LUKE BURGIS: Discerning What You Actually Want

0:00we don't actually need, right? It's like sort of rubber necking at the accident on the side of the road. That's not knowledge that is beneficial for us in any way to just see something on the side of the road or something like that, versus the kind of knowledge that we want to acquire because it's actually leading somewhere. Hey, I'm Michael Hyant. And I'm Megan Hyant Miller. And you're listening to the Devil Wind Show. So today we have a fascinating and kind of surprising in the direction that it went conversation with Luke Burgess, who really talks about the idea that you better know what kind of success you want before you become successful or you can end up achieving the wrong thing or finding it and satisfying. And we had a deeply meaningful conversation about the nature of work, the nature of desire, of calling, of how to discern those things. I mean, it kind of went in all sorts of different directions than we had anticipated, but it was so rich. It did and he has such an interesting career path.

1:00Yes. And it has taken some turns here and there and it's kind of surprising, but I love it. It makes them who he is. And I think this is a rich conversation that we'll all benefit from. Yeah, so Luke is the author of wanting the power of memetic desire in everyday life. That book has been translated by the way into 22 languages, Holy Cow. And he's been named a financial times business book of the month with that book. He's also the author of the one in the 99 forging identity in the age of social contagion. And he's the co-author of Unrepeatable cultivating the unique calling of every person. So like I said, we talk a lot about calling, but he's also an entrepreneur. I mean, this is like a diet in the wool business guy, startup guy. And he tells some really interesting stories about how his own failure in business was the beginning of really understanding why he's actually here. And I think for anybody who's failed, if you raise your hand and say I failed,

2:00and I would raise my hand to that, his story of failure is super inspirational. So he studied at NYU Stern, business find, he has a BS in finance and accounting. He studied at St. John's Seminary and the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome. And he writes a weekly sub-stack and lives in Washington DC with his wife Claire and his two daughters. Enjoy. Luke, welcome to the show. Michael Nagan, good to be here. Thanks for having me. We're so glad that you're here. Okay, I want to start with the photo that you talk about that 1936 photo, which has a sea of arms saluting Hitler. And one man, August Lan Besser, is standing there with his arms folded. And it's this iconic photo. Okay, what did he know that everybody around him didn't and how does that apply to our professional lives? Yes, so when I first saw that picture, I started really trying to get inside the head of this guy.

3:02You know, we see it and we're like, this is really impressive. What I do that, and then we realized he was doing this way before the age of social media. He had no idea that there was gonna be a photographer in the grandstands taking this picture of him so that we could be talking about him like he's some kind of a hero right now, more than a century later. And I was like, so he didn't do it to perform. He didn't do it so he could post it on LinkedIn and get praised for his actions. What was it about him? And then I started wondering, you know, did he do that spontaneously? Like in the moment, did he make that decision? Or did he know something before he even showed up at the rally that day? And you know, his story is tragic. I mean, he joined the Nazi party, probably looking for work. You know, he was just looking for a job and they had the best job prospects. And it seems like he probably joined, you know, thinking that he could stay true to himself, let's say, while also being part of this bigger thing. And then he quickly realized that that was a sorely mistaken assumption. And as I read more about his life

4:04and like what led up to the moment, right? What allowed him and the sea of men to do something frankly very dangerous, which would eventually get him killed? And I realized like he knew he had thought about it before he got in that position. And he knew that when he was in a crowd, when any of our are part of a crowd, we change our psychology changes, right? It's incredibly powerful, the crowd psychology and the way that it operates on us. And he had most likely made a decision before he got there. Like I'm done saluting. This party is coming after me and my relationship. They're coming after everything that I believe in and I've had enough. And he made a decision before he even got there. And there's something really important about that, right? To like know the way that we change when we're in a group environment, especially when there's a lot of coercion or conformity involved. So it needs to be some kind of a reflection on it, to a preparation, a pre-commitment, so that we're not always operating by our default instincts when we're part of a crowd.

5:06And this applies, you know, just even to our daily life, right? When we're in the meeting, if we haven't actually thought about how we're going to react to something, it makes it much more difficult to be intentional about it. Yeah, I think that's really important. It seems like one of the biggest things, one of the biggest takeaways of that story, is just to be aware of the dynamics, of the pressure of kind of the crowd, of the momentum of what's happening. I think that applies to social media today that applies, you know, anytime you're in a power differential, which certainly he was, right? In that context, it makes a lot of sense to me that we don't examine that enough, and then we just get swept away and then realize at some point, this maybe not exactly your language, but that we're out of integrity, and how awful that feels. The ship is too far out of the port. Absolutely. And, you know, I think that's obviously an extreme example, right? We're talking about the Nazi party and this guy who had not saluted. But I think like sometimes we have to look at the extremes to tell us a truth about human nature

6:08and about our own lives. So when I saw that I said, well, can I just look at the groups, the communities that I'm a part of, whether they're healthy or not? I mean, just like what are the communities that I'm a part of? And in which way am I a part of them? Am I sleepwalking as a member of them? Am I experiencing tension as a member of them? And this applies from my church to my family, to, you know, the neighborhood dads group that I'm a part of to my work, right? In which way am I being part of that community? And then some of them, there's maybe it's causing me to sacrifice my integrity. Maybe there's a bunch of little micro integrity, sacrificing moments and maybe those are the kind of groups that I might need to think about, changing my relationship to maybe even leaving. So I think the extremes in some case can tell us truths about the way that we exist and those kinds of environments where it can be uncomfortable to disagree or to do something different or to not go along. This is a little bit of the on the same vein, but in one team, you talk about leaving a company you founded

