From Well-Being to Well-Doing

Andrew Soren opens this episode by warning that the conversation could go almost anywhere. It does, from a misshelved library book that changed the course of Brian Little's career, to Wagner's Ring Cycle, to a hockey metaphor for performance reviews. But underneath the range, there's a single thread: the idea that our lives are organized not around personality traits, but around projects, and that understanding those projects is the key to understanding what makes work meaningful, and what makes it sustainable.

Little has spent decades building that idea into a body of research called Personal Projects Analysis, which he introduced in a 1983 paper and has continued to develop since, including in the 2005 Journal of Research in Personality piece he calls, only half-joking, "six impossible things before breakfast." Andrew frames the episode's real headline early on: not well-being, but well-doing. That distinction is where the conversation, and this piece, ends up.

A Professor Who Sings

Before any of that, Little tells a story about his kids. His children, now in their fifties, once told that he has always been singing. He's spent his career "professing", teaching, lecturing, performing on stage in front of rooms full of students. Even when he teaches, he's singing.

"When I teach and profess," he says, "it is as though in a lecture I'm creating a song cycle. There'll be some sad songs, and there'll be some jovial, almost jubilant songs." Some movements serious, some playful, a whole choir, as Andrew puts it, of voices within one person.

It's a fitting opening for a conversation about personality psychology, a field Little fell into by accident. As a Berkeley-bound undergraduate headed for neuropsychology, he stumbled across a misshelved copy of George Kelly's Psychology of Personal Constructs while looking for something else in the library stacks. He read it on the floor for hours. By the time he stood up, he'd decided to change fields entirely, drawn to Kelly's premise that every person is already a scientist, testing hypotheses about their own life, rather than a passive subject waiting to be studied.

Projects, Not Just Traits

Little is quick to distinguish his field from positive psychology, the discipline many Meaningful Work Matters guests come from. Personality psychology, he says, asks a more layered question: in what ways is each of us like all other people, like some other people, and like no other person at all? Traits, introversion, conscientiousness, the "Big Five," or as Little jokes, "the big few", answer the middle question. They tell you how someone compares to others in their category. What they don't tell you is what that person is actually trying to do with their life today.

That's where personal projects come in. Little defines them formally as "extended sets of personally salient action in context", projects that unfold over time, require action, and matter to the person pursuing them. They range from the mundane (taking out the garbage) to the world-altering (transforming Eastern thought), and Little argues that visible behaviour alone can't tell you which kind you're looking at.

He offers a workplace example: you notice a colleague who's quiet in a meeting, distracted in the parking lot, unresponsive when you say hello. It would be easy to chalk that up to introversion, or even rudeness. But the real project running underneath might be something else entirely, trying to get a better diagnosis for a sick child, for instance. "Unless you know what a person's projects are," Little says, "you could misconstrue that person." He's not suggesting managers interrogate people about their inner lives during a status meeting. But when there's room in the day, a hallway conversation, a moment in the cafeteria, a simple "how's it going?" can open a door that a trait label never would.

Five Dimensions, and Why Meaning Alone Isn't Enough

Little's research identifies five dimensions people use to appraise their own projects: meaning, manageability, connection, and positive and negative affect. Each has its own research history. Manageability, for instance, tracks closely with Albert Bandura's concept of self-efficacy, the belief that a project is likely to succeed, and Little notes that across his data, efficacy and stress are the two strongest predictors of both depression and well-being. Connection, meanwhile, overlaps with Adam Grant's work on giving and generativity: to what extent does a project link you to others, and to what extent does it advance their interests as well as your own?

Meaning is the dimension most people assume matters most. It's also, Little says, the least predictive of well-being on its own, a finding echoed in later work by researcher Ken Sheldon, who used personal projects to test the idea empirically. The reason is what Little calls the meaning-manageability trade-off. A project can feel deeply connected to your identity and values and still fail to support your well-being, if it isn't manageable. Someone can be surrounded by projects that matter enormously to them and still be, in his words, "a happy mess", because meaning doesn't create the time, resources, or support a project needs to actually work.

For anyone thinking about meaningful work, this is the crux of the episode. The instinct is to assume that if a project matters enough, it will sustain the person doing it. Little's research suggests the opposite is just as often true: the more a project matters, the more it can quietly demand a level of manageability the person doesn't have, and the less obvious that gap is from the outside, because from the outside, deep commitment can look a lot like health.

The Environment Is Part of the Project

Little's social ecological framework extends this further. Every project, he argues, has an inner face and an outer one. The inner face is about identity and motivation: do you still care? The outer face is about environment: does your surrounding ecosystem actually allow the project to happen?

