There's one question Jess has started asking almost automatically when she meets someone new. And what someone says in the four seconds after they answer it tells her more than their resume ever could.

What This Episode Is Really About

Most of us were never taught to filter new connections by direction. We network by title, industry, output, accomplishments, whatever looks impressive on a bio. Nobody teaches you to filter by where somebody is actually headed and why, which means you can spend months investing in a relationship before realizing you and this person are optimizing for completely different things.

This episode gives you the one question that shortcuts that discovery. It's built on a distinction Jess learned from John Maxwell: success is a self-metric, where your feet are planted. Significance is an external metric, the impact you have on others. The relationship between them only runs one direction. Chase significance and success tends to follow. Chase success only, and there's a real chance you never arrive at significance at all.

In This Episode

• How one question, "what's your goal with that," reveals whether someone is oriented toward success or significance
• The exact signals to listen for after the goal statement: pronouns, what's being measured, and time horizon
• The follow-up question to use when someone's first answer is ambiguous
• Jess's real conversation with a new friend from the Pink Skirt Summit attendee group chat, and what she led with that changed the whole interaction
• John Maxwell's High Road Leadership framework and the three roads he says most people are walking without realizing it
• The moment inside the Tony Robbins and Alex Hormozi interview where Robbins challenges Hormozi directly on still operating from duty instead of desire
• How the S Test hands off to the Proximity Audit, and why alignment and proximity are two separate decisions
• Why the word "legacy" needs a follow-up question before you actually know what someone means by it
• Jess naming her own significance goal on the show for the first time, tied to her son Thomas's heart journey

The Big Idea

You cannot build something significant while surrounding yourself with people who are only chasing success, and you cannot tell the difference from a resume. You can tell the difference from one question and thirty seconds of listening.

Memorable Lines from This Episode

"Every new connection is either compounding towards what you're building or quietly diluting it."

"If you are seeking significance, success will follow when you get there. But if you are chasing success, there's a big possibility that you will never be significant at all."

"That order is the tell. It's not her resume."

"The moonshot, the significance goal, the desire to impact, that's what actually matters. And that's what will be remembered long after they're gone."

"It's not a verdict on somebody's character. It's how you decide whether to keep investing in the conversation."

Resources

• High Road Leadership by John Maxwell: https://amzn.to/4b8OOM3
• Tony Robbins x Alex Hormozi interview referenced in this episode: https://youtu.be/xz-ymFOhBAE
• Support Team Thomas the Titan (Children's Heart Foundation): https://secure.qgiv.com/event/stlouis/account/2205634/

Your One Thing This Week

Next three new people you meet, ask the real question. Not what do you do, not what industry you're in, but what's their end goal, their big dream. While they answer, notice the pronouns, the metrics, the timeline. If the answer's fuzzy, ask the follow-up: what would it mean to you if you got there? Then run your own Proximity Audit on what you heard.

Connect with Jess

If this one landed, come find me at BigIdeasMadeSimple.com. That is where the newsletter lives, where everything I am building is taking shape, and where you can connect directly. One idea in your inbox every week, nothing else. And if you know someone who's been quietly diluting their circle without realizing it, send them this one. The right idea at the right time changes everything.

Follow Jess: @thejesswebber on Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Facebook

Key Themes

• Success as self-metric versus significance as external metric
• The S Test as a conversational filter
• Proximity Audit as the decision after alignment
• Push motivation versus pull motivation
• Legacy as a values Rorschach test
• High Road Leadership's three roads
• Naming your own significance goal out loud

Welcome to Big Ideas Made Simple,

the show that connects you with the knowledge,

tools, and resources you need to live your most impactful life.

I'm Jess Webber, and today I want to talk to you about a question that

I have started asking almost automatically when I meet somebody new.

And I want to tell you about what their answer tells me before

the conversation is ever finished.

So a few weeks ago, I met a beautiful soul at the Pink Skirt Summit.

We actually first met.

in the attendee group chat and then took the conversation aside just the

two of us and immediately immediately realized how much we resonated starting with

her saying that she wanted to help other moms get to where she's gotten

she had this great mission of serving a bigger community

And that was what led us into the conversation.

It wasn't the fact that she had a podcast like me or has written keynotes like

me or has built a mil multi-million dollar business like I have.

She's got all the same things and we've got all these unifying connectors,

but that's not what she led with.

And I noticed that because of what she did lead with,

it made me lean into the conversation more.

And then I started reflecting on this and realized that it's not just

a one-off reaction. It's starting to show up as a pattern.

And I don't even, you know, pay attention to that.

It's kind of unconscious, but it happens pretty much meeting after meeting,

connection after connection. So here's what showed up

for me that most people don't tell you when you're meeting somebody new.