7:11and not feeling lost but feeling relief. So could you take us back to that and explain kind of what was happening for you and why that made sense at the time? Well, I think that ambition without a sense of self or differentiation of self is just a highly sophisticated form of conformity or at least it can be. And in my case, I was incredibly ambitious without really understanding who I was or what I wanted. And I chased very ambitious goals from transferring into what I thought was the best undergrad business school to getting a high paying job on Wall Street. And then thinking I was escaping a job that I didn't necessarily like and into the startup world. And then I kind of did the same thing there. I was chasing metrics of success as an entrepreneur. And then I found myself doing the performance of the entrepreneur more than actually building companies that I wanted to build. I was performing the role of the entrepreneur and measuring my success based on the success of the people

8:13that I saw around me until I had a company kind of blow up in my face. And the relief that I felt because all of the conditions that made that ambition possible were taken away from me really in a single day when I found out that a big deal had fallen through. And I was going to completely pivot. And it untethered me from my unhealthy mimetic desire. Mimetic desire, just meaning the desires that I had taken on to my own from other people around me. I wanted what they wanted without really reflecting on whether those desires were leading me to a place that was actually going to lead to better relationships and ultimately be fulfilling. And the relief that I felt was the relief of being momentarily unshackled from needing to chase goals that I really no longer believed in. At that particular time, it was I needed a certain valuation to sell my company at. Otherwise, I wasn't a successful entrepreneur. And it freed me from that goal for a minute as jarring as it was and allowed me the time and space to go back to the

9:15drawing board and saying, well, what am I actually doing here? The way that my company had evolved, that it evolved into something that I didn't actually like to run anymore. I was like selling products that I didn't believe in. And I said, you know, I'm actually being given some kind of a gift here. I'm being given the gift of being able to reflect with intentionality on how I want to channel my ambition and go back to the origin of where my goals came from in the first place and how I set them rather than just learning how to I can get really, you can get really good at achieving goals without wondering whether they're the right goals in the first place. And I took a little sabbatical and was frankly life changing. Wow. Do you feel like it takes a crisis to have that kind of reflection or can people be more intentional about thinking about their goals and thinking what they're pursuing before they get to that point where everything, you know, the bottom has to fall out before they have an awakening? Well, for me, it probably did take a crisis, but I don't think it's a test. It did for me too, but I'm just certainly. I definitely wouldn't have taken three years writing a book

10:18about it if I didn't think that it was possible to help other people see some of these things in surface, the origin of their ambition and desires. I do think it's possible to sort of see and to step back from the situations and environments that were in because we're immersed in them. They're so close to us where the fish and water and to be able to name, you know, a simple exercise is just name the models of your desire. Like who are the people who have given you your own desires? Who are the people whose careers you track intensely with mixed feelings? It's a sign that they're important to you for some reason. And when I did that in my own life, and I saw, you know, the entrepreneurs that I was paying attention to on a daily basis, what are they saying? What are they doing, measuring myself according to them? If I had been able to name them a little bit, I would have seen the way that my own ambitions were shaped in that way, and I would have gained a little bit of distance from that, and I think made better choices. But I didn't have the vocabulary or the language or the

11:20ideas to even be able to do that kind of reflection, because I was so busy all of the time. I did not have more of the balance that I ended up finding in my life when I was given the gift of, you know, having to step away for a few months. But I certainly think that being intentional about naming things, naming the major influences on our goals, for instance, is incredibly important. Do you think this is a one and done kind of thing, or have you found yourself at various points, like, say, under stress, or when life gets really busy? A kind of drifting back to that old way of being? I find that it's a constant struggle. I think that the drifting happens all the time. It happened with writing a book. You know, it's a whole new world, and we change domains, you know, kind of the way that these things manifest themselves are just different. They're a little bit different. So, you know, even if I can get relatively good at understanding the way that these forces affect me at work, maybe I don't understand the way that they affect me as a father and as a parent, as the father of a couple of new kids.

12:23Now, I'm introduced to this new world of the memetic forces operating on me and like, how I can be a quote, good dad. You know what I mean? Right. And if I take that far enough, right, I just end up trying to do all of the things. Now, I'm following the dad influencers. Like, where does that ever end? And like, I'm in the same, I'm in the same, you know, the guy that gets up at 430 in the morning and goes, runs 15 miles. And I'm like, you know, this is like the same thing that I was doing as a startup entrepreneur. I can easily see myself doing it now as a new father. Yeah. It's just the startup is your family. Yeah. Exactly. Well, you know what this reminds me of, dad, Luke, several years ago, we were working on an app for the full focus plan. We thought the future was taking the full focus plan or digital. And, you know, that analog was passe and we just wanted to make this app. And so we were seeking private equity funding for the app. And so we had to do all these things to get the business in a place where it would be attractive. And then we got our dog and pony show together and we took it

13:25on the road and we went to Texas and we went to Virginia and we went, you know, we were like doing all this stuff. And I can remember distinctly sitting with somebody in a meeting and thinking, oh no, this might work. You know, like, like it was like, what if they actually cut us a check? Then what are we going to do? Thinking like, I hope they don't. And I'm so thankful we did a you and I talked about it after one of these trips and we ended up saying, yeah, no, we're not willing to make that trade. Well, just to just added an interesting point to it, we literally only had one meeting. It was that first meeting. Right. Well, I had several meetings preparing for that that you weren't a part of. Yeah. This is like the first real live investors. Right. And we walked out of that meeting and we looked at each other. We said, nope. Absolutely not. You know, and it was like the best decision that we ever made. Although it cost us a million dollars in investment. That's true. We had invested a million dollars in the building of this app, which thank God it would have been a lot worse than that because AI

