The Secret to a Life of Connection and Purpose

[Music] Good morning, I'm Michael Covnett and this is the next big idea daily. You're a quick dose of the best nonfiction from some of the smartest authors around. And one of those authors is Michael Pollan. His upcoming book is our pick for the season here at the next big idea club. If you'd like to be one of the first to get a copy of a world appears, a journey into consciousness by Michael Pollan, along with an invitation to a private event with Michael and access to a community of big thinkers, sign up for an executive or hard-backed membership at nextbigideacclub.com. So, here's a question for today. When was the last time you felt like you truly mattered? Not just belonged to a group, but felt genuinely valued and needed. It's a feeling we all crave, yet in our age of constant distraction, more people than ever are feeling invisible, disengaged and adrift. Jennifer Brahenny-Wallis is an award-winning journalist and bestselling author whose new book, "Mattering," reveals why feeling valued isn't just nice to have. It's a fundamental human need. After hearing from Jennifer, we'll explore how leaders can create cultures of significance with insights from Zach Mirkureo's 2025 book, "The Power of Mattering." All that right after this quick break. Today's episode of the next big idea daily is sponsored by Shopify. Shopify gives you everything you need to sell online and in person. Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com /Daily. I'm Jennifer Wallis, a journalist and author of the book, "Mattering," the secret to a life of deep connection and purpose. I'm going to share with you five key insights from my book. Insight One. "Mattering" is a critical human need that is going unmet in our modern world. You've likely never heard about the framework of "Mattering," but you've surely felt it. "Mattering" can be found in life's big moments, like being celebrated by family and friends at a milestone birthday. It can also be found in everyday moments too, like when you're sick and a friend brings you a pot of homemade soup. That feeling that hits you when you open the door is "Mattering." You feel deeply valued by your friend. Simply put, "Mattering" is the universal need to feel valued and to have a chance to add value to the world. First identified by sociologist Maris Rosenberg in the 1980s, today "Mattering" is emerging as one of the most essential and most overlooked pillars of well-being. At its core, "Mattering" is the story we tell ourselves about our place in the world. As in, "Am I valued? Do I make a difference? Would I be missed if I weren't here?" This need is deeply ingrained. For our earliest ancestors, being valued by the group meant safety and survival while being ignored or cast out was a death sentence. That ancient wiring continues to guide us today. "Mattering" cuts both ways, meaning it's protective when we feel it and destructive when we don't. When people feel like they matter, they are more resilient, engaged, and generous towards others. When they don't, they suffer. We often talk about loneliness, burnout, and disengagement as separate crises. But beneath them lies the deeper one, the erosion of "Mattering." This is why "Mattering" feels so urgent right now. In a rapidly shifting world where artificial intelligence threatens to upend our sense of usefulness, feeling valued and knowing how you add value is a stabilizing force. "Mattering" is how we build a life of meaning and purpose. When people feel like they matter, they're more resilient, engaged, and generous towards others. But beneath them lies a deeper one, the erosion of "Mattering." This is why "Mattering" feels so urgent right now. In a rapidly shifting world where artificial intelligence threatens to upend our sense of usefulness, feeling valued and knowing how we add value is a stabilizing force. "Insight 2" "Mattering" is highly actionable, offering both a diagnosis and a cure. Psychologists describe "Mattering" as a metanide and umbrella that encompasses many of our other needs, such as belonging, recognition, connection, appreciation, and purpose. But "Mattering" goes deeper than any of these alone, and this distinction matters. For example, you can belong to a group like a neighborhood or the accounting department and still feel like you don't matter to the people in that group. What makes "Mattering" especially compelling is that it offers both a diagnosis and a solution. After decades of research, four elements consistently show up in the lives of people who feel like they matter. Together they form what I call the "set framework," that is, "significance, appreciation, investment, and dependence." Significance is the sense of being known for who you are as an individual. Appreciation affirms the doer, not just the deed, recognizing the care, effort, and intention that went behind a contribution. Investment reflects the support others offer to you through guidance and belief in your potential. And dependence is the dignity of being needed in ways that feel manageable and energizing. These elements can be strengthened through everyday actions. For example, a parent builds a sense of significance by asking their teenager to teach them about something their team cares about. A manager shows appreciation by closing the loop and connecting an employee to the impact of their work. A friend shows investment by checking in with encouragement before a hard moment. A neighbor fosters dependence by asking someone newly retired to take on a small but meaningful role. A sense of mattering is built in small everyday moments like these. Insight 3. To matter, we must feel valued, but we also need to add value. In my interviews, I found a simple formula for adding value. Notice a genuine need in the world or your community or workplace or neighborhood, and then use your three T's, your time, talent, or treasure to meet it. Needs reveal