Making purpose practical

Timestamps 

00:00:00: Introduction

00:01:42: Purpose and fulfilment

00:03:25: Losing your purpose

00:05:51: Getting to the sweet spot

00:08:01: Find progress

00:08:45: Favour direction over speed

00:09:41: David's personal story

00:13:11: David's career advice

00:14:03: Final words  

Interview Transcription 

Helen Tupper:  Welcome to the Squiggly Careers podcast.  I am Helen, one of your hosts, and this episode is the final one of the special series that Sarah and I created to bring to life some of the ideas and insights in our new book You Coach You.  In this series, we talked to lots of different experts to get their thoughts on how we can help ourselves through some of the knottier moments in a Squiggly Career.  We've covered dealing with distractions, we've covered overcoming constraints, we've helped you build your self-belief, all of those things are there for you in the episodes and also in the book, because all of those episodes relate to a chapter in You Coach You.   

Today the chapter is Purpose, and the guest that you're going to hear me talking to, our expert today, is David Hieatt.  I'm very excited about sharing this one with you, because Sarah and I have admired his work for such a long time.  If you don't know him, he's definitely 100% well worth googling after today.  He is the co-founder of the inspirational DO Lectures and also the co-founder of Hiut Denim and the author of DO Purpose, just to name a few of the things that he does. 

I find his posts on social media compelling and inspirational.  It always makes me pause for thought, which I think is a good thing when you're in scroll mode on social media.  Together, in our conversation, we explore how to make purpose practical, how to make it part of your every day, because I think that is what he does so well.  He takes this concept of purpose that can sometimes feel a bit aspirational, and he makes it super attainable; attainable on a day-to-day basis, and that is what we talk about in the episode.  I really hope you find this as practical and useful as I found this conversation and let's get started. 

David Hieatt:  If we think about running a business, the business wants to run us, and mostly it can win and so it's a daily fight between the business and me and so I have to fight the business every day.  There will be a time when you're running a business that's going to test you.  If you are just running this business to make a ton of money, have a nice life and all those things, they are good aims, but it might not be enough for you to keep going. 

The reason we can think about purpose in practical ways is like grit, is stubbornness, and it keeps you going because the most important thing in terms of business is not to quit.  If you get to the end of the week and you're super tired, you're super stressed, but you've kept the business going but it means nothing to you, at some point you're either going to burn out or have a wobble in terms of, "I don't know what I'm doing anymore in my life". 

The reason billionaires have to give money away is they didn't have enough fulfilment making the money in the first place, so now they're getting fulfilment from giving stuff away.  If you think about the six human needs, fulfilment is one of them.  There's love and connection, there's all sorts of others, but you have to find meaning in your work otherwise at some point you're going to question it.  The midlife crisis is all about the lack of meaning in the work people are doing. 

Purpose can grow and it can be nurtured.  It's not like an epiphany, it's something you can perhaps work towards.  I will give you one example and it's like a personal story.  I do all the businesses my wife -- when I say "I" I really mean "we".  We built a company called Howies, which was really purpose led, and we ended up selling it and then we lost our purpose because we'd sold it.  The thing that we really valued was our independence, so that was interesting where you go, "Oh my gosh".  Losing your purpose is odd and it's disconcerting.  Suddenly you do lose your mojo and it's interesting.  I did a plan for the Hiut Denim company.  I wrote a business plan, and I put it to one side for a year, because I couldn't work out why I wanted to do it. 

I had one phone call with a former designer, and he said, "Why aren't you doing the plan for Hiut Denim?"  I said, "I don't know why I want to run around the same track twice".  He said, "Dave, it's not about you. it's about a town making jeans, it's about passing the skills of that town to the next generation.  So, get out of your own way, put your ego to one side.  This is bigger than you".  In that moment, in that phone call, a lightning rod went through me and I just went, "Okay, I can run this track twice because I know why.  It's not about me, it's about making sure these skills stay in this town and make a town, that's what Cardigan was and is, and to make a town, it has to make, and that's your identity.  Purpose can sound like all this nice to have, it's not nice to have; it's important to have.  Grit and stubbornness is fuel for the journey, but you just have to know you're not going to quit on something, because you care about it so much.  It's important to you.  Quitting on a business is fine, okay, sometimes you have to do it, but to quit on a dream that's hard.  Saying goodbye to a dream, "Oh I'm never going to be able to do that", you go, "Oh that's hard.  That's heart-breaking. 