14:26was just around the corner and would have rendered that thing useless in the way that we imagined. I mean, it was just it was all meant to be. It was like totally a God thing. But it's like you go down this road and you think, yeah, what we want is, you know, we want big capital and we want to ultimately have this big exit from this business. And that'll be amazing. Our lives will just blah, blah, blah. And then you're like, actually, everything that would come on the other side of that would not be a blessing. Like we already have what we want. We just don't want to lose it. You know, and we had to kind of go all the way around the bar and to realize that what we wanted was the thing that we already had. Yeah. That you know, it reminds me of I've learned a lot about the world of philanthropy in the last five to seven years and the way that it works. And what you'll often get is people with big checks to give out. And whether it's philanthropy or grants or something. And they want certain things. They have certain desires, certain things that they were like to see in the world. And to me and my team saw that there was an $8 million grant for a particular thing. Like that's a lot of money and we were told that we were strong, contented to get it. We put together a proposal and then it got to the point where they really

15:28seemed like they were going to give us the grant money. And then I had to stop at the very end and say, wait a minute, if I take the money, I actually have to go do this thing for the next four or five years. Not even like we hadn't spent, we hadn't spent enough time actually thinking about like whether the desire of the foundation was actually like what we were building and we had no way from it. It reminds me a lot of your story. Yeah, you know, it's like the the CFO that we had at the time he used to say he was like a real known nonsense guy. And he said, take the King's coin, do the King's dance. And you're like, nice. No, thank you. That fits it in start contrast. I think it was so good. Yeah. Oh, man. Wow. Okay. You just talked a little bit about naming models and that whole idea, which I think is huge, but you go on to talk about this idea of thick desires and thin desires. Tell us what that means and how we can think about that in our lives with this whole conversation of success and what we want and goals and so forth. Thin desires, the name that I've given to a very ephemeral desire, something that

16:31we want today that we're unlikely to want a year from now, five years from now, maybe not even tomorrow, right? These very subjective things that are formed often in these highly mimetic social ways. And when the context for the environment has changed, the desire itself goes completely away, right? We no longer have it. Probably that one of the easiest ways to kind of determine whether a desire is thinner thick is like does it persist through different seasons of life, through different environments, through different friend groups, through different relationships, a thick desire is precisely that. It's the kind of desire that endures and persists. And those are the ones that I want to invest in because I know that it's not going to be taken away from me in some sense. So obviously my family, there's a thick desire there and it's going to grow and develop layers and layers as I get older and my kids are different ages and that desire will evolve. A thin desire can't really develop the layers, right?

17:31The depth, right? I almost think of it as, you know, if you've went hiking in beautiful places like Utah and you kind of see the different layers of rock that have formed over millions of years, a thick desire is capable of that. Plus we even, the thin desires can become thick, which you have to stay with them and they have to have enough there. There has to be enough substance there to develop different layers and aspects, right? And I think parenthood is certainly one aspect of that, but so is our work. So a thin, a thin desire is now I've gotten better at sort of like telling when a desire is thin, when I sort of, I haven't had time to really think much about it, but it kind of sets me on fire and like, yeah, that's a great idea. Let me go do that. And then I sit with it for a week. It's kind of one of the practices I've developed. And I really, unless it's very time sensitive, I try not to act on anything, unless I've given it quite a bit of time. And I see how I feel about it a week, two weeks, a month later if I have that that much time. Does it, how does it feel? Does it feel like it has gotten deeper or does it feel like it's slowly dissipating? This is probably why it's so important just to slow down.

18:34Yeah. You know, I think, first of all, I'm really good at making decisions and I'm really good at making them fast. And some of the decisions are actually good. But I think what I feel under pressure, then I don't sit with it to determine if this is a thin desire or a thick desire. And you know, sort of the tail tail sign is, you know, I see something in my Facebook feed. And so I order it from Amazon. And then I get it and it's like, did I really want that thing? Or you don't remember that you ordered it? That may have happened at the time or two. You're like, wait, why didn't I order from fill in the blank? I don't even recognize that. And then you're like, you have this vague sort of deja vu like, oh, I think that was an ad I saw. But I tell you what, I'm doing it a lot less now. Yeah. Because I'm just, I've got, my life is not quite as hectic and busy. Yeah. So I've got a little time to think and just think, you know, that probably is just going to go right back in a box back to the sender. So it just won't initiate. And I, you know, I forget what I want on a daily basis. So what my desires even are.

19:34And I can tell you, and I'm not just saying this because I'm talking to you. I think I got a full focus planner back in 2018 or 19, a friend Josh gave me one. And you know, one of the things that I've kind of integrated in my, my own daily kind of journaling, if I write down over the course of 30 days, like what is something that I really want? I really want to take a vacation to Italy. At the end of, and I write, maybe I write that every day for six days and then it just disappears. And I look back 30 days later and I'm like, I really thought that going to Italy was like one of my thick desires. And then all of a sudden, I just completely forgot about it. And I might not have even remembered that it's like actually amazing what happens if you kind of track the persistence of your desires over a long enough period of time. You don't even remember what yours are sometimes yesterday. So true. But I will say the going to Italy should be on everyone's thick desire. That is true. Well, I just, I just got back brother three and a half weeks. I fulfilled that one. I feel good. Oh my gosh. Lasted longer than six days on your full focus planner.

