of their programs.
Speaker C:Instead of looking at, how could we make a bigger impact by doing less?
Speaker A:Dude, like, you might be the greatest marketer of all time.
Speaker A:How does one.
Speaker C:I'm taking that quote.
Speaker A:But, yeah, how does one grow a company that's based on providing free services to the scale that you were able to grow it?
Speaker A:Like, how do you do that without making money?
Speaker A:It seems like.
Speaker A:And obviously there are ways to make money, but how does it work?
Speaker C:Well, I think, first of all, people are hungry to give back.
Speaker C:I remember I hired a very senior marketing exec at Taproot, or, yeah, Taproot, who had been the head of comms at mtv.
Speaker C:And I was like, what's the plan?
Speaker C:She's like, well, I don't have any budget.
Speaker C:And I'm like, you have the largest budget of any company in the world.
Speaker C:She's like, no, I don't.
Speaker C:I don't even have a team.
Speaker C:I'm like, yes, you do.
Speaker C:Like, every marketer out there, like, is looking for something meaningful to do, and, like, you just have to ask them.
Speaker C:And it's just that sort of fundamental shift in mindset of, like, actually, we're sitting with incredible abundance and have an incredible abundance mindset towards that.
Speaker C:And just know that people want to make a difference.
Speaker C:And if you can actually create an experience where they can do that, most people will jump at that.
Speaker C:So I think that was the first piece.
Speaker C:We had a couple of really key initial partnerships that really made a difference.
Speaker C:So one was with Craig Newmark and Craigslist, which is less relevant these days.
Speaker C:Back in the day, that was huge.
Speaker C:And just said, like, same thing with LinkedIn monster.
Speaker C:Like, all these job boards.
Speaker C:He said, give us donated free ad space for job listings.
Speaker C:We're just going to post jobs, but by the way, they're not paid.
Speaker C:And they all gave us just hundreds of thousands of dollars in free ad space just to post these pro bono jobs.
Speaker C:And that just created this incredible pipeline of people applying into our system through those job postings.
Speaker C:So that was incredibly valuable just to get that part of the.
Speaker C:The labor side of it.
Speaker C:And then on the nonprofit side, what we found is that there are charitable foundations in every city that have a set of nonprofits they support.
Speaker C:And what we were able to do is go to them and say, if you pay our costs to manage this, we'll give you $10 in pro bono for every dollar that it costs us to manage it.
Speaker C:And they would buy basically blocks of our projects.
Speaker C:And then we would give priority to their non profits in the process.
Speaker C:So that was how we created an earned income model around it.
Speaker C:And then the branding was one of the things that was really critical to success.
Speaker C:So it's called Taproot Foundation.
Speaker C:If we had said like Taproot volunteers or Taproot services, I don't think it would have ever taken off.
Speaker C:We set the whole process up where nonprofits had to apply for what we called a service grant.
Speaker C:So instead of a cash grant, we were giving them a grant of service.
Speaker C:And it triggered a different psychological connection to our work than had it just been, hey, do you want a free website?
Speaker C:Right.
Speaker C:It was more like, we're going to select these.
Speaker C:It's competitive.
Speaker C:There's a process similar to other grants you're doing.
Speaker C:It totally changed the dynamic.
Speaker C:And it also made the volunteers feel like they were part of something more formal and that they were part of a grant of service.
Speaker C:And that was really important in their psychological framing of it.
Speaker C:The thing I'm actually most proud of is not, I mean, the marketing, I think was really effective.
Speaker C:It was the ability to figure out how to get again, like virtual strangers on complex six month projects, to complete projects, and the amount of team dynamics we had to mess with to try to figure out how do you actually do that?
Speaker C:And we got to the point where we had about a 95% closure rate.
Speaker C:We started off at about under 50% and through experimentation got up to almost 100%.
Speaker C:And it was very relevant to me when I started looking at when the pandemic hit, how do you build effective remote work and virtual work?
Speaker C:And we had really been the largest experiment in doing that that I've ever found up to that point.
Speaker C:So this was a great source of insight in that process.
Speaker A:Wow.
Speaker C:Wow.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:Like, I look at it just from the standpoint of when you're providing free services, like, how does that work?
Speaker A:But you're right, it's all in the framing.
Speaker A:Like, everything you did there was absolutely right.
Speaker A:Like, how did you, did you just figure that out or did you just have teams of amazing people around you feeding you great information?
Speaker C:It was a mix of just trying.
Speaker C:I mean, it's like anything entrepreneurial.
Speaker C:Just try a lot of stuff and see what sticks.
Speaker C:Right.
Speaker C:And you also just talk to experts in the psychology of all of it, because I think that's the piece that I've always been really drawn to is like, what's the actual psychology of what's going on here and how do we understand what people's actual needs are in this situation.
Speaker C:But yeah, OD has always been intuitive to me.
Speaker C:OD and marketing have always been sort of areas that were intuitive to me, which I've been very, very lucky with that.
Speaker C:And I often give that advice to people who are or coming out of college.
Speaker C:I'm like, what class was easy for you that other people thought was hard?
Speaker C:Like, when I took classes in organizational development, I always thought it was like, ridiculous.
Speaker C:I'm like, why are they giving me credit for this?
Speaker C:How could anyone not know how to do this?
Speaker C:This is so obvious.
Speaker C:But most people weren't.
Speaker C:And I was like, oh, this is an area of strength for me.
Speaker C:Same thing with marketing.
Speaker C:A lot of people just don't understand marketing.
Speaker C:I was like, I always intuitively got it.
Speaker C:Those are the areas where you can really make the biggest impact.
Speaker C:Because there's something about your brain that aligns with that kind of thinking.
Speaker A:Yeah, totally.
Speaker A:And there's something, like I said, there's something just about the moment.
Speaker A:Like I would say it's.
Speaker A:Everything feels different post Covid, you know, like, and obviously it is.
Speaker A:The world is a completely different world.
Speaker A:But there were like, ideas.
Speaker A:I feel like that just could never have flown pre Covid.
Speaker A:That now it's like, you know what, doing things that matter to us actually matters.
