Entrepreneurship And Human Flourishing With Dr. Matt Lee

 

Dr. Matt Lee started out studying criminal homicide. But after his career took some unexpected yet fascinating turns, he found himself leading research at Harvard’s Human Flourishing Program. He joins Gary Schoeniger to reflect on how he made this career shift and is now pushing the boundaries of traditional academia. Dr. Lee unpacks the connection between entrepreneurship and human flourishing, emphasizing why this intersection is more than just business. He also shares insights on teaching young people about the sociology of love and explains why action-oriented love is the driving force behind meaningful innovation.

—

Listen to the podcast here

 

Entrepreneurship And Human Flourishing With Dr. Matt Lee

In this episode, I’m talking with Dr. Matt Lee, a sociologist whose career has taken some unexpected and fascinating turns. He started out studying criminal homicide. He’s now leading research at Harvard’s Human Flourishing Program. What’s most interesting to me is why he made that shift. Along the way, Matt began to see that flourishing isn’t just some abstract ideal. It’s something real and something lived. At the center of it are mindset, meaning, and the ability to create value for others. In this episode, we talk about how the limits of traditional academia pushed him to rethink what education is really all about.

As an experiment, he started teaching the Sociology of Love, breaking free from rigid core structures and creating space for students to explore big questions without always needing answers. This conversation goes deep. Matt and I unpack the connection between entrepreneurship, flourishing, and education, and why this isn’t just about starting businesses. It’s about agency. It’s about purpose. It’s about human dignity. We talk about risk, curiosity, compassion, and yes, we talk about love, because maybe the most radical idea of all is that real, grounded, and action-oriented love is the engine of meaningful innovation. Let’s dive right into it.

—

Matt, thanks for being a guest on my show.

Thanks, Gary. It’s always a great joy to have these generative dialogues at the intersection of the entrepreneurial mindset and flourishing.

I’m super excited to have this conversation. It’s been a long time in the dialogue out in the margins. I want to start with how we met through this weird thing. You went through our entrepreneurial mindset training many years ago at The University of Akron. We then reconnected through a mutual friend at a board meeting. I want to ask you. You’re a professor. You were teaching. You’re a sociologist. Do I have that right?

I was a professor of Sociology at The University of Akron at that time. I now have a slightly broader title, which is Professor of the Social Sciences and Humanities at Baylor University. I’ve branched out, I would say, in part because of the workshop that I attended, which you hosted.

What I want to get to is, as a sociologist, why are you interested in human flourishing? Can you walk us through how you came to that?

It is bound up with a number of nudges that I was receiving over the eighteen years that I was at The University of Akron, and then four years at Harvard. I’ve had three years at Baylor. Part of that was my own dissatisfaction with what I was doing with my life. I was interested in something. I went to graduate school. I specialized in it. It didn’t represent the fullness of life. When we think about flourishing, it’s about how we are fully alive and how we are helping our communities help everyone live the good life and live more fully.

My first book was on criminal homicide. I was teaching Criminology classes and a variety of subspecialties within criminology. Nietzsche says that when you look into the abyss, the abyss looks into you. Spending all of my time on such a negative topic was bad for me. What can I do? That was my specialization. That was the thing I was trained to do. I started perceiving some opportunities. In your book, The Entrepreneurial Mindset Advantage, you talk about how people with an entrepreneurial mindset begin to fall into adjacent opportunities. I started noticing these adjacent opportunities. It’s a long and convoluted story.

Essentially, I was already moving in this direction of how I pursue what I love. As you say again in the book, so that I can create value for others. It’s not just by focusing on my narrow specialization in one academic discipline. I started to see opportunities even within the field of criminology to engage with a group called the Center for Restorative Justice of North Central Ohio. I started volunteering for this group. This is a group that says, “There’s a crime. There’s something bad that has happened. What can we do creatively to make things as right as possible?

Scrambling for grants and trying to keep this thing going for a number of years, you’re forced to think entrepreneurially, so I was doing that. I started getting involved in some other research on the topic of love. I then took your workshop. The goal there was to be trained to facilitate the Ice House Entrepreneurial Learning Initiative for other groups. As a faculty member, this was provided to me by The University of Akron, and a number of other faculty members went through this.

It helped me to see there’s a language, a vocabulary, that I can use to describe what I’ve been stumbling around doing, which is looking for these adjacent opportunities beyond the limitations of the silo that I happen to find myself in. The question is, how do you fund it? It is not just in terms of money, but how do you get people to do things? How do people come together creatively to create value for others beyond what we were trained to do? As I took the workshop and started to reflect on this new vocabulary and mindset that you were offering, it crystallized that there are unlimited opportunities, but we’re trained not to look for that. I have to unlearn what I’ve been trained not to look.

There are unlimited opportunities out there. We are just trained not to look at them. Share on X

That’s true. We’re probably living in the most opportunity-rich time in human history. You can access a billion people on your cell phone, and all this knowledge. I started a gutter cleaning business when I was a kid. I was putting little ads, like twenty-word ads, in a local newspaper. It was $300 in the ’80s. The opportunities are latent. They can’t be seen with a managerial mind. They can’t be seen with an untrained eye.