20:35It sounds so great right now. You know, that's interesting just to think about how over time these things persist or not, because I think a lot of times, you know, I was telling you before we started recording Luke, that our audience, our community, our people who are overwhelmed and overloaded. They just have too much on their plate and too much to think through. It's just a lot. And part of that, I just had this realization is that we want too many things, not that we don't too many things that aren't the thick things. And that crowds out our schedule. I mean, if you think about it too many things were buying too many things were trying to fit into our schedule, too many things that are other people's priorities, too many things, just too many things. And if we were to slow that down and become more reflective, as you talk about a lot in your work, that we might feel a lot less overwhelmed and a lot less overloaded because we wouldn't be trying to fit so much in without being intentional about should it even be there in the first place? Yeah.

21:36That's a good, a good breakthrough. Like a lot of people go straight to productivity and organization and, you know, these kind of hacky strategy things before asking the most important question is, should I even be trying to integrate this at all? Yeah, I mean, the danger with the Mimetic Desire at foreign and ambitious person is that once you achieve a goal, you will immediately find another model. You know, because the world is filled of models of desire. And when you achieve your goal, you will either assume that you chose the wrong model or you chose the wrong goal because you're not going to be completely satisfied and you will have no problem finding another one. So one thing that I've learned is filtering things through my thick desires. Even when it comes to simple decisions like the, you know, requests that I get to go do certain things events and speaking. One of my thick desires is spending time with my family. So I even filter those, and I say yes to way too many things. And I've just learned to filter that through that thick desire.

22:38Well, where is it? Can my family come? And it's just reoriented the way that I even make those decisions because I'm now connecting something that could be transactional to something that is a thick desire. Can you talk a little bit about Tyler Cowan's idea of open tabs? And that is a metaphor? This is cool. Yeah, yeah. My, I really hope you don't ask me which tabs I have open right now. Hi, you know we're going to. You're going to ask us. I should have been prepared for that because I put it in the book. Well, my friend Tyler Cowan has what is one of his favorite interview questions is, tell me what tabs you have open on your computer on your browser right now. And you know, he asked that for a couple of reasons, right? One, nobody's really prepared for that question. Right? So it gets them off script. If they came in with prepared scripts and things that they wanted to say, it gets them grounded in something concrete and real and daily life and usually leads to really surprising conversations.

23:41So he really likes that to throw people off a little bit. But now it's too late because he wrote about it. I've written about it. Now everybody knows at least people everybody read him and me. So he's going to come up with a better one. But it also there's a huge difference between what we say we value and the way that the things that we say we pay attention to. And what we actually pay attention to. And the browser tabs are a great example of what we actually pay attention to. I don't know about you, but I spend, you know, eight hours a day probably on my laptop. And I spend a lot of time on those browser tabs. So it's kind of a way to kind of cut through what people say versus what they're actually doing. And the tabs don't lie. Just like the screen time on the phone doesn't lie. Okay. I really do want to know what are your open tabs? Well, give me a few. The reason this is so challenging for somebody like me because I think I have another making this up probably 60 plus tabs open. What? Yeah. And so part of it is I see an interesting. I see an interesting link. And I don't want to forget it.

24:41So I click on it with the intention of coming back. And then periodically I go through it and I say, yeah, I'm not really interested in that. I'm not really interested in that. And I just like close them down. So it's like a metaphorical open tab. It's not just, I mean, it's like something you want to think about later as a metaphor of a thing you want to think about. And it's literally an open tab. Yes. But I will tell you the ones that are open and I'm using, if you really want to know. Okay, I really want to know. Okay. So I've been working on this new webinar. Yeah. This training. So that was probably the most persistent one that's open. Okay. There's usually some kind of AI thing like I really want to go through anthropics courses on Claude. Okay. Certification courses, by the way. And so that's open. What else is open? It's hard for me to not censor myself and say, well, what's virtuous and what's not. Probably Facebook's open. Yeah. You know, in one tab. Yeah. And I think that's probably the three on bouncing around with. You know, it would be a good version of this question. Luke is, I'll tell you mine a second because that's only fair.

25:42But you're going right to the right. So we're fair. Is what are the last 10 topics of your clawed chat? You know, like the topics of your clawed chat. Mine, which is really close to what my tabs would be. I have a whole medical project for my mother-in-law who's sick right now. And so I'm in that. Like I have a, I have a Kaiser Permanente tab open on my browser right now and a project in Claude. I have a dialogue going with Claude about long-term disability insurance. I was just, I was like, oh gosh, I have a friend who's about our age who is in a scary situation of being in the hospital and rehab for an illness for a long period of time in his 40s. And I was like, we don't have long-term disability insurance. I've never really thought about that. I think I have some clothing tab open. You know, I might need to dress for an event that I was thinking about. I think I also have Facebook open. Definitely Google Drive open. Probably have Instacart open because I probably need something at the grocery store that, you know, I'm thinking about, but that's mine.

26:43Well, there you go. Yeah, sorry to disappoint so many of you. Yeah. It's incredibly boring. But, you know, I'm looking at mine right now and I've definitely got 60 plus open. Do you really? I'm a sushi restaurant in DC. Okay. My wife and I have a date night coming up, all kinds of AI tools in Atlantic article. Yeah, it's a total mess. I mean, it is, I just don't know how to actually close tabs. That's the problem. No, I will say my husband Joel, he probably has 100 tabs open. Yeah, he's told me that before. I don't even understand it. Like, when I go into his office on his desk are probably 75 books, like on the desk itself, which is to say nothing of the thousands that are around him. The crazy thing about the tab thing is like, I literally could delete them all after I've opened them once and they're in my history. Yeah, but, but you don't want to forget. But I don't want to forget. So these are, so these are representative though of the desires that we have at some level. I mean, we could probably tease out your list or my list or Luke's list and they would tell us something about ourselves. Yeah, I mean, I, you know, we live in this, I write in the book about this old vice called curiosity toss.