That's life-breaking stuff.  You want to work so it feels like play.  My issue is I find it really hard to not work, because I don't view it as work, so I have to be told not to work.  If I want to be married and stay married and I do, 28 years in, I would like it to be more, is I have to switch off for the weekend.  To be in a point where work feels like play is a good place to be.  I have even gone in the sea each morning, most mornings, and it's difficult.  You walk into the sea, and you go, "It's crazy cold", and I don't like the cold and I can barely swim.  I say to myself, "I just have to get to the sweet spot because there is one", but I know the first ten minutes are not the sweet spot. 

At that point, I'm like, "Why am I doing this?"  Then I get to the sweet spot and I'm going, "It's okay now", and that's where you want to get to with your work where you go, "Do you know what, this is hard work but it's good work".  You have to do the work.  There's no magical pill you can take that doesn't do the work and everybody wants the shortcut.  How do you get 13 years' worth of experience?  You do 13 years' worth of work.  You go, "Is there a hack for that?"  You go, "Oh for goodness sake, come on, just do the work, enjoy the work".  Because you enjoy the work, you get good at the work and that gives you meaning.  If you can only do easy things, you're going to have a hard life.  If you can do hard things, you're going to have an easy life. 

Doing hard things means that most people can't do them. 

I think that's an interesting thing and for me, if you ask me, what is the challenge of business or what is the success metric of the business?  Yes, I want to try and get 400 people their jobs back.  Okay, it's a ridiculously hard dream.  The chances of me pulling it off are rare, but somebody else has done it, so it's no longer impossible.  If I just work every day and I improve and push one thing forward each day, that to me is progress.  Progress gives me happiness.  Going backwards is miserable, and so if I can find a sliver of progress anywhere every day, then that's enough for me.  It's like when you have a painter doing your house or you've got builders in the house, and you go into the bathroom and it's not quite completed but they've done one little wall and you walk in and you go, "Oh, progress". 

We like progress.  People are obsessed by speed. 

How quickly can I get there?  Direction is much more important.  Are you going in the right direction?  But people want to get there by tomorrow, they have unrealistic timelines to quite sensible dreams, because they give up because the timeline is so ridiculous.  You go, "I don't know any business that's been built brilliantly in three years".  Most businesses take a decade before they really start.  Even Googles and Nikes, you go and read Nike's Phil Knight's book; for the first ten years, it's not a test of endurance.  I have just come in each day; when all the data says you should stop, and he didn't because he loved to run. 

He wanted to make sure that he built the best shoes so people could run; he had grit.  I'll tell you a personal story, which I am not proud of, is when I was running Howies I was so driven.  I wanted to build the best brand in the world, and we were doing some quite special things.  We knew we had to go and get some money from somewhere because we were growing so fast, it was ridiculous.  I didn't have the savviness to slow down.  We were growing too fast, and I was hell-bent on us growing even faster.   

We had all these people that wanted to buy it, like really special people.  PPR who owned Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent, Puma, we had the guy who started AOL, Japan's richest guy.  We could have chosen anyone when we sold it, and I'd lost my mojo because actually what I really loved was being able to give it direction.  Then somebody took my direction away.  When I said I was going to resign, even though that was going to cost me a ton of money, because I'd signed up to a 12-year deal and that was the thing that I really wanted to make this thing happen, is half the people that I employed were delighted that I was leaving, because I was pushing them so hard.  I was pushing myself hard, and then 49% of them were gutted because they actually really enjoyed being pushed. 

