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2%.
That's the number of people who take the stairs when there is also an escalator available.
I'm Michael Easter and on my podcast 2 I break down the science of mental toughness, fitness and building resilience in our strange modern world.
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On the Serving Pancakes podcast, conversations about volleyball go beyond the court.
Today we have a little best friend compatibility test.
Okay, how long have we been best friends?
Since the day we met.
As the League One volleyball season heads towards its final stretch, there's no better time to tune in.
You'll hear unfiltered analysis behind the scenes, stories and conversations with leaders making an impact across the sport.
Whether you're following the final push of love season or just love the game, Serving Pancakes brings you closer to the action and the people shaping the future of volleyball.
Open your free iHeartRadio app, search Serving Pancakes and listen now.
Presented by Capital One, founding partner of iHeart Women's Sports.
Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeart Radio.
Good morning.
This is Laura.
Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast.
Today's episode is going to be a slightly longer one part of the series where I interview fascinating people about how they take their days from great to awesome and any advice they have for the rest of us.
So today I am delighted to welcome Marcus Buckingham to Before Breakfast.
Marcus is a longtime thought leader on leadership.
He's a speaker.
He is also the author of the new book, Design Love In.
Marcus, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me, Laura.
Yeah, very excited to have you.
Why don't you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself?
Well, I'm a psychometrician, actually by training, which means that I measure things about human beings that are really important.
But you can't count.
So how do you measure strengths?
How do you measure talents?
How do you measure how satisfied or happy you are with your life?
All those kinds of things that kind of make life worth living.
So I spent 17 years with the Gallup organization building something called Strength Finder, which is all about how do you find out what your strengths are.
And then, in the 17 years since then, I've just built my own business focused on how do you help leaders to get the most out of themselves and the most out of the people that they lead and the people that they serve?
Absolutely.
Well, I know a lot of listeners have done the various Strength Finders assessments over the years.
So in the intro to your new book To Design Love In, you talk about coming to love as a topic which we'll get to in a sec, but at some kind of dark moments for yourself.
I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit.
Yeah, well, I...
I built my company over 10 years, focused on helping leaders to get the best out of the people that they lead.
And we built this lovely entrepreneurial, passionate group of people who'd come together to serve uh, our clients in a way that was very loving.
I mean, it was a.
It was a the kind of environment where you have family members joining the company and everyone else who is friends feels like family, everyone's sort of wearing company merch.
It's all very passionate actually.
And then, because I believed in the mission so much, I sold the company in 2017 to a much, much larger Fortune 500 company that had 3000 salespeople.
Because in my brain I'm thinking if you want to spread the mission quickly, you need a lot of smart friends.
So a 3,000-person salesperson organization is enticing because of that.
And yet over time, quite quickly, the passion drained away, the love drained away.
And it wasn't the bigger company's fault per se.
It was just.
When you get inside a big organization, other considerations start to dominate the conversation.
It's the monthly returns.
It's the quarterly earnings.
It's the performance reviews.
It's the run this by illegals.
And what happens with love, passion, it's not like it gets killed, it just dies from neglect.
You just start talking about other things.
So for me, I saw up close and personal what happens when you don't make love.
I know how silly that sounds as I'm saying it, but if you don't make love, the central organizing principle of how you do work, whether it's the employee side of things or the customer side of things then it slips away.
And you wake up one day and you realize that nobody talks about it anymore.
And everyone's just going through the motions of that day.
And so that was the impetus of the book really is to go wait a minute there is.
Life is too short for us to be going through the motions of the day to get through the day.
So that was the impetus of the book.
Yeah, well, love is kind of a funny word for a business book, as I know you know.
And you kind of shied away from that word at the beginning, right?
You kept looking for like synonyms that sound more business appropriate.
Yes.
Well, the first thing to see is that when you look at the relationship between an experience let's say it's an employee experience the relationship between an experience and an outcome like profitability or productivity or loyalty, the relationship isn't.
The relationship isn't linear, it's curvilinear, which means that if you've got a scale of one to five and the quality of the experience, five being strongly agree and one being strongly disagree, moving someone from a, from a two to a three experience or a three to a four experience doesn't drive their performance at all or their loyalty.
It's really only when you get to a five a strongly agree that you can see any kind of relationship to their next behavior.
So when you look at extreme positive behaviors, the thing that drives them is extreme positive experiences.
Not fours, not threes, fives.
And then when you dive into the fives and you go, what the heck are people saying when they say that they're having an extreme positive experience at work, in their day, in their life?
