What is a Good Life? #155
Making Your Impact Count with Julian Kirchherr
I love doing this work — after interviewing over 300 people so far, every conversation still teaches me something new. I hope it reveals something for you too, sparking curiosity, presence, or an insight along the way. Supporting my work means I can spend more time noticing, exploring, and sharing with you.
On the 155th episode of What Is a Good Life?, I’m joined by Julian Kirchherr. Julian combines a career as a Partner at McKinsey & Company with his role as an Associate Professor at Roskilde University. At McKinsey, he co-leads the firm’s public sector work in Europe, focusing on people and organisational performance, while his academic research centres on the circular economy. He ranks among the most highly cited circular economy scholars worldwide. He earned his PhD from St Antony’s College, University of Oxford, and is the author of The Lean PhD: Radically Improve the Efficiency, Quality and Impact of Your Research.
In this conversation, we explore curiosity, autonomy, and the value of diverse experiences. Julian also discusses caring too much about external demands, and how this can undermine autonomy, meaning, and impact.
This episode will resonate with anyone carving out their own path and explores what it can take to make your own impact.
The weekly clip from the podcast (1 mins), my weekly reflection (2 mins), the full podcast (52 mins), and the weekly questions all follow below.
1. Weekly Clip From The Podcast
2. My Weekly Reflection
I can recall a moment when I knew I had to leave.
The share price of the company had recently doubled.
The chief geologist and the CEO were talking about a potential new discovery on a project.
Both of them seemingly brimming with excitement.
I liked them both, generally felt at ease in their company, and yet here I felt like a third wheel.
I felt happy for them, and my pocket, and also, to some extent, realised I didn’t care.
People often talk of imposter syndrome as something connected to self-worth. I felt it in that moment because I was somewhat pretending to care.
I was around two people who seemingly loved what they were doing, and I didn’t.
It makes me think of what Adam Mastroianni said in episode #149: “It hollows people out… pretending that something is important that you don’t think is important… a lot of us have the capacity to do that for a long time, but it takes such a psychic toll.”
But this wasn’t a moment where I was concerned with authenticity; it was really around my sense of potential. And what may be draining it.
In episode #134, Mike Moss referenced potential as this stored-up energy within us, not something outside of us.
I love this sense that it exists within us already, not another thing to develop or acquire.
At times in my life, I’ve felt it as something scratching away underneath the surface of my skin, just asking to be released. Maybe you have felt that too?
While I was away on holidays over Christmas, I was struck almost by a sadness at what our present system does with our potential. There must be something in between doing something totally for the sake of money and striving to be the best and optimised version of yourself.
Some more space for this life being more a felt expression of you.
In this week’s episode, Julian talks of the joy in pursuing what he wanted to do so freely in his PhD. He also speaks of how his additional role as an associate professor gives him energy for his primary role, as he gets to explore ideas he is totally curious about.
There is something really freeing or liberating in simply doing what you want with your time.
Like a relaxation or release that sweeps over my body.
As we touch on many times in this week’s interview, the combination of the words autonomy and curiosity feels like a beautiful bridge between where we are now and where we might need to go.
We seem to have this idea that if a teacher, parent, or boss isn’t sitting on us, we would just be lazy or up to no good.
I am forever left with the face of my daughter at the playground one day, grasping for a grip on a platform that she was trying to ascend.
A confronting frown shot in my direction as I momentarily had the audacity to see if she wanted a hand.
So I stepped back, and off she went.
I have interviewed several people who talk of an almost never-ending sense of energy for their work when it has stemmed from their own curiosity and autonomy.
For people whose careers were both working out and for those who were still navigating confusion. For both those working for themselves or for others.
It has little to do with status or outcome.
It appears to me that we are totally misusing one of the great human powers.
Terminal illness has once again visited my wider constellation this Christmas, which inevitably evokes conversations full of both confusion about how this life works and clarity about what is important.
Reflections on people’s own lives that reach an effortless depth or substance.
I wonder how many of us will reach the end and feel the weight of the stored-up energy that remains.
What if our potential is less about striving and more a willingness to get out of its way?
To do what is required to make your own impact, whatever that may be.
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Thanks for reading What is a Good Life?
3. Full Episode - Making Your Impact Count with Julian Kirchherr - What is a Good Life? #155
4. This Week’s Questions
Where are you holding back from having the impact you want to have?
What would you pursue if you cared less about what others expected?
About Me
I am a coach, facilitator, and podcast host, based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed over 300 people. I’m not looking to prescribe universal answers, more that the guests’ lines of inquiry, musings, experiences, and curiosities spark your own inquiry into what the question means to you. I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience and more meaningful conversations.
If you’re interested in exploring your own good life through one-on-one coaching contact me via email.
Interesting interview. Thank you both. It's instructive to compare the success of the little people against the Chinese company versus the sad state of autonomy in Myanmar more widely. I would have liked to hear your guest's thoughts on the limitations of small actions. Of course the actions were not small for those who saved their sacred lands.
On another issue, now 67, since the age of 14, I wanted to understand why humans treat each other so poorly, much of the time. That has always driven me, in hidden ways until a major spiritual awakening at the age of 37, when I gained enough understanding to be able to consciously steer my own life, to some non-zero degree. Yet, I chose a career (engineering, in the one department at my school that had a co-op) where I could start partially supporting myself at age 19. Maybe even then, I "understood" that economic self-sufficiency would allow me freedoms that would be otherwise denied.
Superb conversation. The framing of potential as stored energy rather than something external to develop really shifts the question from "how do I build potential" to "what's blocking it." I've seen this in my own work where curiosity-driven projects feel effortless compared to obligation-driven ones, even when the latter pays better. The real challnege is building systems that let people release that energy instead of hoarding it til retirement or worse.