#136 Complexity & Complicatedness - Sam Spurlin on playing hockey, why he quit teaching, studying at Claremont, leaving a PhD program, working pro bono too start his career, complicated vs complex systems, how to deal with ego in organizations, remote work failures, podcasting with his brother, and the importance of a retrospective meeting

[00:59] Paul: Welcome to The Pathless Path. I'm Paul Millerd, and in this podcast, we examine the invisible scripts that run our lives and dare to imagine new stories for work and life. Today I'm talking with Sam Spurlin, who is an organizational consultant at The Ready. I'm super pumped to dive into that. It's one of the, one of a few handful of consultancies that I think are really trying to dive into chaos theory complexity science, and all these different ways of thinking about an organization. Sam's also interesting.

He's been writing consistently for many years, has had many different interests, and I think is a really good example of carving a different kind of path while still being employed. Welcome to the podcast, Sam.

[01:47] Sam Spurlin: Hey, thanks for having me. I'm really happy to be here.

[01:51] Paul: Yeah. First question I ask all the guests, what are the stories and life scripts that shaped who you were as a kid?

[02:00] Sam Spurlin: Man, and how do you even go beyond that with a second question? Because I feel like we could talk about this for a good hour.

[02:07] Paul: I'd be more than happy to.

[02:09] Sam Spurlin: We may not get beyond it. Two things really come to mind for me, and probably more if I sit and think about it a little bit more. So one, I'm the oldest of five. I have four younger brothers. So there's all sorts of scripts that I grew up with around being a role model, trying to bring maybe some order to the chaos of the, of the family life, not in a bad way, but just the chaos that you have when you have 5, 5 boys in a, in a family. So I'm sure there is some like birth order theory stuff here that shows up in like how I am in the world right now.

And then the other part is grew up playing pretty elite ice hockey, grew up in the Detroit area, playing AAA hockey for most of my childhood. And then, you know, playing into high school and then college club for a little bit. So there's this, there's all sorts of scripts around both just athletics in general, in terms of being a good teammate and dedicating yourself to getting better at something. And then there's like the really hockey-specific ones about like playing hurt and, you know, nobody's bigger than the team, which in some ways are really positive scripts that, you know, really kind of bore themselves into my brain pretty, pretty early on and some that have been less helpful. I don't know that playing hurt is the type of thing that I necessarily need to be bringing to my day to day as a 30, soon to be 36-year-old. And I don't know.

So those, those are the two things that, that come to mind for me.

[03:51] Paul: Yeah. That suffering script is such an interesting one and so prevalent in how people think about work. And I think it can be helpful to a point, right? You should, you should not feel perfect all the time. That is not a good frame if you're trying to do super deep work. Um, it might feel uncomfortable, but I think a lot of people apply that, oh, I should just struggle, I should suffer, to unnecessary work.

I'm sort of, uh, I try to rally around it's not worthwhile to be doing pointless stuff.

[04:28] Sam Spurlin: Yeah, totally, totally. I think I was very fortunate that really early on, relatively, so we're talking, um, undergrad, probably. So 2007, I became aware of Getting Things Done by David Allen. And it really helped me break that script that I had to suffer to like get work done. That actually, if I brought a little bit of attention and care to just thinking about like, what am I actually trying to do here? I don't have to just crank harder than anybody else to get stuff done.

So then through undergrad, and through grad school, I really tried to pride myself on— I don't pull all-nighters, I work very reasonable hours, and I'm going to be perfectly functional in class, and I'm like good to go. And I don't need to prove myself by just doing increasingly bizarre or kind of self-flagellation around, around work ethic, unless I choose to in terms of like an experiment, like what would it be like to like do this and see how I react to it.

[05:32] Paul: Yeah, were you playing hockey in college?

[05:35] Sam Spurlin: So yeah, I played, um, so it was Division II club, so I wasn't playing— I went to Bowling Green State University, so I wasn't playing for their, their Division I team. So it was the club team, which was still like pretty high-level hockey. Like everybody played juniors, basically was on the team or high-level high school. And there was the kind of added component that I was the president of the team for 2 and a half years, which basically meant trying to organize a bunch of, you know, early 20s, late teens guys to actually like do the thing, you know, to work with the university to get our ice time, to get all the dues together, to travel, all of that, which, you know, there was nobody paying my way, I guess you could say, for playing hockey at the college level. But that was the furthest I went.

Other than when I graduated undergrad, I did coach the University of Detroit Mercy hockey team for a couple of years, which was a brand new club team as well. So in between kind of graduating and moving on to grad school, I did that.

[06:36] Paul: Were you thinking of playing professionally?

[06:39] Sam Spurlin: This is a much— this is a very interesting conversation tied to lots of different things in my life. So playing AAA growing up in Detroit is like, you know, kind of the highest you can play in that. So we're talking I played AAA through, through my freshman year of high school and then made the decision to step down to play just regular high school. At that time, I was incredibly burned out on playing high-level hockey. I decided to just like go be with my friends and do the fun thing. Because I had kind of told myself, I had told myself that I had reached my ceiling.

I realized now in retrospect, that I had an incredibly fixed mindset around my ability to get better. I was one of those kids who, you know, developed pretty early. So by 8th grade, I was kind of like this size, which meant I was bigger than most people, but eventually everyone caught up with me. And I, and I just felt myself kind of falling behind. And yet many of my teammates, many of my competitors from that time who weren't necessarily any of the best players when I was playing with them, went on and played Division I. Some went on and played in the AHL.

Some are still playing in the NHL right now.

[07:47] Paul: Wow.

[07:47] Sam Spurlin: So there is this, like, there's this, like, this element of regret that I wish I had my psychological knowledge and everything that I've learned in my positive psychology grad program when I was a young teenager, like trying to figure out how to be, be a hockey player. Because I don't know that I would have been able to play professionally, but I think I probably could have played college somewhere, got my education paid for, maybe played in one of the lower pro leagues, ECHL, AHL, that sort of thing. And kind of making sense of that has been a part of my path of like going into psychology and really paying a lot of attention to personal development stuff right now, even just beyond athletics.

[08:27] Paul: I think David Epstein's book Range talks about this, right? I'm not sure if you've read that. I have. Yeah. He talks about these sort of late bloomers or people that you don't expect to take off. Right.

And it's pretty fascinating, right? Because you could apply it to pretty much everything. For example, people label themselves as bad at math pretty early in life. Yeah. Uh, but it's probably not true if you raise the stakes and that we're in the right environment. I think most people could learn high-level math.

Is that something that drove you to sort of get into personal development? What was the trigger to stumbling upon, uh, Getting Things Done?

