How to Link Meaning to Your Career | JP Michel

In this first episode of the After Peter Pan Podcast, Pat has an inspiring interview with JP Michel, the creator of the Challenge Mindset used by nearly 100,000 young professionals to help them link meaning and purpose to their careers. In the conversation they talk about JP's personal growth story from leaving a successful consulting practice to founding his company SparkPath and discovering his purpose.  While sharing his transformation story, JP relays a powerful message: don't forget, the world needs you!
 
Show Notes & Links:
JP Michel's website
Challenge Cards (to implement the Challenge Mindset)
Love Yourself Like Your Life Depended on It - Kamal Ravikant (Creating a love contract to yourself)
JP's book - The World Needs You

Chapters

• 0:00 Intro to JP, SparkPath and JP's Purpose
• 3:34 Transition to Entrepreneur, "aha" Moments
• 8:37 Embracing Failure, Courage over Confidence
• 16:27 JP's Formative Years, from a Pleasure to a Purpose Mindset
• 21:57 Decisiveness vs Trial and Error, The World Needs You!
• 25:08 Fostering Safety as Precursor to Discipline and Good Habits, Journaling
• 30:45 Healthy Competition, Ugly vs Beautiful Jealousy
• 37:26 Using Challenge Cards to Find Meaning and Purpose
• 41:34 Outro

Transcript

Pat (00:00)
This is the first episode of the After Peter Pan Podcast. I’m your host Pat Tenneriello. 

If you haven’t already, I would encourage you to click on our 90 second  trailer for a description of what this podcast is all about.

Today I have an inspiring interview with JP Michel, the creator of the Challenge Mindset used by nearly 100,000 young professionals to help them link meaning and purpose to their careers. In the conversation we talked about JP's personal growth story to founding his company and discovering his purpose.  I love JP’s message which can be boiled down to this: don’t forget that the world needs you. 

I’m really glad you’re here and I hope that you enjoy this conversation.

Pat (00:51)
I thought we'd break down this conversation kind of in two ways. One is your personal journey to finding meaning and purpose in your life and your, in your career and where that's led you. And then two, that's led you into an area where you're actually helping others.

to find meaning and purpose in their lives as well. And so I'd like to learn more about what it is you're up to, with Spark Path with the challenge So maybe you could start off by just telling us a little bit about Spark Path

JP Michel (01:18)
SPark Path helps young people figure out what they want to do. Whether it's a parent that wants to help their young teen think about what they want to do after high school, or if it's a big university or college that are trying to bring meaningful career discussions to thousands of students on campus, that's who we help. And Pat, for me, it's been a journey of learning entrepreneurship, learning how to do sales and marketing, learning sort of an entrepreneur by mistake.

But I love to do what I do. I like the setup that you gave with, you know, my drive for meeting and helping other people's drive for meeting because there's a connection there. That's what's meaningful for me is getting people to reach their full potential. And a lot of the times it's through finding meaning in their career exploration.

Pat (02:06)
how did you figure out that helping others find meaning was for you a meaningful endeavor that that was, call it your calling How did you get there? Cause I'm sure there must've been many things as you were, you know, growing up or, you know, starting your career, many, many things that may have been speaking to you. How did, how did you get

JP Michel (02:26)
When I was graduating high school, I wanted to do sports psychology. This was about helping athletes gain mental skills so they could reach their full potential. I thought that was so exciting to help somebody else get to where they wanted to go. When I got to university, I found out about industrial organizational psychology, which is a type of psychology that helps people reach their potential in the workplace. Turns out, Pat, that that interested me even more. I wanted to help teams reach their potential, individuals reach their potential.

