How Your Worldview Shapes Your Entrepreneurial Style

Cole Abbott (00:00:01 -> 00:00:03)

So today we're talking about worldviews. Yeah.

Mark Abbott (00:00:04 -> 00:00:04)

Yeah.

Cole Abbott (00:00:04 -> 00:00:06)

Something we've been planning for a while. Mm-Hmm.

Mark Abbott (00:00:06 -> 00:00:06)

<affirmative>.

Cole Abbott (00:00:07 -> 00:00:35)

So, you know, we'll see what we get through. But the goal today is to go, you know, start with what is a worldview? Um, then go through the ideas on the different types of worldviews and, you know, what are the types, labels, and what matters with those. Yeah. And then, uh, you know, how do these worldviews impact founders and the businesses they choose to build? And hopefully get, get all the way to, you know, how understanding one's own worldview and how does that impact somebody as a leader.

Mark Abbott (00:00:36 -> 00:02:01)

Yeah. And I think that's gonna be where we may run into a little bit of timing issues, but, um, but I wanna say a few things before we get into the, the meat and potatoes. Right. Which is that, um, you know, why are we even talking about worldviews? Right? And, um, one of the things that, uh, you know, when I was working on work 9.0, which hopefully will be out now in months, um, you know, I found myself needing to go a little bit deeper on, you know, why we are the way we are, why we think the way we think, and whether or not it's important that leaders, especially in this new age of work, have a stronger sense for some of the big questions that exist. Right. And so I went down a lot of rabbit holes, uh, and, um, and I feel like the framework, the lattice work that I've developed and that I write about and work 9.0 is pretty good. Right. But I'm not a philosopher, right. I mean, obviously I am philosophically oriented, but I'm not a educated philosopher. Right.

Cole Abbott (00:02:01 -> 00:02:03)

You're not formally educated in philosophy.

Mark Abbott (00:02:03 -> 00:03:30)

Exactly. Right. So, you know, I can't debate, you know, Fuko versus Kant versus, you know, versus, you know, a bunch of other, um, philosophers with those who, that they do that do this for a living. But the bigger picture, I think I, you know, I have a decent understanding of, and I think, um, it's the bigger picture understanding of why worldviews matter, that I am hoping to help leaders, um, appreciate, uh, so that they can answer hard questions. That I think there are hard questions these days, right. Um, and, um, and, and I look at some of the people that, you know, are dealing with some of the issues that we've dealt with culturally, and I think they haven't thought things through as much, and it comes across, you know, and, and I prefer that they're like, pretty confident about why they think the things that they do and why they take the actions they take. And, and so, um, so this whole worldview thing is something that I, I feel like I've done a reasonably good job of understanding. I am not an expert. And so that makes me a little insecure, right. In answering some of these questions. Um, but I'm also okay with that. 'cause part of my worldview is if you're not a little bit embarrassed about who you are in three short years, you know, you're not growing. So I'll do the best I can. I'm looking forward to this. I'm a little afraid of it, but, uh, but, but I'm also excited about the conversation.

Cole Abbott (00:03:30 -> 00:03:44)

You can look, watch this video, and it's three years and, and just cr Yeah. <laugh>. Oh gosh. Wow. Yeah. It's, it's important to have that humility that there's, you know, there's always more to learn with these things and understand that this is a journey and a process of figuring that out.

Mark Abbott (00:03:44 -> 00:04:29)

Yeah. So, yeah. So first question I think is what's a worldview, right? Yes. So, um, actually start the chapter off. This is the first chapter of the book, and I write, what the heck is a worldview, right? Sorry, yos. I guess I, I, I, I took a little bit about that, but I tried to figure out how to make it as succinct as possible. And what I came up with was the lens through which we orientate our actions and reactions, why we think the way we think and do the things we do. And I actually asked chat, GPT, whether or not this was a pretty decent simplification of what a worldview is, and it gave me a thumbs up. So once again, the lens through which we orientate our actions and reactions, why we think the way we think and do the things that we do, it's pretty

Cole Abbott (00:04:29 -> 00:04:31)

Good. Yeah. That sums it up

Mark Abbott (00:04:31 -> 00:04:36)

Pretty good, huh? Pretty well. Yeah. And so the next question I think is

Cole Abbott (00:04:36 -> 00:04:40)

Right there are different, like the different ideas and the types of worldviews. Okay. Yeah.