[09:10] Sam Spurlin: You know, I don't actually remember what the specific path into Getting Things Done was. It might have been, uh, Merlin Mann and 43 Folders back in the day. Uh, like he was doing some writing around, around GTD, and I don't remember how I specifically came across Merlin, but That was probably my introduction to David's work. And then, yeah, as I got into learning more about GTD, you can either kind of just go down those sort of like life hack route with that, or you can start to ask like pretty deeper, like more fundamental questions about like, well, why does this actually work psychologically? And what are there some more generalizable patterns that you can extract from something like GTD that can be applied, you know, organizationally or in other parts of your life?

So I went down some deep rabbit holes, which led to me doing some work with David Allen in grad school that I think kind of set me on this path.

[10:04] Paul: Yeah. So you ended up getting a PhD in organizational psychology.

[10:08] Sam Spurlin: I bailed on the PhD. I was in the PhD program, but I withdrew from that.

[10:14] Paul: I wanted to ask you first, you did a stint as a teacher.

[10:18] Sam Spurlin: Oh, yeah. Yeah.

[10:19] Paul: I think it's more like— and I definitely want to dive into dropping out of the program because I think that's like a really interesting positive signal. Signal in today's world.

[10:28] Sam Spurlin: Sure.

[10:28] Paul: But yeah, you, you became a teacher after school. Did you see yourself as plugging away in the school system for 40 years when you were graduating?

[10:41] Sam Spurlin: It's so weird because I guess I did, right? Because like, I don't know, I went through all the rigmarole of the 4 years of the program and, you know, student taught and did everything that I needed to do to be a teacher, but very quickly realized like, holy cow, the part that I love about being a teacher is just the teaching part. And you would assume that that's the vast majority of what you do. In reality, it is the minority of what you do. And there was so much administrative BS and bureaucracy around it. It was a profoundly, we're talking about 2009, 2010 era.

Profoundly pessimistic time to be joining as a new teacher. None of the veteran teachers that I was working with seemed to enjoy their job or wanted to, were like encouraging in any way. And I had this moment of like, holy shit, I just spent 4 years getting a teaching degree. I've, you know, kind of done a year and a half or so of teaching and I hate this. What am I going to do? That there was, there was a, there was a morning that I called off from going in to teach.

And at this time I was a long-term emergency substitute teacher, which is as bad as it sounds. I basically went in for one day, one day became two days. That's pretty normal. Even one day becoming three days is pretty normal. Three days became, hey, finish the week. Finishing the week became, hey, can you finish the semester?

Finishing the semester became, hey, can you finish the year? Nothing prepared for me. And this was like my first teaching gig, essentially. So that was rough. But there was a moment where I called in sick and I took my mom out to breakfast and I like broke down. I was like, I can't do this.

I got to do something else. And I got advice from her and just like took the day off. And around that time was when I decided I'm going to go to grad school. I became aware of this thing called positive psychology. I've been writing about it just my own intrinsic motivation for the past couple of years on my website, realized that, oh, this thing I've been fascinated by actually is an academic discipline. So I'm going to roll the dice, take out a truly astronomical amount of student loans, and like go see if I can make this major pivot away from teaching and into something with positive psychology.

[13:06] Paul: I have a similar thing that sort of happened after I graduated. It, it's funny how poorly. Our education system, which is so obsessed with getting people employed after college, actually sets people up to realize what that experience is like. So I was working at GE my first year, and I remember just like talking to my mother on the phone. I'm like, what? This is crazy.

Like, nobody's doing anything. Nobody seems to care. Nobody's motivated. Everyone just wanted to work like for the weekend. And it was like, what? What is the point?

I— it seems like there was a sort of loss of energy and meaning of work at the end of the 2000s. And I think there's an interesting like explosion and we'll dive into this of this whole movement of meaningful work took off in the 2010s. And I think there's probably some downsides to that. But yeah, there was just— I couldn't believe this was what I was going to do for the rest of my life.

[14:10] Sam Spurlin: Yeah, no, what were some of those conversations like with your mom?

[14:13] Paul: Like, what did she say? Was she supportive?

[14:15] Sam Spurlin: Yeah, she was incredibly, uh, incredibly supportive. I've never had any pressure from my parents to do one thing over, over another. I mean, not even when I was, you know, making decisions to kind of step off of this hockey path where, you know, once I decided to stop playing AAA— and nobody forced me to do that, I made the choice basically— My dad did not try to convince me to stay on that path. And my mom, you know, same thing. And the same thing with the school stuff. Like, I've always been— I've been good at school for better or worse.

Like, I like school. So going back to grad school was like actually exciting to me. And I think I had shown my parents and myself that I could generally do things that I put my mind to. So I knew that by taking out these student loans, I was kind of rolling the dice a little bit on myself. But I knew that, I mean, I realized that I wasn't going to make any real money teaching. I mean, all those teachers out there who are doing that work, I admire you so much, but it is woefully undercompensated.

And I figured that if I went to grad school and did this positive psychology program, even though I wasn't quite sure what I was going to do, I was anticipating kind of starting my own thing. And I did actually kind of start my own, my own coaching practice in grad school. But I figured if I'm getting businesses to pay for whatever it is that I'm going to do, I have a chance at actually making enough money someday to like pay this back. And, and really, I just made the decision that I was always going to have a large student loan monthly payment. And if I lived a very simple life, then it would just always be something I could handle. And I'm fine with that if it allowed me to kind of step into a new path, which, which I think it did.

[16:00] Paul: Yeah. What is The Workologist?

[16:02] Sam Spurlin: So way back in the day, I mean, my, my various websites have had very— have had different branding. So it was just like the branding that I had around the writing that I was doing at that time. I don't remember even the specific timeframe, but my first website was 2009, started it right out of, out of undergrad. It was called thesimplerlife.net. And I was part of that spate of websites writing about minimalism in the early 2000s or so, probably as partially a reaction to realizing I was never going to have very much money and like wrestling with that. But it was fun to like write about that.

And that very quickly turned into more just personal development exploration, which was the realization that I was writing about positive psychology and particularly Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's book Flow was the first time that I put two and two together in terms of the stuff that I found fascinating and the academic discipline of positive psychology. I saw on the back of his book that it said he was running a graduate program in California, which is how I ended up at Claremont Graduate University studying with Mike. So, The Workologist was just an evolution of when I think I got to grad school, I started to shift my writing a little bit more towards applying positive psychology to an organizational context because that's what I was studying. And that's what I found particularly fascinating, but ended up moving away from that and back to just samsperlin.com at some point.

[17:30] Paul: What was Claremont like? What was your mindset going in? And you said earlier you ended up dropping out, but what, what was your mindset when you were going in? Were you gonna be a professor or were you just diving deeper into your curiosity with an open mind?

