Purpose Isn’t Found, It’s Built with Aaron Hurst

Purpose Isn’t Found, It’s Built with Aaron Hurst

Kelly Kennedy: Welcome to episode 230 of the Business Development Podcast, and today we're joined by Aaron Hurst, bestselling author of The Purpose Economy, and one of the world's leading voices on meaningful work. We're diving deep into why so many professionals feel disconnected and how purpose isn't something you find.

It's something you build. Stick with us. You don't want to miss this episode.

Intro: The Great Mark Cuban once said, business happens over years and years. Value is measured in the total upside of a business relationship, not by how much you squeezed out in any one deal. And we couldn't agree more. This is the Business Development podcast based in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, and broadcasting to the world.

You'll get expert business development advice, tips, and experiences, and you'll hear interviews with business owners, CEOs, and business development reps. You'll get actionable advice on how to grow business, brought to you by Capital Business Development CapitalBD.ca. Let's do it. Welcome to the The Business Development Podcast, and now your expert host, Kelly Kennedy.

Kelly Kennedy: Hello, welcome to episode 230 of the Business Development Podcast, and on today's expert guest interview, I bring you Aaron Hurst. Aaron is a visionary social entrepreneur whose transformative initiatives in technology, governance, and social impact have revolutionized how businesses and nonprofits harness purpose.

As the founder of the Taproot Foundation Imperative and board.dev, Aaron has consistently pushed the boundaries of corporate social responsibility, catalyzing a 15 billion pro bono service market, and introducing the purpose-driven strategies into boardrooms worldwide. His groundbreaking work on employee purpose profiling and peer coaching platforms has empowered hundreds of thousands at Fortune 100 companies to unlock their full potential and embrace a new paradigm of work.

A bestselling author, and a globally recognized thought leader, Aaron Seminal book, the Purpose Economy, predicted a Seismic Shift towards Purpose as a primary driver of economic and organizational growth as a TED Prize finalist. LinkedIn influencer and keynote speaker. His insights continue to inspire leaders to cultivate more fulfilling careers and organizations that thrive on relationships, impact and growth.

Aaron's dedication to building communities that realize their potential, ensures he remains a trailblazer in the ongoing quest to embed purpose at the heart of the modern economy. Aaron, it's an honor to have you on the show.

Aaron Hurst: Ah, great to be here. And I, I love your voice. It's so great. The world is so much better to have you podcasting, so it's wonderful to be on.

Kelly Kennedy: That is incredibly, incredibly kind of you. And you know, before we get into this today, I want you to know that I really resonated with your book. I absolutely love it. I think purpose is the, is the thing of the moment. And I feel like I really only realized this recently too, which is kind of scary. And I think we can chat about that today.

I know we talked before, I'm like, are we not in the information economy, but we might be shifting? Yeah, I've, I've had the pleasure of interviewing so many amazing people and I think Liz Ryan really like tipped me into this like, new world where it's like, no, Kelly, the whole game is about to change and we're right in the middle of it.

And I think so many people are like, what is happening? And so we're gonna chat about that today. But before we do Aaron. Who is Aaron Hurst? How did you end up on this path?

Aaron Hurst: You just did a pretty long bio. I think you already answered the question. But no, I mean, I, I come from a family of social entrepreneurs, so my grandfather story usually starts with my grandfather, who was a naval officer in World War ii, in one of the first officers in Hitler's bunk when the war ended.

He actually had stole a piece of his stationary from his desk and his goal was to prevent World War iii, and he really saw the way to do that was through. Meaningful, purposeful connection between people of difference. And went on and wrote the original strategy for the Peace Corps and sort of conceived of that idea for President Kennedy.

Wow. And then ran the Aspen Institute for 25 years. And, you know, both of those were about how do you connect people through purpose peace Corps, you know, the idea being it's not enough just to be a tourist. You need to go and actually roll up your sleeves and work together. And Aspen Institutes. You know, roots are really, and bringing people together from different vocations, different backgrounds, but who care about similar problems in the world and seeing if that diversity can help solve solve challenges in new ways.

So that's sort of the backdrop. My parents though were the exact, in many ways, the same, in many ways, exact opposite. They were hippies. I was raised Buddhist moved around a lot. And you know, both of 'em were very social impact oriented, very mindful, like very focused on mindfulness. So that was a wonderful upbringing.

Went to the University of Michigan, which was a transformational experience for me. Spent most of the time building a program to teach creative writing in prisons around Ann Arbor and turning that into a program that the university gave credit to Michigan students to do. And then use the experience to, you know, reflect on not just creative writing, but also social justice and, you know, everything from like teaching, I mean just sort of like e every single topic you can imagine sort of put into this and it's sort a belief of mine is around education is why do we write papers that only one person reads? Like, how can we turn education into producing value for the world?

Mm-hmm. Not just being sort of performative that way. Then worked in inner city education for a little while and then got sort of this bug to sort of say, how can we do things on a bigger scale? So moved to Silicon Valley and worked for two different, very early stage startups that scaled up and blew up.

But learned a ton through that process. Got hired first as a front end dev, self-taught, and then, and product management before starting the Taproot Foundation, which was my first major enterprise in taproots. Focus was on taking the pro bono ethic from the legal profession and bringing it to marketing and tech and hr, because nonprofits need access to more than just legal help and scale that across the US and then globally in partnership with BMW.

Sort really did a lot of work around movement building and understand I'm less interested in building organizations. I'm more interested in building movements and sort of understanding how do you, how do you go about building a movement and building that, that that shift in how companies and how professionals were thinking about community, which led to the insights that created the purpose economy which was a wonderful experience of writing that and touring the world and talking to people about what's possible.

And then raised venture funding and created a tech company based on the core insights in the book. Which just was acquired I three months ago. Oh, wow. But I left that venture about almost two years ago, and I've been working on some new projects, which you can talk about later. I'm in Seattle.

We moved here 10 years ago for my wife's job. She's the chief sustainability officer over at Amazon. So she's doing incredible work there. And I'm also just really enjoying being home with my son who's 16 and recognizing I've got two more years with him and just I think always knew as an entrepreneurial CEO that I put too much time into work, but once I slowed down, I just realized how real that was and it wasn't mm-hmm.

Academic anymore. Mm-hmm.

Kelly Kennedy: Oh my gosh. Yeah. I can totally resonate with that. Dude, I, we have four kids. I have three stepsons and I have one biological son who is eight months old. Oh, that's adorable. It's, it's amazing. It makes you just wanna be a dad all the time whenever possible, right. Yeah. But it's flipping hard, man.

Like I've talked with so many entrepreneurs on the show and finding balance in life. Ugh. Especially as an entrepreneur, feels at times like a completely impossible, impossible task.

Aaron Hurst: No, it is. And you get sucked into this like addiction. I think entrepreneurship has a lot of addiction to it. Yeah. And it's really hard to separate from that.

'cause you're rewarded for the addiction in the short term, not in the long term. Yeah. I was always interested, I forget his name. There was a guy I met from the new school who'd done research on entrepreneurs and. There's such a disproportionate amount of mental health issues with entrepreneurs. I believe it.

Not just created through the process, but I think the people who are drawn to it Yeah. Interest tend to draw like a certain type of person who's big on the highs and lows. Someone who is generally tend to be more prone to depression. Mm-hmm. More prone to a DHD, like a whole set of different, dimensions that make someone sort of open to the stupidity of being an entrepreneur.

Kelly Kennedy: So Well, and it's like, and it's like it draws you deeper as you go too, right? Like as you go and you get more invested, it becomes more of a bit of a life drain on a certain level. Totally. But you're right, it has just enough reward and just enough all the time to keep you in it.