In my case, to get back to your specific question about flourishing, and this was around 2015, I was serving as president for a regional sociology association. It was my job to pick the theme of the annual conference. I decided on new visions for flourishing or something along those lines. I wanted to get people thinking creatively beyond what exists, but to use our imaginations, empathy, and nations, which is key to what entrepreneurs do, as I’ve come to understand from you. We had that conference. I started teaching at The University of Akron on the Sociology of Love, which was very different than all these crime-related courses I was teaching.

Eventually, I said, “Great to learn, read articles and books, and have conversations. Wouldn’t it be even better to practice?” I shifted the title to Love in Action and asked the students to go out into the world and try these things. Let’s come back as a group and see how we can make sense of it in light of the readings. We were still doing the academic work. Let’s be willing to fail. Another thing I learned from you is that we’re afraid to fail because we have all of these high-stakes, standardized tests. We’ve got to be perfect.

We’re missing opportunities to get information that we need to learn how to love better, to learn how to flourish better, and to learn how to do sociology better, whatever the discipline or whatever the practice. I did that event for that association and started doing these classes, not only a different topic, but a different way of approaching it. I felt like I was more fully alive. It seemed like the students were as well. When you invite people to co-create, and you say, “Don’t be afraid of failure. Failure is our friend. Go out and make some mistakes. Let’s learn from the mistakes. Let’s make our practice better,” it becomes a community of practice.

Eventually, I had this opportunity to go to Harvard and work as Director of Empirical Research for the Human Flourishing Program, which was an interdisciplinary program. Initially, it was called the Program on Integrative Knowledge and Human Flourishing. Both aspects appealed to me. I thought I never knew something like this existed. I was used to traditional disciplines and swimming upstream.

Here’s a program that says we want to have as many people from the humanities disciplines as we have from the social sciences. We want real dialogue. We want generative dialogue where the work we’re doing is improved because we’re paying attention and trying to understand across these boundaries in the service of flourishing. That’s a short version of a very convoluted life journey from criminology to flourishing.

I got so many questions here, Matt. You talk about how we get punished for failure. We’re trained not to explore and experiment and not to take risks. When you went from the courses you were teaching to creating a course about love, my first question is, did that intimidate you? What are my colleagues going to think? Am I going to be ostracized by my colleagues? Can you talk a little bit about that? Was that weird for you, or was that not a thing?

Part of my journey is in two phases. There was the pre-tenure phase and the post-tenure phase. I was willing to try to take more risks after tenure because I knew I wouldn’t just be summarily dismissed from my job. That was part of it. I also think that I was experimenting in small ways. This is why it is about having an understanding of the vocabulary of entrepreneurship and the mindset that I was already leaning into. I used to think, “Entrepreneurship, that’s about making money.” I wasn’t making any money.

You weren’t motivated by making money.

No, I didn’t even think about it. At some point, you say, “How do we resource this? We want to scale it. People seem to like it. How do we do this?” You have to start looking at a variety of material flows. What I would say is that I was teaching Sociology of Law. I put in one day in the syllabus, “Law, what’s love got to do with it?” I was thinking about the Tina Turner song, What’s Love Got to Do with It. From the textbooks that I was exposed to and the one that I was using initially, the answer was nothing. It turned out that love has everything to do with law.

I put this in there. It was more of a restorative approach to legal disputes, whether criminal violations, personal injury, or whatever. What would a restorative process look like? What if we grounded this in genuine care for everyone, not just winner-take-all? I started playing with that. It was one day, the first semester, and then the students seemed to like it. I seemed to like it. It was a week in the next semester, and then it was two weeks.

Pretty soon, it was a big chunk of the course. Love started taking over. Not that we weren’t talking about law anymore, but it’s law with the intention of making things as right as possible for everyone, and not just the powerful win because they have the dream team of lawyers. What does it look like? The students found that they enjoyed exploring that. I was already iterating it in this early stage without telling a lot of people, “I’m not going to talk too much about this.”

I was talking with a colleague who retired before I had tenure, Margaret Poloma. She had retired ten years before or something, but liked to come into the office. Her office happened to be right across the hall from mine, one of these contingencies. I said, “Margaret, I’ve been tinkering with the incorporation of love into some of my Criminology classes. I find that I like it, and the students like it. We can understand the creative potential of law differently. Husserl, the great phenomenologist, said that you’ve got these calculative rationalities and non-calculative rationalities. The calculative stuff wants to reduce everything to cost-benefit. You can only see so much, but love opens up our field of vision. We can see everything. We can see something now that we couldn’t see before. This non-calculative rationality way of being was helpful.

I was telling Margaret about this. She said, “You need to meet my friend, Stephen.” Gary, this is our mutual friend, Stephen Post. I thought, “This guy at this med school, Case Western Reserve Med School, what could he and I possibly have in common?” “He wrote a book called Unlimited Love.” I said, “I didn’t know that there were scholars in med schools writing about such topics.” I met with Stephen and became fast friends. Stephen, Margaret, and I did a grant project to move in this direction.

