When Jonathan Fields was working as a lawyer in one of the biggest law firms in the country, enduring long hours and massive amounts of stress, he became an unexpected witness in one of the most important trials of his life. After being hospitalized when his immune system shut down due to a massive infection, he traded law for his health. As a result, he embarked on a wellness journey that led him to owning a fitness studio, a yoga studio and two movements that disrupt our concept of a “good life.”
On his top-ranked Good Life Project podcast, which launched in 2012, Fields has had deeply personal conversations with some of the most well-regarded thought leaders of our time. But he says that it’s not the renown of those he interviews that moves the needle. It’s the fact that they’ve figured out something important—and are willing to share it.
Fields himself has always had something to share. Self-described as a person “almost pathologically steeped in possibility,” he’s “had a deep fascination with the way that we work… and the way that it makes us feel.”
Two years after his third book, How to Live a Good Life, came out, he found the spark of an idea that would change the trajectory of both his career and hundreds of thousands of others’. He was creating a new way to look at work.
Careers that make us come alive
Fields wanted to better understand the impulses that drive us to work and how we could more effectively align with those impulses in a way that made us feel good. He started looking for things that existed in every person, regardless of job titles, industries or companies—intangible things that people took with them wherever they went because they were inherent and personal, not learned or cultivated. He looked for people’s alignment with the work they were doing and what made them feel energized and excited.
“I literally started deconstructing massive lists of industries and jobs and roles and titles to see if we could identify them,” Fields recalls. “And it distilled down to these 10 core impulses really quickly. They just kept showing up over and over and over in different patterns.”
He the nrealized that he could form archetypes from these impulses. “So we started calling them ‘Sparketypes’ for fun—shorthand for the archetype for work that sparks you…. We spent all of 2018 building the Sparketype assessment—building it up, breaking it down, rebuilding it, running beta testers through it—until we found that it was pretty robust and pretty stable, and people were reporting solid results that felt really on point. Then we released it out of beta at the end of that year and were kind of not ready for what happened after that.”
To date, more than a million people have taken the Sparketype assessment, offering up over 50 million data points. In 2021, Fields wrote a book about it, Sparked, and he started the Sparked podcast in 2022.
How Sparketype differs from other career assessments
While there are several great assessments on the market, Fields notes that his is focused in a specific way. “We’re looking at the question, ‘What is the underlying impulse for effort or work that makes a person come alive?’ Because if we can identify that and then help somebody align the work they’re doing with that, everything changes—both for them and for the organizations that they might work for and for the people they’re in service of.”
Knowing your Sparketype, he says, gives people a chance to figure out who they really are. They can then make the necessary shifts to get to where they’d like to be. He recognizes, though, that not everyone has the luxury of making grand career moves just because their work doesn’t make them feel alive. Often, circumstances simply don’t allow for it.
“Maybe I’m working three jobs; I’m supporting extended family,” he says. “I’m not going to blow anything up to try and figure out how to make this a center and start over and rebuild around it.… But at the same time, that doesn’t mean that you have to walk away from this impulse.
“That means that maybe [you take] 15 minutes a day or an hour on a Saturday and a Sunday morning on the weekends [to] find a way to make art or to volunteer to be of service.”
How can Sparketype change your life for the better?
If the work you’re doing doesn’t align with who you are, it’s going to affect your relationship with yourself. It may impact your physical and mental health, as well as your relationships with others.
Fields looked for correlations between doing the work indicated by your Sparketype and feelings of:
- Meaningfulness
- Energy and excitement
- Flow
- Expressed potential or performance
- Purpose in life
“And the data actually proved that out in a really strong way,” he says. “We know the more that you say you’re doing the work of your Sparketype, the more likely you are to actually experience all five of those states.
“The opposite is also true. The less that you say you’re doing the work of your Sparketype, the less likely you are to say that you experience all or any of those five states,” he adds. “And those five states are really important to individuals—but also as an entrepreneur and to leaders and to founders and organizations—because on a human level, they’re critical to flourishing. We need a sense of meaning and purpose.”
He’s proud that the tool he created helps productivity and efficiency. But at its core, it “creates a more human environment where people can feel like they’re seen and appreciated and more empowered to actually do the things that make them feel the way that they want to feel.”
Photo by Kiefer Photography/Shutterstock.com