Mark Abbott (00:04:40 -> 00:04:41)

This, this, this one, I

Cole Abbott (00:04:41 -> 00:04:47)

Love this one. This one goes into a little bit more. Yeah. It's not as, as much of a little quick thesis statement. Yeah.

Mark Abbott (00:04:47 -> 00:12:09)

So, 'cause you could either go down that rabbit hole or you go down the, why does it matter for leaders? But let's go down that rabbit hole. So, um, if you go back thousands and thousands of years, right? You, you start to see the development of worldviews. Um, and in particular, they come to us through belief systems, right? So you go back to, I think, and I don't have the number everything memorized in my head, but I think the first, you know, sort of formal, um, religion is somewhere around 2,500 or 4500, 3500, BCE. Um, and, and, you know, and it's, the religions are there to help us think about why we do the things that we do, what we should do, what's good, what's bad, right? And so, you know what worldviews, as I said earlier, they tend to answer these big questions, questions that certain areas of expertise, um, look into like cosmology, why, why are we here, right? And then there's epistemology, you know, how do we learn? And then there's ontology. How do we organize the things that we learn? And then there's eschatology, and then there's ology, and we can get into a little bit more of that. But there are like six big areas and worldviews kind of bring it all together. Um, and hopefully it's coherent. It makes sense. Um, but the original worldviews were, you know, brought to us by, you know, by religions. Um, you know, Jesus brought us a set of a worldview. Buddha brought us worldviews. Um, you know, Muhammad brought us worldviews, all these different, different religious leaders gave us worldview. And then, um, big picture stuff. And then over time they're followers, right? Um, wrote stories and parables and, and, and, and, and, uh, um, ultimately, you know, the new and Old Testament and, uh, to help us develop a worldview that make some sense. Yeah. So, so, and then the worldview is pretty much, and I call, refer to those as top-down worldviews. So they were predominantly religious based up until, um, probably somewhere, you know, we can have a debate 15 hundreds or 16 hundreds. And then, um, we, those top down worldviews started to get challenged by what I'll call bottoms up worldviews. And, um, and, and that's where you start to see Newton and, um, and, and, and Adam Smith and Ricardo and, and a bunch of other scientists trying to understand why the heck the world is the way the world is Galileo, right? Um, and so you had these, uh, bottoms up approaches to, uh, two worldviews. Um, and that culminate in things like, you know, ultimately, uh, you know, one of, part of my worldview is that, uh, evolution from the date that we can see things, which plus or minus, you know, appears to be the big bang. We don't know what happened beforehand. And so that leaves lots of room for, um, belief systems, because I think they have an extraordinarily important role in helping us think and, and, and, and take action and reaction. So I'm not, I definitely do not want to be one who's perceived as denigrating belief systems. 'cause I believe they're extraordinarily important. They've persisted for thousands and thousands of years. And I don't know, I have no reason to, um, to, uh, sort of, um, I don't, there's nothing inside of me that says that, you know, that, that, that there is not a God and that Jesus was right. I just, there's nothing in me to go and, and, and sort of say, no, I'm an atheist. 'cause that's not who I am. So, so you have the, the, the, the top down belief systems. And then you have this formation of, of bottoms up. And as I was saying earlier, um, for me, you know, what I know is, I believe part of my worldview is evolution is, is unrelenting stacking of useful information. Um, and what happens over time is we, that information gets tested, it persists. There's certain information that's been out there for billions of years, and then hundreds of millions of years. You go from, you go from the sort of the physics to biology and then human history. And we have all this data, and it helps me, um, develop my own worldview. So that's sort of a bottoms up approach. And then what's really interesting is we can have a debate around when this started, starts to happen, but, um, I tend to see it with, uh, you know, Nietzche, you see it with, uh, Kant, you see it with, uh, FKO, but I, I refer to these, uh, the postmodernists. And people don't typically put Nietzsche in the postmodernists, but I think he really was the first one who starts like questioning things in a really interesting and intriguing way. I call them the sides swipers, right? And, and what they're doing is they're basically saying, well, nothing's true. Right? So none of the, none of the top down stuff is real. None of the bottom up stuff is real. Nothing's real. And, um, and while I appreciate the challenge, because I'm very much open to sort of thought positive and negative feedback loops, um, I think that, you know, that if you go too far with some of their teachings of postmodernists in particular, right? If nothing's true, then nothing matters. And you get into, you know, nihilistic sort of perspective on life. And, and, um, and, you know, you can't even have an argument because you don't know anything. No one knows anything. But I kind of feel like we do know some things, right? I think technology's proven that we, you know, bridges and planes and, and medicine and science, and I, I, I, not a post, I'm not a postmodernist, right? But that's the three, I think major players, right? The top down, the bottoms up and the sides swipers. And the top down also, uh, includes non-religion, um, worldviews. I would, I would submit that, um, that Marx had a top down worldview. Well, most of the ideologies, the prevalent ideologies out there are gonna be top down. They're top down, but they're not religious based. They're some other form of Yeah, be secular or whatever, right? Yeah. Marxism Yeah. Is a top down worldview. Um, and so, yeah. So I think there's, there's top down bottoms up side swipers, and, you know, part of my journey is I'd love to be able to integrate it all and have it be, you know, perfectly understandable. That would be awesome. Um, and remove a lot of the, like, the, uh, what's the, you know, a lot of the obviously discord and worse, right?