[17:45] Sam Spurlin: More so the, the latter. I definitely did not want to go into academia. So I went in as a master's student and I got my master's degree. So a 2-year program. Full-time at Claremont. I went in pretty sure that I was going to just create my own opportunity in terms of some combination of like writing online, coaching, consulting sort of stuff.

So what I really did those first 2 years was look for every interesting extracurricular activity that would give me experience outside of having basically I wanted to be able to say that I did things other than sat in a classroom. So I took over the TEDx event that happened at Claremont College. I was kind of the primary organizer of that for a couple of years, which ended up being like a full day. Back in the day, those TEDx conferences were a really big deal. There were a lot of them. I got really involved with that, got to go to the Middle East with a bunch of other TEDx organizers.

So that was a huge part of my first couple of years in Claremont, took on some pro bono consulting opportunities. A couple, a couple of cool things that Claremont did was there were some classes where your primary project was get some pro bono consulting work. So that is actually how I got connected to David Allen for the first time and ended up doing some work with his company and doing some research that actually showed up in the new, the newer version of GTD. There's a chapter about the kind of the psychological implications or the psychological support of why GTD works. And that's mostly the stuff that I had pulled together for him. So Claremont was all about getting as much experience as possible so that when I finished my education, I could figure out like something else to do.

I ultimately decided to stick around and do the PhD program. So when you, when you go from master's to PhD at CGU, you do an additional year of coursework, which I completed. And then you are kind of into the whole process of writing a thesis and doing these other projects, which eventually culminate in a dissertation. At that time, kind of in that year after the additional year of coursework, I had, I found The Ready and I started working at The Ready. So I did like a year of being the first employee at The Ready and also trying to be a PhD student. And whoo boy, was that bad for my mental health.

And ultimately decided like, The PhD was a means to an end for me. And I thought, I mean, the main reason I got that was going to go do the PhD program was I wanted to start my own consultancy. I had no business background. So what is— why would anybody hire me? What credibility did I have? So I was going to use the PhD as that, you know, until I got some actual experience.

I was fortunate enough to be hired by The Ready, and suddenly I was doing precisely the work I wanted to do. And it became really hard to sustain the motivation to continue working on the dissertation.

[20:46] Paul: Yeah, that's, that's fascinating. What was it like letting go of the PhD? I mean, was there tension there with the stick-to-it-ness of hockey?

[20:58] Sam Spurlin: So much tension. I ultimately wrote like a long article when I made the decision, kind of walking through like why, how I made the decision, but I mean, I probably went 9 months of going back and forth on should I quit, should I not? And that whole time trying to like continue working on it a little bit here and there. It was, it was a rough decision, but it was one of those decisions where as soon as I made it, it was like, oh my God, like this is so much better. And why did I not make this earlier? And I have never regretted that decision since, since I've made it.

It's, yeah, it was a major weight off my shoulders. And really what it was, it allowed me to go just sink deeper into what I really wanted to do, which was get really good at like the work that I do right now. And every minute, every second that I was learning some obscure statistical analysis for my dissertation was a second or a minute that I wasn't getting better at what I actually cared about. And once I was able to kind of put it in those sort of opportunity cost terms for myself, it became a no-brainer. And I was able to make the decision and move on and You know, it's one of those stories you tell yourself like, oh, my advisor has put so much time in me, she's going to be disappointed, which I'm sure she was. But she's also a good person and cares about me and wants me to like do the work that I want to do.

And there were other stories I was probably telling myself about, like being seen as a quitter and things like that. But you're able to put that stuff behind you when it means you no longer have to be flogging yourself with a dissertation.

[22:30] Paul: Yeah, I sense quitting is still underrated in today's world. I sort of see people quitting things such as PhD programs as an interesting signal, like, ooh, this person is going against something that would seem obvious to finish out and is, there's probably some thoughtful reflection there, right? And I mean, if I go through your site, it's pretty interesting. You have, I think what? 14 years of writing now, it's— you can just drop into Sam at any point of the time and it's like, oh, he's pretty thoughtful about this. And I think most people are thoughtful.

They're just not writing about their decisions at the time.

[23:11] Sam Spurlin: Yeah. Writing for me, I mean, every year I would probably say I did not write as much as I had hoped that I would, because writing— I mean, writing is such a huge part of how I conceptualize myself. And also it's just— it's how I think. When I'm writing consistently, it means I'm thinking clearly. And if I'm not writing consistently, my thinking is probably not as clear as it could be or as I want it to be. So I did a lot of writing through grad school, a lot of writing, and a lot of writing that never gets published around that decision to quit the dissertation.

But I do think showing myself that I could quit the dissertation had positive effects in terms of quitting other things as well, too. I've tried to become kind of obsessive about finishing things. And that doesn't just mean like finishing things because you're like, you did it all. You can finish the thing because you decided you're done. And that is something that I've like tried to work into my weekly review and my monthly review, like looking at my tasks and my projects and being like, actually, I thought I was going to do this, but I'm not. And now it's gone.

And I can focus on the things that actually matter.

[24:21] Paul: Yeah. So I read your why I quit PhD program and you sort of glossed over how dramatic it was. You were actually laid off before.

[24:33] Sam Spurlin: Oh yeah. That, well, that whole part too. Yeah. Yeah.

[24:35] Paul: And at the end of the post, you're like, well, looks like I was wrong. 4 weeks after moving to New York, I have this new lease. I now have this debt from school and I have no job.

[24:47] Sam Spurlin: So, oh yeah. That's, that, that, that is, I did kind of gloss over the getting hired by The Ready part because what I I actually did was get hired by Undercurrent, which was a different company in New York. I was in LA at the time. And the story there, I mean, I'm, you know, in my PhD program, I'm studying independent work, I'm studying self-leadership applied to solopreneurs and freelancers, and totally intend to never work for an organization and just kind of build my own thing. I actually have a company with a PhD colleague of mine, we're doing some consulting work, like we're living the life while as PhD students. I become aware of this company called Undercurrent.

I read their website. And it's like this quasi sort of like religious moment for me, because it's the first time that I read a company's website where they talk about work the way that I had been talking about it with my colleagues and the way I had been thinking about it. And, you know, they don't— they never use the word positive psychology, but the way they're writing about it, making, you know, work more human, more adaptive is exactly the stuff that I want to do. And I read their website. I'm like, holy shit, now I have to go work for this company. Like, I don't have a choice.

Like, I have to. So that it wasn't as simple as like just applying and being hired. I started following everybody who worked at Uncurrent on Twitter to see like what the conversations were that they were having and seeing. And I guess like starting to like be present in those conversations. I had a conversation with one of the managing directors and he was like, yeah, you seem cool, but like you need more experience. So I spent 9 months like doing as much pro bono consulting consulting work as possible so that when I showed up again, I was like, hey, I'm still here.

