Why Success Can Leave You Feeling Like You Don't Matter | John R. Miles & Linda Hurtado – EP 834

John R. Miles (0:00)

Coming up next on Passion Struck. As I was trying to understand why this is happening to so many of us, I found that the systems and the environments that surround all of us are very good at measuring what we produce, what we earn, what we give, what we prove, what we achieve, but they are very bad at reflecting back our worth.

Hey friends, welcome back to episode 834 of Passion Struck. Today's episode is a special one. Last week, on Tuesday, October 6th, I celebrated the launch of my new book, The Mattering Effect, Creating a Life of Meaning and Worth, at the St. Petersburg Museum of History here in Florida.

It was an evening I'll remember for a long time. We brought together friends, readers, and members of the community to talk about a subject that has become the central focus of my work. Why so many people can look successful on the outside, while feeling increasingly invisible on the inside? For those of you who couldn't join us in person, I wanted to bring part of that evening to you. At the event, I sat down with Emmy Award-winning Fox 13 news anchor, Linda Hurtado, for a conversation about the experiences that led me to write this book, The Personal Cost of Pursuing Success Without a Deeper Sense of Fulfillment, and what we can do to rebuild our sense of meaning, worth, and connection. We talked about the moment. My son asked me why I never laughed anymore. The experiences that forced me to reconsider the life I was building, and the realization that loneliness, burnout, and disengagement can share a deeper underlying cause.

I also explained what I mean by the great erasure, the gradual process through which the systems environments around us extract our value without reflecting our worth back to us.

Linda brought her own perspective to the conversation, sharing what it felt like to work in an environment where her contributions seemed to matter less, and how she ultimately made the difficult decision to leave. Her story illustrates how deeply our sense of worth can be affected by the places where we spend our time. We also explored practical ways to help people feel seen. From the way a parent welcomes a child home, to the questions a leader asks an employee who has spent decades doing their job. These are the conversations that inspired the mattering effect, and I'm glad I can share this one with you. Here is my book launch conversation with Linda Hurtado, recorded live at the St. Petersburg Museum of History. Thank you for choosing Passion Struck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life that matters. Now, let that journey begin.

Linda Hurtado (2:57)

Before we start our conversation, I would like to read the bio of the gentleman sitting next to me because it's quite impressive. John R. Miles is a US Naval Academy graduate and Navy veteran. Thank you for your service. Who went on to become a Fortune 500 CIO, CISO, COO, four-time CEO. I'm not even sure what all those CI whatever's mean, but that's a lot. Leading global transformations in technology and culture, he is also the host of the globally acclaimed Passion Struck podcast. Raise your hand if you've listened. If you haven't, you have to find it as soon as we leave here tonight. The alternative health show with over 85 million downloads, wow, and the award-winning author of Passion Struck. In his groundbreaking new book, The Mattering Effect, Creating a Life of Meaning and Worth, he draws in over a decade of research and over 200 interviews with psychologists, leading thinkers, to name what he calls the Great Erasure, which we're going to talk about, and he offers a practical step-by-step framework to help us recover our sense of worth, significance, and presence. Please help me in welcoming John Miles.

Maybe we should start with a question to the audience.

Raise your hand if you have ever asked yourself, do I matter? Who do I matter to? Is what I'm doing in the world, does it matter? Pretty universal thing.

I think it's even more of a crisis now. But you wrote a whole book on it and spent 10 years studying it. So let's start with the moment you realize that despite all your success, you are disengaged, maybe not happy. Am I saying that correctly? And why you decided you needed to study this whole idea of mattering?

John R. Miles (4:47)

Yeah, I'm going to do a different starting point. There are a couple of people in this room who-

Linda Hurtado (4:53)

That matter to you?

John R. Miles (4:54)