Cole Abbott (00:12:09 -> 00:12:54)

Well, some of it's ambiguous, some of it's discordant and some of it you have people trying to take very literally Yeah. When there's a lot out there, especially with the, uh, the older worldviews. Yeah. Right. That's very figuratively useful. Yes. I mean, it's not literally true, but there is so much to be gained from the abstract and from the narratives and, um, and all those things that, you know, while it's not literal fact in a, in a roadmap for exactly what to do, right? It's, there's so much more to that. There's much wisdom, which is, it's like a, a meta truth kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah. It's more real than the actual thing itself. And so Right. When we, when you don't want to denigrate those old forms of wisdom, right. It's like you, you need to figure out exactly what you're pulling from. Yeah.

Mark Abbott (00:12:54 -> 00:13:02)

And it, and it gets back to just like those, those old forms of wisdom as we're talking about, you know, we go, they've persisted for thousands of years Right.

Cole Abbott (00:13:03 -> 00:13:05)

And been refined on for thousands of years. Yeah.

Mark Abbott (00:13:05 -> 00:13:16)

Yeah. Right? And, uh, and, and you know, I'm often reminded of, and I don't know, we've talked about it, I think we have Chesterton's fence in some of our prior

Cole Abbott (00:13:16 -> 00:13:18)

Episodes. I think we talked in the last episode about it.

Mark Abbott (00:13:18 -> 00:14:39)

Yeah. Right? Yeah. Right. But once again, on that one, for those who don't watch every episode, um, is, uh, you know, the big idea behind Chesterton's fence is that before you take something down spec, especially something that someone's purposely put up, and something that's persisted for a long period of time, before you just knock that bloody thing down and destroy it, you should really understand why it was built in the first place. And once you understand, you genuinely truly understand why it's been built in the first place, and it's no longer relevant. It's no longer needed, awesome. Knock it down. Right? Let entropy have, its, have, you know, um, have, have, its say, but don't, you know, the things that have stood for thousands of years, the stories, the, you know, um, the parables, the, um, the whatever we want to, you know, it's, it's persisted for a reason, right? And so, yeah. Um, like I say, a a you know, I know it won't happen in my lifetime. Probably won't happen for a long, long, long period of time. Unless all of a sudden someone comes down from high and says, Hey, I am real. Here I am, you knuckleheads, boom. Until then, we'll probably not have the complete answer.