Just knowing that there were people like Stephen writing books on these kinds of topics gave me a sense of possibility, and my own experience iterating in my Law class and some of my other Criminology classes. What happens if we connect with our deepest motivation, which is to love? How do we practice? What kinds of correctional processes would we want? Would we want to warehouse people in prisons, or would we want to help people make things as right as possible? It is this connection with a deeper set of motivations, not just “I can have a career within this system, and the system is designed in this way.” What needs is the system, as currently configured, failing to meet? How can I fail my way into understanding that?

That’s the entrepreneur way, though. It’s so powerful.

I’m using your language I first encountered in this workshop many years ago, and then subsequently, in our conversations. It helps us to imagine that we’re stuck here in the basement. What does it look like if we start looking from the balcony? What can we see? If we’re not afraid, if we move with love into this direction that we care about, and we’re not limited so much by fear, there’s always a little bit of fear, and some of that’s healthy, we’re not reckless.

We’re not trying to go completely bankrupt here. We are willing to learn from mistakes and to invite that learning. It’s a different way of being. I would say it helped me on the path to Harvard, and a lot of the work I’m doing now with flourishing. It’s not by the numbers. It’s not just writing articles, conducting research, and publishing findings. I spend a lot of my time on activities that are not reflected in my curriculum vitae at all. That’s the academic version of a resume.

They don’t show up anywhere except that occasionally, I’m put on a board or I’m put on some collaborative project because of the entrepreneurial explorations I’ve been having. A lot of that is invisible to the conventional academic lens. It enhances my contribution to the emerging field, scholarly field, and interdisciplinary field of flourishing, because I’m having different kinds of conversations. We’ve got this public-facing report from the first wave of the global flourishing study that we’re going to release pretty soon. We’re just fixing a few errors.

One of the things that it does is invite us to start thinking about how we integrate and harmonize within our own lives, within particular societies, and then across societies, all of these different domains of well-being and flourishing. Some groups do some things well. Their strengths become their weaknesses. Because of the non-conventional conversations that I’ve been seeking out and oftentimes hitting a dead end, I care about finding. If I can’t go through the door, I’ll find a window. That’s the entrepreneurial way.

Because of that, we’re starting to see more expansively something that maybe is not so prominent in the scientific literature. How do we help individuals, families, communities, and societies understand how their strengths have become their weaknesses through a process of generative dialogue, because we are seeking out groups that are very different from us? They’re doing some things well. We can learn from them. We can share the things that we’re doing well. We can then start to make conscious choices.

It’s nobody’s job to promote flourishing for everyone. As Stephen’s research was focused on unlimited love, it’s nobody’s job to practice unlimited love. We practice love for our family, our community, or our organization. It’s nobody’s job to think about harmonizing across all traditions and all cultures. With these adaptive challenges that we’re facing right now as a species, the time is ripe.

We need entrepreneurially-minded scholars and people outside of academia to come together with great imagination, creativity, and love so that we can begin to hold space for these kinds of conversations to take place. It’s where people can try, fail, and maybe realize for the first time, “Some of the things that I’m good at are actually getting in the way of meeting these adaptive challenges.”

One of the things I wanted to dive into with you, Matt, is I think of a managerial paradigm, culture, or mindset as the other side of the coin to entrepreneurial. The way I think about it is that managerial paradigms or mindsets are important for the efficient replication and distribution of useful things. A mindset is to a person what culture is to a group. They function more or less the same. The underlying level three assumptions of a managerial paradigm are never or rarely articulated, but they’re focused on efficiency. They’re hierarchical in nature. They’re process-oriented. By their very nature, they create error-reducing paradigms.

Here’s the dilemma, Matt. We need those things. That’s important to be efficient. Those paradigms aren’t conducive to discovery, experimentation, and exploration. The managerial assumptions of the last couple of centuries have become so deeply ingrained in our individual and collective consciousness that we don’t even recognize that they’re there. They just keep producing the outcomes. We keep wringing our hands around the future of AI and how kids are going to adapt. We don’t realize the extent to which the way we’re teaching kids, which is steeped in industrial era thinking, is going to make them increasingly vulnerable in a world of AI.

As I think about what happens when the managerial mindset dominates, you can approach technical problems with great efficiency, but you can’t approach adaptive problems with any kind of efficiency. What you do is you disinvite a lot of creative people who have something to contribute.

You prescribe without diagnosing.

My job might be to do what you say. I don’t want to rock that boat, because if I do what you say, I’m going to get rewarded in terms of a pay raise, promotion, or whatever. I was coming back on the plane, and I was reading an article. I write a lot about the connection between love, leadership, and flourishing. This article was arguing that, as often framed, love is incompatible with leadership because leaders exist within hierarchies, and love wants to flatten hierarchies.

If I truly love people in my organization, then I’m going to not treat them as subordinates, but treat them as equals. That’s a mess for one kind of efficiency. Gary, you and I have talked about this at length. We know that young people become systematically disengaged throughout their educational journey. The majority of workers all around the world, maybe seven out of ten, are disengaged. It’s efficient if we’ve got a narrow goal. That’s an extractive goal. It would make most people worse because of the collaboration.

That’s one way of organizing, but we do need to be managerial at times. The tension is, how do you invite people in a loving manner that encourages creativity and possibilities for solving these adaptive challenges, and at the same time, still deal with these technical issues that maybe are effectively organized managerially? People have been trained to do both very well. Some of us stumble into the entrepreneurial mindset, but most of us have had managerial training. It’s out of balance.