And I got to do this as a human resources consultant with a lot of different companies and all sorts of organizations, whether it was gold mines, banking, retail organizations. And what I get most excited about is when someone has an aha moment, they discover a new way of looking at the world that they had never considered before. And often this can.

unlock so many new possibilities in their life. I like going through those experiences myself and I like helping others go through those experiences as

Pat (03:34)
When did the moment come where you made that decision to pivot from someone who was in a full -time job to becoming an entrepreneur? That takes a tremendous amount of courage and effort and it's a scary moment. For you, that one moment? Was it many small

JP Michel (03:52)
It's something incredibly important. Is it a moment or is it moments? I think that everyone should look at this through the lens of moments. If you want to find one moment, you have a romantic view of careers that will never work for you. It's too much pressure. If you want to look backwards and identify the most important moment, that can work consistently. But I think everyone should have

the mindset that I will create moments, will live moments, and those moments will accumulate. So let me give you a few of them. Is that useful if I give you a few examples?

Pat (04:29)
Yeah.

JP Michel (04:29)
In my company, one day a senior manager wanted to give me a compliment. They said, here's my vision for your future. And they laid out a career path with progression and more responsibility and bigger job titles. And I hated it. This was there supposed to be their motivational speech to inspire me. And it was completely different than what I had imagined for myself. That was one of those moments. A second moment was

Because I was unsatisfied being an employee and I had a lot of issues with delegating my success and my reaching of potential to other people in my company, like my bosses. I have had great bosses by the way, but I always felt uncomfortable delegating so much of my future, you know, in their hands. So I started a career coaching company where I would coach parents and students on, you know, where to go next in their career. After working with young, one young woman.

She was 16. She started off by saying, I have no idea what I want to do. By the end of our program, her mom said to me, you'll never understand the profound impact you had on my daughter. Whoa, that was a big moment for me. I didn't know that this made such a difference, these conversations. So that was one of those moments. And I accumulated so many of those moments by simultaneously achieving some results with my career coaching business, by also being dissatisfied with the work.

that eventually I got enough motivation to say I'm quitting my career in industrial organizational psychology. I'm going to try to branch off on my own to be an entrepreneur. And I think that those two examples are just two moments in a series of 12 or 24 or even more moments that pushed me in that direction.

Pat (06:16)
am I correct that those moments, that example you gave with the mother talking about her daughter and that individual coaching you were doing, was that part -time while you were still working or had you already left your job at that point?

JP Michel (06:30)
Part time, I think those are the best moments to look at. It's like part time, what made me make the jump or create that motivation for me. But then the same process started over again, Pat, when I started working. Big wins, big failures, big wins, big failures. It's funny when you introduce me and you consider someone who's very successful, it means a lot to me coming from you, considering all the successes you've had in your career. And I wouldn't use those words.

words to describe myself. I'm thrilled about some of the wins I've had, but I'm also constantly not satisfied with the scale and scope of what I'm doing with my business. For example, I believe that the way we have career conversations with young people throughout their education journey is doing them a tremendous disservice in preparing them for their future. We're hurting instead of helping. We ask, what do you want to be when you grow up? When really we should be asking what problem do you want to solve?

and then helping people work backwards. I've known this and I've been testing this and implementing this in schools for years since 2017. And I'm still not where I want to be, Pat. I want this to be the default approach in all of our schools. I have so much left to learn to be able to do that, which is why I wouldn't use the words very successful. But I think that's probably the mindset of an entrepreneur that you're, you you've got to have a beginner's mindset.

You've got to keep striving and sometimes it's hard to strike that balance between you know, I want to solve a big world problem and I want to really help people And I've had some meaningful wins along the way But where am I at really so I would say it's a struggle to Have that confidence to say like I've made a difference And I still have a lot left to learn and just to be patient as I'm moving forward. Does that make

Pat (08:27)
makes a lot of sense. touched on a few topics that I'd like to deepen. The first is the idea of a failure, of embracing failure. you've had some big successes early on that you clung to to validate the direction that you were going, that you were aiming at. At the same time, you had some setbacks.

how do you deal with failures as they stack up in your journey? Do you kind of remind yourself of the successes? Do you have a method for dealing with

JP Michel (09:02)
Yes, my examples are going to be very entrepreneurship specific, but I'd love for listeners to take this out of the context of entrepreneurship and to apply it to their own lives. This part is so important that you talked about, Pat, and I made a commitment years ago that I would embrace courage instead of relying on confidence. What I mean by that is there is no prescribed path to help Spark Path reach its potential as a company.