Cole Abbott (00:14:40 -> 00:14:44)

Oh, that's part of it. It's just always a journey. You're never gonna arrive at that destination. Yeah. It's like, you know,

Mark Abbott (00:14:44 -> 00:14:47)

Well then what would you do, <laugh>? I

Cole Abbott (00:14:48 -> 00:14:51)

Right. You know, go outta office for a couple days, <laugh>, why are, why

Mark Abbott (00:14:51 -> 00:15:02)

Are we here? Right? I mean, we no longer have any utility. We have no, no longer have any, any, any usefulness. And so at that point, yeah, you probably do have a pretty nihilistic

Cole Abbott (00:15:03 -> 00:15:04)

Yeah. That's the word. Yeah. Yeah. Um,

Mark Abbott (00:15:06 -> 00:15:07)

Existence. There's

Cole Abbott (00:15:07 -> 00:15:13)

A, yeah, we, I could go on for a while about this, but Right. We get, when you have everything, the only thing you lack is lack itself.

Mark Abbott (00:15:14 -> 00:15:14)

Yeah.

Cole Abbott (00:15:15 -> 00:15:30)

And so that's, doesn't, yeah. There's no answer there. So I guess to bring it back in, uh, right. How do, how do worldviews impact founders and the businesses they choose to build?

Mark Abbott (00:15:30 -> 00:18:24)

Yeah. Well, so, you know, when you, when you, when you look through the six big questions, right? So purpose, passion, and cause, right? That's very worldview esque, right? How do we make left better? Why are we here? Right? And so, you know, uh, actually in the book, and, and mean, I could go into, you know, each of the big six questions and, and give you a perspective. I don't know if that would be helpful or, but, you know, it's like if you go into cosmology, right? Why are we here? How do we make life better? Um, and, and I'll go, I'll, I'll go through a couple, couple of those if you don't mind. Um, 'cause I have it in here in front of me. Um, but one of the things ultimately is, is let's talk about big picture. Why I think it's helpful for leaders to have a worldview. So I, To lead means you have followers, and the followers are trusting that you have a sense for not only where we're going, but how to get from here to there. And the how to get from here to there is not just about, you know, build this product, right? It's how do we as a, as a, you know, as a tribe, how do we as a culture, um, make decisions and, and, and why do we do the things that we do? And, um, you know, you know, I believe as an example that if you have a great purpose, passion, and or just cause that If everybody understands it, that actually helps inform so many of the decisions that people are making during, you know, as they go through the day, right? It, it, you know, it informs processes. It informs the, the nature of the product and or service. It informs how we interact with our ideal customers. I mean, it's, it's a really interesting big picture star. You know, I like to talk about Northern Constellation as opposed to a singular star, but, you know, the purpose, passion just cause is absolutely part of our northern constellation, and it's guiding us in lighting the way. And so, you know, is this consistent with who we are? Is this consistent with how we make life better? Right? And so that's, as, that's an example, um, of, uh, of part of a worldview. It's informed by a worldview. But ultimately as a leader, I think you want to have your, you know, the things that are really important as explicit and coherent and resonant as possible. Purpose, passion, and just cause is one of those things. Our core values, uh, is, is, is a part of that. And the core values are definitely worldview influence, right? Because, you know, what's the difference between worldview and culture? Well, it's a little bit of a chicken and the egg, because the culture that you grow up in deeply informs your worldview. But worldviews are very personal. But, but those worldviews are also the worldviews that shape the culture, right?

Cole Abbott (00:18:24 -> 00:18:27)

It's just an aggregation of worldviews, right?

Mark Abbott (00:18:27 -> 00:18:27)

Well,

Cole Abbott (00:18:28 -> 00:18:29)

Fors that culture.

Mark Abbott (00:18:29 -> 00:18:47)

But, but, but as a leader, I walked in, you know, I started the company with a worldview, which obviously, you know, eight years ago was less informed and developed than it is today, but back then, right? I had a worldview and it helped inform the six core values that we have, right?

Cole Abbott (00:18:47 -> 00:19:07)

And you bring people that fit into those core values and sort of, right. We want to get to the point where it's explicit, yes. But every startup, it's gonna be an implicit assumption that the people really resonate with your worldview. And it's why when startups like, oh, this guy just gets it, right? And someone comes in and you kind of move along with that until that doesn't work.