I know you see me on Twitter all the time.

[26:26] Paul: Let's— I want to pause on that because I think this is a totally underrated thing to do, which is like, I have a lot of people that reach out to me to say, oh, I want to break into consulting. How do you, how do you prepare your resume? Like your, your pitch? It's like, well, in today's world, you should just go be a consultant. So I, I wanna dive into what you were saying, but I think this is such an interesting point. How do you just go be a pro bono consultant?

Now there are paths for PhD students to do this kind of work. I mean, there's also a financial incentive cuz you're not really making any money. But yeah, totally. How do you just go be a consultant?

[27:10] Sam Spurlin: Yeah, so definitely, you know, being a PhD student, being funded by student loans, I had the luxury of like not needing to necessarily make money, which I totally acknowledge that privilege on, on that. I also had the benefit— I mean, when you're a PhD student, that can open doors for better or worse. Like, being able to say you're a PhD student, like, people will talk to you sometimes. So that was part of it. And then I mentioned before that I had a couple of classes where there were just— we had relationships with local businesses who needed consulting work. So most of my colleagues would like do the class project.

I did the class project and then like went so much further. And I would go talk to other colleagues or other of my classmates who like just finished their project. Like, hey, can I like carry on the work that you were doing with this organization? So I would just like gather things to do there. And then, you know, once you get— once you've done like one project, you can very easily like ask for connections to others. And these weren't huge projects, but it was like small organizations, like the one was like a small little historical society in Claremont.

They were never going to hire a consultant. But to have a PhD student like do some interesting work for them was perfect. So I just did as much of that as possible so that when I went back to Undercurrent, I could say like, hey, here's some actual stuff I've done. And you could talk to these people about what I'm able to do. And I think that kind of changed the tenor of the conversation. And they finally hired me to come work with them.

[28:41] Paul: Yeah. And I am somewhat familiar with Undercurrent and I know they got acquired and then a bunch of the people that were part of that split up and started a bunch of different organizations. There was like Noble, August, The Ready. And it seemed like a really interesting time. I think in an alternate reality, I might have joined one of these firms. Sure.

I talked to people at, this was like 2015, 2016. I was in New York as well. Yeah. I was working in strategy consulting. I was also, I also interviewed interview to LRN and turned down an offer there. So it was a really interesting time of these newer firms that were tapping into the power of the internet, remote technology to work in a distributed sense.

Like, what was the energy? Why, why do you think all these firms were emerging around that time?

[29:32] Sam Spurlin: Yeah, it was, it was, um, that's a great question. I think so Undercurrent was, was acquired by a company, a startup called Quirky. That went out of business literally 3 weeks after I joined. So even though Undercurrent had just had like the best, I think, best quarter of their existence, they kind of were the speedboat that was chained to this huge tanker that sunk. Coming out of the ashes, as you said, were these various organizations. And I think what Undercurrent had kind of uncovered, like they had gone through an interesting evolution where like they started, and I may be getting this a little bit wrong, but basically started as a more traditional kind of like branding consultancy.

They moved into strategy. And what they had really figured out is, like, I'm sure most strategy consultancies, is that they could do amazing work that they were stoked on, that the client was stoked on, and yet none of it would be implemented. And not because nobody didn't want it to be implemented, but somehow the great ideas that the strategy work brought up would come into contact with just the reality of the organization, and nothing would happen. And they decided that's the more interesting question to, to dive into, not like doing strategy work or doing branding work, but like trying to understand why are organizations, why do organizations have such a hard time, like changing themselves, being adaptive, being able to incorporate the work that they were doing. So this kind of org design focus is what they had turned into by the time that I had read their website and joined them.

And then when they went under and the Reddy and Nobel and others kind of came out, Nobel was existed before the Redi, but, but had a connection to Undercurrent. Basically, everybody decided like, let's figure out this org design thing. Let's, let's better understand how to make organizations more adaptive, more human places. And it's helped by the fact that, you know, holacracy kind of came out around that time. Sociocracy has been around for a long time, but was becoming a little bit more popular. Frederic Laloux's work, Reinventing Organizations, all of these kind of all kind of came out at the same time.

Team of Teams, which were all these, like, new ways of thinking about, like, what could organizations actually be if they weren't these kind of soulless, hierarchical command and control organizations that we've kind of defaulted to for a long time?

[31:47] Paul: Yeah. And so you've been doing this work at the Ready. What do you think is the big difference in how you and your team look at organizations now?

[32:00] Sam Spurlin: Yeah, I think it comes down to the idea of really accepting and honoring the fact that organizations are complex adaptive systems, not complicated systems. So even though we use complex and complicated in kind of everyday parlance as meaning the same thing, they're actually describing very different types of systems. So a complicated system like a watch, or an engine, it's inherently knowable. It may be very intricate. You may need specialized understanding to know how it works. But if I bring you a broken watch and you are a master watchsmith, you can tell me how it's broken.

You can tell me how to fix it. You can make it better than it was. You can fix it, essentially. But a complex system is like the weather or traffic or growing a garden. You can't fix these things. There are so many independent agents interacting with each other.

You're in the realm of probability. It's a probabilistic system as opposed to a deterministic system. So you can model it, you can simulate it, but you can't control it the way you can a complicated system. And so much of how organizations have conceptualized themselves for a very long time, basically since the industrial era, is fundamentally more of that complicated system. We can swap out people interchangeably. We can just like step back and analyze what's happening and redesign it and then introduce it into the organization.

And the organization will work better. No, like an organization is much more like the weather. And if you are trying to bring complicated mindsets and interventions to a complex system, things you don't expect are going to happen, you're going to be disappointed, and it's not going to be a good time. So I think what we really try to do is bring that mindset, that understanding that we need to interact and experiment with this system in order to change it. And we can't just go off and be smart and introduce the, the answer to an organization.

[33:50] Paul: Yeah. And I come from the strategy consulting world, and it's not that they're not interested in this. It's almost that there's too much money to be made from just continuing to deliver what companies have always been used to absorbing. And these complex systems, the fundamental challenge is If you want to communicate to executives, executives want impressive top-down plans that they can talk about to their, their bosses to make them look like they're doing stuff, right? Like I've written about this, there's this massive pressure to constantly show that you're doing stuff. So you need to invent initiatives and top-down things.

But if you take the conclusions of sort of complex adaptive systems, sometimes the best thing to do would be to do nothing.

[34:43] Sam Spurlin: Do nothing, right?

[34:44] Paul: Yeah. Yeah. So I imagine that leads to a lot of work you need to do around egos.