Speaker C:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker C:Taproot would not have existed had it not been for 9 11.
Speaker C:I mean, we started right after 911 and there was just so many professionals were seeing all the first responders out there and seeing all the problems in the world and being like, how the hell am I helping with this?
Speaker C:Or am I just the problem?
Speaker C:And I think that combined with this economic downturn created the sort of spike in demand and interest in the topic.
Speaker C:So timing is so important to what you're doing.
Speaker C:You can have a great idea.
Speaker C:And I've had many great ideas of bad timing.
Speaker C:And guess what happens?
Speaker C:Dies.
Speaker C:Right?
Speaker C:So I guess the piece I've come to appreciate about entrepreneurship is just like how many things have to come together for something to work.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker A:Walk me through, walk me through.
Speaker A:Walk me through the writing of the Purpose Economy.
Speaker A:Right?
Speaker A:Like, how.
Speaker A:What was it that was like, you know what?
Speaker A:Like, this is the time.
Speaker A:I think it's time to write a book on this change.
Speaker A:And I do feel, and we talked about this before the show.
Speaker A:I don't think I recognized that we were in the middle of a change.
Speaker A:Even, even, like, even during COVID I couldn't have quite recognized that we were like, it still felt very much like everything is information based that's the tech sector.
Speaker A:It's still growing like crazy, like we are in it.
Speaker A:But in the book, you make a pretty strong case for why the we are in a transition, if not now, in the purpose economy.
Speaker A:Can you walk through that?
Speaker C:Yeah, I mean, the process for writing the book itself actually started with a very different entry point, which was I knew I was leaving Techroot and I'd been there for 10, 12 years, and just I wanted to capture the experience for the culture of the organization after I left.
Speaker C:So there was sort of some kind of like Dead Sea Scrolls of the organizational culture.
Speaker C:So I spent like two or three months just interviewing employees and leaders who've been part of the organization at different stages in the organization and transcribing them and just sort of looking at what had transpired over those years.
Speaker C:And the Purpose Economy really emerged.
Speaker C:Almost none of that content made into the book.
Speaker C:But the thesis emerged from those interviews of just hearing how people have been like, we had done this and we saw this and we experienced this and we had this corporate partner did this.
Speaker C:And you're like, huh, there's a pattern here.
Speaker C:What is this pattern that I'm seeing emerge from this?
Speaker C:And at the same time, I was reminded of my uncle's work at Stanford who had coined the term information economy.
Speaker C:And it's sort of just, again, it was one of those chocolate and peanut butter moments where I was like.
Speaker C:Like, whoa, wait a sec.
Speaker C:Is this the Purpose economy?
Speaker C:Is that what we're seeing happening now?
Speaker C:And I just sort of put that on the wall as a hypothesis and said, like, what evidence is there of this, that this is happening?
Speaker C:And what would my advice be to individuals, leaders, and market builders in an economy in which purpose is the driver of innovation and value creation?
Speaker C:And that really led to the journey of writing the book?
Speaker A:My gosh.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:No, it just like, I guess purpose.
Speaker A:It seems so broad, right?
Speaker A:Is it broad?
Speaker A:What.
Speaker A:What does it mean, though, Aaron?
Speaker A:Like, what.
Speaker A:What does the future look like?
Speaker A:What.
Speaker A:What is.
Speaker A:What does this transition even look like?
Speaker A:Are we.
Speaker A:Are we gonna go away from.
Speaker A:From the Internet or from the things that we've essentially created in the information technology?
Speaker A:Is.
Speaker A:Is social media going to be a thing of the past?
Speaker A:What is.
Speaker A:What does our future look like in a purpose economy?
Speaker C:So we went from agrarian to industrial to information to purpose.
Speaker C:Right, so start with agrarian.
Speaker C:Do you still eat, Kelly?
Speaker C:Food.
Speaker A:I still eat food.
Speaker C:So it's not like the agrarian economy is gone as a part of it.
Speaker C:It's just that it's a Question of what's creating innovation and dominating change.
Speaker C:Right.
Speaker C:So similarly, you probably have a car.
Speaker C:So the industrial economy is still there.
Speaker C:You're still using social media, that's still there.
Speaker C:It's a question of what's generating new innovation and what's driving the workplace and driving consumer behavior.
Speaker C:And in some ways I think I could have renamed the purpose economy, maybe more accurately the psychology economy.
Speaker C:I think a lot of what we've seen in this era is just a greater understanding of psychology, especially positive psychology, and the use of that to help, I think positive and negative because I think all these economies, like grain economies, great and horrible, industrial great, horrible information, great, horrible.
Speaker C:Like these are not, it's not a Pollyannish definition around purpose.
Speaker C:I think it's more that we start to understand the psychology of people and what they need for well being and how to connect with people at an emotional level.
Speaker C:And that was starting to shift how we think about work and about services, products and brands.
Speaker C:Purpose is a nice way of sort of framing that because at the core, like what people are looking for is meaning.
Speaker C:Yes, they want meaningful lives, they want meaningful experiences.
Speaker C:And you know, we really found it was in three areas.
Speaker C:They want meaningful relationships, they want to make an impact that matters, and they want to grow.
Speaker C:Like those are these three sort of core human needs we've had, you know, since we were cave people.
Speaker C:And there was this recognition in the science, recognition of pop culture, like these are legitimate needs and that they're worth investing in.
Speaker C:And the companies that have found ways to, whether it's with employees or consumers, connect to those needs, their products, you know, start to differentiate, their workplaces start to differentiate.
Speaker A:It's so funny because like, I think back to my time in school and it's like, of course you should do something that you connect with.
Speaker A:It's like, I wouldn't want to hire somebody who doesn't like what they do because they're not going to do good work.
Speaker A:And yet we've never, we've never spent time chatting about this.
Speaker A:Like, I just don't understand how.
Speaker A:I went through college, elementary school, high school, and never once did the conversation of like, hey, whatever you do, you should make sure that you feel connected to it, that you should feel like it is your purpose.
Speaker A:Like that never came up and like, maybe it comes up now.
Speaker C:It came up, I think around and I think it was a mistaken way.