Aaron Hurst: It's always the hope, it's always keeping, yeah. My grandfather's line was always keep the exhilaration in front of the exhaustion, which in my twenties sounded awesome. And now that I'm older, I'm like, that's kind of dumb. Like, is that really the way to live life? Yeah. So, you know, I think I've been, I've been returning more to like my parents' wisdom around mindfulness and being present and, you know, the cliches around, you know, living in the moment and appreciating today and not worrying about tomorrow as much. Yeah. Don't always succeed, but trying to.

Kelly Kennedy: Dude, what was it like growing up with, with parents like that? Like and, and way ahead of their time, by the way, way ahead of their time.

Aaron Hurst: Buddhism actually, I don't know if you know this, Buddhism has been around for thousands of years.

Kelly Kennedy: Well, I knew Buddhism had around behind, they're way behind their time.

I knew that Buddhism had been around for a long time, but I'm just suggesting like, dude, like you're a little older than me, but I grew up in the nineties. Yeah. And the early two thousands and like, it was still like, it was still like, you know, don't cry, be tough, you know? Yeah. If you got feelings, we all have feelings, deal with them.

Like that was the, that was the mentality. Right. Yeah. It kind of sounds like, and especially from the book that your up, your upbringing was a little different than that.

Aaron Hurst: No, it was, I mean, think the people who were drawn to Buddhism who were, you know, not, you know, originally from that culture and that tradition tended to have something in their life that made them need that.

Right. So I think my parents both had, I. Sort of areas of trauma in their childhood that caused them to go to that. So, you know, I think my childhood was a mix of seeing them struggle with the demons of that trauma from their childhood and their, you know, life combined with their exploration of. Sort this other path.

And it was, you know, I think it was a mixed bag. I mean, I went to a Buddhist elementary school, learned a lot. I generally rejected it as a child 'cause it my parents were more focused on Buddhism than they were on parenting. So there was a resentment that came, came with that, to be candid. And I think it took a lot of things as a kid, classical music, hiking that you like, complain about, but then when you're an adult, you're like, actually realize you like and you're grateful that your parents exposed you to it.

So, yeah. I think that's, you know, that's how I came to it. I think there was also, within their Buddhist community, there was a, there was a degree to which there was a cult there, cult feeling to it. Which I think I early on just sort of had an allergic reaction to. But Buddhism is, I mean the, the fundamental ideas behind Buddhism, like now neuroscience very clearly validates.

And I find a lot of the people I talk to who are, you know, introspective, thoughtful, wise leaders. Whether they've adopted Buddhism fully or if they just really bought into some of the core of it. Like it's pretty, it's become pretty prevalent to your, to your point at, at, at this, at this moment.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah.

Yeah. It, it really does feel like when I read The Purpose Economy, it really just hit me that this is, this is happening right now, like right now, more than ever in history before. And yet you wrote this book in 2016 and you, and you founded Taproot in the early two thousands, like you were so, and I like not just ahead, like you mentioned, you might've been the catalyst on a certain level for the purpose economy.

Aaron Hurst: Well, this, there are a number of us that were sort of trying to, you know, starting to see these trends. I actually wrote the book in 2013. The first edition was in 14, so it was about 10 years ago. And I read, and I cringe a little bit because I feel like, oh, like the world has changed in 10 years, but Okay.

It's just funny when you go back and read. Read your own book after a while when time has passed. Sure. No, I mean, I saw it at that point a lot in like the volunteers that we were recruiting to taproot. I mean, there were thousands of people applying to volunteer and they were busy people and they were still making time for service.

And it was clear like they were literally willing to give their most precious resource time because they needed more meaning in their lives. And you, you could see that there was something fundamentally wrong with the workplace and that the companies that were gonna be able to attract the best people and retain them, were gonna have to find a way to make that work meaningful for them.

And that volunteering can't be the answer. It's great, but like, we gotta figure out how to make work itself more meaningful and help people with the skillset to do that. So that was very clear. Then you also also just started seeing it, you know, in, you know, at the time you started seeing it in a lot of the types of services that were emerging for people that were around wellbeing, that were around their ability to connect with others, these sort of sources of meaning in their lives.

They had gotten to this point where they. We're seeing that the, you know, the commercial, commercial success, commercial goods were not meeting their needs. And with the millennial generation, there was a lot of desire for experience and for, you know, self-work and investment there. Mm-hmm. And you saw that those brands that were embracing that in services were starting to eclipse the others.

And I think the other thing is the information economy just commoditized the shit out of everything. So for things to actually stand out in a commoditized, globalized world purpose is the way you actually build connection at a sole level with a customer. And if you can't do that, your product is just gonna be in a downward spiral to the cheapest, whoever's got the cheapest solution which is not a sustainable business long term.

Kelly Kennedy: No, no. But it's like, you know what I mean? I grew up. Differently, right? Like I grew up where it was like, you go out, you got a good job, hopefully you like it. Like that was the way it was. It was like, go find a job that pays well and hopefully you learn to like it. That was essentially the way that I was raised to get a job.

It wasn't necessarily, you didn't get a job because you enjoyed the work. You got a job.

Aaron Hurst: Where did, where did you, yeah, where did you grow up?

Kelly Kennedy: Well, I grew up in, in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so like in Canada, really the outlook, at least in the nineties, two thousands was, you know, go to go to school, get a good job.

Hopefully it's something you like, you know, like they try to push you towards things you like, but let's get real when you're like 19, you don't know what you like. Right? Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think making kids pick what they wanna do for the rest of their lives at 18 is a stupid move.

Aaron Hurst: Well, it's, I mean, in Europe and some places it's even worse where really you get locked into these.

So Kelly, I would, I think a lot of you had a specific experience and you have a lot of confirmation biases we all have where we see things. Sure. And we sort of assume that that's the situation. What I've seen in my research is parents have a specific psychological profile and experience and they tend to then share that with their kids.

Yes. So I would guess I would've found a lot of your peers in Edmonton who actually had a very different experience of that. Interesting. Okay. And yeah, I mean, does it change the time and Yes. But I think you would find that it doesn't change all that much. That actually a lot of it has to do with whether or not parents have more of a transactional mindset or a purpose mindset.

Mm-hmm. And. I think there's people, you know, going back, you know, decades, hundreds of years who've had that purpose mindset where they, they work fundamentally because they find it as a source of meaning. There's other people who work 'cause they fundamentally see it as ego or money or a game. And that tends to then influence those around them in terms of how they perceive it.

I think what you, what what I sense you're describing is it became more part of the zeitgeist to talk about work differently. So it probably shifted sort of more people in that direction. But there's always been people who like, love their work no matter what it is, and raise their kids to just sort of appreciate the day-to-day of what they're doing and to be present in what they're doing and see their work as craft, see their work as service.

So I think there that, I think that's always been there. I just think we've now gotten to the point where that's more in the zeitgeist and popular culture and schools. Are talking more about it. I think schools tend to still be very transactional. And the, I think the No Child Left Behind in the US it was very detrimental to the educational system here, which just made it way more transactional and combined with Think how the finance industry has taken over education just turned it into a debt machine.

And as a result, like so much of the narrative now actually is a lot of it is around professional choice and money because the debt's so insane mm-hmm. That people are getting into here. That in some ways you see some of a counterbalance.

Kelly Kennedy: When I was in high school, they were pushing the trades like, yeah, like hard down your throat.

Like you should go work in the trades because at least in Alberta here, oil and gas is like everything. Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so they want everyone to go and work in the trades. And so even like for me being pushed, like I didn't wanna do that. I never went down that path. Yeah, yeah. But even my family was like, Hey, Kelly, like you should just go get a trade.