What this means is there is no guidebook on how to replace the traditional approach to careers with my approach. So I don't want to pretend like I'm confident that I know exactly how to do this and I know I'll be successful. Instead, what I told my wife is I have a 0 .5 % chance of success in this endeavor. Are you up for taking that level of risk with me? And she is, by the way. I have a very supporting wife and partner, Isabel.

If that's the roadmap, if it's a roadmap with uncertainty, it will be filled with failure, just as you described. So what's it like to live a life that embraces and looks for failure? It might be a different life than the one I had imagined living before, but it's one filled with learning, filled with growth, but also filled with ups and downs. So you really have to focus on developing the right mindsets to do that. In fact, I don't think I do it enough, Pat. Like I think I should.

Look for even more failure to do it quickly. One friend of mine who you know that does this really well is entrepreneur John Gagne, who's really embraced the importance of failure. So that's someone I look up to. Here's an idea to float by you. What if I took this part of my business so seriously, this part of my life so seriously that I did an experiment called 100 days of failure? This is what it would sound like. Give me your feedback on this,

I set an ambitious goal. For example, we're about to reach 100 ,000 students transformed at Spark Path. That means 100 ,000 students have went through our challenge cards experience. What's my next goal? What if I set my next goal to a million students impacted and I documented the first 100 days of that journey and I called it 100 days of failure just as a provocative title. But I think it aligns with my strengths to have a public goal to be

To be able to talk about my failures in public, transparently, to learn, to do a sprint, to be accelerated, I think that might be a good driver for me to go where I need to go. Give me your reaction to that. Terrible idea, don't ever do this. Great idea, start tomorrow. What do you

Pat (11:47)
Well, I find that in my own life, I often will float goals in my head. And it's only when I get them out there in the world that I communicate them that I'm putting them out there. And I'm still not sure that they're good ones or bad ones or I'm gonna pursue them, but

I get them out into the world. Now they're real. Now they, now they exist and I can, get people to push back on them to tell me they're great. And so I liked the idea of a public goal because it holds you accountable. you're going to get people encouraging you

Now, I assume you probably have competitors and maybe some people that you're a little bit more reluctant to kind of get things out so publicly like that. So maybe there's some kind of drawbacks, but on the whole, I think it's a pretty courageous idea and I think that it would hold you accountable.

Have you done something similar before?

JP Michel (12:42)
No, the only thing on a small scale is I challenged myself to post 30 days in a row on LinkedIn. And that was a good challenge, but this is a much bigger scope.

Pat (12:55)
I want to come back to another thing that you said. You had a job as a consultant. It was a great job. You were having an impact there. I'm assuming there was a lot of good things there. And a lot of people are in that situation and maybe have ideas to do something else. But the term golden handcuffs comes to mind where it's comfortable.

but maybe something's missing or there's all these other things that you want to accomplish. And some people just get stuck because of those golden handcuffs. And I wanted to ask you, was that something that you struggled with that took, took a while to overcome or was it a no brainer for

JP Michel (13:39)
was not a no brainer. I had a lot of moments going back to the language that you used earlier. Let me share one of them with you. When I started working there, we had a contract with a big energy company that had been mandated by Obama's government to become a more responsible company after a terrible oil spill. And as industrial organization psychology consultants, we had to map

what are the competencies it takes to be a safe manager? So we're gonna use these competencies for hiring, for developing our talent. And we had a technical expertise to do this. The project leader in my company who did this was brilliant. Even thinking about her today, her name is Sarah, even thinking about her today, I think about all the skills that she had and she wowed me in a room organizing things.