themselves when we pay attention to moments of friction overwhelm or loneliness and ask, "How can I make this easier for someone?" Once the need is clear, the three T's offer multiple ways in. Time might mean reading to kids at the library every Saturday or committing to a standing phone call with an elderly relative. Talent could be a former accountant offering free tax help or a great listener who becomes the person others can find in. Treasures can include weekly donations of spare groceries or a spare bedroom to host a guest. Mattering is the match between a real need and what you can give to meet it. Insight 4. Mattering at the workplace is the hidden fix for America's parenting and civic crises. Workplaces are our most underutilized tool for restoring a sense of mattering. The numbers tell the story. In 2024, US employee engagement fell to its lowest in a decade with 70% of workers reporting they weren't engaged in their work. Two-thirds of employees worldwide report either struggling or suffering with only one in three considered truly thriving, according to Gallup. Workers no longer feel valued and their contributions too often go unrecognized. Mattering at work isn't just good for employee well-being. It's good for business too. According to Great Place to Work, companies voted by their employees as the hundred best to work for have outperformed the S&P 500 for nearly three decades, especially during economic downturns. Simply put, when employees invest in a culture of mattering in which people feel valued and relied upon, performance and retention increase. What happens at work doesn't stay at work. Researchers refer to it as the long arm of the job, the way our work life impacts. impacts our health, relationships, parenting, even our civic engagement. The spillover crossover model, as they put it, confirms what many of us have felt. That when we're depleted by our jobs, it's difficult to be emotionally present at home, creating a psychological distance that can erode our relationships. But the reverse is also true. A caregiver who feels appreciated and valued at work is far more likely to come home and have the bandwidth to approach a child's emotional needs with patience and empathy. Mattering at work also impacts civic engagement. A person who feels empowered to shape outcomes at work is more likely to have the confidence to organize a blood bank during a local crisis. An employee who feels like their voice matters is more likely to speak up at a city council meeting. In other words, if we want strong families, thriving kids, and a healthier civic culture, workplace mattering is one of the most powerful levers we can pull. Insight 5. Life transitions can shake our sense of mattering, but we have the agency to rebuild it. Parents becoming a parent, sending a child to school, retiring, losing a loved one, changing careers or relocating can shake our sense of mattering to its core. But we have an opportunity, even a responsibility, to make ourselves matter again. What I have found in interviews with people who have faced challenges like these is that rebuilding our sense of mattering occurs often by accepting support rather than going through it alone, finding a new meaningful way to be relied upon and staying close to people who see our strengths clearly when we can't see them ourselves. Many of the people I interviewed who navigated these transitions well identified a role model, someone who faced a similar transition and found their way through it. Then they harness the power of invitation, either by accepting or by issuing them themselves. Remember, an invitation isn't just about you. When someone reaches out, they're taking a small risk in their bid for connection. By saying yes, you're signaling that you value them too. In this way, extending or accepting an invitation becomes a mutual exchange of mattering. A young man who recently relocated for work once asked me for a mantra to help him through times when he felt invisible. Instead of a mantra, I offered him a practice to turn his self-focused lens outward by reminding someone else in his life why they mattered. What he found was that the fastest way to feel like you matter again is to remind someone else why they do. Thank you, Jennifer. All right, we're going to take a quick break and then we'll hear from researcher Zach Mercurio, author of the book The Power of Mattering, how leaders can create a culture of significance. You know, when we were starting this podcast, I thought the hard part was going to be finding authors to come on and tell us about their great books. But it turns out that was the easy part. The real challenge was everything else, branding, scheduling, graphics, distribution, monetization. Suddenly, I was wearing a bunch of different hats, none of which quite fit. Finding something on your own or with a small team is exciting, but it can also be intimidating and honestly a little lonely. Every day there's a new decision, a new tool, a new system to figure out. What would be great would be to have a true business partner from day one, a partner that handled the heavy lifting so you could focus on creating. That's what Shopify does for millions of businesses. It's the commerce platform behind tons of brands worldwide and powers about 10% of all e-commerce in the US, from huge household names to brand new creators just getting started. With Shopify, you can launch fast using hundreds of ready-to-use store templates that match your style. No design degree required. And it's packed with AI tools that help write product descriptions, generate page headlines, even enhance your product photos, which saves a ton of time. It also helps you market like you've got a full team behind you, with built-in tools for email and social campaigns so you can reach customers wherever they're scrolling. Plus everything lives in one place, inventory, payments, analytics, shipping, returns. No juggling, five