27:48The desert for months in Egypt and the third and fourth century wrote about this. And it's kind of disordered, a disordered desire for knowledge, right? It's like knowledge that we don't actually need. It's like sort of rubber necking at the accident on the side of the road. That's not knowledge that is beneficial for us in any way to just see something inside of the road or something like that versus the kind of knowledge that we want to acquire because it's actually leading somewhere. And obviously the internet has just made this particular challenge incredibly difficult, right? The amount of unnecessary things that I think that I need to know that I really don't need to know. Well, there's probably no better case for that than just a desire, which I have to keep up with the news. And she's like, okay, so do I really need this? What does it do for me? Yeah, really nothing. Ignorance could be helpful. This maybe left term, did you end up studying at the Vatican or going to work there? I entered seminary in my late 20s. Roman Catholic seminary, when I was 29 years old, I walked away from not the company we talked about earlier, but a different one.

28:52And studied philosophy and theology for five years. And three of those years I was in Rome at the Pontifical North American College, probably 200 yards away from the Vatican for three years. Amazing. What did you take away from that experience that's informed your work today? Because I suspect it probably had a big impact. Yeah, I mean, having founded several companies and then going to school, the study philosophy and theology, and it's kind of a strange order to do things in this very intense way, right, where I wasn't in a relationship or anything, helped give me kind of a first principle's look at. I mean, I started thinking about the nature of work in a way that I never had before. And I had never actually reflected on the question of like, what is work? Why do I work? Why do I like to work hard? What is it about me or the nature of what it means to be human that we work? So I ask all of these kind of very fundamental philosophical questions that really informed kind of the things that I'm doing today, the way that I'm approaching my work and priorities.

29:59And it also really gave me, I mean, to be very practical, I mean, living close to the Vatican in such a beautiful places room, also made me understand like how much I take for granted and how much we take for granted on a daily basis, right? And like how hard it is to exercise gratitude, right? I found myself like walking down the, in order to get back to my dorm room, I'd to walk directly in front of St. Peter's almost every single day. And I would catch myself after about a year of living there, not even looking up and noticing it whatsoever. And I was like, it really takes some real practice to not take this place for granted and the amount of opportunities that I have here to just sink down and actually appreciate this. Well, where I wanted to go with that is I wanted to know if you could differentiate between sort of the Christian notion of vocation or calling. And when you talk about desire, how are those two related or are they? They're very deeply related. And I sort of equate thick desire and our thickest desire with ours vocation.

31:02And when I say vocation, I mean a personal vocation, right? The way that each person, a calling is uniquely called to do something in this world, right? And that I think each person has an unrepeatable calling, something that only they can do with their unique history and situation and context. And I think our thickest desire is oriented towards the living out of a personal vocation, right? I mean, guys not here to play games, right? Our deepest desires are oriented towards the fulfillment of something that we're meant to do. So even though it's not really talked about in those terms in wanting thick desires is a signpost to a calling, which can be lived out in and through our work. But I sort of my understanding of a personal vocation is not something that that work alone can completely sort of satisfy for us. It's like it's something that we can live at every moment of our lives, right? Constantly being called so that we have the calling across every dimension of our lives, our family, our work, everywhere we go.

32:10We're in some sense living out our calling, right? And I don't associate it with me doing one particular thing. Yeah, sometimes I'm called to do some particular things. But I associate it with a thick desire to kind of be in the world in a certain way, something that endures and persists beyond any one particular season of life that I might have. Do you think that's something that we ought to be able to articulate what our calling is or be able to put it into words or is a more amorphous than that more general? I think it's worth trying. I think it's worth trying to articulate things. We have language. It's how we make sense of the world naming things, naming the animals. There's something very, very important about at least trying to. And that's not to say that the way that we articulate it or try to describe it might not evolve. There's always something ineffable, I think, about a vocation or a calling. So we'll never be able to describe it fully.

33:10There's always something I think, a numinous or a bit mystical about it. But it's worth trying. And I don't think it has to be. It's not like an essay. I had one person described their sense of their personal vocation to me as living out the goodness of God. And they said, anytime my whole life that I've encountered passages in the Bible, like the Good Shepherd where God is spoken of as good, they've affected me in a very particular way. And anything that I've tried to do manifesting the goodness of God has been something that has been a through line, a thread that's run through all of the different careers. And I thought that seems vague. But to him, he deeply believed that that was the way that he was sort of called. And it was simple as that. I think this topic of work, which we weren't really going to talk a lot about today. But here we are, which I'm thrilled about. This topic of work for people, at least in America or in the West, we think a lot about it as a thing we do to earn money, first and foremost.

34:16It's a way that pragmatically we're providing for our families or ourselves. And the notion of calling is not something that we talk about a lot. But I think we talk about living our best life, like in kind of a secular context, we talk about living our best life or being true to ourself or other things like that. But I think the Christian understanding of calling is so much deeper than that, so much more meaningful and satisfying. But how does one go about discerning what they're calling is if maybe their orientation has been more pragmatic or more self-focusses. In other words, not in relation to God as created to creator. I don't think there's any substitute to prayer and contemplation and meditating deeply on the movements within us as we go about doing different kinds of work, engaging in different kinds of relationships. There is some value to asking yourself, what would I be doing now if I wasn't being paid this much money? There's value in that, there's value in doing the deathbed exercise.