Mark Abbott (00:19:07 -> 00:19:28)

Yeah. And then all of a sudden for, I don't know what percentage of startups have, you know, really locked in core values. But because this wasn't my first rodeo, you know, very early on, you know, I mean, in the very beginning there were the five core values, and then we added the six after about a couple years just because of some frustrations. And it felt we, like we needed to bring that one.

Cole Abbott (00:19:28 -> 00:19:32)

And there were still like 10 employees at that time. Yeah. <laugh>, right? Yeah.

Mark Abbott (00:19:32 -> 00:29:13)

It was very, very small, right? Yeah. Um, but I would say that, that, that our core values were deeply informed by my worldviews and, uh, my, or my worldview, if you wanna say singular. Um, but, uh, you know, and, and, and, and you know, as an example, inquisitiveness, right? That's part of my worldview. You know, my worldview includes that we're here to advance useful information that we need to be, um, create a culture that's as open as humanly possible to positive and negative feedback loops. And so, you know, and, and, and we need to create a culture that's as open as possible in terms of transparency, right? And so, you know, so my worldview's informed not just our core values, but our culture, right? If you, before I started the company, I was, you know, writing a lot about trust. And so character competency and connection and getting into the deeply into what connection's all about, right? The, the eight levers and openness and caring and investing in people, and turning expectations into agreements and, and, uh, sort of letting peop recognizing that we're all unique in the way we're gonna solve our own our problems is gonna be very different. So rather than focusing on teaching people how to solve problems, it's helping people understand the problems and then helping them figure out the best way to go about addressing the problem, taking into consideration all the things that are great about them, but also using Colby as an example to make sure they're not, we're not putting people in the seats where, you know, we want a high fact finder and you got a low fact finder, right? Or you want someone who's great at process, like someone who's managing a project and we put someone in there has, you know, a two outta 10 in terms of, uh, their ability to follow through and create processes. Makes some sense. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, going back to, you know, I said the so cosmology, as we talked about who I am, who am I, why am I here? Who are, who are we? Where do we come from? Why are we here? How do we get here? Where are we going, right? And then epistemology is how do we best come to know things pretty darn important when it comes to running a company, ontology, what exists? What's real? So as an example, what's the structure of the organization? What do the seats look like? Who's our ideal cus customer, right? Who, um, what's our unique value proposition? Getting back to, you know, explicit, coherent resident. So ontology is really important, right? For us, ology, what is good? So what is good, right? Obviously for us, good is building high trust relationships with all of our ideal stakeholders, ideal stakeholders. Where, where do they come from? They come from ontology, right? So this is what our ideal stakeholders look like. This is what an ideal customer looks like. This is what an ideal employee looks like. This is what an ideal investor looks like, and we have strong opinions about this, right? This is what an ideal, um, strategic partner looks for. Like, this is what an ideal society looks for. Like, and you could say, well, what do you mean an ideal society? Isn't society everywhere? It's like, no, right? Going back to stuff we've talked about before, agreements based versus relationship based cultures. There are, you know, I am not trying to figure out how to be an amazing member of Russia that's not, or China, right? That's not, that's not, you know, that's not an ideal society for us. An ideal society for us is a society that, uh, it's constitutional republic, right? It's a, it is a, it's a society where you have relatively free markets, love them to be perfectly free. But, but we also recognize that, you know, we need rules and laws and regulations. And so, um, in order for us to work really effectively together, um, and, uh, and we need to pay taxes so we can have a country that can, can, can, can defend its all of our rights. So, you know, back to back to ontology and, um, and, uh, and, and having a sense for, um, you know, what each of our ideal stakeholders looks like. And then, and then on ology, ology, as I was saying, you know, it's like, okay, so where do we wanna be in 90 days? Where do we wanna be in a, in a year? Where do we wanna be three