And you are in the process of building things.

Your time and attention are the two things that you cannot make more of.

Every new connection is either compounding towards what you're building

or quietly diluting it. There's not a middle ground.

And we were never taught to filter for that.

So we were taught to network by title,

industry, output, accomplishments,

whatever. Nobody is teaching you to filter by direction.

By where somebody else is headed and why they're headed there.

And so one of my incredible mentors is John Maxwell.

And during a keynote a few years ago,

he put language on that distinction in a way that has made this click for me.

And again, continues to show up repeatedly ever since.

So for him, he explains that success is a self-metric.

It's where your feet are planted,

it's the goals you're personally setting.

For yourself or those immediately around you.

Significance, on the other hand,

is an external metric. It's the impact that you are having on others

and it's something outside of your own ecosystem.

that relationship can only run one direction.

And so if you are seeking significance,

success will follow when you get there.

But if you are chasing success,

there's a big possibility that you will never be significant at all.

He maps this even further in his book High Road Leadership,

where he talks about the three roads that people typically walk in their life.

And so a low road is where people focus solely on personal gain

and they are trying to leave behind broken relationships.

A middle road is where people play it safe and they meet expectations,

but they don't really aspire to bigger things.

And then the high road is where those leaders tend to prioritize others

and strive to make a lasting impact.

So most people are somewhere in that low to middle road range and don't even realize

it. The S test is just a faster way to find out which road somebody

is actually walking.

before you invest six months into them and find out the hard way.

I said S test without completely explaining it and shouldn't assume that

you know what I mean. But it's literally one question.

So what is your goal?

What are you working towards? When you meet somebody and start talking about what

they're doing and where they're headed,

you listen for which of those S's Maxwell outlined that they speak to first.

The goal statement is the entry point.

And your signal is what they say after,

unprompted. So you can listen for pronouns.

Success answers will stay predominantly in first person.

I hit, I scaled, I build, I want,

I will. Significance answers drift into the we's,

them, they's really pretty quickly without being asked.

So if you can listen for what's being measured out loud,

it will help you hear. Success people report numbers.

Significance people report changes in others' lives,

even when a number could make a better headline.

Also listen for the timeline. Success-anchored answers tend

to have deadlines attached. Hit this metric by the quarter or the year,

where significance-focused goals tend to be more open-ended.

The kind of things somebody's building towards without a clearly defined finish

line.

Because the point wasn't to finish,

it was the journey along the way.

And there's another layer even worth listening to more.

What happens when you ask what it would mean for them if they got

to the stated goal? Success-anchored people describe a feeling about themselves.

Significance-anchored people describe a difference in the world or

in someone else's life. That question is your fallback.

If the first answer they give you is a little ambiguous and it clears

up things wildly quickly. So the friend that I mentioned from the group chat,

she had it all, right? I said the podcast,

keynotes, business, all the things,

but it wasn't that stuff that struck me.

She led with serving other mothers in service-based businesses.

That order is the tell.

It's not her resume. And it's funny because it reminds me of something that caused.

Ripples in the entrepreneurial world back in,

I want to say it was January. Tony Robbins sat down with Alex Hormosy

for like an hour and a half podcast.

And I'll link the show in the notes for this episode.

But here's what was interesting:

it was that Hormosy was the one that set up the podcast.

And you could tell that for I mean,

from the second they sat down at the beginning of the interview,

that he expected to.

you know, interview Robbins and get all these golden nuggets.

But it completely flipped. Robbins told the story of feeding people through

his foundation for decades, you know,

42 million people across 37 years.

And for a long stretch of it,

he, you know, he hit whatever he s set as a metric,

but he didn't feel things. You know,

it was just the writing of checks.

And so he went and created what he calls the moonshot.

A massive vision, the way that the US treated getting into space first in 1969.

So he set out to feed a billion people in 10 years.

And that number was unreasonable,

unreasonable enough that it forced him to think differently

and strategize completely opposite of what he had been doing previously.

So he hit that goal in eight and then reset again.

And the difference for him was it wasn't the number,

it was the impact and the shift between what he called a push motivation

and pull motivation. Duty versus the desire to serve.

And in that interview, he challenged Hormosy directly,

telling Alex that he was still operating out of duty,

obligation, not desire. And Hormosey even admitted that he could write a two million

dollar check to a philanthropic organization and the only thing that

he would feel the next morning is two million lighter and that's what Robbins

was pushing at here. Two guys,

two big numbers, or two guys with big numbers,

big businesses, big lives, and those numbers were never the actual point.

The moonshot, the significance goal,

the desire to impact, that's what actually matters.

And that's what will be remembered long after they're gone.

So here's what I want you to do with that.