[34:50] Sam Spurlin: Totally. There's so much work around egos. And, you know, there's an element of like only a certain type of leader is going to seek out the ready and want to work with us. Like, yeah, there's a different like you got to be kind of up for doing something different, because we're not the typical kind of partner on that. And I think we've gotten better over time of setting expectations around like what it actually means to work with us so that we don't have these situations where we have to fire a client, which we did more frequently in the past.

But totally, totally with you, because a lot of our work is about, you know, how do we push more authority and autonomy out to the edges, which is really just another way of saying is how do we take some power away from the top and, you know, upper middle of an organization and put more of it at the edges, which is inherently a conversation about ego and power.

[35:44] Paul: Yeah. And how do you do that?

[35:49] Sam Spurlin: Yeah, good. It's a good question. I mean, our— so one way you don't do it is just talk about it. And one of the things that we have certainly learned, or I've experienced, is that Senior leadership teams are very comfortable staying in the realm of the cognitive, of being cerebral. And you get creative, smart people in a room for a day, we can talk about anything and make it feel like work. And what we would much rather do is find something real that we can do differently, even if it's as simple as, hey, you have a weekly staff meeting, which is kind of garbage and mostly just a status update meeting.

Great, we have a different way of doing this weekly meeting. Let us run it for you for 3 weeks and let's just see how it feels. And inevitably, the, you know, this, this meeting structure and facilitation style that we will bring to this weekly meeting starts to create space to have other conversations. It becomes a bit of a Trojan horse for, hey, you know, I noticed we spent a lot of time doing the status updates. Are these the right projects for this team to be talking about? What actually is your shared work?

Oh, that's interesting. Senior leadership team, you don't actually have any shared work. You're not actually a team then. Let's figure out what your shared work is. And now suddenly you're starting to capture some really important kind of org design work that needs to happen in an organization that only a team maybe that's quite senior can, can do. So we try to get into the realm of like actually doing stuff like, let's go to the gym and actually do some pull-ups.

Let's not talk about the perfect sort of workout plan that we could possibly have.

[37:22] Paul: Yeah. And it seems like the value there is just creating any sort of pattern interrupt. Have you found it doesn't even matter what you're doing? You just need to do something to shake things up and make people a little uncomfortable?

[37:35] Sam Spurlin: Totally. It, um, I would say absolutely agree with that. I think there are certain things that we have seen be just easy places to start. Meetings are one of them because there's, they're very visible. Um, it's where a lot of kind of like structured interaction happens. And if culture in an organization is just kind of the sum total of how we interact with each other, like intervening on meetings is an interesting place to start.

But you're right, it's almost a matter of starting anywhere. And sometimes starting means stopping. So most of our clients are so booked up, their calendars are insane, they're double booked all day long. There's no space to do anything differently. So sometimes the different thing is just Can we wipe all of our meetings for a week or two and just see what hurts and put only those things back? Or can we redesign from scratch our basic operating rhythm just to create some— yeah, make people uncomfortable, create some space, see— it's poking that complex system and seeing how it responds to you and then you responding to that.

And you kind of get into this dance now of actually doing things that are useful to the organization.

[38:42] Paul: Yeah. And how do, how do you work as a firm, The Ready? You've been distributed and remote since the beginning, I know at the beginning you did do some, uh, in-person stuff, but what are the things you've learned? I mean, I think this is where the remote work debate is just nonsense. It's like, which way is better? Both of them you have to learn, right?

[39:06] Sam Spurlin: Yeah.

[39:06] Paul: Um, yeah. And I imagine after 7 years you're probably starting to get into a groove, but it's always changing, right? You add more people, you get bigger, you change the scope of what you're working on. What are some of the meta lessons for thinking about how to work in a distributed way?

[39:23] Sam Spurlin: Yeah. And I think even, you know, the early, early days of the Ready, we were all in New York. So we didn't have to think about this. We had a dope as hell coworking space where we would all show up every day and it was great. But we all started to realize like, we don't have to be here. Like New York is not necessarily the easiest place to live.

And do we want to only have New Yorkers working for us? Like, no, not really. So people people started to scatter and we started to figure out like, okay, we can do this in a distributed way. And now we are fully distributed, no offices, everybody's spread across the world. And I think, yeah, what comes to mind here. So one is that you don't just copy and paste your in-person working styles and agreements into a remote-first or distributed working arrangement and expect it to go well.

Like, it, you have to fundamentally rethink your operating system to be distributed first, which means as much as possible, trying to default to asynchronous because it is challenging when you're spread across time zones to get onto a synchronous phone call. And therefore thinking about, well, what are those things that we can only do synchronously and making sure that we're only doing those. And even taking it a step further, you know, even though we are fully distributed, we have always taken our in-person retreats 3 times a year incredibly seriously. Because we have really learned that having that, those moments of renewal when you are face to face with your colleagues is really important. And we've been really experimenting around what's the best way to use that 2 or 3 days where we fly everybody to some sort of location.

But the, I mean, my personal takeaway from that is even though I think I'm like really easy to work with in most cases, and I generally like all my colleagues, if you spend too long only perceiving your colleague as a virtual avatar or text on a screen, you can start to like— your fuse gets shorter. And when after the retreat, I will— oh, I've always noticed like, oh, like, I feel just like lighter in how I'm interacting with people because we just had a meal together last week. And we, you know, we went and sang karaoke or like hung out together. And now You're kind of pissing me off on Slack, but I'm okay with it because like, I remember that you're a person as opposed to I haven't seen you in 9 months. And I'm just now you're just angry text on my screen. And I'm like, fuck this.

So there's, there's like that, that we have really learned is important. And I think we meet more in person than most distributed companies do. But we've decided to prioritize that as an organization because it's so, it's so key. There are probably, probably other things. As well that I'm just not thinking of.

[42:04] Paul: How do you spend those days? Like, what are the percentages socializing versus talking about the company versus personal development type stuff?

[42:14] Sam Spurlin: I think the general trajectory has been early on, we way overscheduled them and tried to make them too businessy, like really focused on like, all right, we've got, we got to do a full company retro and we have to, you talk about this and talk about this and talk about this. And like, where we got— I mean, in some ways we're all org designers.

[42:34] Paul: Companies do.

[42:36] Sam Spurlin: I know, right? And even when we were small, I think there was this element of like, okay, everyone would expect the org designer company to be really well designed. And we've really taken care, but it's kind of like the cobbler's children have no shoes. Like the org designer's org design was a mess, kind of that. We would try to fix it when we were in our retreats together. And I think the general trajectory has been, more unstructured time, less really focused, like talking about the business, and more just like hang out together and like be people together.