What are they saying?
Well, the word they actually say, the word we humans always say we're trying to describe an extreme positive experience, is love.
We say, I love that.
I love that.
Now, we say it about all sorts of things, Laura.
We say it about, I love those shoes.
I love that movie.
I love that song.
I love my mom.
I love that mentor.
So we use it in all sorts of interesting contexts.
But when we're trying to explain something extreme positive, we pick the word love.
And I kept hearing it as a researcher, and I kept trying to change it into things that were more palatable to the business world.
So things like passion or joy or engagement or stress, those are good words, but they're not actually what the words that we humans use?
When we're trying to explain something that's extremely positive for us, the word we pick is love.
And so, as a researcher, in the end I just had to go for crying out loud Marcus, just go with the word people are using.
Let's explore it.
Let's be curious about it because it's the only thing that drives behavior.
So love is predictive of positive human behavior in a way that no other word is respect learning enjoyment, satisfaction.
None of those predict what someone's going to do next.
So if we want to be serious about actual super productive human behavior well, we got to go to the thing that causes it.
And the thing that causes it is love.
And how do you define love then?
Because people like, again, you use it with all sorts of things.
I love my mom.
I love my job.
We mean different things when we're saying that.
Yeah.
Yeah, so, well, first of all, there's a billion definitions of the word love, right?
There's as many definitions as there are humans alive.
And yet, when you look at the data around the world, when people use the word love in China, we can predict their behavior.
People use the word love in Argentina, we can predict their behavior.
Wherever you go around the world, love is predictive.
So there must be something common about that definition of love, even though every human's got their own definition.
So in the end, if you push and push and push on that, what you bump into is this definition.
Love is the deep and unwavering commitment to the flourishing of a human.
So if you think about that word flourishing, every single one of us as human beings feel that we've got something unique inside of us.
And we want to get to the end of our life and feel that we've had some chances to express what's inside of us.
If you've got kids, you want them to be able to express what's inside of them.
And yet most of us go through life balled up like an armadillo with armor plating, because the world's scary and frankly, doesn't care that much about us.
So we go through life balled up.
Anytime we bump into any sort of experience that allows us to take one plate of armor off.
Even if it's a small thing like I, love that outfit.
I know it sounds silly, but if you feel more yourself, if you feel more fully yourself wearing that outfit, the word you pick is love.
If you work for a leader who cuts through your performance review and allows you to stretch yourself in some way that expresses the best of you, use the word love.
If you've seen a movie where a scene or a character or some aspect of the movie helps you sort of explain your own experience to yourself a little bit better, you walk out of the movie and go.
I love that.
So in a way, love just means bigger.
Any experience, no matter how small or how large, which lets us take the armor plating off, just for a moment even, and lets us take what's inside and put it out.
The word we humans reach for to describe the specificity of that experience is love, whether it's about a shoe or whether it's about a mom.
So there is something common about what we mean when we say love.
And it's not like, it's not lots and lots and lots of like.
Love is just categorically different as an experience.
Love isn't just more likes.
Well, we're going to take a quick ad break and I'll be back with more from Marcus Buckingham.
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And as the number one podcaster, I heart's twice as large as the next two combined.
So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message.
Plus only I heart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio.
Think podcasting can help your business.
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Two percent.
That is the number of people who take the stairs when there is also an escalator available.
I'm Michael Easter and on my podcast 2 I break down the science of mental toughness, fitness and building resilience in our strange modern world.
I'll be speaking with writers, researchers and other health and fitness experts and more, to look past the impractical and way too complex pseudoscience that dominates the wellness industry.
We really believe that seed oils were inherently inflammatory.
We got it wrong.
Many of the problems that we are freaked out about in the world are the result of stress.
Put yourself through some hardships and you will come out on the other side a happier, more fulfilled, healthier person.
Listen to 2 that's T-W-O percent on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
On the Serving Pancakes podcast, conversations about volleyball go beyond the court.
Today we have a little best friend compatibility test.
Okay, how long have we been best friends for?
Since the day we met.
As the League One volleyball season heads towards its final stretch, there's no better time to tune in.
We really are like yin and yang, vodka and tequila.
You'll hear unfiltered analysis behind the scenes, stories and conversations with leaders making an impact across the sport.
Today we have Logan Lednicki.
I feel like our fan base in general is very connected.
It's like a comforting feeling getting to play at home.
Whether you're following the final push of love season or just love the game, serving pancakes brings you closer to the action and the people shaping the future of volleyball.