Now, that isn't a good metric and I'm not proud of that and I learned from that.  I was a little bit broken for a year and the thing for me was, "Next time, I'm not going to be a boss.  I don't want to be a boss.  I'm a terrible boss in as much as I can't manage myself, but I can be a good coach.  I want to hire amazing human beings with drive.  I think I can help them fly".  For me, being a coach now is much more fun.  I'm not going to be the angry boss; I'm going to be a good coach and I'm going to get out of people's way and I'm going to give them the confidence that they could go and shoot for the stars.  When you start thinking of, "Stop being a boss and see how you can grow people, because if you grow people, you're going to grow a business", it's as simple as that. 

Helen Tupper:  There's someone that we both know, called Ian Sanders, who has also been on the podcast recently talking about his book, 365 Ways to Have a Good Day.  One of the things that he does is he has a good things list, and he has these notebooks because he talks about how he catalogues his career.  On one side of the notebook he just writes down interesting things he's done and read and on the other side of the notebook he has good things. 

He writes down the good things that have happened that day, that week.  I thought, "Actually, when you're really busy and when work feels hard, because you could get into feeling quite negative, that actually maybe just taking that moment to write down one good thing could give you that insight into, 'What does feel purposeful and meaningful?'"  Maybe you can't see it on a day-to-day basis but if you wrote down 30 good things that had happened that month maybe there'd be some consistencies in those good things which would help you to see, "What is the work that feels meaningful for me?" 

Maybe that's a useful thing for people to try out.  I wasn't sure if you'd got anything else that if someone's listening to this and they're like, "Wow, that feels really interesting, little bit Squiggly Career, David, as well", is there anything you would recommend to people to do? 

David Hieatt:  It sounds like flip, but it's hugely powerful.  Before you go to sleep each night, just go, "What am I grateful for?"  If you keep saying that enough, it is like you are running your own business, you are brave enough to do it.  You're in charge of your own time, you have the potential to really help your people that work for you in extraordinary ways and for you to be a decent human being to decent people.  So you go, "How lucky are we?  I get to go in the sea most mornings.  I've got the same number of wheels on my car as a billionaire".  What are we grateful for?  We get to run our own businesses.  If it's not fun, it's our fault. 

Helen Tupper:  Thank you so much for listening to this discussion with David.  I hope you found it useful, please let me know, we'd love to get your feedback on this and actually all the other episodes that you might have listened to, in this series in January.  You can just email us, we're Helen&Sarah@squigglycareers.com.  We read all the emails; we really appreciate it.  It's just like all the reviews, we see all of those reviews.  Sarah and I screenshot them to each other, they really matter to us.  Sometimes when you're just talking into a microphone, on your own like I am now, it's kind of easy to forget that other people listen and this might help them in different ways, so please do let us know because it makes it really meaningful to us, to know that this is useful to you. 

You Coach You is out now!  You'll know this if you've listened to the other episodes.  We are really proud of the book.  It is part of our mission to make careers better for everybody.  We really believe that coaching is a skill that if we help as many people as possible to have it, they will be able to help themselves with the knotty moments in a squiggly career.  That's why we've written the book.  It is a super practical read.  Yes, there are a few inspirational quotes but honestly there are way more tools in there. 

There are over 50 ideas for action, there are over 100 coach-yourself questions.  It is a book to be used, it is a book to be scribbled in, it is a book to try out tools with the different people that you work with.  That's what it's there for.  If you do buy the book, we would really love to see the book.  We'd love to see you and your book.  Tag us in any pictures that you take of the book, the book on your shelf, all that kind of stuff, we really love to see it.  I think it makes it more tangible and more real and even more exciting when you put so much work into your words, it's lovely to see that it has an impact on people. 

If you do post it, we would love to see it.  Hopefully, you have enjoyed this series and Sarah and I will be back with our normal Squiggly Career conversation next week, so look forward to speaking to you all then.  Bye, everyone.