It’s like with flourishing. We’ve got all of these different domains that we might want to pursue, but we get out of balance in focusing on some or pursuing them in a certain way and neglecting the possibility of harmonizing some of the others. In our research, for example, we find the middle-income countries doing better on many of the domains of subjective flourishing, whereas the high-income countries are doing better on economic matters and these more objective indicators.

People have less warm and satisfying relationships. Meaning and purpose are lower in these high-income countries. How do we learn from the high-income, middle-income, and low-income countries about the strengths of each of those approaches and about what we’ve been trained to deemphasize, so that maybe we could make more conscious choices?

That’s where the entrepreneurial mindset, to me, offers us a way of making more conscious choices, looking at how the system functions, and not taking for granted, “This is my role in the system. This is my paycheck. This is what I’m being ordered to do. I’ll just do it.” That’s dehumanizing. It’s not connecting with the sense of being fully alive that flourishing would imply, where we want to be optimally engaged. Everything we do in our families, in our communities, and in our workplace, why should we unplug from being optimally engaged in one of those spheres?

We can be optimally engaged in our families, communities, and workplaces by unplugging from fear. Share on X

It sounds so abstract. You and I have talked about this. I lean heavily on Deci and Ryan’s Self-Determination Theory in my book. They’re positing that the human being is no different than any other living organism. We all have the innate capacity and the desire to become all that we can become. They’re also saying that the self-actualizing tendency can be easily thwarted by a constellation of environmental factors, situational factors, motivational factors, and cognitive factors that are mostly within our control, but control is contingent upon awareness.

What Deci and Ryan are saying that I want to explore with you in human flourishing is that this lifelong tendency will continue throughout life, learning, unlearning, social integration, and psychological well-being, if these three psychological nutrients are attainable. What I said in my book and what I wanted to talk about with you is that when we’re cold, we’re hungry, or we’re tired, these fundamental needs are not being met.

It’s very clear to us that we need to solve for that. I’m hungry. I can’t even talk to you. I got to find a sandwich. The psychological nutrients are autonomy, competency, and relatedness. They’re a bit more subtle. What Deci and Ryan are saying is that we turn towards needs substitutes. I’m saying that they’re subtle and they’re harder to attain, specifically within a cultural paradigm that doesn’t value them.

I want to spend a moment on this needs substitute idea. You then get pseudo flourishing, people adapting to an unhealthy system and saying, “I’m happy, I guess.”

I listened to a two-hour podcast on Rich Roll interviewing Laurie Santos. She does the Happiness Class at Harvard. She’s brilliant. I came away thinking, “This sounds to me like a checklist for tolerating an otherwise empty life.” Maybe I misconstrued it, but it sounds to me like you’re hacking at the branches and you’re not getting to the root.

This is what philosophers call adaptive preferences. “I can’t have those grapes. They’re sour grapes. I don’t want them anyway, so I’m going to maximize.” This is the managerial way of being. I manage for scarcity. I’ve got my limited enjoyment or my level of engagement that I’m at right now. I’m going to find a way to do yoga.

Find a way to tolerate my shitty job.

I’m going to find a way to lower my blood pressure through yoga or something like that.

I’m going to give $20 to a stranger.

It’s pretty good. You mentioned Deci and Ryan. One of the core needs is for autonomy. It is in a lot of managerially oriented spaces, and I’m not just talking about businesses. I’m not talking about what happens after you get your college degree and you go to this large for-profit business. I’m talking about what we do in families and what we do in communities.

It is permeating the whole culture.

If I tell you, as a student in an education system, your value primarily is going to be determined by your grade point average and your score on a standardized test, then you start to feel like, “I’ve got to sacrifice my autonomy in order to achieve those marks that have been set out.” It’s this external locus of control. I’m being battered around the ocean on these waves. I’m not steering the ship anymore. One of the things that I’ve loved about your work and better understanding the hundreds of entrepreneurs that you’ve interviewed is that these people with the entrepreneurial mindset say, “I’m going to grab hold of the rudder and steer my own boat. Thank you very much.”

Let’s talk about that. You’re getting to something. There’s no way we’re ever going to crack this nut in an hour and a half.

No, we’ll have to have a subsequent episode or two.

Please feel free to poke holes in my thinking. That’s half the reason I’m talking to you. As far as I can tell, that’s the single most powerful thing that distinguishes an entrepreneurial-minded person from a non-entrepreneurial mindset person. It has to do with perceived locus of control. It has to do with some idea that the future can be different from the present. I don’t know if anyone else is talking about mindset in this way. As I said to you, mindset is to a person what culture is to a group.

I took Danny Kahneman’s work and looked at it through an evolutionary lens. Mindset is a cognitive mechanism that works in your favor and stable conditions. We automate all these schemas. They drop our awareness, automaticity, and habitual control. We get better and better at doing the thing, but they become a glitch in the face of adaptive challenges. That’s how I think about it.