Jordan Thompson had that microphone out.
God forbid we make mistakes or cuss at our coach.
Open your free iHeartRadio app, search Serving Pancakes and listen now.
This has been Serving Pancakes and we'll catch you on the flip side.
Okay.
Presented by Capital One, founding partner of iHeart Women's Sports.
Well, I am back talking with Marcus Buckingham about how to design love in.
So we've been talking that people – having love as a driving force.
We want to be a company that people love to work for, or companies that are selling things.
Want customers to love their products.
But part of that is flourishing as humans.
And you talk about this a lot.
So much of the world seems designed not for humans these days.
I mean so much of what we experience in terms of robocalls or, you know, horrible customer experiences at a doctor's office or in an airline.
I mean, it's like people forgot there were humans or something.
Yeah, it's funny.
Coming out with the word love, I thought the problem would be that people would go oh love, that's not real.
Or, oh, love, come on.
I thought they'd push back against the word love.
But funnily enough, the word that people push back more on is experiences.
We humans, we go through, let's say you go to the doctor's office.
That's an experience for us.
And we as the human are going through that experience.
You would have thought that doctors, let's say, would have designed an experience as though the whole human was going through it.
But we don't.
We design it for process.
So in the doctor's office, there's a series of handoffs that you have from the person who's there as the receptionist or the person that hands you off to one nurse, to another nurse, to the doctor, to a different nurse on the way out, to an insurer.
One handoff after another.
If you call your bank, it's one handoff after another.
If you call your airline, it's one handoff after another.
Call the insurance company.
It's one handoff.
And we have to, we as the human, have to contain...
The coherence of our own story, repeating our story, whether it's at the hospital, whether it's at the restaurant, whether it's at the bank.
We're the ones who have to try to keep the coherence of our story together, because the whole darn world we live in has not been designed for a coherent experience.
It's one vertical process after another, and we're just handed off.
The whole world's been designed transactionally, which is why for the first time, by the way, in 30 years we asked this question.
I started doing this back in the early 2000s when I was still at Gallup.
We were just measuring trust trust in big business, trust in schools, trust in the government, trust in big media.
Last year was the first year where not a single one of those institutions I've just mentioned had more than 15 of people saying I strongly trust them.
We are living in a world where we just do not trust the institutions that are a big part of our world, from schools to hospitals to banks, where we just don't think it's not built for us.
Because it's not.
It's built for process and efficiency and transactionalism.
And it feels terrible for us.
It feels terrible when you call your bank.
It feels terrible when you try to buy tickets for a Taylor Swift concert.
And she's outsourced the selling of tickets to Ticketmaster, who then gouged it, by the way, which is why she took that back, interestingly enough.
Because she did take the experience seriously and started, I think it was taylorswiftics.com, to take it back in so that she could own the totality of the experience.
But most experiences for us in our world are designed as though we aren't the human going through them.
And it feels rotten.
Yeah.
And you say that it's not so much that people are evil about it.
I mean, they're not.
It's not immoral.
It's just amoral.
Right.
That it hasn't been considered to make a human being flourish.
Right.
I mean, the simplest and the most banal example would be you go to a restaurant and the person who you made the reservation through who is probably interactive voice response, by the way, which is not a relationship strategy
It's a containment strategy.
That's what IVR is.
You've made your reservation online.
The person you bump into at the hostess stand is not the same person whose voice you heard when you made the reservation.
The person who seats you is not the same person.
The person you can order your drink from is not the same person.
The person who then takes your order is not the person who brings you.
The whole thing is designed to efficiently contain table four, as efficiently as possible.
It's not designed to go, you're a human.
You probably want to feel as though there's another human going through the experience with you, who's probably thinking about you as having a holistic experience.
Even something as banal as a restaurant isn't designed that way for you.
And so we live in a world where trust is low, love is low.
There's an experience which back in the late 19th century, actually a very famous sociologist called Emil Durkheim coined a term anomie, which means alienation.
We live in a world which feels like it's blind to us humans.
As employees at work, we're not called employees.
We're called full-time equivalents.
FTEs or headcount, all of the human capital management systems that do our pay, that do our recognition programs, that do our goal setting.
Those are all extensions of financial systems.
All of our human systems are actually financial systems.
And so we live in a world where Our humanity, even at school, if you think about it, the uniqueness of the student from the ages about zero to 10, the uniqueness of your child, is kind of interesting to schools.
