How to find your purpose (w/ Master Fixer Molly Graham) | from Fixable

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They're the ones who ruthlessly protect their team's time and attention. And yet, so many of us are still losing hours to the basics, like procurement, ordering supplies, chasing down purchases that should just happen. That's where Walmart Business comes in. It's built to simplify your operations. A huge assortment of business products, everyday low prices, and fast, reliable shipping and fulfillment. You can manage all of it on your schedule, online, in-store, or right from the Walmart Business app. It's Walmart, built for your business. Get your team focused on what actually moves the needle. Sign up for a free Walmart Business account today at business.walmart.com Hi WorkLife listeners, it's me, Molly. Recently, I was a guest on another TED podcast, Fixable, with Anne Morris and Frances Fry. Each episode on Fixable, Anne and Frances take on a problem with work and fix it. And in this episode, I joined them to kick off a series they're doing this month on a big problem that almost everyone faces, one that can feel impossible to solve. What is your true purpose and how do you find it? This was a really fun conversation and I'm so excited for you to hear it. Now on to the episode. I think that I spent a lot of my early career fighting to be remembered, like fighting to do work that was so important it would be in a history book or written down or something like that. And I had to confront, no one's gonna remember you. Like, no one gives a shit about you. Like, no one, the work you do is for you, not for other people. Hello, everyone. Welcome to Fixable, a show where we take the problems at work that feel unfixable and prove that they are not. I'm Anne Morris. And I'm Frances Fry. This month, we're going deep on this very powerful variable in work and life, Frances, which is purpose. We see a hunger for purpose everywhere we go. We see it from young people just starting out in their careers, but also from people reinventing themselves and embracing purpose at work in new ways. So in this series, we're going to ask all the hard questions. How do you find purpose? How do you create it? What do you do if you've lost it? What do you do if you've never had it at all? You know, people often think purpose is a soft idea and maybe there are soft contours to it, but we should be clear, it can provide incredible advantage in the workplace. It's a source of resilience. It's a source of ambition. It's a source of focus. And teams and organizations with a clear purpose go further, faster. Oh, absolutely. We see it all the time. It can be a bit slippery as a concept. So the practical definition of purpose that we're going to use in these conversations is simply the why behind the choices we make. And I can't wait. We have some really terrific guests lined up. Oh, they're amazing. Thinkers, leaders, builders, people who have done the hard work of figuring out this purpose thing, sometimes after spectacular detours. Our goal with this series is to help you, our listeners, build a roadmap to finding and unleashing your own purpose at work. So today on the show to kick off this series is a guest who is a very familiar face and voice here at TED. Her TED Talk has over a million and a half views. She's the new host of the WorkLife podcast. It's the wildly talented, multifaceted Molly Graham. Before Molly became what she describes as a company and community builder, she worked at tech companies like Google and Facebook, where she became an expert in scale. She also has a substack called Lessons and is the co-founder of a leadership peer group called the Glue Club. And what I appreciate most about the wildly talented, multifaceted Molly Graham is that she takes the multi and knits it together so that one plus one plus one is way more than three. And I learned so much from her privately, and I'm really looking forward to our listeners learning from her collectively. She is a renaissance woman for the digital age, and I'm really looking forward to this discussion. Molly Graham, welcome to Fixable. Thanks for having me, Anne. I'm happy to be here. Oh, we're thrilled to have you on the show. Frances is devastated to miss this conversation, so she sends her regrets. Well, tell her I say hi. We want to congratulate you right off the bat on a new season of WorkLife. Thanks. I am finding my podcast legs, learning from the two of you. This is really your first swing at this format. I've been on a lot of other people's podcasts, but this is my first time as a host, and it's, as you know, very different. It's very different, but you appear to be a total natural. Oh, well, that's very nice. I don't feel that way, but I'm glad I'm faking it well. This month on the show, we're tackling this big, messy theme of purpose at work. And based on our deep, deep reporting, you said yes to TED's offer to host the show in the first conversation that you had about it. Yeah. What was the why behind that yes? And I'm curious how it's connected to how you understand your own purpose at this point in your career. Yeah, I did say yes on the first call. I mean, I'm sure I said, let me think about it, but I basically said, yeah, yeah, I would do that. For me, my life took a big turn, you know, let's call it three and a half years ago, where I, you know, I've spent sort of 18 years building companies and being the right hand of, you know, various CEOs. I was a COO for a lot of the last part of my career. And I got to a point where basically that was the job everyone was trying to hire me for. And it was like, yeah, you know, people would call me and say, hey, do you want this job? And I'd be like, you know, I'd be really good at that job. You called the right person. I am absolutely one of the best people on earth to help you build your company and deal with all your weird, and I'm going to be miserable. I'm going to be miserable doing that job. I love weird as a noun. It is part of the