Speaker C:It came up around the idea of a calling and sort of like, oh, I have a calling to be a doctor, I have a calling to be an artist, you have these sort of.
Speaker C:These ideas.
Speaker C:That idea has been around for quite a while.
Speaker C:This idea of like, do you have a calling?
Speaker C:And then for everybody else, it's kind of like, what do you do?
Speaker C:Because you don't have that calling.
Speaker C:Callings are problematic because they're a fixed mindset towards purpose.
Speaker C:If you, like, say your calling is medicine, and then you can't do medicine.
Speaker C:Like, you can't have your purpose now, you're screwed.
Speaker C:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker C:So like, any kind of, like, the calling framework is highly problematic.
Speaker C:Long term, short term, it's motivating, but it's problematic.
Speaker C:The skill that's needed, Kelly, is it's less about finding your purpose and it's more about how to find meaning in your day to day.
Speaker C:It's not about finding the perfect job or perfect anything.
Speaker C:It's more about we create meaning for ourselves.
Speaker C:Like nothing actually has meaning.
Speaker C:Like, we as human beings are meaning makers.
Speaker C:So it's more about cultivating in kids and early career.
Speaker C:How do you create meaning and not just sit there or feeling like you're the victim of the world, but more like, how are you creating meaning out of anything you do, positive and negative?
Speaker C:I mean, we talked about parenting.
Speaker C:Parenting is deeply meaningful.
Speaker C:It's not fun most of the time, but you create.
Speaker C:If you're a good parent, you create meaning out of the good, the bad and the ugly, right?
Speaker A:Yes.
Speaker C:You know, and I think that's like, that's sort of the same thing with work.
Speaker C:And I think we tend to think that finding the right job or the right profession, suddenly that's going to click into place.
Speaker C:But it's actually much more of a skill and a mindset of meaning creation.
Speaker C:And I think that's where my Buddhist upbringing helps sort of shortcut that for me is like, everything's relative.
Speaker C:It's really a question of what you create with whatever's in front of you.
Speaker A:Interesting.
Speaker C:That's really what the science of it is.
Speaker A:Okay, okay.
Speaker A:That's a different frame, Aaron, than I've ever heard.
Speaker A:So basically what you're saying is you can choose purpose, you can choose and give you wanted to have.
Speaker C:Yeah, I mean, most people working in the nonprofit sector are unfulfilled.
Speaker C:Most people working in medicine are unfulfilled.
Speaker C:There's no purpose profession, or purpose job.
Speaker C:We create purpose and meaning or we don't.
Speaker C:And it's about learning that skill.
Speaker C:You know, part of it's mental health and mental wiring.
Speaker C:Like, whether or not you're someone who, like, naturally does that.
Speaker C:There are People who just naturally do that.
Speaker C:But it is a skill you can learn largely through gratitude and reflection.
Speaker C:Reflection is the actual process of meaning making.
Speaker C:Part of the problem with the world right now, Kelly, is people are so damn busy and they don't turn off technology, so they never reflect.
Speaker C:Therefore, no matter what they're doing is not meaningful.
Speaker A:Wow.
Speaker C:Because a life without reflection is a life without meaning.
Speaker C:And between Netflix, social media, work like very people don't put that quiet in there for reflection.
Speaker C:And then work becomes work, life, et cetera is not meaningful.
Speaker C:So that's one of the big things we need to do as a society is figure out how to put reflection back into our day to day experience.
Speaker A:Yeah, it's, it's really funny that you bring that up because I actually recently interviewed Dr.
Speaker A:Robert Pearl and we were talking about how like the healthcare professionals, doctors go into it and then they get just so overwhelmed that the amount of people even leaving the healthcare sector and it's like if they're burned out, they're completely burned out.
Speaker A:They're, they're suffering with ptsd, they're suffering with all sorts of things, and yet they went into becoming medical professionals with.
Speaker C:Purpose, with good professions.
Speaker C:Yeah, the calling professions often have that problem, right, where you're considered like your only choice, you're considered lucky to be able to be successful in it, and you romanticize it and it never adds up to what you thought it was because you're not creating the meaning yourself.
Speaker C:Whether that's teaching, architect, a lawyer, doctor, all these calling based models tend to have problems with that.
Speaker C:And healthcare and education right now are acute because they're understaffed and bureaucracy has taken away the autonomy and craft of those jobs to a large degree.
Speaker C:And they're just overworked.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker A:It's really interesting because, you know, if you go back even one generation to my father's generation, right, where you got a career and you worked in that career for 30, 40 years and you got your golden, your golden parachute when you left and life was good.
Speaker A:It's like that time is so over.
Speaker A:And it's like, were those people living purposeful lives or were they just living to live like I.
Speaker A:Why now are we allowed to live purpose when they weren't?
Speaker C:And again, I don't know if that's true.
Speaker C:I think at certain populations where that was the case, especially like people working in companies, I mean, there's really more, there was more longevity to jobs, there was much less sort of churn around jobs.
Speaker C:Skill sets didn't shift as Much.
Speaker C:You saw a lot of those changes happen.
Speaker C:Yeah, I think the thing that's, I mean, my dad, my father who's, you know, 80 now, like, I mean, he was an industrial spy.
Speaker C:He was a provost at a university.
Speaker C:He was a minor.
Speaker C:What else did he do?
Speaker C:I mean, he had so many random professions.
Speaker C:This is why there's just so many exceptions to what you're describing.
Speaker C:The big piece, Kelly, is that as you moved into the information economy, the power dynamic in the workplace shifted.
Speaker C:People in an industrial economy are highly replaceable and the model was built on value creation coming from raw materials and through a manufacturing process.
Speaker C:With the information economy, value creation is based on knowledge workers.
Speaker C:And suddenly the actual means of value creation were people, not raw materials.
Speaker C:And with that, the power of employees shifted dramatically.
Speaker C:Where it went from something where, you know, don't like your job, you're fired, to like, how do we retain this person, how do we keep them, how do we make sure they're happy?
Speaker C:Because they can easily go to Apple, they can shift over to Google, they can go to Amazon.
Speaker C:The market became fluid and there was way more power based on the way that economy was structured.