It's a great paying job. Yep. You, there's constant work. It's never going anywhere. Like that should be what you do. And it was like, I don't wanna do that. Yeah. I dunno what I wanna do, but I know I don't wanna do that.

Aaron Hurst: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, send around. I, you know, depending on their background, like you know, I'm a Jewish tradition, like a lot of our broader family, it's like, you know, like a lawyer or a doctor, like that's what you do.

Yeah. Right. So it's just interesting, different different cultures, different places. There's sort of these, these norms of like, you can't figure it out. Here's the default Yeah. Of what's expected in the family.

Kelly Kennedy: It's so funny because I think, you know, I look at, like, when I got outta school, you know, I worked a number of jobs before I even went to college, right?

Like, I'd worked in car sales, I'd worked in sales, I'd worked in parts sales, I did a whole bunch of stuff before I had ever, like, went into college and I went to college and I was like, well, what do I wanna do? And I'm like, I don't know. I'm just gonna go into business. I'm gonna go into business because I don't know what I wanna do.

I, in my mind, the I, the idea was if I go into business, I can get a job in operation somewhere and I can just do that and find something I like to do. It's really funny because I, I didn't find my pur, my purpose found me, Aaron my purpose found me. So I always find it funny where people are out there searching for their purpose.

Where I think, like with me, I got offered a position in business development and it changed my life. It became something that I totally fell in love with, even though I was completely running from sales going into college to go into business and really ended up on a certain level right back in sales and marketing, but on a different type one that fit me better.

1. And I would say like, my entire life was changed by finding that, or by it finding me maybe the other way around, ironically.

Aaron Hurst: Yeah. No, I mean, that's great and I'm glad you found it. That's, that's amazing. And I always think it's interesting when people are younger, like, I want to go into business because I don't even know what that means.

Yes. It's like, go into business. So like, you wanna go into like the sector of for-profit. Like what is that? It's like so broad.

Kelly Kennedy: It was so broad. That was the whole point. The whole point was, it's so broad. I don't know what I wanna do. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And I think that that's to this day, what a, what a lot of young people do.

And I, ironically, it was the perfect choice. That's exactly the right thing that I, that's awesome. Needed to lead me down my path. It's just one of those things where I think so many people are out there working jobs that they're working simply because they pay the bills. And you know, talking with Liz Ryan and chatting about reinvention roadmap, and her big thing is you can do something different.

You can do something different. Yeah. People get roped into this idea where it's like, well, I've been in accounting for 15 years, I can't do anything different. Yeah. But it's like, yes, you can, you

Aaron Hurst: 100% can. Right. No, it takes a jump. It's a leap of faith and it takes some creativity and just talking to folks, but yeah.

No, absolutely. Especially if people are unhappy.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah. Well, you know, like, talk to me about taproot. Like, what was it that drove you to really change pro bono services forever? Like, what was it, how, what led you down that path?

Aaron Hurst: Well, I think it's an, you know, it's an entrepreneurial journey, so, you know.

Classic story of like working in tech in these startups and realized like I wanted to go back to more social impact work and started talking to nonprofit leaders. And I was like, how can I help? Like, what could a job be for me in the nonprofit sector now? And they're all like, we don't wanna hire you, but can you build a website for us?

Could you help us with our HR policies? Can you help us with these projects? And I was like, no. Like, that's not what I wanna be doing. I'm asking you like, what can I do for you? Not what can I do for you? Yeah. And what talked to like 1, 2, 3, 5, 10 nonprofits and it was like pretty much the same story.

It's like, we need help with these projects. It was not and like we have no budget for them or next to no budget for them. And it was just sort of one of those chocolate peanut butter moments where just sort of clicked like, oh, like I know dozens of friends and each of them know hundreds, like through the ripple effect, hundreds and thousands of people who Yeah.

Are looking for more meaningful ways to contribute. They don't wanna do traditional corporate volunteering 'cause it's generally uncomfortable or a waste of time. And would be psyched to be able to help you build a website for a nonprofit if we gave them the right structure to do it. And for just to, was that light bulb moment where you just realize, okay, so there's like actually a model here that if we could create a scalable process for high volume pro bono services we could actually scale this to make it way more accessible to nonprofits and get much, many more business professionals exposed to the community in a meaningful way.

Not as tourist, but actually sort of rolling up their sleeves. And it was great. And it was you know, 25, almost 25 years ago, and you know, it was using early technology, things like Yahoo Groups technology. Like a lot of what we did wouldn't have been possible five years prior. Because it was, you need to be able to have remote virtual work by teams who don't know each other Yeah.

For a sector they've never worked in. Right. So from like a team development perspective, it was wildly challenging and it wasn't until like Yahoo Groups came along where you could actually have like a shared work, like online workspace that it was even possible to do this kind of pro bono work. So it was just interesting, like the different technologies at different stages, like open up different possibilities.

So, you know, we did that, started in San Francisco, got venture philanthropy support scaled it to seven cities. We had offices in seven cities and we became the largest nonprofit consulting firm in the world. And then realized. Like, we're barely serving a fraction of the need. And we're like, well, what if we double?

We're like, eh,

10 x, eh. We're like, okay, we can't, this is not gonna be solved through programs. We need to solve it through a movement. And that's where it really shifted from focusing on delivery to how do we actually bring the pro bono ethic to these business, to CSR, to corporate responsibility to these professions?

How do we build non profitability to use these resources? And how do we think about this as a broader marketplace, not us as a service provider? And that was a huge shift in our strategy and really opened up like a whole nother level of impact. And I guess one of the things nonprofits often failed to do is they were very protective of their programs.

Instead of looking at how could we make a bigger impact with, by doing less.

Kelly Kennedy: Dude, like you might be the greatest marketer of all time. How, how does one, I'm taking that quote, but Yeah. How does one grow a company that's based on providing free services to the scale that you were able to grow it?

Like how do you do that without making money? It seems like, and obviously there are ways, there's ways to make money involved. Yeah. But how does it work?

Aaron Hurst: Well, I think first of all just people are hungry to, to give back. Like, I always remember I hired a very senior marketing exec at Taproot or not Yeah.

Taproot, who had been the head of MTV comms at MTV. Wow. And I was like, what's the plan? She's like, well, I don't have any budget. And I'm like, you have the largest budget of any company in the world. She's like, no, I don't. I don't even have a team. I'm like, yes you do. Like every marketer out there like is looking for something meaningful to do and like you just have to ask them.

And it's just that sort of fundamental shift in mindset of like, actually we're sitting with incredible abundance. And have an incredible abundance mindset towards that. Wow. And just know that people like wanna make a difference. And if you can actually create an experience where they can do that, most people will jump at that.

So I think that was the, the first piece. I think we were able to, we had a couple of really key initial partnerships that really made a difference. So one was with Craig Newmark and Craigslist, which is less relevant these days, back in the day. That was huge. Very, yeah. And just said like same thing with LinkedIn Monster, like all these job boards.

He said, give us donated free ad space for job listings. We're just gonna post jobs, but by the way, they're not paid. And they all gave us just hundreds of thousands of dollars in free ad space just to post these pro bono jobs. Wow. And that just created this incredible pipeline of people applying into our system through those job postings.

So that was incredibly valuable just to get that part of the, the, the labor side of it. And then on the nonprofit side. What we found is that there are charitable foundations in every city that have a set of nonprofits they support. And what we were able to do is go to them and say, if you pay our costs to manage this, we'll give you $10 in pro bono for every dollar that it costs us to manage it.

And they would buy basically blocks of our projects and their, and then we would give priority to their nonprofits in the process. So that was how we created a rev, like a earned income model or hundred. Yeah. And then the branding was one of the things that was really critical to success. So it's called Taproot Foundation.