From 10 onwards, it's how closely do you match up to the standardized testing that we're going to do all the way up through college, actually. and the grade point average of the seniors who graduate from the college.
That's the preoccupation of schools, education at large.
And then it continues at work.
And there are exceptions.
There's beautiful leaders and beautiful managers and beautiful teachers who really get to know us as unique humans.
But most of the world is set up to turn us from a human into a financial element of a transaction.
And with AI barreling down the track, We're going to get more of that, not less of that.
And the point of this book is that's stupid.
It makes very bad business sense.
Why?
Because love's the most powerful driver of productive human behavior for employees or for customers.
So when you put systems in place that drive love out... you are undermining the behaviors that you want, whether it's productivity or loyalty or advocacy or word of mouth or whatever it is.
So let's say, somebody is listening to this and they are a manager of a team and they're like OK well, I may not be the CEO of a huge corporation, but I would still like people to love to work with me.
Yeah.
Right.
And to help my team members flourish.
What are some of the things that a manager can do? to cultivate that within their team?
Well, the simplest thing that you can do, if you think about what's the handmaiden of love?
Well, attention is the handmaiden of love.
Humans don't do very well when we're ignored.
Like what's the opposite of love?
Hate?
No, the opposite of love is ignoring someone.
So the simplest thing that a manager can do, which so many managers don't.
But they're put upon and the company's yanking them one way or another.
But really what you should do is check in with each of your people for 15 minutes one-on-one every week.
It's the simplest thing.
Ask them two questions and do it 52 times a year.
And the two questions are how did you feel about last week and what are you working on this week and how can I help?
Do it 52 times a year.
It's 15 minutes.
And you're not coming in with some amazing coaching tip every week.
That's fine.
What you're doing is giving someone the benefit of attention about the short term past.
How was last week for you?
Did you love it or loathe it?
What'd you love?
Like, seriously, go.
What'd you love about last week?
What'd you loathe?
OK, interesting.
I'm right with you now.
What's your focus for this week?
How can I help?
And you just keep doing that 52 times a year.
Then, for all of you you and the rest of your team what you'll be doing is establishing emotional harmony with your team.
Because if you think about it, a year oscillates.
Everybody goes through ups and downs and challenges.
And what you want as a person on a team is just having a leader who pays attention to it.
They don't have to fix it.
They just have to pay attention to it every week.
Now, maybe on some weeks you can tweak or adjust or course correct.
But for most of us, when we go to work, we feel unseen.
So if you want to fix that, have a frequent light touch check-in or conversation, call it whatever you want check-in touch base.
It turns out when you look at the modality, it doesn't matter.
You can do it online.
You can do it with an email.
You can do it face-to-face.
You can do it on the phone.
What matters isn't the modality of it, Laura.
It's the frequency of it.
Do you repeatedly touch base with each of your people about the near-term future every week?
If you don't, do that.
By the way, if that sounds boring to you to do, then you shouldn't lead people.
Because leading is actually individualized attention to the human and the work, and the human and the work, and the human and the work.
Gosh, you do that 52 times a year, you'll be in the top 5 of leaders in terms of the loyalty and the productivity you get from your people.
And then one other thing you mentioned is sort of paying attention to customs, which I know a lot of people listening to this show are very much into routines and rituals.
Are there certain sort of rituals that good managers do in order to build love into their teams?
Well, the two – by the way –
Every single leader, of course, I call it the ABCs of leadership, authenticity, beliefs, customs.
So, whatever your customs are, they better be authentic and they better be a manifestation of your beliefs.
If you're trying to fake it, If your customs are just a manipulation, we humans can sort of sniff that out.
So the C comes after the A and the B. Authenticity means we don't need you to be perfect.
We need you to be you.
Beliefs means don't assume that we can read your mind.
What do you believe is deeply important to you?
Tell us, help us know that because we can't actually dive into your heart.
Customs would be like.
What are the things that you repeatedly do that bring those first two to life?
If you were to think about some super predictable ones that probably work for most leaders, although the way in which you do them might vary according to your style?
First of all, catch people doing things right.
There's a million different ways in which things can go wrong.
Your goal as a leader should be to keep looking for excellence.
And when you say good job, that is not the end of a sentence.
It's the beginning of an inquiry.
So when you say good job to someone, that should be the beginning of why did that work for you?
Let's unpack that a little bit.
Why?
So that you can do it again, so that we can refine it or improve it.
Let's look at the bits that worked.
Because excellence in any job isn't just the opposite of failure.