Coming back to what you said, the entrepreneur is using imagination and memory, where most of us are drawing from the past to determine what’s possible. You even said in your own story. It starts with some level of dissatisfaction. Sometimes, those can be subtle little hollow things. They’re not a dead end. “I lost my job. I can’t pay my bills.” It’s there’s something inside of me that I’m not flourishing. This isn’t all there is for me. It always starts with some level of dissatisfaction.

I heard this great phrase. “My upset became my setup.” What is it that I’m upset about? What would I want to fix for myself and for others if we could fix that? What I noticed as an instructor in university classes was that it was the banking model of education. You’re sage on the stage. You make deposits in the brains of all these students, and then it pays off on exams, or it doesn’t. We started a group of us at the Experiential Learning Center, the center where you hosted your workshop at the university.

We started talking about unclasses because we wanted to create a different space. We did the opposite of everything else we had done before to see what would happen. Rather than handing out a syllabus with a reading list and exams and everything spelled out at the beginning of the semester, let’s invite students to help select the readings, co-create the assignment, have peer-graded assignments, and other things like that.

Instead of meeting in a classroom, let’s go outside in the community. This is where I was alluding to earlier. At some point, there is a financial resource issue. In that case, we were able to work with the community foundation to get some funding to create spaces in the community that could host these meetings and allow students to have these deep, enriched experiences relevant to the topic of the course, but in the community with community members, assist the community, and solve community problems. That’s it. I wasn’t prepared to do that on my own.

I was doing a lot of other things, publishing and doing all sorts of things. We needed some funding so that we could have people to support that. Part of that was support for the community members themselves. We started thinking about it differently because we had this idea that we were all dissatisfied with looking at disengaged students who were not fully present in what we were doing. Many of us in our own ways found that students learned much more deeply and the lessons stuck with them much longer when they were co-creating, when they were using their imaginations, and when they were invited to be equal participants in the learning journey.

Human Flourishing: Students learn deeply in their lessons if they are co-creating, using their imaginations, and are invited to be equal participants in the learning journey.

 

I started learning as an instructor from the students. Some of what I now share with students is wisdom that the students surfaced as we practice this course, Love in Action, or these other kinds of things. What became apparent to me is that these fixed structures, these fixed ways of being, are actually quite changeable. They look very solid. How could we do these things in classes? We started doing them and sharing what we were learning in a community of practice. We found that it was energizing. Maybe it doesn’t work for the economies of scale that universities require in some ways, having a thousand students in the Intro to Sociology class, computer-graded exams, and all that stuff.

Can there be spaces within any group, any organization, where we might need that, but we can have this other thing, too? It’s like infant psychiatry. I don’t know if you remember one of Winnicott’s key points. The successful parent, the parent who helps the child feel at home in the world and feel love, is the one who allows the child to take some risks in a good enough safe space. There is support and there’s comfort, but it’s not like this smothering cocoon where the child can take risks and learn from failure. We need to create those spaces where we can try our own thing.

The infant crawls away and explores the environment. It’s a little bit unsettling, but it can come back to Mom or Dad and be held and nurtured. We want to create those spaces where there can be some autonomy and in a context of healthy relatedness, as you were saying about Deci and Ryan. It all fits together. We were creating courses that didn’t honor that basic fact about human nature. When we started to do these unclasses, we rediscovered these basic needs. Let’s get rid of the needs substitutes and go right to the root.

I love that. That’s the future of learning, Matt. It’s facilitating the knowledge. I had these arguments. I was at a global conference in Indianapolis, the Global Entrepreneurship Congress. That’s the entrepreneurial ecosystem, folks. There were 3,200 people there from 200 countries. I hear people teaching entrepreneurship like they’re teaching math or science. “The mindset is all fine and good, but they still need to learn about finance. They still need to learn about marketing.” I keep thinking to myself, “Yes, they do, but if you’re not getting the mindset right, they’re going to need you to teach them all that stuff. Newsflash, it’s all on their phone for free. It’s on YouTube.”

What I love about what you’re saying, Matt, and I’ve talked to Jaime Casap at Google Education about this, is that the future of learning and work is intrinsic. That’s it, full stop. That’s what you were facilitating. In my book, I call it entrepreneurial discovery learning. You are facilitating students to discover for themselves. It’s Jerome Bruner’s stuff about discovery learning. That’s the future. It gets back to the topic that we’ve nibbled around so far. It’s very unlikely, as far as I can tell, that human flourishing can occur within a managerial system.

We accept the premise of autonomy, competency, and relatedness. I define relatedness as being respected by my tribe, the people around me, and my community. I’m recognized for what I’m contributing. I’m respected for that. I’m part of it. I don’t know if there’s a better way to say it. It’s not a term a lot of people are familiar with. I know Richard Ryan was a little bit chafed by this, that Dan Pink took their work and dumbed it down to autonomy, mastery, and purpose. For shorthand, you can use those terms. To put a finer point on this, Matt, and I think you know this, Deci and Ryan are very clear. Two out of three won’t cut it. You need all three. If you take one of those legs out from underneath the stool, it’s going to fall over.

