How to Simplify Your Message So People Get It

Jonathan Fields: [00:00:11] So how do you tell the story of what you do, what you create, how you serve, what you make in a way that your audience will really notice and get and act on? How do you cut through the noise and connect, and why does it seem so difficult for people and organizations to communicate clearly in today's SPARKED Hot Take messaging expert Ben Gutman joins me to explore simplifying communication to ensure that it genuinely resonates. Ben is a marketing entrepreneur and educator, and is the author of Simply Put, Why Clear Messages Win and How to Design Them. He is the former co-founder and managing partner at Digital Natives Group, an award winning agency that worked with the NFL. I love New York, Comcast, NBC universal has set books and so many others. And Ben teaches digital marketing at Baruch College in New York City and consults with a range of thought leaders, venture backed startups and other brands. And today, we tackle why most messages fail and how to design one that compels action. Ben reveals the gap between hyper distracted modern brains and Stone age instincts, and why we must meet audiences where they are. He also offers interesting insights about how to use constraints to spark creative breakthroughs, and we unpack big communication questions, including what principles and techniques make messages more salient, focused, and empathetic, and how can we minimize friction and guide audiences smoothly to where we want them to go? So if your vision feels lost in translation, or maybe it's not even existing yet.

Jonathan Fields: [00:01:48] Join us for counterintuitive ways to simplify communication. Let's dive in. I'm Jonathan Fields and this is SPARKED. Ben, it is great to be hanging out with you. We have been in conversation over the years about various different projects, and I've been a huge fan of the work that you've been doing, and so much of it has been around this notion of how do you work with creators, with businesses, with executives, with products, all the different things, and tell a story of it in a way that's deeply compelling, that actually gets it across without massively overwhelming people and having that classic either deer in headlights or eyes glazing over, and you've really developed just an incredibly unique skill set. And one of the things that you speak to in your new book, simply put, is this notion that when it comes to telling the story of what we have to offer, we're bringing a Stone age brain to a smartphone fight. So take me there.

Ben Guttmann: [00:02:55] Oh, absolutely, I appreciate it. Likewise, it's always great to connect. And, you know, it's a great honor to be here as well. So you mentioned that anecdote there of the Stone age brain to a smartphone fight. That little line kind of wraps up the first piece of this book, which is about why it is so difficult for so many people and organizations to communicate. There's this kind of fundamental gap between where receivers are in terms of what they want to hear, how they want to receive information, and where senders are in terms of how we're built to send messaging, how we're forced to communicate from internal and external factors. And this gap only gets worse when we start to layer on all these, you know, buzzes and beeps and dings and everything else that the modern world kind of throws at us. And it's not particularly unique revelation to say that it's we're busy and we're distracted. Right. That's something that everybody knows. Everybody feels. But the fundamental gap that I've identified when I look at those type of organizations we talk about is that, well, when we're receiving, we want things that are easy, we want things that are fluent. That's the word that cognitive scientists will use on it, something that's easy to kind of take in from outside, stick in your head and make sense of. And when you look at the research that's associated with us buying things more, liking them more, trusting them more. But when things are not, when things are more complicated, well, we're less likely to buy, less likely to trust, less likely to like. And the challenge becomes, well, when we're communicating, we're often pulled in the direction of making things more complicated.

Jonathan Fields: [00:04:32] As you're sharing that, like that classic line, the message is the medium comes to mind. Also, like so many of us think, well, you know, it's all about the product. It's all about the offering. It's all about like the how but how we actually bring it, how we communicate, whatever it is that we have. It's not only the message that we wrap around it, but for so many, that is their first experience of like the product or the solution or what, like the brand, the business itself, and they conflate one. So if they struggle with the message, they're probably going to psychologically overlay that same sense of struggle and say, well, then I'm going to struggle with whatever's being offered as well. I mean, do you see that in the work that you've done? Absolutely.

Ben Guttmann: [00:05:14] If the message feels like, oh, they can't, what are they talking about? Is this clear? Is it the why are they jumbling things? Well, what does that say about your piece of software? The message is complicated when they're explaining it. Well, I'm going to assume the software is complicated. I'm going to assume the assembly instructions for your piece of furniture are complicated. I'm going to assume that that the product in and of itself is something that's not going to be easy, because you can't it's not easy to understand what you're saying about it. There's this big gap that I've also seen in my work where people who have something to say if it's a creator, if it's a brand, if it's an advocate, we assume that everybody cares as much as we do about the thing we have to say. We assume that this ad we have is so great, everybody's going to want to see it. This product we have is so wonderful. Everybody's going to want to buy it. But the dirty secret that underlies most advertising is that nobody cares. Nobody cares. Nobody woke up today and said, you know what's on my to do list? I want to go click on some banner ads. I want to go open some spam emails. I want to go view some Instagram interstitials. Nobody wanted that. And every ad you've ever seen has been against your will. And so we have to kind of have that humility that, well, what's interesting to us may not be interesting to our receiver, and we have to make sure that we're focusing on their needs and their wants when we're communicating.