Speaker C:So the information economy shift to knowledge workers and shift to more value creation by employees enabled them to start thinking about, oh, I have power now, what do I want?
Speaker C:Whereas that wasn't really possible with earlier economies as much.
Speaker A:That's.
Speaker A:Yeah, I agree completely.
Speaker A:That makes a lot of sense because like, you're right, like as you look now, most people do not stay much longer than three or four years in any position.
Speaker A:And I don't really think like, could they.
Speaker A:Sure, you're absolutely right, they probably could.
Speaker A:But it's like the calling changes or the connection to the job, you stop, you stop having the passion for it and then you might go and work for somewhere else.
Speaker A:Right, you're right.
Speaker A:It's like, I don't know though, is that, is that better or worse?
Speaker A:Makes you wonder.
Speaker A:Right?
Speaker C:Well, I mean it's.
Speaker C:Yeah, it's interesting.
Speaker C:It's like all these different sort of paradigms, like some people argue, like arranged marriages, a lot of cases work better than self selected marriages.
Speaker C:There's all these different instances where choice actually creates unhappiness.
Speaker C:But I think as a writ large, I think it's been positive and negative and people have been able to think about what they want, to advocate for what they want, but then also to be unhappy with not getting what they want.
Speaker C:So it's sort of raised that bar.
Speaker C:And we've also just become a culture of entitlements at choice, which I think has actually ironically decreased a lot of our commitment to each other and to community because we've become more and more individualistic as we've had more and more choice.
Speaker C:Now we just have really unreasonable expectations around individual choice that are, in my perspective, causing huge political problems.
Speaker C:They're creating these sort of have and have not gaps at unprecedented levels.
Speaker C:So, yeah, I'm interested to figure out how could we as a society move back to more collective because it's very clear that's where well being sets.
Speaker A:Well, it's really interesting because in a time that we are more connected to each other than ever, we are the least connected in a meaningful way than we have ever been.
Speaker A:I think, like, it's a.
Speaker A:It's a very strange thing.
Speaker A:And it's like, you're kind of right.
Speaker A:It's like because we have so much access to connection, we don't value it as much or we don't make the effort.
Speaker C:It's really hard.
Speaker C:Well, it's more than I could.
Speaker C:This is my new.
Speaker C:My new organization that I've just launching soon that's focused on that issue.
Speaker C:Like, how do we address the loneliness epidemic and the lack of social connection that's tearing us apart as individuals and as a society?
Speaker C:There are so many things that are causing us to disconnect from just the fact that people are moving all the time.
Speaker C:Like, I moved to Seattle.
Speaker C:My family doesn't live here.
Speaker C:I don't have a network around me.
Speaker C:Right.
Speaker C:The workplace is now remote.
Speaker C:So I'm not like, I'm at home, I'm not in the office.
Speaker C:But it's also little things like, like, I'm not going to go to my neighbor to ask for sugar like they used to in the movies or whatever it is.
Speaker C:Like, I'm just going to go on Amazon and get it in an hour.
Speaker C:Like, there's no need to like engage.
Speaker C:And there's also this perception that there's like a perfect person out there who has a shared interest versus just saying, like, oh, no, like my neighbor actually, even if we're really different, like, I need a relationship there and it's important for proximity.
Speaker C:Like, there's been less emphasis on that connection that way.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker A:It's so funny.
Speaker A:It's like, you know, even living in the city that we live in, we live in Edmonton and we have amazing neighbors.
Speaker A:Like, I've met them a handful of times.
Speaker A:They're really nice people.
Speaker A:But yeah, like, we don't go out of our way to like, hang out with them or to, like, to really generate that relationship.
Speaker A:And I don't know why.
Speaker A:I don't know why.
Speaker A:Maybe I should.
Speaker A:I don't know what's wrong with me.
Speaker A:Maybe I'm broken.
Speaker C:So let's fix it.
Speaker C:Let's.
Speaker C:Why don't we do an experiment?
Speaker C:Maybe you can be the catalyst for change in Edmonton.
Speaker A:Yeah, I guess that's what it takes, isn't it?
Speaker A:It takes someone to say, you know what?
Speaker A:This is stupid, that I don't know my neighbors.
Speaker A:I think I should make some effort.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker C:I mean, I've started just doing a dinner party every two weeks and having, like, four, five, six people over for dinner.
Speaker C:And I find that that's.
Speaker C:You know, it's starting to create that for me.
Speaker C:It's about, you know, asking for help from your neighbors.
Speaker C:It's about.
Speaker C:You know, I think one of the things we see in Seattle is people just don't invite each other into their homes.
Speaker C:Like, we need to open our doors and let people into our homes.
Speaker C:It's part of that individualism.
Speaker C:Like, it's like, there's been more and more of this barrier at the front door, and we need to learn to reopen our front doors and not just be scared.
Speaker C:Everyone's got a gun or someone's crazy or someone's gonna, like.
Speaker C:Like, go on social media and take a picture of something inappropriate in our home.
Speaker C:Like, we just become so weirdly private because we want to curate everyone's experience with us, and that's just so ridiculous.
Speaker A:It is weird because I think about it from the standpoint of, like, I'm.
Speaker A:I'm pretty introverted.
Speaker A:Right?
Speaker A:Like, I just am.
Speaker A:And it's so funny.
Speaker A:I'm the weirdest introvert you've ever met because I'm in business development.
Speaker A:I have a podcast.
Speaker A:I talk to a lot of people.
Speaker A:But, like, personally, I love my alone time.
Speaker A:I love just being Kelly and my family and that being good, right?
Speaker A:And yet, like, yeah, it's.
Speaker A:It's really strange.
Speaker A:And I.
Speaker A:And I.
Speaker A:It's funny because I've been introverted my whole life.
Speaker A:I've preferred to be a little bit isolated my entire life, and so to, like, open that door and have that conversation.
Speaker A:You're right.
Speaker A:But that feels a bit uncomfortable to me.
Speaker C:Isn't that weird, though, Kelly, what's.
Speaker C:What's it going to take for you to invite your neighbors over for dinner?
Speaker A:Oh, my goodness.