I'm sure we'll probably like swing too far one way at some point and feel like we need to bring it back. But I think we're doing a better job of that. And like our most recent in-person retreat last fall was a little bit different because we kind of had some strategic direction changes we wanted to talk about and really dig into. But the other aspect is too, as we get larger, there's not much a group of 40 can do as a group of 40. Like you can't have like a really intimate conversation with 40, 50, 60 people. It's much more about individual teams or what we call circles at The Ready spending time together talking about their specific area.

So that's what we spend more time on recently.

[43:52] Paul: And what do you see people, companies are getting wrong with remote work? I imagine most of the clients you're working with had some stretch of hybrid remote. It seems like the majority of companies are in hybrid work now, right? And a lot of them though are performing office work on the internet.

[44:14] Sam Spurlin: Yeah.

[44:14] Paul: Not actually doing remote work. What have you seen as some of the entry points to kind of shift mindsets around that stuff?

[44:22] Sam Spurlin: Yeah, I think so much comes to mind. And I like the phrase that you just said there, we're kind of performing office work on the internet. Because when everyone is distributed, or you're dealing with hybrid, I think there's such an opportunity to like, rethink value creation, which is such a like, I don't know, I kind of cringe as a consultant, like, that was very consultant speak. That you don't have to do all of this kind of theater that you have to do when you're in an office together. Like we could fundamentally rethink like, all right, this is what our customers are paying us for. And this is like the quickest, most direct kind of value chain we can create to do that.

And why not use this opportunity where we have all kind of had like toss up all of our routines and how we normally do things and rethink that from scratch, which is a lot of work. And I think for a lot of organizations, they're like, I don't actually want to do that. And instead, we're going to copy and paste what we did before to virtually. So instead of me going down the hall to a conference room multiple times a day, I'm just going to be on Zoom all day long. And I may not speak in literally any of these meetings. But, you know, that's what I would normally do.

So now here I am, and maybe I try to fit in some work around the edges instead of really— I mean, there's so many different forces at play here, you know, executives, senior leaders who are not— do not— wonderful background noise there. I'll restart.

[45:49] Paul: We can ride with it. No, we just—

[45:51] Sam Spurlin: we just ride with it. All right, good.

[45:53] Paul: Let's do it. This is the, you know, The Pathless Path podcast. We're not going for the Mean Streets of Arlington, Virginia podcast.

[46:03] Sam Spurlin: I know. So I mean, the ego thing comes back into play. Like if you're a senior executive and you're used to being able to kind of like walk out into the hallway and survey your domain, and now you like to see like a list of names on Slack or Teams, or maybe just an inbox full of emails from your team, like that's a very different experience. And I think a lot of what we have seen in some of our clients is executives or senior leaders kind of like thrashing and trying to figure out like, how do I remain relevant? Which is inserting themselves in places where they don't need to be or putting kind of like dictates in place about like, you have to come to the office 3 days a week. Because even though, I mean, I've had some mind-boggling ones like, all right, you have to come into the office 3 days a week, but there's no conversation about coordinating with your team.

So everybody comes into the office and then it's just on Zoom with their teammates who are not in the office. Like this is really— seems like elementary stuff, but it just shows— what it tells me is that we're doing it for the wrong reason. If we actually cared about coming into the office because of whatever reason that you can assert, which could be good, then you'd be a little bit more thoughtful than just saying, you know, come back in and, you know, we need to basically, basically make a case for why we're paying so much money for a building.

[47:19] Paul: Yeah, it's sort of cargo cult thinking. It's We need to take work seriously. People need to be in offices, right? Instead of saying, well, what are we actually trying to accomplish here? And the challenge I think though is you might get worse in the short term.

[47:38] Sam Spurlin: You almost certainly will.

[47:39] Paul: Yeah. And so how do you take clients through that as they're fumbling and screwing things up and dropping the ball?

[47:46] Sam Spurlin: Yeah. Yeah. It's, It's a great, it's a great question. And I think there's a, it's, it's, I think there's an element of helping a client have a, take the really long-term view and also the incredibly short-term view. So the really long-term view is like, hey, you know, we're going through this tough time because we have this case for like, if once we get through this valley, like we have a better future in front of us and that you can do things to kind of help make that real and tie us to that vision of where we think we're gonna go. And so that's the longer term view.

But then in the short term view, it's just like, hey, is tomorrow better than today? Is today better than yesterday? And like really trying to see those incremental gains that are easy to ignore if you're not looking for them. And you know, that 1% better every day, not necessarily just like in metrics, like I actually spend very little time like looking at specific metrics, but Hey, this meeting that we had this week's staff meeting, was it a little bit better than last week's staff meeting? Do we feel like we're talking about a slightly more percentage of our time is spent on the most important work as opposed to just theatrics? So I think my role kind of helps like modulate between those two timeframes and not just get stuck in the like, wow, things suck right now.

And I wish we could go back to the way they were.

[49:02] Paul: So I could nerd out on consulting and thinking about this.

[49:06] Sam Spurlin: That's why people, that's why people tune in to The Pathless Path, right?

[49:10] Paul: They do. I— well, I don't know. Uh, dear listeners, you'll, you'll, you'll have to tell us.

[49:17] Sam Spurlin: You have to tell us. We'll do more.

[49:18] Paul: Tell us. Um, but I, I do do a number of episodes where I go pretty deep on consulting and organizational changes. It's sort of my hobby interest now. Um, yeah, and I'm probably losing more and more cred every, um, every year of like not actually doing larger change programs. But I wanted to shift to how you think about work. You've thought about work for a long time, and I don't find a lot of people that do think deeply about work.

There's like Tim Ferriss and Cal Newport and me. And this is why I always tell people, please write about work and your reflections on work, because there's so little interesting writing on work. The mainstream writing in a lot of the publications outside of Derek Thompson is just utterly awful. It sucks.

[50:11] Sam Spurlin: Yeah.

[50:12] Paul: So what does Sam think about work? Like, what is work? Yeah, well, the philosophical question.

[50:21] Sam Spurlin: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I wish I had a really good, like, clear thesis statement on that because I feel like I have really evolved my thinking over time because, like, the names you just mentioned, including yourself, have all influenced how I think about work. You know, I was really into The 4-Hour Workweek when it, when it came out. And, you know, some of the things that I talked about earlier in terms of constraining my working hours and really focusing on the most important stuff comes right out of that. You know, Cal Newport has been a really big influence, especially thinking about deep work and like what, what it looks like to take deep work seriously and why you would even want to.

So in many ways, I'm just kind of copy. I'm a bit of a copycat to those thinkers. I guess I pull a little bit more from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and the idea of flow. So optimal experience, losing that sense of time. I think, you know, work at its best is a flow experience for, for a lot of us. And I think that's that when I read Flow and decided to go into the positive psychology, organizational positive psychology route, I was thinking a lot about, well, how do you create that opportunity for more people?