And we had a skill set that complemented each other very well, but she was further along in her journey than I was. And I knew from speaking to her that she had been placed in a talent pool to become one of the top 10 members, like in 20 years of the whole, the entire company, thousand person company. When I found that out, I quickly said to myself, that's who they want. That's the ideal IO psychology consultant. It's not me. Turns

I was wrong. The day that I quit, someone told me that I was also part of that talent pool, but that nobody had told me. And it's not necessarily the fact that I made a mistake, but there were more things going well in my company than they were going wrong. My strength profile was different than Sarah's, but I was very good at innovation. I was very good at training teams, at public speaking. I was not strong at some other core aspects of the job, like project management.

But I was working on them, planning and organizing. was working on them. And that lens of that story helped me analyze a lot of things that happen within the organization. And it is one of the things that helped me decide, maybe I should think about doing something else. Maybe I should think about working somewhere else. Maybe I should think about working for myself. I think a lot of employees have this employee experience that they look at what their company's doing and they say, we should be doing something different. I could be doing this better.

And working in entrepreneurship is the ultimate test to say, you right or are you wrong? Maybe you have no idea what you're talking about. Maybe you're completely wrong. So I always thought I can go back to coaching leaders. I can go back to IO psychology, but I'd like to have the entrepreneurship experience to have tested out my ideas to see how far they can go and to see what I'm actually right about and what I was

Pat (16:27)
I want to go a step back before DDI. I want to go

young JP, you know, teenage JP,

These are times in your life where there's a lot of fun to be had. You that hedonistic lifestyle that happens at a young age, that selfish lifestyle, just maximizing pleasure and fun.

you say you grew out of that and was it something that you struggled

JP Michel (16:52)
grew up as a very shy kid. Transformation for me was to start playing basketball at the ages of 11, 12, 13. That gave me a new arena to develop confidence and to become my own person that could have a positive impact. That was a difference maker for me because then in high school, even though was not necessarily, I was still shy, not comfortable in social situations.

I got to try out for a very competitive basketball team and I made it like as the 13th best player out of 13 players. And at an intense two year experience of going from the 13th best player to maybe the sixth best player on a team of future, you know, college, university players, some Olympic players. And that was a defining moment in my life that showed me the level of agency, like my locus of control over getting better and improving.

That made a big difference for me, Pat. Let's call it like, I don't know if the profession is the right word, but in terms of skill development. Socially, it also helped me be a bit more comfortable in my skin, which I think is big challenge for most people. When I started university, I had a completely open mindset to trying anything. And I joined all these student groups on campus and became part of all these student organizations. And that was another...

transformative experience for me going from I don't know if you would call it a hedonistic lifestyle of just looking for pleasure but having a little bit more purpose like joining a group to me was purposeful these groups had older people in them which I found amazing because I could learn from older people and they had processes in place they had goals like they had missions that I could join and that was very cool and those experience led me to a time of my life

let's call it maximum extroversion and charisma experience, charisma experiences. So that's in my life, like I feel like I went from introvert to extrovert and now I'm going back to somewhere in the middle, you know? So that really describes my transition well. And even at my max extroversion, I decided to run for president of the student federation on my campus and university.

And that was a big campaign. had team of 20 volunteers and it was six weeks and I lost the election by six votes. Imagine there were maybe 20 ,000 or 30 ,000 students voting for the elections. And that really hurt, that really stung and it made me have to readjust. But all of those experiences had showed me that I could have like a life of purpose beyond just, I guess

most people do to chase pleasure. And it showed me like real satisfaction is not about fleeting happiness, you know, and moments of joy, you need those, but it grounded me more in accomplishing goals, setting goals, joining groups. And I think that made my transition to the workplace where those things are important, a lot more purposeful, a lot easier than it is maybe for the average person who's a student transitioning to the

Pat (20:11)
And I'm hearing you speak about this. I'm sensing someone who is competitive, who wants to win, someone who's ambitious, someone who wants to make an impact, someone leadership. Are those accurate assessments of you?