different platforms, just trying to keep things straight. And if you get stuck, Shopify's award-winning 24/7 support is always there. Start your business today with the industry's best business partner, Shopify, and start hearing. I'm Zach Mercurio, author of the Power of Mattering, how leaders can create a culture of significance. Often, when we think about and talk about leadership, we use impressive terms like inspiring, courageous, or even heroic. But through my research over the last decade, when I've asked people what makes their leaders great, they don't talk about grand actions or noble qualities. Instead they talk about small interactions. Moments in which their leaders help them feel seen or heard. Illuminated gifts they didn't know they had or showed them the difference they made. It turns out that feeling significant to someone else in these ways has a name. Psychologists call it "mattering," and it comes from knowing that we're valued by others and how we add value to their lives. As I dug deeper into what mattering is, why it matters and how leaders can cultivate it, I was struck by five key insights. Insight 1. We are facing a matter deficit. Let me take you back 10 years to a hospital room. I was meeting my newborn son, and I remember looking down at this tiny crying human and he tilted his head, locked eyes with mine, and reached out his arms frantically. When I reached back, he gripped my index finger and wouldn't let go. His crying stopped and his whole body calmed. I didn't realize it then, but I was experiencing six million years of fine-tuned programming. Scientists call that grip, I felt, the grasp reflex. And automatic action we take to secure our first caring relationship. From your first breath, your survival depended on mattering to someone. Think about this, none of us would be listening to or reading this, if at some point we hadn't mattered enough to someone so they'd keep us alive. As we grow up and go to work, the survival instinct to matter evolves into the psychological need to feel seen, heard, valued, and needed. And this need is met, we experience what's called mattering. Now, mattering is distinct from belonging or inclusion. Belonging is feeling part of and connected to a group. Inclusion is being able to contribute to a group, but mattering is knowing how you're significant to individual members of that group. When we experience mattering, we flourish. We're more motivated and grittier and experience greater well-being. But when we feel that we don't matter, we languish, and either act out in desperation or withdraw. Imagine the absolute panic of a child reaching out and finding no one. In a way, that's what's happening today. Too many of us are experiencing the same stress of insignificance. For example, in January, Gallup reported that employee engagement is at a 10-year low. If we were an organization, seven out of ten of us would be emotionally uninvested in our work. That's despite services to improving engagement becoming a $1 billion industry. So what's going on? Two data points stand out. Just four out of every ten employees in that sample felt that someone at work cared about them as a person. And only 30% believed that their potential was invested in. Last year, one poll showed that 30% of people felt invisible at work. And repeated surveys reveal that six out of every ten people feel underappreciated. Again, we are not facing a disengagement crisis. The most glaring symptom of this deficit is loneliness. Estimates show that one out of every three people feels persistently lonely. At work, it's closer to two out of every three. The advice to solve this has been to connect more. The result has been that we're in more meetings and on more platforms. The average adult sends 30 to 40 text-based messages daily, and spends more time in meetings than ever, yet we're still lonely. So what have we missed? Research shows the quantity of interactions don't matter much when reducing loneliness. The quality does. So what makes it quality interaction? Experiencing what researchers call companion-it love, receiving the interpersonal behaviors of attention, of respect, and affirmation. In other words, the opposite of loneliness isn't having more people around you. It's feeling that you matter to the people around you. That's why just putting the our phones won't reduce disconnection. What we do after we put down our phones will. The solution isn't to connect more. It's to relearn the skills to connect better by showing people that they matter to us. Insight 2. Mattering happens in moments. Take a moment and think about when you most feel that you matter to others. How many of you are thinking about getting your direct deposit or when you want employee of the month? If you're like most people we've asked this question to, you're not thinking about big actions. You're thinking about small interactions. Let me give you an example. Gain is a custodian at the university where I do research. She was part of a study we did on how front-line service workers experience meaning. She told me she only took the job because she was nearly homeless and needed to put food on the table. Her friends kept telling her that cleaning was a dirty job and she started internalizing that. She told me that during her first month she would clock in, clock out, and continually think why couldn't I have done something more with my life. She said, "I felt useless and worthless." But then she described to me how a couple of minutes changed everything. A supervisor noticed she was struggling. He invited her into a training room, handed her a dictionary, and asked her to read the definition of the word custodian, a person responsible for looking after a building, and everyone in it. "That's you," he told her. "You're responsible for this building and everyone in it." Jane looked at me and said, "That was the first time in my life that someone made me feel worthy