His example is deliberately mundane: taking out the garbage. For most people, it's a "schedulable act", trivial, low-stakes, done without much thought. But if you're in a wheelchair and the garbage is down a flight of stairs, the same project becomes something else entirely. The meaning hasn't changed. The manageability has, because the environment has. Little pushes the point further, noting that this logic scales all the way up, from stairs to workplace culture, to whether a culture allows a woman to pursue an education at all. The project stays the same shape. The ecosystem around it decides whether it's even possible.

Applied to work, this reframes a common assumption about burnout. It's tempting to treat burnout as a personal failure of resilience, or meaningful work as inherently risky. Little's framework suggests looking elsewhere first: not whether someone cares enough, but whether the organization around them has made their caring sustainable.

Seeing the Assists

One of the more concrete takeaways from the conversation is about performance reviews. Little uses a hockey metaphor: some people score goals. Others rack up assists, creating openings, building trust, holding a team together in ways that rarely show up in a standard review. He describes a hypothetical person who doesn't shine individually but whose team would fall apart without him, and someone who's the person everyone trusts to say, out loud, when something isn't working.

His suggestion for managers is simple: when discussing a project, ask who helped make it possible. Not just what someone accomplished, but who created the conditions for it, a question that surfaces contributions a results-only conversation tends to erase.

Free Traits and the Cost of Performing Well

Little has also spent time studying the concept of "free traits", the ways people act against their natural disposition in service of something they value. He's a self-described introvert who has to "act out of character" every time he steps on stage to teach. An accountant might have to perform extroversion in a client pitch. Someone naturally averse to conflict might have to push into a hard conversation because their team needs it.

People take on free traits, Little says, for two main reasons: love and professionalism. We do it for people we care about, and we do it because a role we've committed to requires it. Both are legitimate, even admirable. Neither is free of cost. 

Restoration, though, isn't one-size-fits-all, and this is where Little points to a study by one of his Cambridge doctoral students, Sanna Balsari-Palsule, on restorative habits inside entrepreneurial firms. She found that roughly 60 percent of the people she studied used jogging at lunch as a way to recover after acting out of character at work. The activity looked identical from the outside. It wasn't. Introverts jogged alone. Extroverts jogged in groups. Same behaviour, opposite function, a reminder that recovery has to match the person, not just the schedule.

A Caution Worth Taking Seriously

Little offers one warning about applying any of this too eagerly. Asking someone "what are your projects?" is a very different question from asking whether they prefer parties or quiet nights in. A real answer might involve a spouse's illness, a strained relationship, or a private hope someone isn't ready to share. "This is very revealing," he says, and revealing questions require trust that hasn't necessarily been earned.

His advice for leaders is to build enough trust that people can choose to share what's useful, and to ask in a way that signals genuine support rather than data collection: what should I understand about what you're carrying right now? What would make this more manageable? Who's already helping you?

For Leaders and Coaches: Where to Start

Little doesn't offer a formal program for putting any of this into practice, and he seems wary of anyone who tries to build one. But a few specific moves surface throughout the conversation, and they're worth carrying into your next one-on-one or team conversation.

1. Start with the assist question. In a performance conversation, ask who helped make the work possible, not just what got accomplished. It's a small shift, and it tends to surface exactly the kind of contribution a results-only review erases: the person everyone trusts to flag what isn't working, the one whose team would fall apart without them even though their own name is never on the win.

2. Watch for free traits on your team. If someone is consistently doing something that runs against their natural grain (the introvert running every client meeting, the conflict-averse manager delivering every hard message), that's worth noticing out loud, and worth asking what's helping them recover afterward. It can look effortless from the outside. It rarely is.

3. And when you do want to understand what someone is carrying, ask: what should I understand about what you're dealing with right now? What would make your work more manageable? Who's already helping you? 

Well-Doing

Little closes on the term that gives the episode its shape. He resurrects "well-doing" from sixteenth-century theology, defining it as "felicitous action", engagement in projects that benefit both the person doing them and the people around them. Human flourishing, in his framing, isn't a feeling. It's "the sustainable pursuit of core projects in our lives", projects serious enough that, as he puts it, without them "we may wonder whether to go on at all."

That sustainability has the same two faces as everything else in his framework: an internal one (do you still have the motivation to keep going) and an ecological one (does your environment actually let you). Meaningful work, in other words, isn't just a matter of finding work that matters. It's a matter of whether the projects that matter to you are ones you, and the systems around you, can actually carry.

As Andrew put it at the end of the conversation, it's enough to leave your head swimming with beautiful music.