JP Michel (20:24)
Yeah, that's a good point.

Yeah, you really read that correctly. Like it comes from basketball. Here's a feeling I get on the floor. It's that there are 10 players on the floor and you yourself, you're part of a five person team and you want to make the other team lose. And there's something competitive about that. Like you want them to have a goal and be disappointed that they don't reach it. And I got a thrill from doing that in the environment of a basketball court. It sounds funny, but that's reality. And how does that apply to my life today, Pat?

I think SparkPath has, and our schools, like our partner school, our advisors, we have a way better idea than the traditional idea. So I really want our idea to win. And I got a chance to practice being competitive, getting better, losing and winning while I played competitive basketball. And that was a really important experience because there was another possibility for me is to be cut from the team, not make the team. Another possibility was to quit the team.

which I could have done in the first three months. remember coaches putting so much pressure on the weaker players that they wanted them to quit in a sense because they weren't contributing to the team. needed a new approach. They needed a mindset. They need to work hard. But I didn't quit. I kept working. And I think it made me into the person that I am today. And I think you nailed it when bringing up this element of competitiveness, which is still a big driver for

Pat (21:57)
also see you're very decisive person, you know, like you know what you know your likes and your dislike you love the love of basketball, the desire to be to be in a leadership position to become an entrepreneur, like it's very decisive to do that. And I think there's a lot of people who may be listening who they have tons of ideas that but there's a lot of uncertainty and they don't really know where to start or maybe they lack confidence because you also need to

confident to be able to make these decisive moves. any suggestions or advice for someone listening who maybe just doesn't know what path they're on or is struggling to find some of these decisive moments?

JP Michel (22:41)
Yeah, it's funny you say that and I'll take it as a compliment, but I think it might be biased because of our relationship. Here's what I mean. Because you're a true great friend of mine, I feel so safe around you. What's the result of that? I can tell you about my life at my worst, but I can tell you about my life at my best. So sometimes if I tell you about my life at my best, it might come across as confidence or decisiveness, which I do have moments of.

I also have moments of indecisiveness and lack of confidence that I think are characteristic of the human experience and especially the entrepreneurship experience. At work, I even call myself a great flip -flopper, meaning one way entrepreneurs become successful is by committing to helping one group, one audience in one way. I have not done that with SparkPath. We help a lot of people. We help parents, we help students.

We help schools, which includes high schools and universities. So we help a lot of different folks. So I don't know how, if I've been as decisive as I need to be. So that's the right context. But I'll still take your compliment. And I still will offer a piece of advice to people who aren't sure about their path. A lot of people that I meet that aren't sure about what they wanted to do, they make a few key mistakes. Number one, they forget that the world needs

They show up to the workplace, to education, to parties that they go to, and they think the world doesn't need you. I disagree. I think there's so many problems to solve in the world. I think there's so many challenges to meet. I think there's so many opportunities to take advantage of that you need to remember that the world needs you. When people explore in this way, and they look at, what are the problems in the

What are the companies working on that? Who are the people that work there? What do I need to do to do that? They discover actually like there's a whole bunch of companies that would love to hire me and they would love to have me there. Now getting the decision right to like which job, which company first, what do you study first? That's very technical. And you won't always, you don't need to know the right answer before you start trying stuff. You don't need decisiveness and confidence. You need, you just need to try stuff. But if you do that whole process and remember that the world needs

a lot of it becomes

Pat (25:06)
Well said. add to this is discipline. So maybe you don't need to be decisive. Maybe, maybe you're indecisive, but if you're going to go from having ambition and setting a goal without discipline, you're never going to get there. Right. and so could you talk a little bit about

has helped you stay disciplined and stay on

JP Michel (25:35)
Let's start with safety. I have a partner, my wife, who creates, let's call it psychological safety for me. She's happy and satisfied as my life partner on this journey, even if I fail. I've said it out loud, she said it out loud. We've put it in writing. Pat, we've literally made entrepreneurship contracts that define what success and failure looks like, just so she knows the journey that I'm on. And she's created so much safety.

