I’m guilty of falling in this trap too.

And that’s even after I founded a climate tech company many people would call the dream: working with a team from Patagonia, Levi’s, Google, etc to build software that helps hundreds of brands decarbonize their supply chains

How do I know if I’m in the ‘make a difference at work’ trap?

You’ll know if you’re causing yourself unnecessary pain if you’re spinning wheels during a career transition, feeling totally uninspired in your day job, losing key employees, and ultimately missing tons of opportunity right in front of your nose.

If you’ve either felt “I must work for this company” or “I must work in climate/health/whatever” … or else it’s a total waste of time. Or just questioned “what’s the point of this all?” Then you’ll know you’re causing yourself unnecessary pain.

I’m not making those examples up — I quite literally said them myself and felt the emotional cage of narrow-mindedness at so many points in my life.

So how should I think about making a difference… without causing myself pain?

Defining what ‘makes a difference’ is key. How do you do that?

Being crystal clear about your values is step one. These values define what’s important to you as a person, what’s worth working towards, what “making a difference” means to you. I’ll share mine at the end as an example.

Actually writing values down forces clarity and can serve as rubric to know if what you’re working on is in alignment — aka if you’re working on something with meaning.

I’m not going into how to write values here (there are a few ways), but the high level is they need to have:

1. overarching principles for what’s important to you — the hills you want to die on for the type of world you want to live in

2. a handful of habits and specific actions that you can do in the day to day so you know you’re acting in alignment through the daily chaos
   

With these values in hand, there are two ways to be in alignment with them

Two ways to be in alignment with your values at work — one of them is often forgotten

Path 1: work on something related topically to your values

When I think about what I’m working on, there’s a difference between making an impact through what you topically work on (e.g. climate in my case) and the impact you make through the day to day.

The topic / problem area we work on it what we think about as impact, the stories we afford ourselves that powerfully reinforce our identities and the narrative that we’re in alignment with our values. These stories are really powerful in giving us the perseverance to do really hard things, like create a startup.

Obviously creating a climate startup is hard, but it’s gonna be worth it.

These stories are also the most powerful motivator for teams — humans are storytelling machines, and a powerful story can move mountains.

As a side note, I actually often put product visions in the forms of stories. Same thing with a personal growth conversation. Even if someone doesn’t know their values, crafting a story about the impact of their work is going to be motivating, if it’s authentic & believable.

However this is where people get tripped up! If you’re going to go on this path of working on something topically in alignment with your values, you need to avoid a huge pitfall.

You need to be super honest with yourself about why you’re doing it so you can uncover your hidden expectations.

Take my example: I’m working on climate which is great! But climate change is still going to happen if I work on this or not. So what’s the point?

Also, if I’m going to be working on software every day, will I really even feel the impact of what I’m working on? The end impact of helping brands reduce emissions is abstract vs. writing code every day — am I ok with that?

This sounds crazy writing it, but deep down I didn’t realize I was actually really trying to end climate change, and anything short of that would mean there wasn’t a point to it. This is a recipe for immense pain.

It made things feel like a struggle no matter the success we had. And it further reduced the options both for our business, and me personally on feeling motivated on the day to day.

The antidote is to ask yourself the 5 why’s when you’re tapping into the topical impact motivation — why is working on this important? And think through what the day to day is going to be. Does the day to day match your hidden expectations necessary for you to be motivated and happy every day?

For me, going through that process to uncover my hidden expectations was was quite freeing. It allowed me to create a more realistic narrative for what impact means, bank the wins with every customer and realize that working towards the future I wanted was just as good as the end result since it’s a necessary step in the process.

Path 2: derive impact from your day to day, the less celebrated path

The impact on the day to day is different. This comes without us creating a story about what we’re working on.

It’s the feeling we have in the moment, the satisfaction at the end of the day. It’s figuring something out that’s hard, adding structure to a complicated problem, developing a teammate, producing a work of art, reducing suffering in someone you’re spending time with.

These are only a couple examples.

This path is 1000x more flexible in creating impact since you can do it at any place that isn’t actively working against your values (e.g. cigarettes or something).

There are many ways to reduce suffering in someone’s day to day, to do something hard and grow through it.

There’s a second order benefit of this path that I personally loved.

Because you’re not constrained by having to work at just 5 companies or problem areas that fit with your topical narrative, you can craft a life that has more time to work on those topical narrative points outside work.

For example, I was a PM at Dropbox. File sync and storage wasn’t topically in line with my values, but I was growing a ton in the job and working with amazing people.

It also had a very flexible culture, and I used that flexibility to teach mountaineering classes that helped people get outdoors with confidence. This was very much in line with my topical values.

And more than that, I was able to really feel the impact by working with people 1:1 and with my hands outdoors, something I didn’t feel when working on climate tech (which was working on software day to day).

The learning here is if I had been so narrowly focused on trying to work on something climate related, I would have missed the creativity in finding meaning in the day to day that was often much more powerful.

Both path 1 and 2 are powerful and can create our sense of identity as someone who’s doing something positive in the world. Both can work. The point is don’t forget about path 2 and feel so hell bent on defining impact by the thing you work on.

4 Steps to Avoiding Unnecessary Pain

1. Get clear on your values — what you care about and how you know you’re in alignment with them

2. There are two ways to work on something with meaning: work on something topically related to your values (e.g. healthcare or climate or whatever) or derive value from the day to day

3. If you do the former, you need to be totally honest with yourself about what needs to be true in the job for you to feel fulfilled. And consider that the day to day may not feel connected to that impact.

4. If you do the latter, you’ll have tons of flexibility in the role and time outside to work on things topically related to your values like volunteering.

If you feel the grip of feeling uninspired, spinning your wheels on what to work on, or that there are only a few things out there for you — that’s time to take a step back and realize that you’re operating from a place of scarcity, and that scarcity kills creativity.

Once you’ve realized this and commit to changing your approach, you can feel dramatically more empowered and get to way better options for yourself. With less pain too 🙂 

If you know someone who’d find this helpful, send it along.

My Core Principles

Leave world better than it was before I got here by

• leading with empathy and patience against a bedrock of principles and truth telling

• relieving suffering in those around me, especially those who are working on improving health & the environment

• improving the natural environment and people’s connection to it​

Live simply through avenues like

• building in flexibility — someone who has a career that’s flexible enough in time to change with life’s priorities (kids, adventure, parents, etc)

• developing clear principles to be sure of himself — doesn’t attempt to control the uncontrollable, builds wisdom & mindfulness to form opinions with conviction and act on them

• shows up — builds memories with friends, knows when people need help before they do and are there for them, makes my wife's dreams come true, doesn’t travel too much to build community​

Enrich life through adventure and the right risks

• by being healthy — a person who is injury-proof with a cardio, strength, and stability base to last for decades

• connecting to nature— someone who reflects on the positive, makes every day moments memories, is outside as much as possible and makes memories in nature with friends

• continuing to take risks — in work to build the world he wants to see, in the outdoors to build a richness in life and deeper connection to nature’s truth

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