Speaker A:I don't know.
Speaker A:I guess I just got to do it.
Speaker A:Like, now that you've made that Aware.
Speaker A:Like, I was.
Speaker A:I feel like I wasn't aware until we just had this conversation, but now that you've made me aware of it, I can't pretend it's not happening.
Speaker C:So when.
Speaker C:When are.
Speaker C:When are you gonna have them over?
Speaker C:Let's figure this out.
Speaker A:You know what?
Speaker A:You're absolutely right.
Speaker A:I think we need to invite them over.
Speaker A:Yeah, we need to set some time.
Speaker A:I.
Speaker A:You know what?
Speaker A:You're right.
Speaker A:I'm going to.
Speaker A:I'm going to talk with Shelby, and we're going to invite them for supper.
Speaker A:You're absolutely right.
Speaker A:Like, this is ridiculous.
Speaker A:And I hope everyone listening is also realizing how crazy this is that you don't know your neighbor.
Speaker C:Yeah, no, it's so common.
Speaker C:I mean, there's some people who do, but it's, like, so prevalent.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker C:Just trying to get, like, a habit of doing that.
Speaker C:It's super nice.
Speaker C:And it's so good for your kids because it also creates a broader sense of safety and community.
Speaker C:It gives them, like, more.
Speaker C:More family.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker C:Neighbors can be much more family than, like, just random friends somewhere in the city.
Speaker C:And it's also really important when, you know, especially with climate change, because we have natural disasters and problems.
Speaker C:Like, your neighbor.
Speaker C:You may have to end up living with your neighbors because your house might get taken out by a tornado or you may have flooding.
Speaker C:Like, you need.
Speaker C:Need.
Speaker C:Like, we need neighbors more than ever, and yet we know them less than ever.
Speaker A:Wow, man.
Speaker A:That's crazy.
Speaker A:Like, I really hate that.
Speaker A:You just opened up my eyes, Aaron.
Speaker C:You're welcome.
Speaker A:It's one of those things that just feels a little bit bonkers, but you're absolutely right.
Speaker A:We need to.
Speaker A:We need to meet our neighbors.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker A:Challenge.
Speaker A:If I'm being challenged, you guys are also being challenged.
Speaker A:Just invite one neighbor over for supper this week and see if there's something there.
Speaker A:See if there's a relationship there.
Speaker A:Like, these are people you live next to every day.
Speaker A:Your kids probably play together.
Speaker A:Like, it's crazy.
Speaker A:It's weird, dude.
Speaker A:But you know what?
Speaker A:I look at it as my life, Aaron.
Speaker A:And growing up, we didn't know our neighbors.
Speaker A:Like, also, growing up in a small city outside of Edmonton, my.
Speaker A:My parents weren't friends with our neighbors either.
Speaker A:Like, heck, I couldn't even pick them out of a picture.
Speaker A:Like, that's how little I saw them.
Speaker C:Wow.
Speaker A:So maybe it's just.
Speaker A:It's like.
Speaker A:What do you call it when it's, like, perpetual.
Speaker C:Yeah, no, it's like.
Speaker C:Yeah, it's just.
Speaker C:It's getting.
Speaker A:I'm Perpetuating.
Speaker A:I'm perpetuating.
Speaker A:It is.
Speaker C:What are the problems, Kelly?
Speaker C:No, it's easy to solve.
Speaker C:It's easy to fix.
Speaker C:Once you sort of realize how simple that is and that your house doesn't.
Speaker C:Like I have.
Speaker C:We're having a bunch of construction down the house.
Speaker C:I'm like, oh, I can't have people over for dinner.
Speaker C:I was like, they're going to come in and say, oh, my God, I can't believe you let me in the house when you have construction going on.
Speaker C:Nobody cares.
Speaker C:I was like, oh, we're in the middle of, like, redoing our living room.
Speaker C:Who cares?
Speaker C:Just.
Speaker A:Just.
Speaker C:That's how you actually.
Speaker C:It's not about curating a restaurant experience.
Speaker C:And I actually intentionally try to serve very simple, boring food because I want to set the bar low so that other people are wanting to host people.
Speaker C:I don't think they have to put together a Thanksgiving meal.
Speaker A:Not ribs and steak night.
Speaker A:It's like hamburgers night.
Speaker C:Well, it can be like, barbecue.
Speaker C:Simple barbecue.
Speaker C:I mean, I'm vegan, so I do my version, which I do just couscous and lentils and a salad, and people bring things.
Speaker C:But, like.
Speaker C:Like, it's simple.
Speaker C:It takes me about an hour to put together, and it doesn't intimidate people to say, oh, well, I'm not a chef, like, Aaron is, so I can't do this.
Speaker C:I'm clearly not.
Speaker C:Like, you put the couscous in a bowl with hot water and some spices and stir it around, and it's done.
Speaker C:Like, tastes great, but, like, it doesn't have to be complicated.
Speaker A:Oh, my gosh.
Speaker A:Like, I am.
Speaker A:I am no cook, but we do order.
Speaker A:We do order equivalent to hellofresh.
Speaker A:It's called fresh prep.
Speaker A:Here we order fresh prep.
Speaker A:It's awesome.
Speaker C:It's awesome.
Speaker A:Yeah, it's made much better cooks out of me.
Speaker A:At least Shelby was already a great cook, but I needed some practice.
Speaker C:One of the things I'm learning, which is fun from a friend, is, like, actually, one of the ways to have the best kind of dinner party is actually cook together.
Speaker C:So invite people over and say, hey, we're going to make this.
Speaker C:And you have those recipes versus a formal.
Speaker C:I've made dinner, it's served.
Speaker C:But to actually just say, hey, I got all the ingredients.
Speaker C:Let's just have a cooking party, and then we'll eat what we made is actually a really nice way to.
Speaker A:You really know how to push people's boundaries, don't you, Aaron?
Speaker C:This one should not be a Boundary Kelly.
Speaker C:This one should not be one.
Speaker A:Oh, my gosh, dude.
Speaker A:Yeah, it's.
Speaker A:It would feel like a boundary to invite for me.
Speaker A:It'd be like, you invited me over and I gotta cook the food.