job description. Yeah, but I just realized that the Venn diagram between what I was great at and what I loved doing had changed, which is really scary. And it took me on this three and a half year journey just to cut it all a little short of like, what is the work I want to do? And what, you know, if it's not building companies and if it's not doing this thing that I'm now well-known for, what is it? And that was a very scary, hard journey for me. But I arrived at realizing that what I loved doing is creating spaces where people can learn and grow, but also feel safe and feel seen to talk about just the hard part of work. I basically love making people feel both more seen and more confident at work. And I think those are some of the tools that give you grounding to sort of do your best work. And a lot of people travel through work feeling lonely, feeling confused, feeling insane. Like they're like, is it supposed to be this hard? And so I think when they offered me WorkLife, I was like, this feels like a much bigger, incredible space to be able to do this work, which is to try to reach people that I'm never going to meet and say, hey, it's going to be okay. You know, and the thing that you're going through, other people have gone through and here's some tools to help you out and some stories to make you feel a little more grounded. And your impact is no longer limited by the walls of an organization. You get to blow out those walls in this kind of a format. We wanted you to help kick off this And I was like, you think this is solvable? But she did. Literally five sessions later, it was like, you gotta go because this is not your work. And she helped me realize that I had work to do on like, what it was that I wanted to do, but I had to step away in order to do that work. And I had to sort of step off that path. That was the moment that was sort of a right turn. This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn. Running a small business means every hire matters. A bad hire can cost you time, money, and momentum. A good hire, they can change everything. But finding great talent isn't easy, especially when you don't have the time or resources to sift through piles of resumes and find the right fit. That's why LinkedIn built Hiring Pro, your new hiring partner that screens candidates for you. So instead of sorting through applications, you can spend your time talking to candidates and finding your next great hire. With Hiring Pro, you can hire with confidence, knowing you're getting the best talent for your business. 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So then, where do you go next with this insight? Oh, man. So basically, I told her, I was like, I feel like if I leave, I'm just going to be lost. And she was like, all right, reframe. Like, got to find a different way to describe what's going to happen when you leave because you need to take this leap to figure out what's right for you next. And so she was like, you're going to go on an adventure to, like, figure out what... And she was like, you like adventure, you know? And you're going to get to learn and, like, all these things. So there was partially just reframing, like, a feeling of adriftness and identity crisis into, like, all right, next adventure. And I think sometimes the language we use really prevents us from being willing to do that, you know? Willing to, like, jump off whatever cliff or step out of this place where we feel safe and clear, even if we're miserable. So it was helpful to be like, okay, adventure's I can do. So give me a couple of plot points. And I'm trying to channel our listeners, some of whom are like, oh, God, I am having these feelings and I'm not ready to confront them. Give us some of the plot points in how you found your way back to connecting your sense of purpose and reason for being here with the work you're doing. Were there therapists involved? Were there long walks with friends? Was there journaling? Like, give us some tactics here on just what worked for you. Yeah, totally. So I basically, the year after, I took a couple of months just to kind of come back to myself from that job. And all I was doing was seeing friends and family. And it had been a very intense job. So I just needed a minute to recover. And Maggie, my coach, was like, you pick a date, you put it on the calendar, and on that date, you can start to think about work again. But before that date, you get to only do things that remind you who you are outside of work. How far away is that date from your exit? So it was three months. So I took three months off and I just saw my family and I saw my friends. And then I basically, then we designed a second phase that was starting the journey of asking what is work for you? Like, what gives you energy? And my agreement with myself was any idea that I got energetic about, I wasn't allowed to judge it. I was only allowed to be excited about it. And that could be a job working for someone else. It could be an idea for a startup or whatever. But it was just like, okay, if you get excited about it, like, write it down, get all excited, and then let it go, you know? I did a very intensive therapy workshop called The Hoffman Process, which thankfully for, I guess, me, I will go on almost any experience with sort of an open heart and an open mind. And it was one of the best things I've ever done in my life. But it really sends you on a journey to ask yourself a lot of pretty fundamental questions about why you are the way you are and why you do the things you do. And in it, I basically found this question, which is, what would you do if you believed you were already enough? And it was, you know, that proving energy we were talking about, I think it really put a spotlight on the idea that I was trying to fill up a void or something, that I only felt like I would be worthy or loved if I did all these things at work. And I came out of it sort of with that question of just like, if you believed you were already enough, what would you choose to do? Such