I get this all the time when I talk about love and leadership. People say, “What about operational excellence? That’s critical.” Yes. One of the things that we’ve been doing is working with organizations that have found that their operational excellence improves when they engage with relatedness, love, or whatever we would call that. When we understand, it’s not either or. This is the point I want to make about flourishing. It’s endlessly inefficient to only focus on those handful of domains that we have strengths in, in terms of our flourishing.

We’re good at these things. We’re focused on that. We’re not understanding how the domains we’re neglecting are also part of our flourishing. Going back to awareness, what can we bring into our awareness individually or collectively so that we can understand? You only get so far with a predominantly managerial approach. That’s not flourishing. That’s the needs substitute. That’s managing for scarcity and all the rest.

If you have an educational process and a workplace onboarding process where people realize they have a valuable contribution to make, their creativity and their autonomy are valued and supported, and there’s a safe space to do this, then you can begin to have something other than seven out of ten disengaged, whether it’s in the school, the workplace, or the community. Do I have something to contribute, and is it safe enough? Do I trust everyone else enough that I’m willing to make mistakes and learn from those mistakes because it’s in the service of the purpose that we have? That’s where the operational excellence comes.

If we have a shared purpose, we care about that purpose, and we want to work together to achieve that purpose, then closing down creativity and innovation doesn’t make any sense. It’s not about throwing out the managerial competency, but it’s about recognizing how to balance that with a more entrepreneurial way of understanding the world so that we can begin to transcend where we’re stuck. Otherwise, if you live where you’re stuck for too long, eventually you die.

Let’s talk about that for a second because maybe there’s a way we can Trojan horse this idea. What you’re saying is this is a means of unleashing another level of potential in the people in your organization. If you’re over-focused on efficiency, you’re going to miss this. As the rate of change continues to hockey-stick, the days when you can do what you did yesterday, today, and tomorrow are almost like leaders have to rely on the innovation and entrepreneurial competencies of their people.

There’s this deeply embedded idea in the Great Man Theory of the Industrial Revolution that good ideas can only come from brilliant people. What our work has uncovered, Matt, if I could be so bold, is the recognition of the extraordinary ability of ordinary people when we create these circumstances or these conditions. We have this dilemma. You understand that humans need autonomy, competency, and relatedness in order to flourish. I have a company that has to maximize shareholder value, to use Milton Friedman’s idea. How do we reconcile those two things? I don’t have the answer.

It’s an amazing question. You can work within that system. There are also ways to think about a new system, but let’s take that framing. Let’s work within that system and say there’s competition, there’s scarcity, and we have systematically disinvited people from contributing innovative ideas.

We haven’t done that consciously. We’ve disinvited them. It’s happening at level three. We’re operating on these antiquated managerial assumptions, “You don’t have a master’s degree or a PhD. You go stand over there.”

The great leader is going to save us. We’re going to do what the leader says.

That’s an evolutionary glitch in the brain.

What your work, as I’ve increasingly come to understand and appreciate it, has done, and talking to hundreds of entrepreneurs, one of the things that you’ve dispelled is the myth of the great leader that’s going to save us. Instead, you find people who have honed empathy and awareness. I remember you telling a story about someone who created a new medical device or intervention, partly because there was some need within the family that the existing devices were not meeting, or something like that. I care about this.

I’m a fifteen-year-old kid.

Maybe you tell the story. I care about this. I’m paying attention. I have empathy. This is what ordinary people are capable of doing. We all can do it. We can all open up a new possibility. If we’re waiting for the hero to show up and save the day, and we’ve created structures where that seems to be what the invitation is, then we’re going to be stuck for a while. That’s why I was saying earlier. You’re stuck in the quicksand. Eventually, you’re going to run out of food and die.

If we are waiting for a hero to show up and save our day, we will remain stuck. Share on X

That’s the possibility of leadership being a capacity of a group or a capacity of a system, if we invite properly and maintain a focus on operational excellence. I remember Martin Luther King saying, “People misunderstand love. Love without power is sentimental and anemic, but power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice.” It’s about making these connections.

What I’ve been exploring with a lot of groups is how we bring into awareness things that, before, we wouldn’t even have thought about. It wouldn’t even have come up because we had been conditioned not to notice it. How do we bring these things into awareness so that we can invite a different kind of creativity, even with working within that system that you describe?

If we create a space of psychological safety, where people are invited to be creative and to share, we’re going to have better outcomes, even within that system. We might begin to design a different kind of system where we’re not so beholden to always increasing shareholder value, which eventually starts to run up against some carrying capacity limitations of the planet. We’ve got possibilities of working within the system and beginning to imagine a new system.

I’m going to make my first attempt here to connect the dots between entrepreneurship and human flourishing. Let me take a stab at it here, Matt.

We could talk about these fascinating things forever. How do we land the plane?

We’re not going to land it in one episode, but let me try to find the airfield. One of the things that I discovered through my quasi-ethnographic research and interviewing these underdog entrepreneurs who start with little or nothing, it seems to me that empathy is the key cognitive thing that’s happening. Keep in mind, entrepreneurs don’t know what they know. As I started interviewing entrepreneurs many years ago, pretty quickly, I started to recognize these common and predictable patterns of underlying values and taken-for-granted assumptions, of which the entrepreneurs themselves were not aware. They’re driven by some desires. They’re abiding by a logic that they can’t quite explain.