Speaker A:But that's just introverted Kelly being like, I don't know if I want to do that, dude.
Speaker A:I want to spend some time with you.
Speaker A:On finding purpose.
Speaker A:Finding purpose has been something that, I'll be honest, I don't think I ever found purpose.
Speaker A:I think purpose found me.
Speaker A:There was like a day that I woke up and I was like, I love this, I love what I'm doing.
Speaker A:I'm passionate about it, and I'm going to take this thing to the next level.
Speaker A:I ended up starting a company that was business development.
Speaker A:I now have the business development podcast.
Speaker A:Like, it has become something that I've become incredibly passionate about.
Speaker A:But it's weird because, dude, there was a.
Speaker A:There was a time when I didn't even know what it was.
Speaker A:Like, I had no idea that this was a position in a company, even in college.
Speaker A:It wasn't until after college that someone gave me the opportunity to try it and I was like, holy crap, this is a thing.
Speaker A:I had to Google it because I hadn't even heard of it before.
Speaker A:Right, right.
Speaker A:But I wonder how many people.
Speaker A:That's what happens.
Speaker A:They don't find their purpose.
Speaker A:They find something that is purposeful or purpose finds them.
Speaker A:What do you think about that?
Speaker C:I think the frame of purpose finds you is problematic because it basically sets the story of, like, I just need to wait for it to come to me.
Speaker C:And it's not taking responsibility.
Speaker C:Doesn't mean there's not some truth in it.
Speaker C:I just think it's a problematic way to think about it because, you know, I'm an 18 year old, I'm like, okay, well, I'll just sit at my desk and wait for purpose to find it.
Speaker C:Like, that's not what happened.
Speaker A:That's not what happened.
Speaker C:No, you experimented.
Speaker A:That's right.
Speaker C:And you reflected while you were experimenting until you found something where that one morning you woke up reflecting be like, huh, I think I may have found something here that works.
Speaker A:Sure.
Speaker C:Okay, so I think you more did Agile software development of experimentation, checking to see if it was working, and then you like landed on, oh, like, this is working for me.
Speaker C:I'm finding the needs that I have met here.
Speaker A:Yes.
Speaker C:This aligning with my personality.
Speaker C:So I think, like, it's a great Hollywood story that purpose found you.
Speaker C:I think the reality is you just did a bunch of micro experiments until you found something that's fair.
Speaker A:I've done a ton of things before I found business development.
Speaker A:You're absolutely right.
Speaker A:Yes.
Speaker C:Right.
Speaker C:And it's not like you read an article and was like, oh my God, business development, it's not.
Speaker C:That's not how that happens.
Speaker C:So I just think as a story, it's problematic for others to talk about it that way.
Speaker C:And the reality is, the answer is just experiment, reflect, experiment, reflect.
Speaker C:And business development 10 years from now may no longer be the thing that, like, you enjoy.
Speaker A:Correct.
Speaker C:You have to continuously reflect and do that because it's not static that way.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker A:And that's something else I wanted to chat with you about was can your purpose change?
Speaker C:So it depends on your definition of it.
Speaker C:My experience is like, we kind of are who we are.
Speaker C:I think as you get older, you just peel layers of the onion back and you get more to something core and you get rid of a lot of the pieces that are taken from society, from your parents, from expectation.
Speaker C:As you get older, those.
Speaker C:Like your wisdom basically peels off all that nonsense and gets more to the core.
Speaker C:So to me, it's less about it changes and more that you're actually removing layers of distortion and getting to your more and more to your core.
Speaker A:Amazing.
Speaker A:So does that mean that, like, business.
Speaker C:Development isn't a purpose?
Speaker C:Right.
Speaker C:Like, there's something in this, that's the purpose.
Speaker C:So no, if you did something else, it'd be further doing something along those lines.
Speaker A:Correct, Correct.
Speaker A:It's not the business development itself that ends up being the purpose, and especially not with this show.
Speaker A:What the purpose is helping educate and inspire so many people.
Speaker A:That's where the purpose comes from.
Speaker A:But you're right, it's like business development could have been the tool, but the purpose is different.
Speaker A:You're absolutely right.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker C:You could do that.
Speaker C:As a teacher, you could do that.
Speaker C:I mean, there's a lot of different ways you could do that.
Speaker C:Right.
Speaker C:You can do it.
Speaker C:As a parent, what we found is when people are authentic with their purpose, it's.
Speaker C:It is how they parent, it is how they work.
Speaker C:It's how they show up in, like, every aspect of their life.
Speaker C:So it's trying to find that.
Speaker C:That.
Speaker C:That common root.
Speaker C:Then I often, like, when I'm working with someone on their purpose, I'm like, they've got a draft of it.
Speaker C:I'm like, okay, could a CEO have that purpose?
Speaker C:Like, if you went and did a CEO, could you do it?
Speaker C:Okay, great.
Speaker C:Could your assistant to the CEO have That purpose.
Speaker C:Right.
Speaker C:Could the center for the New York Knicks have that purpose?
Speaker C:Could a doctor have that purpose?
Speaker C:And if it can't pass like any of these, it's too specific around, like a profession.
Speaker C:Like, it needs to be something more generalized that could be in different parts of your life for it to be something that like, is authentic.
Speaker A:Can we chat a bit about pro bono services?
Speaker A:Because, you know, your work with Taproot really kind of exposed something where it was like, there's a lot of professions that aren't like lawyers and doctors and things like that that can be pro bono work.
Speaker A:But most people don't look at it that way.
Speaker A:Can we chat a little bit about the reward?
Speaker A:The reward of doing pro bono work?
Speaker C:Yeah, I do a lot of it myself.
Speaker C:I think there's.
Speaker C:But I mean, it goes back into those three areas of purpose.
Speaker C:Right.
Speaker C:So one is relationships.
Speaker C:It's a great way to make new friends.
Speaker C:It's a great way to meet people from other sectors.
Speaker C:It's a great way to network.
Speaker C:So there's a.
Speaker C:And it's often with like, similar people, people with similar values.
Speaker C:So that's high value.
Speaker C:It's impact.