Jonathan Fields: [00:06:37] And we do, we fall in love with what we create, you know? And we kind of think, well, like, of course, like anyone who's the right person for it, where it's going to genuinely help them. Of course, any way that we actually interrupt their attention to share this amazing thing, that's really going to help them. Of course, they be excited about that, but that's, you know, really not the case, you know, because they don't know that before they've actually had the experience of understanding what this is and how it can help them, you know, and you have to earn that. And these days especially. You don't have a lot of time to actually earn that, like you have the blink of an eye. Um, if you think about products or brands or companies, not necessarily that you worked with, but you have such a sort of like encyclopedic knowledge of just the landscape in so many ways. Where there was it was a great idea, it was a great product, it was a great something. And then you sort of like saw how it entered the market. On some level, this great thing ended up bombing as an actual thing because of the message was too complicated. I'm wondering if any there are any case studies or sort of like use cases of this that really stand out to you as something where you're almost looking at it, doing the work that you do and saying, oh man, I wish they had asked me about this first, because you could have done X, Y, and Z and it would've been a completely different outcome.

Ben Guttmann: [00:07:56] Well, one thing that jumps to mind is something that's, you know, the jury is going to be out for a while if this is going to be a successful product or not. But when we look at did you see the video about the eye pin that was going around?

Jonathan Fields: [00:08:08] I did, I did I've been talking to a bunch of people about that.

Ben Guttmann: [00:08:13] Maybe an interesting product. However, the video is a ten minute launch video, and the first things they talk about in that video are what colors it comes in and how the battery attaches to your lapel pin into your lapel. That's before they tell you anything about what it does, about what problems it solves, about how it fits into your life, about how it makes your life better. It ignores all these benefits and just talks about these features right off the bat. It's a long video. I mean, I talk about this a lot too, which is, you know, length is not necessarily mean. Something is less simple when something is longer because it's about friction, not about duration. So that's not necessarily a problem that it's longer, but the framing of it is very misguided. It's like they banished anybody who is a marketer from, from, from the room when they were figuring out how to, how to put that thing together. And I saw more and it might just be because of the environment I'm in where I interact with a lot of people in the marketing space. I saw more conversation about the video itself than I saw about the product over that time, so I think that'll be something to keep an eye on.

Ben Guttmann: [00:09:22] We have a really hard time as humans, uh, framing messages in a way that connect with why we actually do things. So there's a famous line in marketing by Theodore Levitt, a 1960s Harvard professor, who he said, people don't want to buy a quarter inch drill. They want a quarter inch hole. Right. And I tell my students this every semester I teach marketing at Baruch College here in New York. I tell them every semester, if you only remember one line, one idea from this entire course, or this entire degree, if you remember that you're going to be so far ahead of everybody else. Because we always talk about features. Features exist in the real world. We see them, we touch them, we smell them, we taste them. But we don't buy features. We buy the benefits. We buy how our life is better because of that product. We buy the end state. And that's an example where I feel like it was just completely missed. As part of their their announcement video.

Jonathan Fields: [00:10:15] In order to even get to like what is the benefit, you know, like the whole rather than the drill, you know, there's a meta question there, which is for who, you know, like, who am I actually speaking to? Because the benefit for one person is going to be completely meaningless for another person. And I want to kind of drop into some of like the major things that you talk about in terms of what we should focus on and really simplifying, getting our message across. But I think the meta question here, even before we sort of like get more granular, is like really spending some time figuring out who are we talking to, who are we solving for? And rather than just skipping to like, how should we communicate this? And I'm wondering whether you see that as being a misstep on a fairly regular basis.