It's like you don't write a great poem by fixing all the dangling parts of the split infinitives.
So you as the leader, you've got to be really interested in what works, when it works, what works.
Catch people doing things right, not just to make them happier, but because that's...
The raw material for future greatness is current goodness, not current badness.
So many leaders can get drawn into remediation and fixedness.
No, keep looking for what's right.
And then another custom, which is do it once a quarter for yourself.
I would suggest you actually do it once a quarter with each of your people, but start with yourself.
Just take a blank pad around with you for a week, draw a line down the middle of it, write loved it at the top of one column and loathed it at the top of the other.
Take it around with you for a week.
Anytime you find some activity or interaction that you love, that you lean into, that you find yourself looking forward to.
Time speeds up when you're doing it.
Scribble it down in the loved it column.
And in the loathed it when you see the opposite, when you're procrastinating, when time drags on, when you're doing it.
Okay, scribble that down.
Take an inventory of a regular week of your life and put it through the lens of love.
Again, I know that sounds a bit kumbaya, but really what you're trying to do is use love as your decoder for what are the particular activities or situations that super energize you?
No one else is going to do it for you.
I actually call those, Laura, red threads.
Every job has thousands of different activities in it.
And some of the threads are pretty neutral.
You just got to do them.
They're black, they're green, they're gray, whatever.
You just got to do them.
But some of the threads are red.
These are activities that you love.
And everyone's colorblind to your red threads.
Even your mom, who may love you to the nth degree, doesn't know what your red threads are.
She doesn't know what activities, moments, or situations super energize you.
You do.
You do know them.
You're the wisest person about what you love in your life.
Do love it.
Loathe it once a quarter and use the raw material of your own day or week to pinpoint where are my red threads.
Because if you want a really, really happy life at work or frankly life, you don't need a red quilt.
There's research out of the Mayo Clinic which suggests you need 20% red threads.
20% red threads.
That's the equivalent of one day a week, right?
Exactly.
Or 20% every day.
But you don't need 100% every day.
You're never going to find a job you love.
That's just not real.
But you can find the love in what you do.
That's different.
That's doable.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, we're going to take one more quick ad break and then I will be back with Marcus Buckingham.
Run a business and not thinking about podcasting.
Think again.
More Americans listen to podcasts than ad supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora.
And as the number one podcaster, I heart's twice as large as the next two combined.
So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message.
Plus only I heart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio.
Think podcasting can help your business.
Think I heart streaming radio and podcasting.
Let us show you at I heart advertising dot com.
That's I heart advertising dot com.
Two percent.
That is the number of people who take the stairs when there is also an escalator available.
I'm Michael Easter and on my podcast 2 I break down the science of mental toughness, fitness and building resilience in our strange modern world.
I'll be speaking with writers, researchers and other health and fitness experts and more, to look past the impractical and way too complex pseudoscience that dominates the wellness industry.
We really believed that seed oils were inherently inflammatory.
We got it wrong.
Many of the problems that we are freaked out about in the world are the result of stress.
Put yourself through some hardships and you will come out on the other side a happier, more fulfilled, healthier person.
Listen to 2 that's T-W-O percent on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
On the Serving Pancakes podcast, conversations about volleyball go beyond the court.
Today we have a little best friend compatibility test.
Okay, how long have we been best friends for?
Since the day we met.
As the League One volleyball season heads towards its final stretch, there's no better time to tune in.
We really are like yin and yang, vodka and tequila.
You'll hear unfiltered analysis, behind-the-scenes stories and conversations with leaders making an impact across the sport.
Today we have Logan Lednicki.
I feel like our fan base in general is very connected.
It's like a comforting feeling getting to play at home.
Whether you're following the final push of love season or just love the game, serving pancakes brings you closer to the action and the people shaping the future of volleyball.
Jordan Thompson had that microphone out.
God forbid we make mistakes or cuss at our coach.
Open your free iHeartRadio app, search Serving Pancakes and listen now.
This has been Serving Pancakes and we'll catch you on the flip side.
Okay.
Presented by Capital One, founding partner of iHeart Women's Sports.
Well, I am back talking with Marcus Buckingham, the author of the new book, Design Love In.
So we've been talking about things that energize us as we go about our schedules.
I'm curious about you, your schedule.
This is a time management podcast.
So do you have any rituals or things you do during your day that you think make you more productive?
Well, not to be too sub-referential, but I start, the first thing is attitudinal.
You've got to think to yourself my day is my smartest wisest, most loving friend which I know sounds a bit silly, but so many of us look at our days as something to get through.