a powerful question. Then I started off on what I would say has been an eight-year journey, if we're being honest, to figure out what that work was. And the first thing I did was found a company with a friend and we thought we were going to be like private equity people. We were ready to, like, buy startups that were sort of struggling and turn them around and had all these, like, ideas. And I think we both realized about a year or two into that, that we didn't love that work. One of my biggest journeys has been realizing that I love being pretty intimate with the impact that I'm having. And it's part of why philanthropy doesn't feed me, is like philanthropy is sitting very far away from the people's lives that you actually impact, or at least most philanthropy is. And same with this company I started with a friend, was like, you were pretty far away from the sort of impact that you were having. So, again, that was another one where, like, two years into it, I was like, uh-oh, not my work. And part of the reason why I tell you this story is just because, like, when I've watched friends and folks that I work with go on these journeys, like, they're just not a straight line. They're not a straight line. And I always say, like, sometimes you need to take the interview to remind yourself that, like, oops, not gonna do that again. Or sometimes you need to take a whole-ass job to be like, yep, really done with this, you know? And I feel like, for me, the last eight years have been working and working and working, both on, like, being better at fighting the fights and winning. Like, there's just different parts of myself that I've discovered through all of this therapy and all of this coaching work where there's certain parts of myself that are like, yeah, let's take that cool job that everyone's gonna think is awesome. And I've had to work really hard to listen to the parts of myself that are like, you've done this before. The stove is hot. Do you really need to touch it again? And find, like, that voice that says, what does this get you that you don't already have? And what is the work that you're meant to be doing right now, Molly? You know, and is that it? Is this really it? Is this the best use of you and your time? Do you feel like on that arc, do you feel like you have arrived with both clarity and a canvas to kind of express this purpose? So, three and a half years ago, I started on this journey that I mentioned, which is, okay, I'm not gonna take another job. I'm not gonna take a CEO job of a turnaround company. I'm not gonna take a COO job working, you know, for somebody else. So it was like, what do I want to do? Okay, Molly, you're building something yourself. And I basically said, okay, is so good at making you do exercises that really shine a light on what's actually going on. So one of the exercises she made me do was for an entire week, she made me rate every single meeting on a scale from 1 to 10 in terms of how energized I was coming out the other side of it. And it was just like very wild because I had 1s and 10s. Like I think a lot of people would be like 5, 5, 5, 6, 8, 4, 2. I was like 1, 10. And the 10s were actually all one-on-ones with people or moments when I got to like really connect with someone and help them. And so it was very eye-opening for me about what energized me, you know, and I feel like I come from, I was raised, Facebook built a strengths-based framework for how we coached and grew people. And that means that what, you know, if you believe in strengths-based, it means that you should focus on what you're great at and what you love doing, not trying to get better at what you're bad at. And I really believe that. Like I really believe that what the most powerful signals in your life are, what do you naturally love? What do you naturally want to spend time doing? And, you know, some of those questions that I ask people when I'm like coaching them about what they might want to do next is look backwards and say, okay, if you think back over the last couple of years, like what are the things you're proudest of? What are the things where you're like, I would do that a hundred times if you gave me that as a job. I would, the time passed and I didn't even notice when I was doing that. Those are the kinds of things that are telling you something about your natural strengths. And then there's like what you love doing, which sometimes is like a slightly different list. I would say there's a Venn diagram between the two of like, what are you good at and what do you love doing? And you're looking for that Venn diagram, you know? And then the third part of the Venn diagram is obviously like, what will people pay you a lot of money to do? So somewhere between like, what do I love doing? What am I great at? And what will people pay me money for is like the highest and best use of you. I love all of that. And the metric that has been most useful to me, and I have to get sometimes a little quiet to pay attention to it properly, but it is this vitality question of when do I feel most alive? How do you get connected to it? I've learned to pay attention to which parts of me show up in which situations, which kinds of conversations. So one of the most reliable tests for me is if that playful part shows up. I don't know that it's always about vitality because I think that playful part probably needs to feel safe enough to reveal herself. But it is an indicator that a whole bunch of me wants to be in the room or in the situation or solving the problem. And so, and I see the patterns. And so like doing hard creative things with a team of people, that's a game. It's almost like a hack to feeling fully alive for me. And listeners will are tired of me using this quote, but I think what first got my attention is Howard Thurman, who was described 20th century theologian, said, don't ask what the world needs, which for a young Anne and I bet a young mom, it was like a shocking start. Because aren't we obligated to meet the world's needs? Ask what makes