for me to be my best self, for me to win, for me to fail. That's the starting point for me to then create the discipline. What time I wake up? What are my habits? How do I prepare to be successful? How much time do I work? Without that safety, I think it's very difficult to use a book like Atomic Habits and create the right habits, to use any entrepreneurship book or methodology to create a high level of self -discipline.

And I think it's an ingredient that we don't talk about enough.

Pat (26:34)
How much of a role does having a stable partner, a stable household have in the sense of safety and can it be had without

JP Michel (26:44)
Yeah, maybe it's a cheat code for me, but it shouldn't be for everyone, right? Because you don't have a partner yet. So you have to be reliant on creating that safety for yourself. That's something I work on. I'm working on all the time. Can you write out what safety means for you? Can you write out how you create conditions for safety for yourself? Can you write out in a contract to yourself, you know, no matter what happens, I will love myself. I will be okay, even if I fail.

I read an excellent book, Pat, that maybe we can add in the show notes that articulated how to write a love contract to yourself to ensure your safety. without that, how can we do the earlier parts of this conversation where we said you have to take risks? How can you do the failure part if each difficult thing you try jeopardizes your

Long -term health and safety and identity and social ranking and self -view It's it's too hard. It's too challenging that you know, why would you even try? So I think you can foster that environment for yourself But for 99 percent of people it doesn't happen by accident. You can't work it out in your head You might have to put it down on a piece of paper and I know that's very purposeful and I know for some people that might be you know,

Woo woo of an exercise to do but I am here to recommend it. I am here to recommend the life on purpose. I love the title of your Podcast after peter pan and to me we've talked about a lot of the success factors in doing that and one of the themes In my life that I think applies here is living life on purpose And that does require you to think more deeply to reflect To make commitments to write things down I know that's what

what's helped me a lot in my journey.

Pat (28:37)
Well, there's a lot of evidence to suggest that writing things down, getting them out of your head, there's a lot of benefits to that. It's akin to thinking, to making sense of your thoughts.

JP Michel (28:47)
Is that something that you do as well, writing things

Pat (28:49)
I do. I make space for writing. keep a journal. I splurged and got myself this really beautiful Italian leather journal that I've had for a few years now. you know, for me, my kind of growing up journey has really started about five years ago. And that's when I went around that time, I got this journal and I write. When I write, I take the time to make space. I wish I would write more frequently, but I often feel

like a weights off my shoulders after I've written or it's given it's it's made space for me to then be in a mindset to go and have a conversation with my wife or to go and have a conversation with a close friend. It kind of is that opening for

JP Michel (29:36)
And you tell me about your process. Do you open up a blank page and start writing? That feels intimidating to me. Do you have different prompts that you use? How does that work for

Pat (29:45)
No, for me, it's just a blank page. I'll usually start with the date and then it's usually bullet form. And I may jump around, like one bullet may not flow with the other, but it's usually just bullet forms. I'm not looking to be a poetic or to be an author. I'm really writing it in a way that it's meant for my own consumption, which means that I'm trying my best

put anything on there, even if it's shameful or embarrassing. But that's how I write it. How about

JP Michel (30:24)
I like writing in bullets too. I think I've open -ended journals, you know, maybe a dozen times in my life where I just like keep writing. That's more difficult, but I think it's a great practice. I think if you looked at my journals, you would see like random notes and random ideas. And that's probably my preferred style.

Pat (30:44)
Okay.