The day is the enemy.
It's a to-do list that rolled over from yesterday and I've got to get through the day, get through the list.
And of course there is some part of that that's real.
But I always start off every day.
Right now it's early in my day.
I start off and go.
What red threads am I going to weave today?
Because my day is trying to show me.
My day is trying to show me a whole bunch of threads.
And it's basically saying to me every day, is this one red?
Is that one red?
Is this one red?
My day is trying to help me find the energy that I need to be invigorated in my life.
It's trying to, if I would but listen.
So for me, initially, it's always, start off and go, what red threads will I read today?
Because if I don't set that intention around, what are the activities that I can seek out, linger on, pay attention to?
If I don't do it, no one's doing it.
So every day for me starts that way.
Over time I end up writing.
I mean I've written down you know 10 or so red threads that I know will invigorate me.
They always do.
So for me, and it's going to sound boring, but one of my red threads is finding patterns in data.
I love finding patterns in data.
And if I let days go by and I don't do that, I don't sit with some data to go, what does it mean?
Which I know for some of your listeners, I'm sure sounds like pulling teeth.
No, we love data over here.
Yeah.
How people spend their time, for instance, is fascinating.
I love looking at data sets of thousands of people and how they spend their time.
Yes, absolutely.
So for me, like the moment you say the word data set and patterns, I just lean in.
I just always have leaned in.
So I love doing that.
I love, I mean, turning it into narrative.
I love turning data into narrative.
So for me, that could be a podcast like this, by the way, which is, I mean, I'm loving like time's flying by for me.
I don't know how much time has gone by, but it could be three hours.
I don't know.
It's just whipping by for me.
I will deliberately seek out opportunities to.
I can write, I can record, I can do a put, but any time where I can seek out an opportunity to tell a story from data, I'm going to lean in and seek that out.
So those sort of rituals for me give me some intention and control not control over you or control over someone else, but gives me control over the way in which I'm spending the time in my own days.
That's hugely important.
It gives me agency.
Absolutely.
Well Marcus, I always ask my guests we've sort of been getting at this, but what is something you have done recently to take a day from great to awesome?
Well, that's a jolly good question.
I mean.
For me, the challenge in a day is always the it doesn't like no one who's calling you knows you the way that you know you.
So for me, every day has to start off, and it's not really like something I did that is special about a particular day.
For me, every day has got to be Do you want to take love seriously in your own life, Marcus?
Do you want to make sure that that day to day you're feeling a little bit more fully yourself today as compared to yesterday?
So from, I mean, I'm not saying I have every single day as an awesome day.
But once you understand that love is your decoder and that love is available, activities that you love, interactions that you love, situations that you love that are so specific and unique to you, once you understand that that's there every day, then I don't know.
For me, it feels like every day is being designed By me to have a lot of love in it.
And that is awesome.
I mean, I'm sorry to sound too woo-woo-ish.
That works for me.
We're going to design love into our days as well in order to take them from great to great.
One quick thing about that, Laura, the opposite of design.
I've been thinking about a lot about this because of the book.
But what's the opposite of design?
What happened with my company?
What happens to so many people in their lives is drift.
When you don't design, you drift.
And sometimes you're lucky you have a great day.
But in a world which is pulling you and pushing you this way and that which doesn't really think about your flourishing very much at all.
In fact, as we talked about, it sort of ignores your flourishing.
You can drift a long way from the authenticity and the energy that you need to have a full life.
It's not bad.
It's just you've drifted.
And so design feels like the right word to say, no, no, no, let's bring it back.
We're all designers.
You can design experiences in your own life that invigorate you.
And it's up to you to do it because no one else will.
Yeah, absolutely.
It's all about being intentional with our time, our lives, everything we are doing.
So Marcus, where can people find you?
Well, rather unsurprisingly, probably go to designlovin.com, which is the book site.
We just launched the pre-orders of the book and we're doing this masterclass series for folks with the book, with the Harvard Business Review who's the publisher.
So designlovin.com would be great.
And then my various socials.
I'm always pottering about trying to be helpful and thought-provoking for folks.
Excellent.
Well, Marcus, thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you to everyone for listening.
If you have feedback about this or any other episode, you can always reach me at laura, at lauravandercamcom.
And in the meantime, this is Laura.
Thanks for listening.
And here's to making the most of our time.
Thanks for listening to Before Breakfast.
If you've got questions, ideas or feedback, you can reach me Before.
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