A 17-minute Deep Cuts episode on the work that would actually be missed if you stopped — featuring Seth Godin and Dr. Mike Steger.
A few weeks ago a successful business owner said something to me that I haven't been able to put down. I've gotten really good at being busy. I don't think I'm any good at being useful anymore. He'd hit every target he could name. He was also describing his life as a problem he couldn't quite see. He's not wrong. And he's not alone.
This week's Deep Cuts pulls one thread out of two recent conversations — with Seth Godin and with Dr. Mike Steger, the researcher behind the most-used meaning-in-life questionnaire in the world. Both of them, in different rooms, pointed at the same thing: we've confused being productive with being a contribution.
Act 1 — The Idea
There are two kinds of contribution. The visible kind that produces status, and the generative kind that produces something specific in the world. Seth replaces the entire scale-and-growth conversation with a gardener. Mike breaks meaning into three dimensions — coherence, purpose, and significance — and names where most successful people are starving.
Act 2 — The Tension
If you take significance seriously, the work isn't to do more. It's to focus on the small handful of things and people that would actually be missed if you weren't doing them. Mike asks the dangerous question: what's it for? Seth tells the story of a wealth manager who built half a billion dollars in assets by sending clients to four competitors when they asked for the wrong thing. Grabbing things is how you drown.
Act 3 — The Action
A two-week exercise built on Steger's research on noticing and Gollwitzer's work on implementation intentions — the most-replicated finding in behavioral science on closing the gap between intention and action. Seven evenings of noticing. Two if-then plans. Less than five minutes a day.
The question to carry
If you disappeared from your work tomorrow — not died, not retired, just stopped — what specifically would not get made? And whose name would be attached to what was lost?
Listen now wherever you get your podcasts.