I saw plenty of people growing up as a kid, whether parents or aunts and uncles or friends of the family, who seemed to my, you know, in my experience with them, incredibly capable, incredibly smart, incredibly creative people who would go to jobs where none of that was valued. They would go to their job, punch in, do what they needed to do. And I think there are plenty of people who like, that's what they want from a job. And that is awesome. I don't begrudge anybody that at all. But there are people, and I grew up around some of them, who I think wanted more from their, their work opportunities.

And for whatever reason, it just never really happened for them. And I think for most of us, if we're lucky and healthy, you know, we spend a lot of time at work or doing some sort of work-type activity. So how can that be not a death sentence, not a jail sentence, but actually an opportunity to, to grow, to learn about yourself, to feel like you're making a contribution, to feel like you are developing skills that you care about and kind of that self-efficacy, that self-mastery. Those are all the types of things that I think about when I think about how do we make organizations better? How do I, how do I want to experience work as an individual, whether I'm working for The Ready or working for myself or some, some other organization? In the future.

I think, I think work has a lot to offer in those, in those capacities. But a lot of our current system optimizes for other things, or other things take precedence over those. And the fact that I'm even talking about them may seem like a joke to some people who like don't even get to sniff anywhere close to some of those sort of more ideal outcomes in the work that they do.

[53:22] Paul: The Pathless Path listeners are the best. They're thinking deeply about this. You're not going to get pushback here.

[53:29] Sam Spurlin: Yeah. I'm always, I'm always just trying to listen for like, the pushback. Yeah, I totally agree. This audience is probably not the pushback. But I'm always, I'm always very, I'm trying to become more aware of when I am talking from like a point of privilege that I'm not necessarily articulating or making conscious to myself. And that's something that, you know, I'm just trying to like make sure that I'm not speaking in universal language about work experience, because I think it is such a personal— what we— what you want out of it can be so personal, and what you are trying to get out of it that I'm trying to— I'm basically trying to assume that people aren't always like me, which is, you know, tough.

[54:10] Paul: Yeah, I think that's a useful lens, especially if you're communicating to a massive audience. However, I do think not enough people actually share what fires them up, what makes them tick, what they feel connected to, let that rip because not enough people are actually hearing what people— how people are thinking about the recipes for their life. And like, I think we've gone too far in like trying to not just say what we think.

[54:38] Sam Spurlin: Yeah.

[54:39] Paul: Yeah. I love the idea of flow though, because the way I think about work now is that there is this state to be found that you can feel connected to what you're actually doing. Now, can you make money from that? I have no idea. It took me a damn long time to figure out how to, like, make above, like, break-even wages. Yeah, but once you find that state, the experience can be so life-altering and jolting that you sort of restructure your life to protect those things.

Do you have those things still? And are they— I imagine writing is one of those things for you. How do you think about protecting that?

[55:18] Sam Spurlin: Yeah, writing is definitely one of those things. And I'm in the fortunate position that the vast majority of the work that I do at The Ready is, is those things. I mean, I think I go through periods of time where just through the nature of what I'm doing, I maybe spend more time in meetings or in conversation with people than I would prefer. But also, I'll go through periods like in between projects where I have nothing except my own free time to write and think. And I find myself craving that connection with with clients. So I think I'm lucky in that most of the stuff that I do, I find myself losing track of time.

At the end of the day, I feel like I have put forth a great amount of effort towards things that matter. And writing, it's definitely part of that. I do a ton of writing just in the actual day job. But also, you know, in some ways, I feel like I'm on this like 7-year detour of working for an organization from the thing that I'm actually really wanting to do, which is like my independent writing and my own kind of like solo stuff. But as long as The Ready kind of continues to scratch that itch for me, which I don't see any reason why it would stop, I am— I think I'll kind of continue on that path and make writing the thing that I do, you know, around the edges, or if I can bake it into my day a bit more, that tends to go better considering after lunch I kind of stop becoming coherent and As I look at 2 o'clock right now and realize, but I'm a morning person for sure.

[56:47] Paul: What have you learned from your brother about work? You've hosted a podcast with him for a few years now.

[56:54] Sam Spurlin: Yeah, my youngest brother is an organic farmer, so he's a farmer, I'm a consultant, and we have a podcast called Fields of Work. And I love talking about work with him and there's so much similarity in how we think about work and some of the stuff that we have to like— that we— not, not the stuff that we do in the sense that he's not on Zoom calls all day, obviously. But thinking about the system that is the farm that he is trying to grow, literally, as a complex system and responding to things that you don't anticipate. And how do you kind of stay adaptive and make really tough prioritization decisions in the moment, like, do I go weed this field, or do I go harvest this field? And like, what are the implications of both? It's a lot of fun to talk with somebody who has a much more direct relationship with his labor in some ways.

And just the way that he thinks about it. I, I, yeah, I went out there and worked on his farm for a week a couple of summers ago. And just gave me such an appreciation for like what actual hard work is. You know, 95 degrees harvesting okra is quite different than like, you know, sitting in my very nice home office chatting with Paul. You're better than harvesting okra in the 95-degree Nashville heat.

[58:25] Paul: Yeah, a little easier, but maybe not as rewarding.

[58:29] Sam Spurlin: Maybe, although it was certainly rewarding to go from empty bucket to full bucket. Like there's an element of rewarding that I found myself, like I realized that I don't get in basically anything that I do as a consultant. There's very, very rarely is like, oh, we started here with nothing in the ground. And now there's like a growing field. Like that's, that's pretty satisfying.

[58:51] Paul: That's so cool. You wrote, I always need to be doing something scary and unknown in order to feel like I'm doing the right thing in my career. What's that about?

[59:01] Sam Spurlin: I think it goes back to what kind of what I did with joining Undercurrent. I mean, even going, going, quitting teaching, going to grad school, joining Undercurrent, doing this Ready thing. I feel I'm very wary of complacency because I think there is an aspect of my personality that just loves routine and comfort and will happily stay there forever. And there may be a point where like, that's just fine. And like, I'm okay with that. But I have had enough experience of ignoring that voice and doing kind of the opposite and things working out really, really well that I kind of want to keep following that, that path and see where it, where it takes me.

I think that you're, you're quoting the article that I recently wrote about kind of looking back at the last 7 years of my career and like trying to like make sense of like, do I like where I am? Do I want to do something different? You know, how am I thinking about that? Am I right?