If we had said like taproot volunteers or taproot services, I don't think it would've ever taken off. We set the whole process up where nonprofits had to apply for a, what we call a service grant. Yeah. So instead of a cash grant, we were giving 'em a grant of service and it triggered a different psychological connection to our work than had it just been, Hey, do you want a free website?

Kelly Kennedy: Mm-hmm.

Aaron Hurst: Right. It was more like, we're gonna select these. It's competitive. There's a process similar to other grants you're doing. It totally changed the dynamic and it also made the volunteers feel like they were part of something more formal and that they were part of a grant of service and that was really important in their psychological framing of it.

The thing I'm actually most proud of is not, I mean, the marketing I think was really effective. It was the ability to figure out how to get remote again, like virtual strangers on complex six month projects to complete projects. And the amount of team dynamics we had to mess with to try to figure out how do you actually do that?

And we got to the point where we had about a 95% closure rate. We started off at about under 50% and like through experimentation got up to almost a hundred percent. And, I think it was very relevant to me when I started looking at, you know, when the pandemic hit, like how do we, how do you build effective remote work and virtual work?

And we had really been the largest experiment in doing that, that I've ever found up to that point. So this was a great source of insight in that process.

Kelly Kennedy: Wow, wow. Yeah, like I look at it just from the standpoint of when you're providing free services, like how does that work? But you're right, it's all in the framing.

Like everything you did there was absolutely right. Like how did you, did you just figure that out or did you just have teams of amazing people around you feeding you great information?

Aaron Hurst: It was a mix of just trying, I mean, it's like anything entrepreneurial, just try a lot of stuff and see what sticks.

Right? And you also just talk to experts in the psychology of all of it, because I think that's the piece that I've always been really drawn to is like, what's the actual psychology of what's going on here? And how do we understand what people's actual needs are in this situation? Yeah. So but yeah, od Hass always been intuitive to me.

OD and marketing have always been sort of areas that were intuitive to me which I've been very, very lucky with that. And I often give that advice to people who are coming outta college. I'm like, what class was easy for you that other people thought was hard? Like, when I took classes in organizational development, I always thought it was like ridiculous.

I'm like, why are they giving me credit for this? Like, how could anyone not know how to do this? This is like so obvious. Yeah. But most people weren't. And I was like, oh, like this is an area of strength for me. Like same thing with marketing. It's like a lot of people just don't understand marketing. I was like, I always intuitively got it.

Those are the areas where you can really make the biggest impact because you, there's something about your brain that like aligns with that kind of thinking.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah, totally. And there's something, like I said, there's something just about the moment, like I would say it's. Everything feels different post covid, you know, like Yeah.

And obviously it is, the world is a completely different world, but there were like ideas I feel like that just could never have flown pre covid that now it's like, you know what? Doing things that matter to us actually matter.

Aaron Hurst: Like, like the, there's events. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Like taproot would not, taproot would not have existed, had not been for nine 11.

I mean, we started right after nine 11 and there was just this, so many professionals were seeing all the first responders out there and seeing all the problems in the world and being like, how the hell am I helping with this? Or am I just the problem? And I think that that combined with this economic downturn created the sort of spike in demand and interest in the topic.

So timing is so, so important to what you're doing. You can have a great idea and I've had many great ideas of bad timing and guess what happens?

Kelly Kennedy: Mm-hmm.

Aaron Hurst: Dies, right? So I guess the piece I've come to appreciate about entrepreneurship is just like how many things have to come together for something to work?

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah. Yeah. Walk me through, walk me through, walk me through the writing of the purpose economy. Right. Like how, what was it that was like, you know what, like, this is the time, I think it's time to write a book on this change. And, and I do feel, and we talked about this before the show, I don't think I recognized that we were in the middle of a change.

Even, even like, even during Covid, I couldn't have quite recognized that we were in like, it still felt very much like everything is information based. That's the tech sector. It's still growing like crazy. Like yeah, we are in it. But in the book, you make a pretty strong case for why the, we are in a transition, if not now, in the purpose economy.

Can you walk through that?

Aaron Hurst: Yeah. Yeah, I mean the process for writing the book itself, I mean, actually started with a very different entry point, which was, I knew I was leaving Tap Boot and I wanted, I'd been there for 10, 12 years and just, I wanted to capture the experience for the culture of the organization after I left.

So there was sort of some kind of like Dead Sea scrolls of Yeah. The organizational culture. Sure. So I spent like two or three months just interviewing employees and leaders who have been part of the organization at different stages in the organization and transcribing them and just sort of looking at what had transpired over those years.

And it. Purpose economy really emerged, like almost none of that content made into the book. But it, the thesis emerged from those interviews of just hearing how people have been like, we had done this and we saw this and we experienced this, and we had this corporate partner did this. And you're like, huh.

There's like, there's a pattern here. What does this pattern that I'm seeing emerge from this? And at the same time, I was reminded of my uncle's work at Stanford who had coined the term information economy. And I had sort of just, again, it was in one of those chocolate and peanut butter moments where I was like, whoa, wait a sec.

Is this the purpose economy? Is that what we're seeing happening now? And I just sort of put that on the wall as a hypothesis and said like, what evidence is there of this, that this is happening? And what would my advice be to individuals, leaders, and market builders in an economy in which purpose is the driver of innovation and value creation?

And that really led to the journey of writing the book.

Kelly Kennedy: My gosh. Yeah. No, it just like, I guess purpose. It seems so broad, right? Yeah. Is it broad? What, what does it mean though, Aaron? Like, what, what does the future look like? What, what is, what does this transition even look like? Are we, are we gonna go away from, from the internet or from the things that we've essentially created?

Yeah. In the information technology. Is, is social media gonna be a thing of the past? What is, what does our future look like in a purpose economy?

Aaron Hurst: Yeah. So we went from agrarian to industrial to information to purpose, right? So like, start with agrarian, like, do you still eat Kelly food? I still eat food. So like, it's not like the agrarian economy's gone as a part of it.

It's just that it, it's a question of what's creating innovation and dominating change, right? So similar, like you probably have a car, so the industrial economy is still there. You're still using social media that's still there. It's a question of like, what's generating new innovation and what's driving the workplace and driving consumer behavior.

And in some ways I think I could have renamed. The purpose economy, maybe more accurately, the psychology economy. I think a lot of what we've seen in this era is just a greater understanding of psychology, especially positive psychology. Yeah. And the use of that to help I think positive and negative because I think all these economies, like great economies, great and horrible, industrial, great, horrible information, great, horrible.

Like these are not, it's not a pollyannish definition around purpose. I think it's more that we start to understand the psychology of people and what they need for wellbeing and how to connect with people at an emotional level. And that was starting to shift how we think about work and about services, products, and brands.

Purpose is a nice way of sort of framing that because at the core, like what people are looking for is meaning. Yes, they want meaningful lives. They wanted meaningful experiences and you know, we really found it was in three areas. They want meaningful relationships. They wanna make an impact that matters and they want to grow.

Like those are these three sort of core human needs we've had, you know, since we were cave people. And there was this recognition in the science, recognition of pop culture. Like these are legitimate needs and that they're worth investing in. And the companies that have found ways to, whether it's with employees or consumers, connect to those needs their products, you know, start to differentiate their workplaces start to differentiate.

Kelly Kennedy: It's so funny 'cause like, I think back to my time in school and it's like, of course you should do something that you connect with. It's like, I wouldn't wanna hire somebody who doesn't like what they do because they're not going to do good work. And yet we've never, we've never spent time chatting about this.

Like, I just don't understand how I went through college. Elementary school, high school and never once did the conversation of like, Hey, whatever you do, you should make sure that you feel connected to it, that you should feel like it is your purpose. Like that never came up and like, maybe it comes up now.