you come alive because what the world needs is people who have come alive. And there was so much challenge and permission in that that I have never forgotten the first time I read it. And I return to it constantly. And in this work with myself and with other people trying to find their way towards meaning and purpose, I find that idea of vitality, paying attention to it, understanding, paying attention to yourself. And I love the simplicity of like, rate the meeting 1 to 10. Like how much of you was in the meeting? How much of you wanted to be in the meeting? I found very helpful for me personally. Yeah, you got to find the right tools for you. And it's different for everyone. But what I've really found, again, as I've like seen a lot of this and it sounds like you have too, is just, this is about you finding the tool that gets you to sit down and be like, okay, who should I be listening to? And what are the things and the signals and the signs and the metrics that I want to orient my life around instead of sort of like letting myself drive blindly or letting my biography drive? Yeah. This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn. Running a small business means every hire matters. A bad hire can cost you time, money, and momentum. A good hire, they can change everything. But finding great talent isn't easy, especially when you don't have the time or resources to sift through piles of resumes and find the right fit. That's why LinkedIn built HiringPro, your new hiring partner that screens candidates for you. So instead of sorting through applications, you can spend your time talking to candidates and finding your next great hire. With HiringPro, you can hire with confidence, knowing you're getting the best talent for your business. In fact, LinkedIn found that its users are 24% less likely to need to reopen a role within 12 months compared to the leading competitor. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at linkedin.com slash worklife. Terms and conditions apply. This episode is brought to you by National Business Furniture. You can find them at nbf.com. What your workspace looks like says a lot about the way you work and can make a big difference when it comes to productivity. The truth is our surroundings can impact how we think, how we feel, and who we become while we're in them. Your workspace can affect engagement, productivity, and maybe even retention. That's why getting your workspace right matters. It's proof that you value your team. National Business Furniture believes that every business deserves furniture that lasts, service that cares, and a partner that gets it, all on a budget that works. That's National Business Furniture's commitment to you. Find the right furniture for you and your team at nbf.com and use the promo code pod10 to save 10%. That's nbf.com and experience the better way to buy office furniture. This episode is sponsored by Rula. When you're going through a difficult breakup or a tough time at work, or just dealing with the anxiety and stress of everyday life, the last thing you want to do is scour the internet for therapists who take your insurance. A lot of online therapy won't accept insurance at all, which means taking care of your mental health requires paying out of pocket or signing up for a pricey monthly subscription. But Rula does things differently. They partner with over 120 insurance plans, meaning the average copay is just $15 per session. That's real therapy from licensed professionals at a price point that actually makes sense. With a network of thousands of therapists nationwide, Rula can help you find the right one for you based on your needs, preferences, and state requirements. Thousands of people are already using Rula to get affordable, high-quality therapy that's actually covered by insurance. Visit rula.com slash worklife to get started. That's R-U-L-A dot com slash worklife. You deserve mental health care that works with you, not against your budget. All right, Molly, so it's graduation season and young people everywhere are applying for jobs and trying to figure out what they're going to do with their lives. We wanted to hear directly from some of these graduates. So our producing team went to Washington Square Park in New York City, the famed Washington Square Park, to talk to people who had just graduated from NYU about how they're thinking about purpose as they enter the workforce. So let's hear from one of them. My name is Sam. My passion is really around higher education and making sure that everyone has access to it. I think a lot of people either think I need to find my purpose in my work or I need a job that doesn't necessarily fulfill my purpose, but then I can do that outside of work. I'd love to know how to merge those things, how people can really look at how do I make this a core part of every part of my life, not just work or at home. Molly, we hear a version of this question a lot. You know, should I be looking for purpose in my work or my life? And how do you see this working in practice? How has it worked for you and how do you see it working for the people around you? Well, listen, man, you got one life. You know what I mean? And your life is a set of hours. And, you know, at the end of the day, you know, I said I spend some time thinking about death and it's like your journey is ours, right? And we spend some number of those hours earning money in order to take care of our needs and our family's needs. And that is work, right? Careers are long and the journey is the point, you know? You're gonna go on a journey and it's not to say that any of it is wrong. Like all of it is just a journey to find yourself and that's really powerful. Like I think part of what bums me out is that we send kids into like high school now and it's like you're supposed to know what you want to major in and then you're supposed to get to college and you're supposed to know exactly what job you want. And it's like, no, man, like you are supposed to go on a journey. And actually your