[59:56] Paul: Yeah, that— and I found that fascinating. Because it's such a good lens into— this is why I love reading what people write about work. It's such a good lens into— there's no real right path, right? And you're constantly just sort of checking in. Okay, do I like what I'm doing? And you sort of talk yourself into, okay, I'm going to stay at the Ready.

This is working. But you're also giving a peek into, oh, I do have this solo ambition. And I think a lot more people are having that because there's way more people taking unconventional paths and doing their own thing. But at the end of the day, it's all like my path is still like would be a job to some people. It's enjoyable to me, but it's, it's so hard to figure that out moving forward.

[01:00:45] Sam Spurlin: Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, I think the— it's that just that commitment to regularly checking in with yourself and just like asking like how things are going. I mean, that's, that's a retrospective meeting in an organization. And we often talk about if you're going to just do one thing in an organization to make it function better, make a commitment to once a month come together with your team and ask yourself like, what's going well? What do we want to change? You know, what's not going as well?

And like making a small change based on that conversation. If you at the very minimum just do that, things will get better. And you can do that as an individual practice as well.

[01:01:24] Paul: Who's your PATH role model?

[01:01:28] Sam Spurlin: Great question. I don't think I have one at the moment. There are folks, I mean, I think I find myself looking at folks who have made writing the vast majority of what they do. So whether just an author or writing online, that I, I, I can think in my, in my moments where I'm frustrated with how much time I'm spending dealing with clients or feeling kind of over the consulting side of things, I look at the folks who are mostly writing and I'm like, I want to do what you do at some point. But I also know like I've had enough, like I took a sabbatical 2 years, 2, a year and a half ago for 4 months, where I had a ton of free time and I did spend a bunch of time of it writing. And by the end of it, I really want wanted to do some client work.

So I don't, I, I, I know enough about myself to know, like, I don't know that that is, that the grass is really that much greener on that, on that side.

[01:02:23] Paul: Yeah, it's so hard. I think I've enjoyed working on my own because I am able to balance all the things. So I work with corporates on training. I was running a workshop for a company in Indonesia last night on strategy consulting skills. Today I'm doing a podcast. I'm taking the rest of the week off, but I do a bunch of different stuff.

I went to the gym this morning, gives me all this flexibility, but I've really resisted the urge to do just one thing. I think that's often a trap sometimes, and it's sort of downstream from thinking about jobs as like saving us, right? We sort of think once I have that dream job, everything will be figured out.

[01:03:03] Sam Spurlin: It's—

[01:03:04] Paul: the reality is we need a mix of different types of things.

[01:03:07] Sam Spurlin: Trap is a good word because I got even going back to my, like, you know, writing about minimalism days and simplicity. There are— I will find myself sometimes really getting on the kind of thought path of, I wish I just had one thing to get really good at. Like, if I was just getting good at one thing, imagine how good I would be at that one thing. And I think that's actually probably dangerous for me because I agree with everything that you, that you just said. So as, as satisfying as it would potentially be, or I think it would be to be this some sort of like urban writing monk, I don't think it would actually make me that, that happy.

[01:03:49] Paul: I love that. And yeah, and people that are writing a lot, it's often we are— it's often our projections, right? We see somebody and like, wow, they're writing a lot, but they're often doing other things. They might be working on other things. Things that we might not label as work, or they're doing promotional stuff, interviews, different things like that. But I sort of think this impulse to do one thing is essentially a personality type.

This is a working theory, but I think it's a personality type of basically just somebody that has outsized focus on clear rewards, right? So there's people that are just so obsessed with crushing it and scaling and getting enormous wealth in short amounts of time. And it's always them who are like, you need to focus, you need to work on one thing. But over and over again, I'm just doing a bunch of random stuff. I'm probably dropping the ball collectively on all of them, but it's hella fun.

[01:04:47] Sam Spurlin: Yeah, yeah. No, I'm, I'm right there with you. And I think my, my particular flavor of that is less about the, like, I'm gonna do one thing so that I can kind of squeeze as out of it. And more so, at least this is what I tell myself, more so about like, what layers of mastery would I uncover if I really just took this one thing as seriously as possible? There's that element of it that I think is really fascinating. And there's something to it.

But also, you have to— the opportunity cost of that is so high, and you have to be okay with paying that. And I learned through the PhD process that I was not willing to pay that opportunity cost. And I don't think I would be to just purely be a writer either if that meant, you know, I couldn't do a podcast in the middle of the day or do a client workshop on value stream mapping, which is apparently what I'm doing in an hour. So, you know, nice.

[01:05:39] Paul: Use those lean principles. I used to do some value stream mapping back in the day.

[01:05:44] Sam Spurlin: Yeah. Yeah.

[01:05:45] Paul: What's something that's inspired you in the last 6 months?

[01:05:50] Sam Spurlin: Hmm. Hmm. What is something that has inspired me in the last 6 months? I love writing. I love reading Craig Mod stuff. You know Craig Mod?

[01:06:01] Paul: Yeah, he's great.

[01:06:02] Sam Spurlin: The long walks and everything that he does and the kind of the independent career that he has pulled together for himself making book-shaped objects.

[01:06:09] Paul: Maybe this is your path, Roman.

[01:06:11] Sam Spurlin: I was just about to say, I was just about to say, coming back to your previous question, I think he might be kind of my, my role model, even to the point I mentioned the sabbatical that I took. What I did on my first day of my sabbatical, I wanted to do a week-long challenge where I walked like 25 miles a day for a week. And I did the first day and I got massive blisters all over my feet. And that was the end of that experiment. But that was my attempt at like channeling Craig Mod. So I love the stuff that that he does for sure.

I mean, I'm resisting the urge to just like pop open my Goodreads and look at like what books I've read recently. I've been trying to read more fiction because I mean, part of my story about working at the Ready is that I went right from grad school to consulting. So like I had zero experience. I felt very behind the eight ball every day. So I tried to make up for it by just reading an insane amount of nonfiction related to the work that I was doing. And that probably carried on too far.

So in the past couple of years, I actually feel like I do know what I'm doing and can kind of hold my own. So therefore I can like do other things. So I've been reading a lot more fiction, which is just to say that, you know, I've really enjoyed like The Three-Body Problem and some other sci-fi that I just haven't read in a long time. And I want to be a fiction writer sometimes. And then I sit down to like actually try and I'm like, oh shit, this is like a thing that I have. This is a muscle that I have never developed.

[01:07:39] Paul: Why did you leave New York?

[01:07:41] Sam Spurlin: It was really simple. So my girlfriend at the time was still in LA. I moved to New York to work for Undercurrent and then The Ready. We were long distance, and then she got a job in DC. And I realized at that time, Aaron had already moved away and a couple of other early employees had all moved away from New York. And I was like, well, why am I going to stay in New York?

So I just moved down to Arlington to move in with her.