Speaker C:Whatever you do professionally is probably the way in which you can make the greatest impact because that's what you're paid the most money for and therefore what's least accessible to other people.
Speaker C:And then growth, applying your profession to a new sector, a new situation is how you grow and getting out of your comfort zone.
Speaker C:So if you're looking at how do I be more fulfilled, how do I have more purpose?
Speaker C:Like, pro bono work really hits that really well because it has the relationships, the impact and the growth that you'd want and you'd see.
Speaker C:And I saw through Taproot, like, people got married, people moved because they found a new neighborhood, people got involved long term with nonprofits, people found new jobs, people got promoted, and all the things you'd hope would happen would happen.
Speaker C:And I mean, the research is like the things that matter most in terms of happiness, it's like number one on that list is like helping others.
Speaker C:So.
Speaker C:And I think often when we're getting paid for stuff, it doesn't feel like we're helping others.
Speaker C:It feels more transactional or it can.
Speaker A:It's like if you can remove the transaction, you just get the fulfillment.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker C:I think it's interesting with pro bono right now, which is somewhat challenging, is that with COVID and with the cloud based work and with remote work, more and more people are doing freelance work.
Speaker C:And the dynamic for like A freelancer to like do pro bono works different than I work at Apple in marketing and I'm doing pro bono work.
Speaker A:Yes.
Speaker C:Because I think often someone doing freelance like they people are constantly asking to work for free or discounted, whereas like Apple, they're not doing that while you're in your job.
Speaker C:It's like about doing it outside of that.
Speaker C:So it is also this interesting.
Speaker C:Like there's two very distinct populations.
Speaker C:There's like the institutional and then there's just sort of the individual freelancer.
Speaker C:I think every freelancer should, should take on pro bono work that stretches them so that they build their skills to that next level or they get the network to the next level.
Speaker C:They should always be doing it, but they just need to be much more strategic about it because it's actually a core part of their development of their business.
Speaker A:Yeah, no, I agree.
Speaker A:I agree.
Speaker A:Dude, that's been absolutely amazing.
Speaker A:I want to chat a little bit about board.dev.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker C:So it's one of my new projects built off of original insights from Taproot.
Speaker C:But the basic idea is nonprofit board been around for a long time.
Speaker C:They are based on very traditional understanding of the world because they were designed so long ago.
Speaker C:And the reality is that today for a nonprofit to be successful, and the ones that are successful, they fully embrace technology and the ones that don't do it tend to have diminished impact.
Speaker C:The challenge is nonprofits spend about a dollar for every dollar three a company of similar size would spend on technology.
Speaker C:So if a nonprofit's spending a dollar of its budget and it's a million dollar budget, the company at the same size is spending three.
Speaker C:And so we're seeing way under investment in technology by nonprofits.
Speaker C:And the reason for it to a large degree is that most nonprofits are small and they don't have senior tech staff.
Speaker C:If they have anybody, they have like a junior person or a small team.
Speaker C:And there's no strategic conversations about technology.
Speaker C:There's no meaningful business case being put against investments in technology.
Speaker C:So you just sort of get stuck in the spiral of un, like underinvestment.
Speaker C:So what we're doing@board.dev is we sort of have this insight that if you have a cto, a CIO or someone sort of on that career path on your board, they can play that role of bringing that strategic perspective into the boardroom and making sure that you're not only compliant as an organization with, you know, technology, privacy, security, but also that you're really thinking strategically about how could technology change the nature of what we're able to do and how is technology changing our constituents lives and therefore how do we need to adjust how we're adding value in the world?
Speaker C:AI has certainly accelerated this.
Speaker C:I mean, so many boards are talking about, like, what does AI mean for us?
Speaker C:And they don't know how to talk about it.
Speaker C:We need people on the boards who know how to talk about these things.
Speaker C:So our goal is to have a technologist on every nonprofit board and to create standards and processes for them to be successful in that role.
Speaker C:And by doing that, greatly increase the impact of the nonprofit sector and then also get technology professionals, who are often very separated and isolated from the reality of the world, world into the community.
Speaker C:And we think through that it'll help mature the technology industry, which to date is still a pretty immature industry in terms of its maturity of its responsibility as a part of society.
Speaker C:So it's sort of a twofold mission.
Speaker C:Like the core is health and nonprofits, but there's sort of this Trojan horse of let's help the tech industry mature and develop more soul behind it.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker A:Well, you know, I mean, it's.
Speaker A:Is tech industry primarily millennial run at this point point?
Speaker C:I don't know the data on that.
Speaker C:I mean, Gen X is certainly a big part of it.
Speaker C:Sure.
Speaker C:Still, boomers are certainly not relevant as relevant now.
Speaker C:Yeah, millennials are a big.
Speaker C:They are a big part of it.
Speaker C:And I think we've also had this story that tech companies are actually doing more good than nonprofits.
Speaker C:And a lot of companies have gotten sold on this sort of concept, which occasionally is true.
Speaker C:It's generally not the case.
Speaker C:And it's really important, I think, for these tech execs to.
Speaker C:To get involved in nonprofits and, you know, starting as, you know, starting in your starting off, like doing pro bono work in your 20s, and then sort of by mid-30s, you should start looking at joining a board.
Speaker C:And by the time you're a cio, cto, you should be on a significant board.
Speaker C:And it should be a major part of how you show up in the world.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker A:It's about giving back.
Speaker C:It's about getting involved.
Speaker C:I don't even think I was giving back.
Speaker C:It's like getting involved and realizing you're part of a community and getting the context.
Speaker C:Sort of going to the new Kamala Harris thing about the coconut falling from the tree and didn't come without context around it.
Speaker C:Your organization exists in context.
Speaker C:Your family exists in context.
Speaker C:Where you live exists in context.
Speaker C:And if you're not contributing to that.
Speaker C:That's all going to decay.
Speaker A:Interesting.
Speaker A:So what you're kind of saying is leading a company really isn't enough.
Speaker A:There has to be like, there should be more to it.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker C:I mean, there's exceptions.
Speaker C:Right.
Speaker C:But I also just think of one dimension.