35:21What would I want to be investing in right now? What would I wish that I had been investing in right now? But I do think that meditating on the, what I would call like the way that different things affect us at the level of thick desire is a very important tool of discernment. Like does engaging in this particular work give me this enduring sense of joy and fulfillment, right, which come from God, or does it give me a fleeting sense of satisfaction. And if you can find a pattern in those, let's call them fulfillment stories over a long enough period of time, you probably have the, I would call them, you know, the marks of the Holy Spirit and, you know, probably a little sign of what you might be calling to do. I mean, the first time that I ever rolled up my sleeves and volunteered at a soup kitchen, it was just an incredibly powerful experience to me. I wasn't quite expecting it. You know, I was expecting like I signed up. I'm going to volunteer. And then I just had to ask myself like, well, what does that say about you, Luke?

36:25And I think if we can evaluate our experiences in terms of what they're doing to us in our interior life, we're constantly getting little hints and signs for what our personal calling might be. You know, it seems to me you mentioned prayer, but I think of journaling as well, which is something I do coupled with prayer. But it's, you know, to take the time, it seems like such a luxury today and I'm very not popular practice, perhaps, but just trying to sort your thoughts out by getting them on paper. That's been enormously helpful for me for discerning my own calling, but I also so would say I wanted to know what you think about this. I think just as other people observe my life and see things that perhaps I can't see, you know, this could be apparent. It could be your spouse. It could be even your kids, even my kids, even your kids sometimes. But how do you think about that to sort of the external validation of what you think your calling is? Because I would never want to be the kind of person who appears on American idol thinking that God's calling me to sing.

37:28And Simon Cowell says to me, you need to sue your voice instructor because you have zero talent. Yeah, yeah, and I think I wanted to be an MBA basketball player when I was a kid too. I had nine and Devah decent little jump shot. Yeah, I mean, I do think that discernment is something that is done with others in community. I'm, so I'm Catholic and our idea of like you go to the seminary and the discernment is not individual, you know, you can't raise your hand and say, or day me now it happens. The discernment is done as part of the community, you know, over a period of many years, right? And in some cases, it's like, you might not be called to be a priest. So, you know, it's critical. We all have blind spots. You know, I think one of the best things that I've ever done is joined like a men's group just to like help talk through things or women's group. But I'm listening. And there's been nothing more important in my life than to take the things that I'm wrestling with in terms of my own discernment. Should I work on this? Should I work on this?

38:29I think that to a trusted circle of men who know me well and can help me know when I'm when a Luke is regressing back into the, you know, ambitious Luke that just says yes to everything, right? It's just critical to have that. So I would say, yeah, I think that oftentimes calling is spoken of in a highly individualistic way. And there's part of it that is right because God speaks to us personally. But I think we should, we need to take that to others because we exist in a social context. It's really wise. There's somewhere where courage is wrapped up in all this. And you talk about Paul Tillich in the four forms of courage. Could you just elaborate on the role of courage in this whole conversation? I read Tillich for the first time just a few years ago. And I was struck that he was writing about courage back in the middle part of the century as, you know, corporations are becoming mechanized and you felt like people are becoming interchangeable. And he wrote a book called The Courage to Be. You know, The Courage to Be is just kind of an existential courage to show up and affirm existence and the goodness of being the goodness of the people around you, you know, even when it's hard, you know, just to kind of show up.

39:38We don't often talk about courage that way. And we usually when courage is mentioned in the public square, we're talking about soldiers, you know, we're talking about a whistleblower. But he wrote about courage is really kind of a daily thing, right, as a daily thing to exercise. And I don't think we, I don't think that I had meditated on that nearly enough. Okay. And then in the book, he distinguishes different kinds of courage. And he said, there's the courage to be that's critical. It's kind of an existential courage. We need to exercise the courage to be a part of something bigger than ourselves, right, which might involve sacrifice in their ego, the courage to take on a role, the courage to say yes to what someone is asking of us, even if it's not what we might have chosen. There's a courage to be a part of something bigger. And at the same time, there's the courage to be a part as one self. All right. So to be a part of something without sacrificing your integrity, right, and that is a second layer of courage that he articulated and to be able to do both at the same time, which is essentially the subject of my whole book, right, the one and the 99, how are we both one and part of something bigger than ourselves is what I've called, you know, the courage to be in communion and being in communion means, you know, learning how to be a differentiated self with a calling while also being part of the

41:01culture of something bigger and learning and sometimes that creates a little bit of tension in our instinct is to flee any form of tension or any anxiety, we just want to cut and run. And I think there's a lot to be learned for sitting in the tension to be a part and to be oneself. And in fact, the tension is a sign of health usually the tension goes away when we're dead, you know, in this life, there's not a perfect community. There will be tension and how do we lean into that or when and when don't we lean into it, obviously, in some cases, like August, landmessor, that's so good because I think it's there's tendency to do one of the other and like one of the most one of the oldest philosophical problems is the one and the many. Right, and in Christian faith, and I really mean this to be a Christian conversation so much, but you know, there's this manifests itself in so many different ways, not the least of which is the doctrine of the Trinity, I'm Eastern Orthodox, so cousin to you, but but very similar kinds of things and I think there have been times in my life when I've been probably too isolated and probably times in my life when I've been too a meshed in a community and I like that differentiation between those two things that we have to learn.

42:11Things that we have to hold and hold intention, you know, it's not a tension to be resolved it's just it's something to be lived yeah the Trinity is a communion of distinct persons yeah and you know where do we see that in the world and you know which kinds of communities and groups flatten any kind of distinctiveness in which ones actually allow people to evolve and and to be part of the whole or to be part of the body without demanding that they be something that they're not or demanding that they sacrifice their integrity. So that's just a this question of there's so many books that have been written about how to find your tribe and you know in my life I've searched for my own tribes and I found a lot of different ones from you know work to seminary and then I always realize that once I found it's like where the hard work actually really begins or I need to learn how to be part of the tribe while also contributing myself and you know and not in that fleeing from the responsibilities of. Having difficult conversations are existing in it in such a way where i'm not just completely conforming to the point of being it being healthy.