You know, keeping up with the Joneses, this mentality of comparing oneself to their peers, especially your circle of peers, is if they're very successful financially or otherwise, however they may define success or how you may define success when you look at them. How do you avoid that keeping up with the Joneses mentality, JP? Is that something that comes up for

JP Michel (31:12)
Yes, maybe not as much as somebody else who wants to compete. Because early on, I worked with a business life coach who encouraged me to take that part very seriously. I think in our society, if I said, I've got these people, I want to be like that, I want to compete with them, that is discouraged. Don't compete with others, just compete with yourself.

tend to hear, but my coach had a different approach. They told me to make a competition board and you might not remember, but you're on this, you're on this board as well. You yourself, our friend Matt, and a lot of people had met. Some people had not met. So they said, okay, next put up this board in your apartment. I said, no, okay, like, listen, I like the encouraging me to compete. I got to put people's faces that I'm competing with in my apartment. And why not? Well,

It's easy if Pat or Matt was in my apartment, I'd be embarrassed. Why would you be embarrassed? Well, I don't want them to know I'm competing with them. That's like, I don't want to take them down. And then the question was, well, what if you told them, like how, how would they react? So I actually did this with, with our friend, Matt. I said, Matt, like I'm competing with you

What he told me was that that's the biggest compliment that he ever received and I was shocked by his reaction because I felt like it was a threat or a risk to ask him it required a lot of vulnerability and then I learned that he actually admires me and what I'm doing and in some spheres of life I'm excelling in some other spheres of life. He's excelling and we're learning from each other and That may have happened

six, seven or eight years ago. And I would say that we're still heavily competing and collaborating with each other. And one practical example, eight years after that conversation is that I nominated Matt or as part of a committee that nominated Matt for a big business award, which he won. He did the same for me for a different award. So we both won different awards. So this year, within the span of a couple of months, we attended at the same location.

Two different ceremonies one that celebrated him one that celebrated me, but it was in the same Hotel room which kind of made the whole thing funny, but it showed this unexpected consequence So what I just described to you going back to your question is a different way to live keeping up with the Joneses More practically, I think if a quick linkedin church would would show you that matt is making a lot more money than I am Okay, so that impacts his lifestyle

And Matt would be very happy to share that with you as well. And then another spheres of his life, like Matt helped me write my book that I published, like he reviewed it, gave me comments and feedback, and he admires that part about me. So I think that's an alternative way of looking at like, who do I compete with? How do I collaborate with them? How do I tell them? How do we inspire each other? And I think that can keep me out of like lower level vibrations, let's call it, of

wanting to have something that somebody else has, I think this way of looking at it has more purpose.

Pat (34:34)
I love that. They say, you you can judge somebody by the people that they, that they hang around with by their, their closest friends. And I think having close friends who push you and who have healthy competition helps to bring out the best in you helps to push yourself

I can remember a conversation that you and I had that is kind of similar in this line where you admitted to me that there were moments where you felt jealous.

And I was very surprised by that because you've always been someone that I've looked up to and admired in many of your accomplishments and your courage to go and to confront the unknown, right? And to be willing to fail. And so I love that you were willing to, like admitting to oneself.

that there's healthy competition, that there's jealousy. To admit that those feelings exist probably is a good place to move beyond

JP Michel (35:47)
Yeah, and I've tweaked the beyond them part, Pat. And this is very, maybe semantics, maybe it's transformational language. You get to decide, but maybe I have ugly jealousy and maybe I have beautiful jealousy. And the difference is incredible because ugly jealousy might be, okay, this year, you know, I'm paying myself zero, like I remember paying myself $0 through SparkPath to make entrepreneurship work.

And then I pay myself 30 ,000 a year. Then I pay myself 40 ,000. Then I pay myself 50 ,000 a year. Four years of doing that. Not everyone's willing to take that kind of sacrifice fair. So maybe ugly jealousy during that time would be if a teacher is negotiating with me saying that like my little deck of challenge cards is too expensive and I know they're making 120 ,000 and I'm barely paying myself. I'm like, no, like this doesn't work. And I'm frustrated.