Ben Guttmann: [00:10:56] Oh, that's that's one of the big ones. So there's a whole one of the principles about how we bridge that gap that I talk about is empathy. And that's exactly what it is, is how do we spend time with how do we understand our audience, how do we meet them where they are, both in terms of language but also motivations, emotions, uh, what their needs are and the most no duh piece of advice about how we can bridge that gap is by talking to our audience, is by testing our message. But it's also the thing that most people will completely ignore because it's inherently uncomfortable. Right? You got to go and you have to, you know, hold a focus group and look for this double sided mirror and try to figure out, you know, how much do they hate my thing, how much they love my thing? Or you have to go flag people down on the street and interview them. All these things that are inherently uncomfortable and awkward experiences, on top of the fact that you might hear feedback that you don't like, you know you were not looking for it. I might put you back to the drawing board on something. People don't like to get negative feedback, so we avoid getting feedback at all. That is, I think, the biggest trap that a lot of folks fall into is that they they stay in their own bubbles. We have this thing called the false consensus effect. Where we're more likely to believe that our opinions, our attitudes, our motivations, our likes are generally representative of society, but they're usually not. We're usually way overstating how much we represent the median person, how much we represent the audience. So it puts us in this position where we're more likely to say, well, and going back to that video, maybe they saw this as like, oh, this is the cool thing, but it's not what the audience needed to hear. It's not where they, uh, they want to go with that message.

Jonathan Fields: [00:12:34] Yeah. I mean, it's interesting. A chunk of years back, I spent a weekend as a mentor in one of these startup weekends when they were sort of, like, popping up all over the place, and there was a whole, you know, like startup process. And part of that process was you'd have 4 or 5 people just around the table. Strangers would be for that who came for this workshop. And they they'd start bringing brainstorming ideas for a product or a brand or an offering or and then they'd all kind of pick one, and then they kind of the next step was what you're talking about. It was like the let's get empathetic step. And they would call it like, get out of the building. And they would literally force like, you know, normally like people in their early 20s to go out on the street with clipboards and just or call anyone that they could that they thought might be and just ask them questions and give them, say, almost like, hey, we're thinking about creating this. Or maybe they've got a sketch or a draft of like a prototype and show it to them and ask them for their feedback.

Jonathan Fields: [00:13:30] And you could literally see, like in the five minutes leading up to that phase of the of the workshop, which was a couple hours long, where they'd leave the building and go to the streets in New York City, you could feel the terror in the room, you know, it was like the whole room was sweating and anxious. And you're just we are we have this visceral reaction to just going out and getting in front of people and saying, what do you think? You know? And I think so much of it is because we're concerned that the thing that we hold so precious, they're going to be like, you kind of miss the mark, you know? And so before you even get to how we're telling the story of it, we're freaked out that that feedback is going to actually tell us that kind of off base with the core thing itself. So we avoid it and just hope, you know, that we've got it right. But that can cause so much not just suffering, but, you know, like loss of resources, loss of time and just outright failure.

Ben Guttmann: [00:14:26] Absolutely. The best piece of feedback I can get is critical feedback. I want somebody to tell me if something's not working before I go and spend all my time and resources trying to make that thing a reality. It is awkward, right? It's a really tough thing. I remember I for a project once, years ago, I stood in the concourse of Grand Central Terminal, was flagging people down, asking them about their day, asking them about, you know, their experience. And it's really awkward the first couple times you do it. And, you know, I've knocked on doors volunteering for political candidates over the years. And that's also really awkward the first couple times you do it. But by the time you get halfway down a block of canvassing, you're a pro. We get a lot better at this, a lot faster than we think we will. And then the other thing to pair with that as a piece of kind of motivating advice on it, is you don't need to talk to that many people. We think, oh, we have to talk to a bajillion people to understand our audience. And, you know, you're going to get more insights the deeper you go. But it's also going to start to be diminishing returns. I believe the Gallup poll does, uh, surveys on the American public of 330 million people of a thousand respondents. Right. It's a very small sample size compared to what we think is is going to be necessary for that. If you go out and you talk to five people who match your target market, who match who the the message is designed for, you're going to get so much further than the person who talked to zero people, and that's often enough to begin to put us in the right direction.

Jonathan Fields: [00:15:55] Yeah. That phrase you just used, though, I think is, is another really missed piece who match your target market. You know, for example, I've seen folks who just wrote, you know, wrote a book, they wrote an e-book, and they're mocking up different cover designs for the book, you know, so they go to, to Facebook or some other social platform and they put, you know, like the four different designs, the concepts that they have. And they're like, hey, share your vote in the comments like A, B, C, or D. And you're wondering, are any of these people the intended audience for this book? Because you could have a thousand people really quickly say like, give their answer to that, and then maybe you have one answer that really stands out. Oh, like 73% of these people picked a. And yet if barely any of them are the intended audience or the target market, it's largely useless information. Yet I feel like we often do things like that.