Aaron Hurst: It came up I think around, and I think it was a mistaken way it came up around the idea of a calling and sort of like, oh, I have a calling to be a doctor. I have a calling to be an artist. You have these, sort of, these ideas that, that idea has been around for quite a while. This idea of like, do you have a calling?

And then for everybody else, it's kind of like, what do you do? Because you don't have that calling. Callings are problematic 'cause they're a fixed mindset towards purpose. If you like say you're calling is medicine and then you can't do medicine, like you can't have your purpose.

Kelly Kennedy: Now you're screwed.

Aaron Hurst: Yeah. Yeah. So like any kinda like the calling framework's highly problematic. Yeah. Long term short term, it's motivating, but it's, it's problematic. The skill that's needed, Kelly, is it's less about finding your purpose. I think it's more about it. How to find meaning in your day to day. Mm-hmm. It's not about finding the perfect job or perfect anything.

It's more about we create meaning for ourselves. Like nothing actually has meaning. Like we as human beings are meaning makers. So yes, it's more about cultivating in kids in early career, how do you create meaning and not just sort of sit there feeling like you're the victim of the world, but more like how are you creating meaning outta anything you do positive and negative.

Kelly Kennedy: Mm-hmm.

Aaron Hurst: I mean, we talked about parenting. Parenting is deeply meaningful. It's not fun most of the time. Yes. But you create, if you're a good parent, you create meaning out of the good, the bad, and the ugly. Right? Yes. You know, and I think that's like that's sort of the same thing with work, and I think we tend to think that finding the right job or the right profession, suddenly that's gonna click into place, but it's actually much more of a skill and a mindset of meaning creation.

And I think that's where the, like my Buddhist upbringing like helps sort of shortcut that for me is like, I. Everything's relative. It's really a question of what you create with whatever's in front of you. Interesting. That's really where the, the, the science of it is. Okay.

Kelly Kennedy: Okay. That's a different frame, Aaron, than I've ever heard.

Yeah. So basically what you're saying is you can choose purpose, you can choose and give it's option, meaning you want it to have.

Aaron Hurst: Yeah. I mean, most people working in the nonprofit sector are unfulfilled. Most people working in medicine are unfulfilled. There's no purpose, profession or profe purpose job.

We create purpose and meaning, or we don't. And it's about learning that skill, you know, and part of it's mental health and mental wiring, like whether or not you're someone who like naturally does that. There are people who just naturally do that. But it is a skill you can learn largely through gratitude and reflection.

Reflection is the actual process of meaning making. Part of the problem with the world right now, Kelly, people are so damn busy and they don't turn off technology, so they never reflect. Therefore, no matter what they're doing is not meaningful. Wow. Because a life without reflection is a life without meaning.

And between Netflix, social media work, like very, people don't put that quiet in there for reflection. And then work becomes, work life, et cetera is not meaningful. So that's one of the big things we need to do as a society is figure out how to put reflection back into our day-to-day experience.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah, it's, it's really funny that you bring that up 'cause I actually recently interviewed Dr. Robert Pearl and we were talking about how like the healthcare professionals, doctors go into it and then they get just so overwhelmed that the amount of people even leaving the healthcare sector Oh yeah.

Massive. It's awful. They're burned out. They're completely burned out. They're, they're suffering with PTSD, they're suffering with all sorts of things. And yet they went into becoming medical professionals with purpose, with good intention. It's the calling professions.

Aaron Hurst: Yeah. The calling professions often have that problem, right?

Where you're considered like your only choice you're considered lucky to be able to be successful in a. And you romanticize it and it never adds up to like what you thought it was 'cause you're not creating the meaning yourself. Whether that's teaching architect, a lawyer, a doctor, like all these calling based models tend to have mm-hmm.

Problems with that. I think healthcare and education right now are acute because they're understaffed and bureaucracy has taken away the autonomy and craft of those jobs to a large degree. And they're just overworked.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah. Yeah. It's really interesting because, you know, if you go back, even one generation to my father's generation, right?

Where mm-hmm. You got a career and you worked in that career for 30, 40 years and you got your golden, your golden parachute when you left and the life was good. It's like that time is so over and it's like, were those people living purposeful lives or were they just living to live? Like I, why now? Are we allowed to live purpose when they weren't.

Aaron Hurst: I, and again, I don't know if that's true. And I got certain populations where that was the case. Especially like people working in companies. I mean, there's really more, there was more longevity to jobs, there was much less sort of churn around jobs, skill sets didn't shift as much, so he saw a lot of those changes happen.

Yeah, I think the thing that's I mean my dad, my father who's, you know 80 now, like, I mean, he was an industrial spy. He was a provost at university. He was a minor. He what else did he do? I mean, he had so many random professions. Like, so like this is why I, there's just so many exceptions to like what you're describing.

Sure, yeah. You know, like the broad, the big piece, Kelly, is that as we moved into the information economy, the power dynamic in the workplace shifted. People in an industrial economy are highly replaceable. And the model was built on value creation coming from raw materials.

Kelly Kennedy: Mm-hmm.

Aaron Hurst: And through a and through a manufacturing process with the information economy.

Value creation is based on knowledge workers and suddenly the actual means of value creation were people, not raw materials. And with that, the power of employees shifted dramatically. Where it went from something where, you know, don't like your job, you're fired to like, how do we retain this person?

How do we keep them, how do we make sure they're happy? Because they can easily go to Apple, they can shift over to Google, they can go to Amazon. The market became fluid and there was way more power based on the way that economy was structured. So the information economy shift to knowledge workers and shift to more value creation by employees enabled them to start thinking about, oh, I have power now, what do I want?

Yeah. Whereas that wasn't really possible with earlier economies as much.

Kelly Kennedy: That's, yeah, I agree completely. That makes a lot of sense. 'cause like, you're right. Like as you look now, most people do not stay much longer than three or four years in any position. Yeah. And I don't really think like, could they Sure.

You're absolutely right. They probably could. But it's like the calling changes or the connection to the job, you stop. You stop having the passion for it. Yeah. And then you might go and work for somewhere else. Right. You're right. It's like, I don't know though. Is that, is that better or worse? It kind makes you wonder, right?

Aaron Hurst: Well, I mean like, it's yeah, it's interesting. It's like all these different sort of paradigms. Like some people argue like arranged marriages, a lot of cases work better than self-selected marriages. Like there's all these different instances where choice actually creates unhappiness.

Kelly Kennedy: Mm-hmm.

Aaron Hurst: But I think as a.

At large, I think, I mean, it's, it's been positive and negative and people have been able to think about what they want to advocate for, what they want, but then also to be unhappy with not getting what they want. Yeah. So it's sort of raised that bar and we've also just become a culture of entitlement to choice, which I think has actually ironically decreased a lot of our commitment to each other and to community.

Yeah. Because it became, we've become more and more individualistic as we've had more and more choice. Yeah. And now we just have like, like really unreasonable expectations around individual choice that are, in my perspective, like causing huge political problems. They're creating these sort of have and have not gaps at unprecedented levels.

So yeah. I'd be interested to sort of figure out like how do we, how could we as a society move back to more collective? 'cause it's very clear that's where wellbeing sits.

Kelly Kennedy: Well, it's really interesting because in a time that we are more connected to each other than ever. We are the least connected in a meaningful way than we have ever been, I think.

Yeah. Like it's a, it's a very strange thing and it's like you're kind of right. It's like because we have so much access to connection, we don't value it as much or we don't make the effort. It's really hard.

Aaron Hurst: Not connection. Well, it's more than like, it's, this is my new, my new organization that I've just launching soon is focused on that issue.