years? Where do we wanna be in 10 years? And really having goals that everybody understands and, and, and we explain why those goals matter. We provide the context behind that. So that's all part of ology. Interesting, right? And then pology, you know, okay, so this is, these are our goals. What are the actions we should take? And how do we take action? Well, once again, we've talked about high trust relationships, right? So let's continuously do the right things that we can have a high trust relationship. So there's any question in your mind making a decision, um, on, you know, and if you think one is going to adversely impact the trust people have in us, once again, we've defined that character competency and connection, then let's not do that, right? And, um, what actions should we take? You know, is it consistent with our brand, right? That's the thing that we spent probably more time than most early stage companies, right? Really getting our arms around. And we're still not, we still haven't done the job we need to do. You and I both know this in terms of helping people understand why it's so important that the things that we put into, into this world should be not only on brand, but they should be things that we're proud of, right? Because that's part of our brand, is we're not trying to put crap into the world, right? That's a little tension we have every now and then with regard to merchandise, right? Which is, we don't want to have anything with our name on it, be something that someone throws away. That's just not who we are, right? We don't want to put crap into the world, right? And, uh, and, and everything we put into the world, we wanna, you know, we, we want it to be at least like an a minus, right? If we create some video and, you know, it's like, ah, but it just gets the job done, then no, we're not putting into the world. But we've had challenges over the years with people just wanting to bang something out because, you know, it was asked for, and it's like, okay, it's good enough. And it's like, no, it's good enough. It's not who we are, right? And so that gets back to pra pology, right? What action should we take? What paths should we follow? How should we act to reach our goals? And then the last one of the big questions is eschatology, right? Which is, you know, what do we, why are we here? What's our legacy? What, how are we gonna leave the world? You know, how are we gonna make it better? Are we playing a game where all we care about is getting, you know, making I, I'm, I'll just make, you know, growing 20% and generating a, a, a 50% EBITDA margin and taking that money and going off and doing whatever, whatever, whatever. Um, and, and that's the most important thing, or is it No. Right? We're playing this long slash infinite game, and it's not about the outputs, it's about the inputs. It's about what we do, it's about how we do it. It's about how we impact people. It's about creating a company that we're proud of forever, right? Um, and so that's, you know, that's sort of eschatology. So each of the six big questions actually is something that companies should be reflecting on. And, um, and I'll, I'll just go down, you know, one of 'em as an example. So cosmology, right? Universal connection and interdependence. So I would argue that an enlightened leader sees beyond the immediate and the individual, right? Um, origins stories and shared histories, right? They help their ideal stakeholders connect more deeply with the company and why it exists and where it's going, right? This is all under cosmology purpose in place, right? Why do we exist? Future visions and legacy, which we've just talked about, falls under cosmology, ethical, and ex existential questions, right? How are we forming how we make life better on this planet, not just for today, but for 10, 50, a hundred years from now, embracing complexity and uncertainty, that's part of cosmology, right? It's like we don't have all the answers, right? And so it's that, it's that back to inquisitiveness, encouraging a culture of learning and curiosity and openness and, and, and, and, and a culture where people are comfortable being uncomfortable, right? People recognize that, as we've talked about before, that actually 15% failure rate is optimal for, for learning and growth. And so we embrace failure. Now, obviously, we don't, we talked about this before. We don't want people to do the same thing over and over again, right? And we'd rather the failures be quick failures. Um, use Jeff Bezos analogy, right? That if we make failures or we make bad decisions, they're through doors with which we can walk back through turnstiles. We can go both ways, right? But if it's like you make this decision and there is no return, those are the places we'd rather not, you know, sort of experience optimal failure, right?