Ben Guttmann: [00:16:49] Oh, definitely. And the problem is, the people on Facebook are probably people a lot like you. Right? So we are subject to another kind of grouping phenomenon known as homophily, which is we tend to spend our time with people who are like us, we tend to work with and. Live next to and study with and, you know, fraternize with people who are generally in the same socioeconomic bucket as we are. Those bubbles can be caused by kind of self-selection, but usually they're caused by upstream factors like education and geography and those type of things. But because of that, you know, those people in your network might be completely different. They might be all like you and all completely different than the person that really actually matters.

Jonathan Fields: [00:17:36] Yeah. And I think we again, this goes to our discomfort of going outside of that like small bubble of people who we just feel already comfortable with. One of the things that you talk about in your book is the notion of what I think you phrase is salience in terms of how we create our messaging. So take me into like describe what we're actually talking about here.

Ben Guttmann: [00:17:57] So salience is does it rise to your attention. Right. Does it does it contrast. Is it noticeable. Does it zig when others zag. Is there a different um, unless your message is salient, well, it's not going to be noticed. Right. And so that that's one of the five principles about designing simple messages. And it's not a step by step plan. It's not a rubric. But there's kind of design principles that the better we adhere to them, the better we're going to be at kind of bridging that gap between senders and receivers. You mentioned empathetic. That's one of them. We talked about benefits. That was another salience is important because again, when we're in a noisy environment, we only will notice what is different. And we also like things that are different too, by the way. So there's some studies on contrast where respondents will see images that are lower contrast versus higher contrast. So we're we're predisposed to liking and choosing the ones that are higher contrast. That all backs things up. And I argue that the best way in terms of how we can create salience is by embracing constraints, actually is by by forcing us to have creative pressures that change our output in a way that those pressures are not applying to everybody else in the environment. And, you know, that could be in only giving us a certain amount of time, a certain amount of space, a certain set of tools. But by giving ourselves a little bit of pressure, we're able to do things that are going to become salient.

Jonathan Fields: [00:19:18] What's your take on why that works? Because I've seen that work also. And I'm always curious because I think before you experience it, the assumption is often, oh, like the more time, the better. The less constraints, the better, the more resources, the better. And yet oftentimes, as you're describing, it's the opposite. True. I'm curious what your take on like what the why is beneath that. Oh yeah.

Ben Guttmann: [00:19:36] I mean, the empty canvas is not always this empty canvas of opportunity. It feels like it. You're trapped under this, this big weight of infinite opportunity. It goes back a little bit to things like the paradox of choice, where when I'm choosing one thing, well, I'm giving up all the other things that I'm not choosing, right? That's the kind of marginal value you get out of something. But when you're when you're forcing yourself with constraints, you give yourself at least a little bit of something to grab onto, and then that becomes the thing which inspires everything else. Uh, I would also argue that constraints, we often think of them as a maximum. That can very much be the case. Obviously, we say, I got to write something in 140 characters for Twitter, 280 or whatever it's going to be, you know, now other things are crazy there, or I only have 60s to to make a video for TikTok. Those will force you to make creative decisions that you wouldn't have to make otherwise. But I also would say that using a minimum as a constraint is an interesting tactic that I don't see used as much, because let's say you have to make a banner design for your website, so the hero image for your website, or you have to make a tagline for your brand.

Ben Guttmann: [00:20:48] Well, if you task yourself with making five of them, okay, you're going to get through some of the easy things, right? You're going to maybe get ten of them. Okay, well, I'm going to get through some of the cliches and I'm going to go out and I'm going to, you know, put a few good ideas out there. But if you task yourself with making 100 of them, well, all of a sudden you ran out of all the easy options. You're going to get into some weird territory a little bit. You're past where the rut ends, the creative rut ends, and you're into this un, you know, unexplained, unexplored territory, and you often end up kind of diving for all these really interesting, weird pieces that you wouldn't get to if you only tasked yourself with making ten things instead of making 100 things or a thousand things, or whatever it is for your creative endeavor.