Like how do we address Yeah. The loneliness epidemic and the lack of social connection that's tearing us apart as individuals and as a society. There are so many things that are causing us to disconnect from just the fact that people are moving all the time. Like, I moved to Seattle. My family doesn't live here.

I don't have like a network around me. Right? Yeah. The workplace is now remote, so I'm not like, I'm at home. I'm not in the office. But it's also little things like, I'm not gonna go to my neighbor to ask for sugar like they used to in the movies or whatever it is. Like, I'm just gonna go on Amazon and get it in an hour.

Like there's no need to like engage. Yeah. And there's also this perception that there's like a perfect person out there. There's the shared interest versus just saying like, oh no, like my neighbor actually, even if we're really different, like I need a relationship there. And it's important for proximity.

Like there's been less emphasis on that, that connection that way.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah. Yeah. It's so funny. It's like, you know, even living in, in the city that we live in, we live in Edmonton. Yeah. And we have amazing neighbors. Like I've met them a handful of times. They're really nice people. But yeah, like we don't go out of our way to like hang out with them or to like, to really generate that relationship.

And I don't know why. I don't know why. Maybe I should, I don't know what's wrong with me. Maybe I'm broken.

Aaron Hurst: So let's fix it. Let's, why don't we do an experiment? Maybe you can be the catalyst for change in Edmonton.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah. I guess that's what it takes, isn't it? It takes someone to say, you know what? This is stupid that I don't know my neighbors.

I think I should make some effort.

Aaron Hurst: Yeah. I mean, I've started just doing a dinner party every two weeks. And having like four or five, six people over for dinner. And I find that that's, you know, it's starting to create that for me. It's about, you know, asking for help from your neighbors. It's about, you know, I think one of the things we see in Seattle is people just don't invite each other into their homes.

Like, we need to open our doors and let people into our homes. It's part of the individualism. Like, it's like there's been more and more of this barrier at the front door. Yeah. And we need to learn to reopen our front doors and not just be scared Everyone's got a gun or someone's crazy, or someone's gonna like go on social media and take a picture of something inappropriate in our home.

Like we just become so weirdly private 'cause we wanna curate everyone's experience with us. And that's just so ridiculous.

Kelly Kennedy: It is weird 'cause I think about it from the standpoint of like, I'm, I'm pretty introverted, right? Like I just am and it's so funny, I'm the weirdest introvert you've ever met. 'cause I'm in business development.

I have a podcast. I talk to a lot of people, but like best salespeople are. But personally I love my alone time. I love just being Kelly and my family and that being good. Right. And yet like. Yeah, it's, it's really strange and I, and I, I, it's funny 'cause I've been introverted my whole life. I've preferred to be a little bit isolated my entire life and so.

To like open that door and have that conversation. You're right. But it, that feels a bit uncomfortable to me. So you, you should do it. That, that is the uncomfortable thing. Isn't that weird though? So

Aaron Hurst: Kelly, what's, what's it gonna take for you to invite your neighbors over for dinner? Oh my goodness. I don't know.

Kelly Kennedy: I guess I just gotta do it like, yeah. Now that you've made that aware, like I was, I feel like I wasn't aware until we just had this conversation, but now that you've made me aware of it, I can't pretend it's not happening.

Aaron Hurst: So when, when are, when are you gonna have him over? Let's figure this out. Yeah. You know what?

Kelly Kennedy: You're absolutely right. I think weekend need to invite them over weekend. Yeah. Next weekend. Yeah. We just had some time. I, you know what, you're right. I'm going to, I'm gonna talk with Shelby and we're gonna invite them for supper. You're absolutely right. Like this is ridiculous. And I hope everyone listening is also realizing how crazy this is that you don't know your neighbor.

Aaron Hurst: Yeah. No, it's so common. I mean, there's some people do, but it's like so prevalent. Yeah. Yeah. Just trying to get a tr like a habit of doing that. It's super nice and it's so good for your kids 'cause it also creates a broader sense of safety and community. Totally. It gives them like more, more family.

Yeah, because neighbors can be much more family than like just random friends somewhere in the city. And it's also really important when, you know, especially with climate change, because we have natural disasters and problems. Like your neighbor, you may have to end up living with your neighbors 'cause your house might get taken out by a tornado or you may have flooding.

Yeah. Like you need, like, we need neighbors more than ever. And yet we know them less than ever.

Kelly Kennedy: Wow, man, that's crazy. Like I really hate that. You just opened up my eyes. Aaron. You're welcome. It's one of those things, it just feels a little bit bonkers, but you're absolutely right. We need to, we need to meet our neighbors and, okay, challenge, if I'm being challenged, you guys are also being challenged.

Just invite one neighbor over for supper this week and see if there's something there. See if there's a relationship there. Like these are people you live next to every day. Your kids probably play together. Like it's crazy. It's weird, dude. But you know what? I look at it as my life, Erin. And growing up we didn't know our neighbors.

Like also growing up in a small city outside of Edmonton, my, my parents weren't friends with our neighbors either. Like, heck, I couldn't even pick them out of a picture. Like that's how little I saw them. Wow. So maybe it's just, it's like, what do you call it when it's like perpetual?

Aaron Hurst: Yeah. No, it's like, yeah, it's just, it's getting perpetuated, perpetuating generationally, perpetuating.

Kelly Kennedy: I'm, I'm perpetuating it is what I'm doing.

Aaron Hurst: You're the problem, Kelly.

Kelly Kennedy: I am the problem.

Aaron Hurst: No, it's easy to, it's easy to fix once you sort of realize how simple that is and that your house doesn't, like I have, we're having a bunch of construction down the house. I'm like, oh, I can't have people over for dinner.

And I was like, if they're gonna come in and say, oh my God, I can't believe you. Let me in the house when you have construction going on, nobody cares. I was like, oh, we're in the middle of like redoing our living room. Who cares? Like, just, yeah. Like that's how you like, actually it's not about curating a, like a restaurant experience and I actually intentionally try to serve very simple, boring food.

'cause I want to set the Barlow so that other people are wanting to host people. I don't think they have to put together like a Thanksgiving meal.

Kelly Kennedy: It's not ribs and steak night. It's like hamburgers night.

Aaron Hurst: Well, it can be like barbecue, simple barbecue. Like I, I mean I'm vegan so I do my version, which I do just couscous and lentils and a salad and people bring things.

But like. It's simple. It takes me about an hour to put together and it doesn't intimidate people to say, oh, well I'm not a chef like Erin is, so I can't do this. Yeah. I'm like, I'm clearly not. Like you put the couscous in a bowl of hot water and some spices and stirred around and it's done. Like tastes great, but like, it doesn't have to be complicated.

Kelly Kennedy: Oh my gosh. Like I am, I am no cook, but we do order, we do order equivalent to HelloFresh. It's called Fresh Prep here. We order Fresh Prep. Yeah. Yeah. It's awesome. It's awesome. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's made much better cooks out of me. At least. Shelby was already a great cook. I, but I needed some practice.

Aaron Hurst: One of the things I'm, I'm learning, which is fun from a friend, is like, actually if one of the ways to have the best kind of dinner party is to actually cook together. Yeah. So invite people over and say, Hey, we're gonna like, make this. And like, you have those recipes and like versus like a formal, like, I've made dinner, it's served.

But to actually just say, Hey, I got all the ingredients. Like, let's just have a cooking party and then we'll eat What we made is actually a really nice way to.

Kelly Kennedy: You, you really know how to push people's boundaries, don't you, Aaron?

Aaron Hurst: This one should not be a boundary Kelly.

This one should not be one.

Kelly Kennedy: Oh my gosh, dude.