Speaker C:You don't want to be one dimensional in general.
Speaker C:Right.
Speaker C:So it's good to sort of see different perspectives to get out into the community.
Speaker C:You are going to be a happier human being on a sustained basis if you do that.
Speaker A:It sounds like honestly the whole thing and almost every point has led back to you're better off with community.
Speaker A:Do more about building your community.
Speaker A:That is the secret here.
Speaker A:To be living purposeful.
Speaker C:Well, Kelly, I mean, think about if you were a cave person back wherever it was in, you know, three, four or five, whatever, however many years those people lived.
Speaker C:Like the number one predictor of your lifespan was whether or not you were in a tribe.
Speaker C:A human being on their own in the Serengeti is dead.
Speaker C:Like, you cannot survive on your own.
Speaker C:So we are biologically wired to need to find community and connection and we're highly threatened for good reason when we're not.
Speaker C:So like we are wired to need that connection.
Speaker C:So there's just a very strong biological basis for it based on how we evolve to be able to survive in nature.
Speaker C:Humans are not.
Speaker C:They're not like some animals that are just fine as loners.
Speaker C:Like, we are not designed to be loners.
Speaker A:We're not, we're not good loners.
Speaker C:Like we are, we are prey.
Speaker C:We go from pre work as a community or predators as individuals for prey.
Speaker C:And to be able to be on that side of it, you have to be in a community, man.
Speaker A:How did we end up here?
Speaker A:Like, that's, that's the question.
Speaker A:That's the thing that like gets me is like, I agree with you completely.
Speaker A:But I feel too like as a species we've really taken community out of the whole thing.
Speaker A:Like, what the heck?
Speaker A:How did this happen?
Speaker C:So many a book on the topic.
Speaker C:Yeah, there's a lot of great research on that topic.
Speaker C:And I think a lot of it is we've allowed companies to take over the world.
Speaker C:And companies in a lot of cases do not benefit from community.
Speaker C:And they are trying to replace it with something they can charge for most of the things.
Speaker C:I mean, it goes back to even you're a parent.
Speaker C:Like the best toy for a lot of kids is a cardboard box, right?
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker C:But no company wants to sell that because that's not like viable.
Speaker C:So we're always trying to like sell things to meet these needs when often like, the best solution is to have your neighbors over for dinner.
Speaker A:The best solution is to have our neighbors over for dinner.
Speaker A:I'm on it, dude.
Speaker A:You got, you got me.
Speaker C:I'm counting on.
Speaker C:I want a photo.
Speaker C:I want proof.
Speaker A:You got me.
Speaker A:You got me.
Speaker C:So I think that's, yeah, so I think that's where, where a lot of that has gone and science has also just gone evolved so rapidly and companies have learned how to use science to manipulate people.
Speaker C:So we like to think that there's free will and free markets, but the reality is companies have gotten good enough at using psychology, this is the dark side of it, to learn how to build addiction, to learn how to cause you to want things that are not actually in your best interest.
Speaker C:And they've done a lot of lobbying to ensure that's protected.
Speaker C:So I think, think a lot of this is at a political level of trying to figure out the role for companies that enables them to be successful but doesn't enable them to take advantage of the things that we think we need but don't actually.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker A:Amazing.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:I, I, who knows, man?
Speaker A:Is that could be the next book.
Speaker C:You can write that one.
Speaker C:I don't need to write a book right now.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker C:But yeah, no, it's, no, it's really fun to work on and it's nice to work on a building global movement, but starting locally and figuring out like how can you just in your neighborhood start to create that change?
Speaker A:It's one relationship at a time.
Speaker C:Yep, exactly.
Speaker C:Exactly.
Speaker A:Aaron, you know, there's a lot of people listening right now who have been inspired by the things we've chatted about.
Speaker A:I know you do public speaking.
Speaker A:Are there some other services that you do as well?
Speaker C:I mean, I do public speaking, but mostly what I'm doing now is starting this new organization just launching.
Speaker C:It's going to be called the Chamber of Connection.
Speaker C:And the idea is that it's going to be in every city within 10 years as a infrastructure to help people have dinner with their neighbors and to help people connect.
Speaker C:And that's really where I'm focusing most of my energy.
Speaker C:If people are interested though, in technology and boards, check out board.dev.
Speaker C:if you're.
Speaker C:I have a purpose driven leadership program down in Chile and Latin America.
Speaker C:So if you happen to know people down there that need that like bring it on purpose economy website generally has most of my projects going, but mostly just, I think I just encourage everyone to just create the change in their own lives.
Speaker C:These things are not, they're not that hard once you get past the sort of initial fear.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker A:It's all choice.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:We have to get to a point where we make a choice to do something different.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker C:And they're enjoyable things.
Speaker C:You just have to get past that, you know, get past this whole story of we're too busy, we're too whatever, and just be like, like, what is the most fundamental human thing that we want to.
Speaker C:Like I should do today, reflect, be in communion with others.
Speaker A:Amazing.
Speaker A:If people want to get a hold of you, Aaron, what's the best way for them to do so?
Speaker C:LinkedIn is great and then, you know, my email is aaronaronhurstus.
Speaker C:So that's also another way.
Speaker C:But LinkedIn's always a good.
Speaker C:I'm pretty on top of my LinkedIn world, so feel free to DM me there.
Speaker A:Awesome.
Speaker A:Well, thank you so much for joining us.
Speaker A:I really enjoyed your book.
Speaker A:I am going to be recommending it.
Speaker A:It's excellent.
Speaker C:And yeah, yeah, it makes a great gift at dinner parties, by the way.
Speaker C:True, true.
Speaker C:Great to talk to my friend.
Speaker A:Until next time.
Speaker A:This has been the Business Development Podcast and we will catch you on the flip side.
Speaker B:This has been the Business Development Podcast with Kelly Kennedy.
Speaker B: business development firm in: Speaker B:His passion and his specialization is in customer relationship generation and business development.
Speaker B:The show is brought to you by Capital Business Development, your business development specialists.
Speaker B:For more, we invite you to the website at www.capitalbd.ca.
Speaker B:see you next time on the Business Development Podcast.