43:15Luke shifting gears a little bit you talk about this kind of counterintuitive idea that rules or constraints for life are actually free and you talk about the rule of Saint Benedict as kind of an example of this I think it's easy to think maybe even especially as we get older I mean in one way this is true and we're younger but I think as we get older it's like we want. We want to have autonomy we think we've earned it we don't necessarily want to live by rules we think we've sort of paid our dues why should we reconsider that and and what are you really talking about like for a professional who might be listening to the show what would what a rule for our lives look like. You know living a rule of life often has to do with rules for you know resolving conflicts and relationships for instance whether that's your marriage or in the workplace and you know when we think of rules at work we typically think of handbooks and policy manuals and operational things like the rule for getting x y and z thing done right that's how we think of rules and I think it's given rules and we learn rules get a bad rap they get a bad rap in school they get a bad rap in most workplaces with me.

44:31It's sort of a hall monitor way of enforcement rules and I kind of wanted to go back to a deeper tradition and I was like well what are some of the communities that have endured the longest in the world where people have to live together for a very long time and get along and grow in virtue and what are the kind of rules that are concerned with virtue and the formation of the whole person and not just the execution of tasks and things to get done. And I found the rule of Benedict which has been around for more than 1500 years like the you know if the lindy effect means anything the rule of Benedict is something that we should pay attention to right it's probably going to be around around for another 500 and the rule is focused on the way that an individual monk can live in community with other monks and the kind of rhythms that guide their life right obviously these are monks so let her jicle rhythms and the rhythm of prayer so there are things in the rule like when the bell rings. The monk must be obedient to the bell and drop whatever they're doing even if they're not done and make the way to the chapel for prayer it's got all these interesting kind of rhythms of of of life and a rhythm of life is very important right.

45:37And if you're not religious at all just having a rhythm to your week is critical right it changes our relationship to time it helps time slow down gives it a different feel. And I read the whole the whole rule and I thought you know what this rule actually is about is how to be a self in a community and what to do when there is anxiety intention and how to resolve those things in healthy ways right so it's a rule for relationships and the Bible contains these kinds of things right I mean if you have a problem with somebody go to them directly first you don't go tweet about it you don't put it on LinkedIn right go to them directly. And then you go to the church and then you know so there's a there's a way of thinking about human relationships that I think the rule has a lot to offer us and I'm not suggesting that it be adopted as an organizational manual because we're not monks most of us listening I would assume but there's a lot of wisdom in it and I and I think developing a rule of life that is a layer deeper than the operational rules is critical my my wife and I kind of have one in our own family with our daughters like this is how we agree.

46:45This is how we agree to handle situations when this is happening when something gets thrown in a window gets broken we're not just instinctively reacting we have a process for dealing with that and this is what the rule is all about you know how does the Abbott resolve differences and conflict among monks what happens when a new monk knocks on the door and wants to join surprisingly you know Benedict says you know you should stand outside of the Abby for a few days before he's admitted entrance to test his desire this filled with these entrance interesting anecdotes so the rule has to do with this deep kind of human things and I think we each probably need to write our own based on our own context but I would encourage everybody to kind of think about we know what what rules for dealing with conflict and anxiety in particular do I have in my own life am I operating with intention or am I operating based on instinct in the moment because if it's the latter and we don't have something that's kind of a habitual kind of virtuous practice to fall back on we can tend to make bad decisions.

47:47What it seems to me that those rules are inescapable you know if we don't if we're not thoughtful and create our own rules whether they're informed by our faith or something else then we're just going to have these rules that are just kind of have passed maybe we got it from our family maybe got them from our society in our environment but something's going to govern our lives one way or the other absolutely and the family is the first place that we learn rules to yeah it's why why they're so important and yeah so you got a they are going to govern our lives. And it's worth actually naming the rules that govern our lives just like we talked about naming models earlier you know like what rules do do I live by many of us have really never thought about that but what what is the rule right is it my workplace conduct policy or do I do I actually have a rule that goes beyond that that I try to live by myself. You know what is interesting to me about this is that in a lot of ways it's the antidote to decision fatigue. You know if we think about the stress of these kinds of situations that you're talking about the hardest decision this is exactly why organizations have policy manuals because when an HR situation comes up it's really hard to figure out how to handle it oftentimes they don't present themselves neatly there are kinds of you know complexities and you need a pre planned response to the situation because it's too difficult we know this it's too difficult to be fair to make good decisions in a high

49:15really stressful situation in a workplace that we don't think about that with our lives you know where we have all these implicit rules like you're talking about and I think we are advocating for Luke is to make those explicit and really examine them so that you know this is like good you know you know you know you're going to be a political behavioral therapy you know you pre plan your your response is a distressful situations so that you can handle them in ways that are functional instead of dysfunctional and I love that. I haven't thought about it in that way before but man that's a that's a big light bulb for me. I think it's a simple rule that I have in my own workplace is like when there is maybe some tension or you know a difficult conversation needs to be had we go to launch right away just like that's what we do so I can sit there and and ruminate and all the different ways to go about it but just having actually a nice generous launch that gets us a little bit outside of the work context it's just my go to it's work for over a decade now it's just kind of my go to so when I start and I forget it all the time and I'm like and I come back like Luke