Yeah, it's, it, it would feel like a boundary to invite for me. It'd be like, you invited me over and I gotta cook the food, but that's just introverted Kelly being like, I don't know if I wanna do that. Dude, I wanna spend some time with you on finding purpose. Finding purpose has been something that, I'll be honest, I don't think I ever found purpose.

1. I think purpose found me. There was like a day that I woke up and I was like, I love this. I love what I'm doing. I'm passionate about it, and I'm gonna take this thing to the next level. I ended up starting a company that was business development. I now have the business development podcast. Like it has become something that I've become incredibly passionate about.

But it's weird because dude, there was a, there was a time when I didn't even know what it was. Like, I had no idea that this was a position in a company, even in college. It wasn't until after college that someone like gave me the opportunity to try it. And I was like, holy crap, this is a thing. Like I had to Google it 'cause I hadn't even heard of it before.

Right? But I wonder how many people, that's what happens. They don't find their purpose. They find something that is purposeful or purpose finds them. What do you think about that?

Aaron Hurst: I think the frame of purpose finds you is problematic. 'cause it basically sets the story of like, I just need to wait for it to come to me.

And it's not taking responsibility doesn't mean there's not some truth in it. I just think it's a problematic way to think about it because

mm-hmm. You know, I'm an 18-year-old. I'm like, okay, well I'll just sit at my desk and wait for purpose to find it. Like, that's not what happened to you. That's not what happened.

No. You, you experimented. That's right. And you reflected while you were experimenting until you found something where that one morning you woke up reflecting and be like, huh, I think I may have found something here that works. Sure. Okay. So I think you more did agile software development of experimentation, checking to see if it was working and then you like landed on, oh, like this is working for me.

I'm finding the needs that I have met here. Yes. This aligning with my personality. So I think it's a great Hollywood story. That purpose found you. I think the reality is you just did a bunch of micro experiments until you found something.

Kelly Kennedy: That's fair. I've done a ton of things before I found business development.

You're absolutely right. Yes.

Aaron Hurst: Right. And it's not like you read an article and was like, oh my God, business development. It's not, that's not how that happens. So I just think as a, as a story, it's problematic for others to talk about it that way. And the reality is the answer is just experiment, reflect, experiment, reflect and business development 10 years from now may no longer be the thing that like you enjoy.

Correct. So you have to continuously reflect and do that because it's not static that way.

Kelly Kennedy: Okay. Okay. And that's something else I wanted to chat with you about was can your purpose change?

Aaron Hurst: So it depends on your definition of it. My experience is like we kind of are who we are. And as you get older, you just peel layers of the onion back and you get more to something core and you get rid of a lot of the pieces that are taken from society, from your parents, from expectations.

As you get older, those like your wisdom basically peels off all that nonsense. It gets more to the core. So to me it's less about it changes and more that you're actually removing layers of distortion and getting to your more and more to your core. Amazing. So does that mean, which again, like business development isn't a purpose, right?

Like there's something in this that's the purpose. So no. If you did something else, it'd be further doing something along those lines.

Kelly Kennedy: Correct? Correct. It's not the business development itself that ends up being the purpose. And especially not with this show. What, what the purpose is, is helping educate and inspire so many people.

That's where the purpose Yeah. Comes from. But you're right, it's like business development could have been the tool, but the purpose is different. You're absolutely right.

Aaron Hurst: Yeah. You could do that as a teacher, you could do that. I mean, there's a lot of different ways you could do that, right? You can do it as a parent.

What we found is when people are authentic with their purpose, it's it is how they parent. It is how they work, it's how they show up in like every aspect of their life. Mm-hmm. So it's trying to find that, that, that common route. And I often, like when I'm working with someone on their purpose, I'm like.

They've got a draft of it. I'm like, okay, could a CEO have that purpose? Like if you went and did a c could you do it? Okay, great. Could your, the assistant to the CEO have that purpose? Right? Could the center for the New York Knicks have that purpose? Could a doctor have that purpose? And if it can't pass like any of these, it's too specific around like a profession.

Like it needs to be something more generalized that could be in different parts of your life. Yeah. For it to be something that like, is authentic.

Kelly Kennedy: Can we chat a bit about pro bono services? Because, you know, your work with Taproot really kind of exposed something where it was like, there's a lot of professions that aren't like lawyers and doctors and things like that, that can be pro bono work, but most people don't look at it that way.

Can we chat a little bit about the reward? The reward of, of doing pro bono work?

Aaron Hurst: Yeah. I do a lot of it myself. I think there's, but I mean, it goes back into those three areas of purpose, right? So one is relationships. It's a great way to make new friends. It's a great way to meet people from other sectors.

It's a great way to network. So there's a sign and it's often with like similar people, people with similar values. So that's high value. It's impact. Whatever you do professionally is probably the way in which you can make the greatest impact because that's what you're paid the most money for and therefore what's least accessible to other people.

And then growth applying your profession to a new sector, a new situation is how you grow and getting out of your comfort zone. So if you're looking at how do I be more fulfilled? How do I more purpose, like pro bono work really hits that really well because it has the relationships, the impact and the growth that you'd want.

And you'd, you know, I saw through tap, like people got married, people moved 'cause they found a new neighborhood, people got involved long term with nonprofits, people, you know, found new jobs, people got promoted. And all the things you would hope would happen would happen. And I mean, the research is like the things that matter most in terms of happiness.

It's like number one on that list is like helping others. So and I think often when we're getting paid for stuff, it doesn't feel like we're helping others. It feels more transactional or it can.

Kelly Kennedy: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. It's like if you could remove the transaction, you just get the fulfillment.

Aaron Hurst: Yeah. But I think it's interesting with pro bono right now, which is somewhat challenging, is that with Covid and with cloud-based work and with and remote work, more and more people are doing freelance work.

And the dynamic for like a freelancer to like do pro bono work's different than I work at Apple and marketing and I'm doing pro bono work. Yes. 'cause I think often someone doing freelance, like they, people are constantly asking 'em to work for free or discounted. Whereas like Apple, they're not doing that while you're in your job.

It's like about doing it outside of that.

Kelly Kennedy: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Aaron Hurst: So there's also this interesting, like there's two very distinct populations. It's like the institutional, and then there's just sort of the individual freelancer. I think every freelancer should take on pro bono work. It stretches them so that they build their skills to that next level, or they get the network to the next level.

Totally. They should always be doing it, but they just need to be much more strategic about it. It's actually a core part of their development of their business.

Kelly Kennedy: Yes. Yeah. No, I agree. I agree. Dude, that's been absolutely amazing. I wanna chat a little bit about Board.Dev.

Aaron Hurst: Yep. So it's one of my new projects built off of original insights from Taproot.

But the basic idea is nonprofit boards been around for a long time. They are they're based on very traditional understanding of like the world because they were designed so long ago. And the reality is that today for a nonprofit to be successful and the ones that are successful they fully, they fully embrace technology.

And the ones that don't do it tend to have diminished impact. The challenge is nonprofits spend about a dollar for every $3 a company of similar size would spend on technology. So if a nonprofit spending a dollar of its budget and it's a million dollar budget, the company at the same size is spending three.

Yeah. And so we're seeing way under investment in technology by nonprofits. And the reason for it to a large degree is that most nonprofits are small and they don't have senior tech staff if they have anybody, they have like a junior person or a small team. And there's no strategic conversations about technology.

There's no like meaningful business case being put against investments in technology. So you just sort of get stuck in the spiral of un like under investment, so what we're doing at Board Dev is we sort of have this insight that if you have a CTO, a CIO or someone sort of on that career path on your board they can play that role of bringing that strategic perspective into the boardroom and making sure that you're not only compliant as a organization with, you know, technology, privacy, security, but also that you're really thinking strategically about how could technology change the nature of what we're able to do and how is technology changing our constituents lives, and therefore how do we need to adjust?