This is where it ties to love and human flourishing. Let me put us in the business context. We’ll go back to love for a second, if we can jump back and forth, and we’ll eventually wind up with the same sauce. This is why I’m so excited to talk to you about these ideas. The entrepreneurs who fail are the ones who go, “I have a great idea,” “I want to start a business because I hate my job,” or “I love to do X, so I’m going to open a business that does X.” The fundamental flaw, according to my analysis, in their underlying logic, is that it’s about them. It’s about what I want, what I need, and what I like to do.

It’s so subtle, but so powerful, Matt. The minute you start to pay attention to what other people need, opportunities start to appear. I’ve referred to this in the past as a simple secret hiding in plain sight. Managerial systems promote that. We’re already on empty because we’re not being fulfilled. The last thing in the world you think about is somebody else’s unmet needs. You come home from a job. You feel like you’re beat down. It’s not fulfilling. It’s so damn counterintuitive, but that’s the magic.

It’s empathy for others. It’s not just like, “I wonder if my neighbor needs his lawn mowed.” It’s looking past the transactional dimension of the need and understanding the deeper social and emotional needs. The vast majority of entrepreneurs are not inventing anything new, but they are intuitively focused on filling other people’s needs. It is that other orientation. The genesis of human flourishing at the intersection of entrepreneurship and human flourishing is the focus on how I can use my gifts, attitudes, and skills to help other people.

This is what we’ve been talking about. It is how to combine the entrepreneurial mindset with an appreciation of the fullness of all the domains of flourishing.

What are those domains?

There’s a lot. At a subjective individual level, the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard that I’ve been working with has been talking about happiness and life satisfaction, meaning and purpose, character and virtue, close social relationships, and mental and physical health. There are things at the group level, trust, mission, and values. There are all kinds of domains. Oftentimes, we will look at meeting financial needs, for example. “In our organization, we have all these inequalities. We’ve got to sort that out.” There’s financial inequality, but there’s also effective inequality. The warm relationships are not as available to everybody within the group as well.

The entrepreneur who has empathy can start to see how those things connect and how other domains are going unfulfilled. We’re so focused on our meaning and purpose that we’re neglecting our happiness. This often happens with groups that are very clear about their contribution. They tend to extract from the human beings who are co-creating and achieving that purpose to the point where people get burned out. Even if you are engaged, you might be engaged and exhausted. How do we begin to think about all of these different domains in a way that allows us to increase our empathy, to have more empathy, because we can see things that we weren’t looking at before? That’s the work of love.

We are so focused on our meaning and purpose that we often neglect our happiness. Share on X

I’ve defined entrepreneurship in the past as an altruistic paradox. It’s not about altruism, where I’m giving of myself and I’m depleting myself in the process. That’s a broad brushstroke, I understand, but by creating value for others, I empower myself. I don’t mean power in a vulgar way. I don’t mean I have power over others. I become economically empowered. Your ability to make yourself useful is a source of economic mobility.

By the way, you don’t need somebody else to tell you how to make yourself useful. You can figure it out for yourself. We empower ourselves by stumbling into the Deci and Ryan trifecta. We were autonomously pursuing things that are interesting to us in ways that are useful to other people. That’s the essence of the intersection. We still have a lot of work to unpack that. There’s more and more leadership literature coming forth about leaders who start to emphasize the employee over the customer. I don’t know if I sent you that podcast from the guy, the former CEO of WD-40.

It was brilliant.

It’s dumbassery or whatever he called it. That gives me hope. There is a way to reconcile these two things.

I did a workshop at Harvard with Steve Gund of The Gund Company. That’s exactly what he said. They always had a focus. The three legs of the stool were the business, the customer, and the team member. He said the customer was the North Star. What they discovered is that when they shifted so that the team member was the North Star, the customer was even better cared for. The business grew even faster.

Human Flourishing: When we shift our business to make our team the North Star, the customer will be better cared for, and the business will grow faster.

 

It’s about understanding, first and foremost, what a human being needs in order to feel fully alive, to thrive, and to flourish. Ask that question of how we have created systems that get in the way of that. How might we change our system so that people can live into that high vibrancy? It’s helpful to have that entrepreneurial mindset that is looking for possibilities and eager for the feedback from failure as we start to build that kind of culture.

The entrepreneurial mindset, then, is a building block for the culture that would be a culture of flourishing, where we understand that it doesn’t make life more difficult. It makes life easier when we pay attention to all of these things simultaneously. We ignore that. When we compartmentalize most of that, we think we’re very efficient and we’re moving forward, but we’re stuck in that quicksand.

Matt, you’re an educator. No one ever tells a young person, and I’m going to channel Abraham Maslow here for a second, that you have gifts. They came on the hard drive. It’s your job to figure out how to make yourself useful to other humans with your gifts. No one ever tells a kid that. Here goes Abraham Maslow. “If you don’t do that, you should plan on being unhappy all the days of your life.” You’re going to thwart the self-actualizing tendency. Newsflash, making a pile of money is not going to do it for you. We all think we’re the exception to that, but the data is clear on that.

It could be trying to please the teacher with high grades and deferring your happiness until you get a good job. You’re trying to please the boss with productivity and deferring your happiness until retirement. On and on it goes. The happiness is right here in front of us.