50:18remember launch like lunch as you go to for this thing and and nine times at a 10 it just like leads to some kind of a little breakthrough would just make it or it makes the conversation easier but it's just a little one that I have for myself smart so good well as we move through life there are so many times when you know relationships are damaged or whatever and the ability to repair those and move toward that other person is such an important life skill yeah kind of a medical look I'm sad to say we're out of time and this has gone very quickly and I feel like you're kindred spirit but if you were to leave people with something that they could take away from this conversation that could measurably impact their life going forward what would you say that is I think one thing that anybody could do today or this week similar to kind of naming models is no just make a list of of the community that you feel like you're part of that shape you in some way or that you shape make a list of all of them and is to be going full circle right back to the beginning of the conversation and think about the ways in which you are part of those communities right how do you show up where do you feel tension the one where you're sort of sensing kind of the most tension do something this week anything right just one thing to show up differently within it so that you can learn something right the goal is not

51:45right the goal is not to leave right the goal is to just do one thing to show up is what I call in the book as a solid self with the maximum amount of integrity think ahead of time about how you're going to show up anticipate why you might be feeling the tension and it could be there it could be a very small thing right it could be the way that you respond to a message on slack right I'm not not suggesting you know show up to a board meeting and start jumping on the table here but just just one one thing right how you can just change the normal script a little bit so that you can learn both more about yourself and more about that community and try to diagnose why you might be feeling that tension and if you do that it will probably lead you to the next step and you might be able to figure out how to be part of that community in a more life giving way. One last question where would you suggest people start who want to learn more about you. I appreciate that Michael look purchase calm be your GIS. I think most of what I'm working on is is there and I'm the director of the cluny institute so cluny CLUNY dot org was a famous monastery built in the 10th century that is inspired me in a variety of ways well you can find me there to fantastic great well thanks so much this is rich thanks so much appreciate it.

53:08I like his demeanor me too I found that he had very calming energy he did I felt so calm just talking to him yeah but he you could tell he's very thoughtful very contemplative which is so interesting and and the mix that I found fascinating was what he's drawn from Catholic tradition in particularly monastic tradition on the one hand but a hard core of Wall Street business stuff to yeah and I think that's such an unusual mix but extremely helpful for people of us who are trying to navigate through the world. Well I think it's easy especially as high capacity people as people of goals as people who want to have a meaningful life and achieve things you can be successful at achieving things and then realize that you don't actually want the things you achieve and what a terrible place. To find yourself in and so I think this conversation about desire and assessing out what is truly.

54:15The thing you're called to what is it that are the thick desires of your life as opposed to the thin ones is very important especially if you have means especially if you have. Any level of autonomy in your life there's a lot of options available to you you're probably more. subject to influence in of these mimetic desires as he talks about them you know from outside of yourself then you might think you know you feel the need to keep up with other people are presented certain image or present success or pursue things because other people say they're good. And you know nobody gets to the end of their life and wishes they had done more of what other people. That was important so true you know I don't I don't intend this is a promotion but we've got a course called life focus. That I think runs so parallel to this yeah I thought the same thing to in helping people figure out. What their mission what their values what their desired future is. But I the thing I love about that course and what I loved about it when we were doing it as a standalone event is that it gives people the space.

55:17To push sort of the stop button and just reflect on their life not only where they've come from. But where they're going and to live more intentionally. That was one of my biggest takeaways from what he talked about was just the need to slow things down before making decisions and see what sticks you know that idea that he was writing in his journal or his planner. Some desire that he had and the question was it is going to be durable you know am I going to two weeks or or two months later still want this thing and if I don't it's probably not worth having and if we could just wait. To take action I say this is two people who are you know action taking kind of people and you guys are probably too listening. The older I get the more I think there's so much value and slowing things down so true sitting with things and that oftentimes. Speedy decision making is driven by anxiety in my experience at least speaking for 100% 100% and you can't make quality decisions when you're going to speed a light. Yeah you know you have to slow it down and you have to think about it and that's hard for me because I tend to be a very quick decision maker somebody who's order line impulsive sometimes is impulsive and I think just whether it's a big decision or a small decision i'm trying to train myself to go okay.

56:33That thing I want to order how about if I just give it a week and see if it's something I still want to order or that event that I want to sign up for in a 10. Chances are 48 hours from now i'm not going to feel the same way you know it's funny I will often send myself links to things you know recipes things I might want to order texture so I text myself. Me too i have probably hundreds of links that I've texted myself you know how often I've gone back to look for a link. Zero zero i'm not kidding you literally zero i would have to say the same. And what does that tell us now the good thing is it gave me a thing to do it made me feel like okay i'm not going to forget this kind of we're talking about the tabs idea. It made it where I felt like i'm not going to not be able to find this again if I really want it it's just that I never want it. And that is fascinating because how many ads for things do we see for example to buy or invitations are we given. That we eventually say no to or whatever that mean nothing to us no because they're not organic to who we are yeah they're externally imposed or solicited.

57:40And when we really sit with ourselves and reflect on what we want that usually presents a lot different answer yeah but we can't do that. If we're just kind of moving through life so fast that we don't have time to reflect I mean one simple thing that gallon I are trying to do at night now is just. To sit down after work usually outside when it's not so hot and you know just have a glass of wine or whatever and just talk about the day and think about it and just be more intentional yeah. Well hope you guys have enjoyed this episode and I want to ask you to share it with a friend if you've gotten value out of it share it with somebody else and if you feel so inclined. Lead us a review on wherever you listen to podcasts because that does help get visibility for the show and get this message of the double win out so we'll see you next time.