Jonathan Fields: [00:21:32] Yeah. I mean, it's interesting, as you're describing, that what came to mind is the move from film photography to digital photography. It was in part this was a constraint shift. You know, when you're shooting film, there was an actual cost to every single shot that you took. There was a film, there was the processing, there was. And photographers were just a lot more. They're like, I'm aware of the limitation here, I'm aware of the constraint. So on the one hand, I want to get a whole bunch of variations, but I've got 36 shots on this roll, I've got ten rolls. And then I've kind of I'm coming close to my budget in terms of what, what I have available to me here. And then digital enters the picture and all of a sudden it's like I have an endless amount of shots that I can take. So I'm literally going to keep my finger on the shutter for like 100,000 times. And both of those have their own both benefits and limitations. Like, I often think that sometimes the constraint of film and knowing that there's a little resource and cost constraint there made people much more intentional about like how they were actually choosing what they wanted to capture. And on the one hand, I think that's really good. On the other hand, I think what you're just describing is there's also limitation there in that sometimes. That's when you get past a certain number where you get into the stuff that was just so non-obvious that it really gets to the creative and the innovative stuff. And if you don't ever get to that place, that's a different kind of pain.

Ben Guttmann: [00:22:58] Oh, yeah. And it, uh, reminds me, did you read 4000 weeks?

Jonathan Fields: [00:23:02] No, I haven't. I've literally had so many friends recommend that and I still haven't gotten to it.

Ben Guttmann: [00:23:07] It's a wonderful book. I love it, I read I read it about a year ago, and I kind of want to reread it now, but there's a exercise that the author describes that a professor, I believe at Harvard does, where they have a student. This professor has their their class go to a museum, find a piece of art, and sit in front of it without your phone, without a book. Sit in front of it and look at it for three hours. Right. And this is a little bit different than what we're talking about, but it's about noticing rather than creating. And when you sit in it for three hours, what happens is in the beginning you see the obvious, and then an hour in you start noticing something else, and then two hours in, you start noticing something. And, and this kind of going deep instead of wide unlocks so many really interesting things.

Jonathan Fields: [00:23:52] Yeah, that makes so much sense. We've talked about three of the five principles really focusing on benefits, salience and empathy. Focus is another one that is a and I feel like this is almost like a pet peeve type of one. And a lot of different ways, you know, it's the notion of like, how can we actually not just put the kitchen sink into everything that we're doing? And especially so many people struggle with this because they're like, I just want to share everything about it. Oh, yeah. And from a telling the story of it, from a communicating it, that can be death.

Ben Guttmann: [00:24:23] That's one of the biggest problems when you talk about how groups communicate in particular, is that you mentioned those groups before at the start up thing, inherently flat organizations. Right. And so when you have that type of environment, it is the perfect breeding ground for what I like to call the Frankenstein idea. I see this happen in my class a lot actually, when I because that's also flat organizations. I give the students a brand. I say come back to me with some pitches for that brand. No matter how much I warn them, I get the same pitch back every single time, which is obvious that somebody threw out NFTs, somebody threw out drones, somebody throw out influencers. Three hashtags got written on the whiteboard, and I come back and there's a lot of great ideas, but because there's a lot of great ideas, it's actually collectively a bad idea. And that's what happens when you look at Mary Shelley's book and Frankenstein. How she describes the monster is that individual pieces were beautiful. They were selected to be individually beautiful pieces, lustrous black hair, pearly white eyes. But when you put them together, it's this gruesome composite that's worse than the sum of its parts.

Jonathan Fields: [00:25:25] Yeah, and that's what we end up with and wonder why it doesn't actually work. Which really brings us down to the fifth principle, which is focused around being like minimal simplification. And again, I feel like this is one of the huge struggles. I've written copy for years, and I've gotten into the habit very early in my copywriting, I was fortunate to be taken under the wing of a couple of people who are just tremendous and had been doing it for decades, and they told me, they said, you know, write your whole long form copy and then let it sit for a couple of days and come back to it. And it's almost guaranteed that you will be able to delete the entire first third. So if you write 5000 words, you will literally be able to cut the first 1700 and it will be better for it. And I was like, there's no way that's possible. Every word is precious. It has to be there. And then I started doing that and I'm like, oh, this is like, this is really true. Like less is better, but it's sometimes so counterintuitive.