and important." She said that realizing she was responsible for a building and its people changed her beliefs about herself and her job. She's been here for 18 years. These moments of mattering are powerful. They can incite two beliefs that drive future behavior, self-esteem, which is the belief that we're worthy, and self-efficacy, which is the belief that we're capable. It turns out that the best leaders tend to turn regular interactions into moments of mattering. Insight Three There's a difference between knowing somebody and noticing them. There's a difference between knowing someone and noticing them. You can know your best friend, but not notice that they're struggling. You can know a team member, but not notice he or she feels on her or left out of discussions. Jane Supervisor noticed she was struggling and took action. Noticing is the deliberate act of paying attention to the details, ebbs, and flows of others lives, and offering an action to show them we're thinking of them. Noticing takes time, attention, and practice. In one distribution center I worked in, there were 20 teams who all scored low on their employee engagement surveys, with one extreme outlier. When I met with that team, they all told me some version of, "It's our supervisor. She just gets us. We do anything for her." So I asked that supervisor what she did. She pulled out a black mole skin notebook. Every Friday she wrote down one thing she noticed about each team member. Nerves about a meeting, a struggle on a task, a child starting a new sport. And on Monday she told me she reviewed her notes and scheduled a micro check-in with each of them. She would start the conversations with, "I remember last week you were nervous about that meeting. How did it go?" or, "I know your child was starting baseball this weekend. How did it go? Did he like it?" She said to me, "You know Zach, there's magic in being remembered." Great leaders are noticers. We've come to call that practice her noticing notebook. She also asked her team two questions every week. "What would you do if you were me, and what are you struggling with and how can I help?" Leaders who are great noticers tend to do three things. One, they have a process and practice for observing the details of people's work in lives. Two, they note those details. Noting is a powerful way to retrain our attention, and three, they share back what they observed. And others create understanding, and understanding creates trust. Insight 4 Affirmation can be more powerful than appreciation or recognition. When Jane Supervisor, as we described earlier, defined custodian for her, he gave her the indisputable evidence of her significance. That's what makes affirmation different and more powerful from appreciation or recognition. Appreciation is showing gratitude for who someone is. Recognition is gratitude for what someone does, but affirmation reveals how someone's unique gifts make a unique difference. One way to affirm someone is to give them more meaningful gratitude. For example, anytime you say thank you are a good job, go one step further and show people the difference they make and exactly how they make it. First, name people's unique gifts. Everyone offers us four unique gifts every day. Their strengths, what they love and what they're good at, their purpose, the impact only they make, their perspective, how they see the world, and their wisdom, what only they can teach us from living their life. Second, show them vividly the unique impact they make. For example, a facilities and maintenance manager I worked with at the National Park Service had a powerful practice. Each week he would walk the park and take photos of park visitors using projects his team worked on every day. If there was a bridge being repaired he took a picture of visitors walking across the bridge. If there was a bathroom that was reopened he took a picture of the shorter lines for the other bathroom. And then he had a process on Friday of emailing them and all he wrote was "look what you did" and he attached the photos. He gave his team the indisputable evidence of their significance. And this is what we find. It leaders tell people that they matter but great leaders have the skills and practices to show people exactly how they matter. Insight 5. When people feel replaceable they will act replaceable. Finally, to feel that we matter we must feel needed. In 1913 the French agricultural engineer Max Ringelman had groups of students pull on a rope as hard as possible. The rope was attached to a device called a "dynameter" that measures force. When he had the same students pull the rope as hard as they could but as individuals. He then added up the force readings. Who do you think exerted the most total force? Groups or individuals? It was the individuals. Why? Because they knew that they and their effort was indispensable. When people feel replaceable they tend to act replaceable. But when people feel irreplaceable they tend to act irreplaceable. When I've interviewed people and asked them to share when they most felt that they mattered in their lives, they frequently mentioned some version of these five words being said to them. If it wasn't for you. If it wasn't for you this wouldn't be possible. If it wasn't for you we wouldn't have made it through the week. They have someone who you rely on. Now think of the last time you explicitly told them. Try saying to them if it wasn't for you and show them how you rely on them. If you do you will see and feel the power of mattering and you'll be putting into practice a skill that sets the great leaders apart from the rest. The skill to show people exactly how they matter. Thank you Zach. Okay everyone if you got something out of today's show please leave us a rating and review so others can find it. And by the way you can get a copy of the books we talked about using the links in the episode notes. I'm Michael Covnet. See you tomorrow.