Cole Abbott (00:29:13 -> 00:29:15)

There's a lot of turnstiles on the way to that ledge.

Mark Abbott (00:29:15 -> 00:29:16)

Yeah. Yeah.

Cole Abbott (00:29:16 -> 00:29:27)

Yeah. And so you want to make sure you're doing that appropriately, so that when you do get to that point, yeah. You have the best set of information and experience and everything to make the important decision when it matters.

Mark Abbott (00:29:27 -> 00:30:14)

And so, what's the phrase we use all the time? Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. Yeah. For that very reason, right? Right. So as, as much as we're growing very fast, right? We still, in a lot of ways, probably a lot of people think that we could go faster or make decisions faster, or they could have more autonomy. And we don't go there yet because we don't believe that they're at a place in understanding everything that we're trying to do. They're capable of putting a minus work out into the world without others, given the big thumbs up. And if it's not a big thumbs up, using it as a teaching moment. Yeah.

Cole Abbott (00:30:14 -> 00:31:14)

Right? Right. When you make the right the world doing everything explicit, and then you can, you're going for everything for the right reasons, then you are allowed, right? Then there's that trust that if you do fail, you failed for the right, for the right reasons, right? Yeah. If you're failing 15% of the time, but doing so with the goal of, right. 'cause the 15% means that you're pushing yourself enough to the point where you're learning from your mistakes. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, but also advancing everything at the same time. Yeah. And so if, you know, you're just slacking off and just not doing anything, that's why the 15 percent's coming about, right? That's not good. Right. The, the 85 15 rule only actually works when everything else is in place. Yeah. Um, and, and when it is in place, it's, it's okay. And so it, right. All of this is so complex and why it's difficult. Yeah. And you know, there's not really any great examples or frameworks that exist right now, but hopefully we have a good one that we can help others with soon. Yeah.

Mark Abbott (00:31:14 -> 00:33:01)

Yeah. In in, in terms of making sure things are on, on brand. When you're small, there's 10, 15 people, you know, you can, you can make a lot of things happen just based upon the explicit, under implicit understanding that everybody has being around one another. And, and, uh, you can hear each other in a lot of situations, right? You're all there, you're all talking all sense of what, what have you thought about this? Have you thought about that kind of a thing? Right? But the bigger and bigger the company gets, the more you just have to move towards an agreement based, um, culture where the things that are really important are very explicit. They make sense. Having a reasonably well articulated worldview or developed worldview helps you make sure that, you know, there's not a lot of things in here. It's like, well, you talk, like we said before, you talk team, and yet you're incentivizing these people to go and, and just do whatever the heck they want. So the bigger you get, the more important it becomes, I think, for the, for the, um, things to be explicit, resonant, and co coherent, resonant, um, you know, and then so, you know, sustainability and long-term thinking falls under cosmology, right? And so enlightened leaders are capable of explaining how they contribute to the infinite game of making life better and better. And then the final one I have under this one right, was cosmic humility. Right. Which we've kind of already talked about. Yeah. Right? So, you know, so, you know, what are the questions leaders can ask around cosmology? It's like, you know, what broader human trends are we a part of? What historical precedent is connected to what we're doing? What led to our company's founding moment? And how does this show up in our work? You know? Um, and so that's an example of how one's worldview has a pretty big impact on things that are important to a company.

Cole Abbott (00:33:02 -> 00:33:07)

Yeah. Both consciously and subconsciously. And shows up in the work. Yeah. In all the work, right? Yeah.

Mark Abbott (00:33:07 -> 00:34:11)

Yeah. And then it's like, so, you know, one question is, you know, what percentage of the time is all the work? Is the work that everyone's doing? And I know this is, this is like a, this is a, an impossible to answer question, but, but I think really interesting one to ask, which is, what percentage of the time does our work reflect A, Our purpose, passion, just cause, I mean, does it really truly reflect it? Is it 90, 95, 98? Is it 70? Is it 60? Is it 50? Is it 40? Right. That's a hard question to ask, but you can, you probably have a gut sense and you could literally apply that gut set across every single department, across every single team, and really, you know, across every single individual and just say, Hey, right. You know, what percentage of, of your time, your team's time, right. Your department's time is really just, you know, on brand.

Cole Abbott (00:34:13 -> 00:34:17)

Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's a good place to wrap it up for today. Alright,

Mark Abbott (00:34:18 -> 00:34:18)

Cool.

Cole Abbott (00:34:18 -> 00:34:24)

So yeah, we'll probably have a, another episode Yeah. Around this at some point. Yep. So,

Mark Abbott (00:34:24 -> 00:34:25)

All right.

Cole Abbott (00:34:25 -> 00:34:25)

All right.

Mark Abbott (00:34:25 -> 00:34:26)

Thanks,

Speaker 3 (00:34:27 -> 00:34:27)

<inaudible>.