This is where that S test hands off something that I always already know that

I do naturally, which is the proximity audit.

And if you didn't hear that episode,

the short version of it is not everybody who's aligned with you earns

the same access to your time and your energy.

Alignment tells you direction and

Proximity is a separate decision about distance.

So the S test can tell you somebody's orientation,

and the proximity audit can tell you how close that orientation actually earns them

to you. A significance answer doesn't immediately put somebody in your inner circle.

And a success answer doesn't immediately write them off.

Somebody

Answering from success still might be the exact right person

for a specific transaction or skill exchange or a door that they could open for you.

They just don't automatically get proximity to who you are

and everything that you're building.

That is reserved for the people whose direction actually compounds your significance

goal. And that's what happened in the group chat.

I didn't just notice that she led with impact,

I noticed.

I wanted to keep talking to her after.

That's the actual output of the S test.

It's not a verdict on somebody's character.

It's how you decide whether to keep investigating or investing.

It's not a verdict on somebody's character.

It's how you decide whether to keep investing in the conversation.

And I say that because I've been on the other side of this too.

I've been in rooms.

With a coach or a speaker where they lead with their numbers,

their metrics. And I feel myself calibrate differently in that moment.

Not as a judgment on them. I'm not qualified to judge anyone.

But the information that they gave me determined how much attention,

time, energy I want to put into pursuing a relationship with them.

And as I think about this,

there is a word.

That I've noticed is kind of a buzzword that keeps showing

up in these conversations. And it's one that I started learning

to ask more questions around. This word is legacy.

I have one diff definition of legacy for myself,

and I realized fairly quickly once I started asking the right questions that

not everybody views legacy the same way.

In the context of the S test.

When somebody names legacy as their outcome,

their destination, their significance goal,

you have to go deeper because it could land on either side of that spectrum.

A success-focused legacy talks a lot about generational wealth.

A significance-focused legacy talks in impact language.

Success funds things, it can change lives.

It's not that success is bad, but the high road was never about that metric.

Significance is the high road behavior.

And success, the generational wealth,

the everything else, that can follow when you set your sights on something bigger.

And so, as always, I want to leave you with an action item.

The next three people that are new to you that you meet,

ask them the question. Not what do you do,

not what industry you're in, but what is their end goal,

their big dream?

And while they answer, notice the pronouns,

notice the metrics, notice the timeline.

If the answer is fuzzy, ask the follow-up.

What would it mean to them if they got there?

And then run your own proximity audit on what you heard.

Some people earn a transaction,

others earn a spot in your inner circle.

The S test is just telling you which conversation you're starting in.

So

I want to share my significance goal just to make this land a little bit harder.

I have shared in previous episodes that my son was born with cardiac issues,

has had six heart surgeries, and will need more.

During that journey, we were connected with an organization called

the Children's Heart Foundation.

And they raise funds for pediatric cardiology research.

And they're one of the only organizations nationally that does this.

Because a lot of the other heart foundations focus on adult cardiac health

and research. And so our family is very passionate about raising awareness

as well as raising funds to support the research that has literally saved

our child's life. And so every year we do,

you know, we we participate in galas and we do the Children's Heart Foundation walk

locally with our chapter.

And we have a team for our family called Thomas the Titan.

And so our goal is to raise as much money as possible through awareness

and through my coaching, speaking,

training to fund some of that research that can impact Thomas's life.

And so we want to help change lives for families who are affected by cardiac issues.

One in 100 kids is born with some sort of cardiac defect,

and most people don't have a clue.

And so

When you can name something like that,

and again, it can be small, it can be local,

it can be Tony Robbins feeding a billion people in 10 years.

When you can name something like that,

you're gonna start to feel a shift in the way that you show up and the

way that you operate. And so I hope that if this landed for you,

if it reframes something, then the most useful thing that you can do for

me is run the S test.

share the episode. And if you want to connect with more people that

are building something of significance,

make sure that you find me on socials or subscribe to the podcast.

Downloads helps tell the algorithm that I am saying things that resonate with

people. So don't forget to do that.

And I don't say any of that is a vanity metric,

but it's about a mission to put more of this kind of information in more ears.

And if you ever are in a space where you want to support my mission

or somebody else's, let me know.

I'll link the Team Thomas the Titan in the show notes.

And you are welcome to donate.

You're welcome to share it on socials as well.

Because again, we are gonna make the world a little bit better when

we do this together. I I mean,

that is literally why I start every episode and end every episode with

my mission to help people have a bigger,

better life.

through knowledge, tools, or resources that can create impact.

And so I hope this means something to you and that if you're somebody

who found yourself chasing success,

that you can spend a little bit of time and name a significance goal

for yourself as well. Thanks for listening and I'll see you next episode.