I also wanted to take Maslow’s idea. He wrote about this in The Farther Reaches of Human Nature. A bunch of students were in Arlington when I was there. I said, “You have gifts. It’s your job to figure out how to use your gifts to make yourself useful. If you don’t do that, you will suffer. Your community will suffer because we won’t get your gift.”

What you were saying earlier resonated so well. I mentioned Stephen Post earlier. In one of my first meetings with him, he said, “In the giving of self lies the unsought discovery of a better self.” You don’t give yourself to the point of being totally annihilated.

It’s not altruism we’re talking about here.

Adam Grant would call it otherish. Rather than selfless or selfish, it’s otherish. You’re inclined towards the other. When you start to see that others value the way that you are noticing an opportunity or noticing a possibility that wasn’t there before, that benefits them, then that’s very energizing, but to try to conform to a system that doesn’t honor the gifts that we have. Howard Gardner is an education professor at Harvard. He has this great quote. “It’s not how smart you are that matters. What counts is how you are smart.”

Trying to fit everyone into one mold, one way of being intelligent, is not very smart for societies to do. As you were saying about discovering your gifts and then applying those gifts, the real question we should be asking is, how are you smart, and how can that unique way that you are smart benefit the community? When we start to do that, we’ll find that there’s less of a need for needs substitute.

There’s more possibility of feeling authentically happy and fulfilled and flourishing more fully when we’re able to invite people to live into their gifts. To some extent, we do. I don’t want to say that we don’t do this, but there’s even more opportunity for us to understand this basic point that it’s not how smart you are that matters, but what counts is how you are smart. Everyone has a contribution to make.

I love that. We can land the plane here for now, Matt. What I found in interviewing all these entrepreneurs is that, on par, they’re not great scholars. They don’t have 140 or 150 IQ. They’re C students, but they seem to be flourishing. They seem to be fully engaged. They seem to be engaging their full faculties. They seem to be reasonably fulfilled. I’ll say optimally engaged for a simple phrase. When we look at the fact that most of the world is not engaged, the vast preponderance of humanity is essentially phoning it in.

Maybe this is the beginning of our next conversation, but part of getting to the intersection of human flourishing and entrepreneurship is that we have to look beyond business. If you hear the word entrepreneur, you think, “That means starting a business.” Folks need to understand that when Matt and Gary are talking about entrepreneurship, we’re talking about one simple thing. We’re talking about self-directed value creation. How can I make myself useful to other humans?

In the process, I come to discover that life is abundant. We’ve been trained to manage for scarcity, but we can lead for abundance when we come to understand that very point. The more I create value for others, the more I empower myself. I’m not thinking about this transactionally, like I’m doing it because I want to empower, but it’s the unsought discovery of the better self.

Human Flourishing: We are trained to manage for scarcity, but we can always lead for abundance.

 

When I say, “When you pursue your interests and develop your abilities in ways that are useful to other humans, you flourish,” that’s not moral or philosophical. I’m pretty sure it’s biological. It’s a natural phenomenon that’s everywhere in nature. What I so love about your work, Matt, and these conversations I’ve had with you, is what you and I are both saying. It’s that there is a vast reservoir of human potential that’s hiding in plain sight. We’re never going to get to it with our current managerial paradigm. Matt, thank you. Thank you for being on this show. Where can people learn more about the work you’re doing in human flourishing?

You could go to The Human Flourishing Program‘s website at Harvard, where I have a page, and also at Baylor University, where I’m a professor of the Social Sciences and Humanities. I have a page there as well. I’m on LinkedIn also. Gary, if I could respond to your closing thought there, the other misconception of entrepreneurs is that they’re looking to make money for themselves. It’s a zero-sum game. You can’t have a world of entrepreneurs. You’re only going to have a few people who can do this and do it well and make lots of money.

What you and I have been talking about is sharing this mindset with everyone and then sharing an understanding of flourishing in its fullness so that everyone can participate in this. The possibility of some of the conflicts in the world being reduced, because everybody has the possibility of exploring with their gifts how they can serve others, how they can contribute value to others, is appealing to me. We try to have various agreements or brokered deals to try to get countries to overcome their conflicts.

If the vast majority of people who are disengaged, suffering, and not fully able are invited to participate in this wonderful journey of discovering how to create value for others and how to flourish in the process of doing that, we’ve got a great opportunity here. The message here is for everyone, not just for the well-educated. That’s what I like about your book. This is something that everyone can start doing right now.

That’s what I’m saying in the book. You know how to create the conditions that are more conducive to your flourishing. Get out of here. Go do it.

Let’s end on that. That’s a great place to stop.

Thank you, Matt.

 

Important Links

• Matthew Lee on LinkedIn
• Matthew Lee at Baylor University
• The Entrepreneurial Mindset Advantage
• Unlimited Love
• The Science Of Happiness: Dr. Laurie Santos Shares Evidence-Based Tools For Genuine Joy, Why We Chase The Wrong Things & What Actually Creates Well-Being
• The Farther Reaches of Human Nature
• The Human Flourishing Program
• Institute for Global Human Flourishing