Ben Guttmann: [00:26:24] Well, there's the old Mark Twain or what is mistakenly attributed to Mark Twain because everything is mistakenly attributed to Mark Twain. Uh, quote. Which is I wrote you a long letter because I didn't have time to write you a short one. Right? It takes more work to get something simple, to get something minimal than it does to get something big and complex. This is the interesting thing that a lot of people get wrong, and I alluded to this when I was talking about the video. What we're looking to minimize is not the fewest number of words or sentences or pages or slides or whatever. It's the least amount of friction, you know, how are we able to get somebody from where they are to where we want them to be, with as few bumps in the road as possible? You know, my background is in design. If you ask a user experience designer about friction, they're going to know all about it because, well, you put friction in between things that you don't want people to do, and you remove friction for the things that you want people to do. If you ever try to delete your account on some software package, well, you're going to go for lots of friction, right? They're going to give you pop ups.

Ben Guttmann: [00:27:24] They're going to give you have to make a phone call. You have to do this. You have to mail in your birth certificate all these other crazy things. But the thing they want you to do about checking out, well, that becomes really easy, right? All of a sudden you're removing all the opportunities for somebody to leave. You're removing all the as you go through that checkout flow. Well, there's no longer going to be the links. Their blog is no longer going to be the links to their LinkedIn page or whatever. It becomes this squeeze page that gets somebody very quickly to that end of the line. Um, because every bit of friction is, is this opportunity for somebody to take that off ramp? And when you're talking about a world where the average American consumes 13 hours a day of some form of media, well, there's a lot of off ramps or there's a lot of other things for us to pay attention to. And so it's important that we prioritize the stuff that's important while stripping away everything else that isn't vital to be there.

Jonathan Fields: [00:28:18] Yeah, that makes so much sense. I mean, and I love the notion of, um, it's not about minimizing, sort of like volume. It's about minimizing friction and sort of like what is the simplest, fastest way to move somebody from where they're beginning to where you would love them to be. So as we sort of like circle, come full circle in this conversation, talked about the importance of really simplifying, distilling the five different elements benefits, focus, salience, empathy, minimizing. If we zoom out a little bit, um, is there any sort of like macro message macro idea about because we we'll have a lot of people here who are either working in organizations or they're starting they have their own practice or business or they're thinking about a lot of people are thinking about something right now, and they're really trying to figure out, how do I communicate this? We've got principles here. Is there anything that's more meta level here where you're like, this is something even before you get into the details really to think about.

Ben Guttmann: [00:29:17] So I mentioned senders and receivers before. I like that model because it strips out everything else. The senders are the advertisers, the politicians, the leaders, the teachers, entrepreneurs. Doesn't matter sender and the receivers and the buyers, the voters, the donors, all of those strip it away. Just as this is the single kind of biggest mindset shift that puts you in position to to really close that gap. Just as if you're mailing a physical letter. The sender is responsible for the metaphor, the metaphorical and the literal cost, the communication. It's their responsibility to connect with the receiver. Again. Receivers. We woke up every you know, all of us have receivers, all of us are senders. We woke up today with lots of things we cared about. We cared about our family and our friends and our vacation and our deadline. All these things. We didn't care about your product. We just it just wasn't part of our to do list today. I mentioned before, every ad we've ever seen has been against our will. And so we have to acknowledge that. And we have to put that kind of humble hat on. We're going out and we're communicating, because if we don't do that well, we're going to be tossed to the wayside like all the other thousands of things that scurry across our attention and are dismissed.

Jonathan Fields: [00:30:26] Yeah, that makes so much sense to me. And it feels like a good place for us to wrap up. Ben, always great to just be in conversation with you and learn from you. And I hope everyone tuning in take notice of some of these ideas and all laid out with a lot more details and examples in the book, which happens to be a really simple and straightforward and effective title for the book too. So thanks and for all of our fantastic listening audience. We'll see you again here next week. Take care. Hey, so I hope you enjoyed that conversation. Learned a little something about your own quest to come alive and work in life, and maybe feel a little bit less alone along this journey to find and do what sparks you. And remember, if you're at a moment of exploration, looking to find and do or even create work that makes you come more fully alive, that brings more meaning and purpose and joy into your life, take the time to discover your own personal Sparketype for free at sparketype.com. It'll open your eyes to a deeper understanding of yourself and open the door to possibility like never before. And hey, if you're finding value in these conversations, please just take an extra second right now to follow and rate SPARKED in your favorite podcast app. This is so helpful in helping others find the show and growing our community so that we can all come alive and work in life together. Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields and this is SPARKED. This episode of SPARKED was produced by executive producers Lindsey Fox and Me, Jonathan Fields. Production and editing by Sarah Harney Editing help By Alejandro Ramirez. And special thanks to Shelley Adelle for her research on this episode.