How we're adding value in the world. AI has certainly accelerated this. I mean, so many boards are talking about like, well, what does AI mean for us? And they don't know how to talk about it. Yeah. We need people on the boards who know how to talk about these things. So our goal is to have a technologist on every nonprofit board and to create standards and processes for them to be successful in that role.

And by doing that greatly increase the impact of the nonprofit sector and then also get technology professionals who are often very separated and isolated from the reality of the world into the community. And we think through that it'll help mature the technology industry, which to date is still a pretty immature industry in terms of its maturity of, its, its responsibility as a, as a part of society.

Sure. So it's sort of a twofold mission. Like the core is helping the nonprofits, but there's sort of this Trojan horse of let's help the tech industry mature and develop more soul behind it.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, I mean, it's is tech industry primarily millennial run at this point?

Aaron Hurst: I don't know the data on that.

I mean, gen X is certainly a big part of it. Sure. Still boomers are certainly not as relevant as relevant now. Yeah. Millennials are a big, they are a big part of it. And I think we've also had this story that like tech companies are actually making, doing more good than nonprofits, and a lot of companies like have gotten sold on this sort of concept, which occasionally is true.

It's generally not the case. And it's really important, I think, for these tech execs to get involved in, in nonprofits. Mm-hmm. And, you know, starting as, you know, starting in your, starting off, like doing pro bono work in your twenties and then sort of by mid thirties, you should start looking at joining a board.

And by the time you're a c you know, CIO, CTO, you should be on a significant board and it should be a major part of how you show up in the world.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's about giving back.

Aaron Hurst: It's about getting involved. I don't even think I was giving back. It's like getting involved. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Realizing you're part of a community and getting the context sort of going to the new like Kamala Harris thing about the coconut falling from the tree and like didn't come without context around it. Like your organization, existing context, your family, existing context where you live, existing context.

And if you're not contributing to that, that's all gonna decay.

Kelly Kennedy: Interesting. So what you're, what you're kind of saying is like, leading a company really isn't enough. There has to be like there should be more to it.

Aaron Hurst: Yeah, I mean there's exceptions, right? But I also just think of one dimen. You don't wanna be one dimensional in general, right?

So it's good to sort of see different perspectives to get out into the community. You are gonna be a happier, happier human being on a sustained basis. If you do that.

Kelly Kennedy: It sounds like honestly the whole thing and almost every point has led back to you. You're better off with community, do more Oh, for sure.

About building your community. That is the secret here to, to be living purposefully.

Aaron Hurst: Well, Kelly, I mean, think about if you were a cave person back wherever it was and you know, three, four or five, whatever, however many years those people lived like the number one predictor of your lifespan was whether or not you were in a tribe.

A human being on their own in the Serengeti is dead. Like you cannot survive on your own. So we are biologically wired to need to find community and connection and we're highly threatened for good reason when we're not. So like we are wired to need that connection. Mm-hmm. So there's just a very strong biological basis for it.

Based on how we evolve to be able to survive in nature. Humans are not, they're not like some animals that are just fine as loners. Like we're not designed to be loners.

Kelly Kennedy: We're not, we're not good loners.

Aaron Hurst: Like we are, we are prey. We go from pre, we're as a community, but we are predators as yeah, individuals, we prey.

And to be able to be on that side of it, you have to be in a community.

Kelly Kennedy: Man. How did we end up here? Like, that's, that's the question. That's the thing that like gets me, is like, I agree with you completely, but I feel too, like as a species, we've really taken community out of the whole thing. Like, what the heck?

How, how did this happen?

Aaron Hurst: So many a book on the topic.

Yeah, there's a lot of great research on that topic and I think a lot of it is we've allowed companies to take over the world and companies in a lot of cases do not benefit from community. And they are trying to replace it with something they can charge for.

Most of the things, I mean, it goes back to even you're a parent, like the best toy for a lot of kids is in cardboard box, right? But no company wants to sell that. 'cause that's not like viable. So we're always trying to like, sell things to meet these needs when often, like the best solution is to have your neighbors over for dinner.

Kelly Kennedy: The best solution is to have our neighbors over for dinner. I'm on it dude. You got, you got me. I I'm on it.

Aaron Hurst: I'm counting on. I I want a photo, I want proof.

Kelly Kennedy: You got me. You got me.

Aaron Hurst: I think that's, yeah. So I think that's where a lot of that has, has gone and science has also just gone evolved so rapidly and companies have learned how to use science to manipulate people.

Sure. So we like to think that there's free will and free markets, but the reality is companies have gotten good enough at using psychology is the dark side of it, to learn how to build addiction, to learn how to cause you to want things that are not actually in your best interest. And they've done a lot of lobbying to ensure that's protected.

So I think a lot of this is at a political level of trying to figure out the role for companies that enables 'em to be successful but doesn't enable 'em to. Take advantage of the things that we think we need, but don't actually. Yeah. Yeah.

Kelly Kennedy: Amazing. Yeah, I I, who knows, man, is that could be the next book.

Aaron Hurst: You can write that one. I'm write a book right now. Yeah. But no it's no, it's really fun to work on it. It's nice to work on a building global movement, but starting locally and figuring out, like, how can you just in your neighborhood start to create that change?

Kelly Kennedy: It's one relationship at a time.

Aaron Hurst: Yep. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Kelly Kennedy: Aaron, you know, there's a lot of people listening right now who've been inspired by the things we've chatted about. I know you do public speaking. Are there some other services that you do as well?

Aaron Hurst: I mean, I'm, I, I do public speaking. But mostly what I'm doing now is like starting this new organization which is launching, it's gonna be called the Chamber of Connection, and the idea is that.

It's gonna be in every city within 10 years as a infrastructure to help people have dinner with their neighbors and to help people connect. And that's really where I'm focusing most of my energy. If people are interested though, in, you know, technology and boards, check out board.dev. If you're, have a, I have a leader purpose store and leadership program down in Chile in Latin America.

So if you happen to know people down there that need that, like bring it on purpose Economy website generally has most of my projects going. But mostly just, I think I just encourage everyone to just like create the change in their own lives. These things are not, they're not that hard once you get past the sort of initial, the initial fear.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah. Yeah. It's all, it's all choice, right? We have to get to a point where we make a choice to do something different.

Aaron Hurst: Yeah. And they're enjoyable things. You just have to get, get past that, you know, get past this whole story. We're too busy, we're too whatever. And just be like, what is the most fundamental human thing that we want, like I should do today reflect, be in communion with others.

Kelly Kennedy: Amazing. If people wanna get ahold of you, Aaron, what's the best way for them to do so?

Aaron Hurst: LinkedIn is great. And then, you know, my email's Aaron at Aaron Hurst us, so that's also another way. But LinkedIn's always a good, I'm, I'm pretty on top of my LinkedIn world, so feel free to DM me there.

Kelly Kennedy: Awesome.

Well, thank you so much for joining us. I really enjoyed book. I am gonna be recommending it. It's excellent.

Aaron Hurst: Fabulous. And yeah, it makes a great gift to dinner parties, by the way.

Kelly Kennedy: True, true my friend. Until next time. This has been the Business Development Podcast, and we will catch you on the flip side.

Intro: This has been the Business Development Podcast with Kelly Kennedy. Kelly has 15 years in sales and business development experience within the Alberta oil and gas industry, and founded his own business development firm in 2020. His passion and his specialization is in customer relationship generation and business development.

The show is brought to you by Capital Business Development, your Business Development Specialists. For more, we invite you to the website @ www.capitalbd.ca. See you next time on the Business Development Podcast.