That's ugly jealousy. That's not accepting the world and my decisions taking ownership. Beautiful jealousy is the example of me telling you or Matt or anybody else, I admire what you have and how did you get there? And I want to learn more and I want you to inspire me. and I think I don't want that to die. I think the traditional advice is for, you know, stop comparing yourself with others, stop having envy, stop being jealous. I don't think that's the right formula for

I think I want to keep having beautiful jealousy. think I want to keep having conversations to learn from other people. And I think if I do it that way, that's going to drive my learning. That's going to drive my growth.

Pat (37:26)
the challenge cards. We didn't really talk a little

challenge cards and how someone might utilize them to try and find some meaning and purpose in their career?

JP Michel (37:38)
Yeah, I'll just leave you with a story. How's that? In 2014, I was living in Pittsburgh in the U S and I met a high school student named Anna. She had a big problem. She's being asked, what do you want to be when you grow up? And this was a hard question to answer. Okay. Because she really only knew about 10 or 20 job titles and there's 20 ,000 job titles out there. So I said, Anna, like forget picking one job title for life. Find a problem you want to solve. And to do that, I gave her a copy of a magazine.

I gave her a copy of the Economist and I said, pick your favorite article. And she picked this green colored water, like this specialized algae that was being developed to clean polluted waterways. This for Anna was exciting. It was meaningful, had purpose. And I said, okay, well let's work backwards. That's the challenge you want to solve. What companies are working on that? We found their name online, Hypertrophic. Then we looked at who are the people working there? What are their jobs?

And then we looked at what did they have to learn to be able to do that. They discovered materials, science and engineering. And it turns out that Anna loved that idea. I didn't even know what that was, Pat, when I started off and I was a career coach. But we discovered it through something called the challenge mindset, which flips the model to careers because all of Anna's friends did it completely differently and it went really poorly. Okay. They did, what's my favorite class? What kind of majors related to that? What job can I go with my major?

please somebody hire me and then 10 years into their career, they're gonna try to see what am I actually doing? What's the problem we're trying to solve? This doesn't work. With Anna, we flip the model. And that's what Spark Path has helped thousands of students do. Harvard uses the challenge cards, University of Waterloo uses the challenge cards, community colleges use them, high schools. So if folks on this call are interested in using the challenge cards to help them.

discover new career possibilities, they can check them out at mysparkpath

Pat (39:38)
Great, great story. And that actually speaks mindset when I was going through school and the Career Center would have had that available to me. And we'll put the website link in the comments. For someone

growing up in their mid -30s, call it that way. Does a system work for someone who's 10 or 15 years into their careers? Is there different sort of tweak that you would recommend?

JP Michel (40:13)
Difference is that it's much more important to start off with this approach because by your mid 30s, you may have developed a linear expertise in one area. And to discover the next step in your career, you need to broaden your horizons. How do you do that? Escape your undergraduate major, escape the functional expertise you've developed. Look at the world a little bit more broadly. And the challenge mindset helps you do that. So you can go do that. You can go look at the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

pick one that you like and then work backwards to find new organizations, new possibilities, new jobs you haven't considered before. And then you think about how do I make that leap from where I was to where I want to go? And it's only after broadening your horizons and looking at a broader set of possibilities that you can think about a leap that will get you closer to meaning and purpose.

Pat (41:07)
Well, I think that's a good place to end. JP, I want to thank you for the great conversation we had. I couldn't think of a better first guest on our very first episode. So thank you for making the time. It's been a pleasure.

JP Michel (41:25)
My pleasure. honored to be guest number one. Please invite me back to be guest number 101.

Pat (41:31)
have a great day. I'll see you soon.

JP Michel (41:32)
Take care, Pat. OK, thanks. Bye.

Pat (41:34)
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