Speaker 1: You have to get a goal that like you out,
Speaker 1: that you care about, that you can invest in. Because
Speaker 1: you're talking about a chunk of time of your life
Speaker 1: that you're about to spend on this, it's going to
Speaker 1: be meaningful for you. Welcome to the one you feed
Speaker 1: throughout time. Great thinkers have recognized the importance of the
Speaker 1: thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or
Speaker 1: you are what you think, ring true. And yet for
Speaker 1: many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us.
Speaker 1: We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We
Speaker 1: see what we don't have instead of what we do.
Speaker 1: We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit.
Speaker 1: But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It
Speaker 1: takes conscious, consistent and creative effort to make a life
Speaker 1: worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep
Speaker 1: themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their
Speaker 1: good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this
Speaker 1: episode is Michael bungay stain here. He's the author of
Speaker 1: six books, which have between them sold more than a
Speaker 1: million copies. He's perhaps best known for the book The
Speaker 1: Coaching Habit, which is the best selling coaching book of
Speaker 1: the century and already recognized as a classic. His new book,
Speaker 1: How to Begin, helps people be more ambitious for themselves
Speaker 1: and for the world. Hi, Michael, welcome back. Alright. Gis
Speaker 1: so nice of you to invite me back. Thank you.
Speaker 1: It's a pleasure to have you on again. I don't
Speaker 1: know how long ago it was that we had the conversation.
Speaker 1: It's been several years for sure. I do know that
Speaker 1: I've gone back to your book The Coaching Habit a
Speaker 1: number of times to pull out good questions. Thank you.
Speaker 1: It's a great primer on some very good questions to ask.
Speaker 1: So I've gone to that. But we're gonna be talking
Speaker 1: about a different book today. We're gonna be talking about
Speaker 1: your latest book, which is called How to Begin. Start
Speaker 1: doing something that matters. But before we do that, we'll
Speaker 1: start like we always do with the parable There's a
Speaker 1: grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say, in life,
Speaker 1: there are two wolves inside of us that are always
Speaker 1: at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things
Speaker 1: like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is
Speaker 1: a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred
Speaker 1: and fear. And the grandchild stops and thinks about it
Speaker 1: for a second and looks up at their grandparents SS well,
Speaker 1: which one wins, and the grandparents says, the one you feed.
Speaker 1: So I'd love to start off by asking you what
Speaker 1: that parable means to you in your life and in
Speaker 1: the work that you do. Well. First of all, I
Speaker 1: admire you telling that so well still, because I know
Speaker 1: you must have told that powerful many times now as
Speaker 1: you set up your shows. Um, and you know, I
Speaker 1: thought about this. I think what this resonative made me
Speaker 1: think about this time around is not only what I'm
Speaker 1: trying to feed the good wolf, but when I'm trying
Speaker 1: to not feed the bad wolf. You know, human nature
Speaker 1: is whire to add rather than subtract. We have a default,
Speaker 1: which is like the thing to do is do something
Speaker 1: or do more. And often one of the great ways
Speaker 1: to make change and make progress is to remove stuff
Speaker 1: and stop doing stuff and step away from stuff. So
Speaker 1: rather than just look at what's in the light, and
Speaker 1: you know, I think about things around, how do I
Speaker 1: descenter myself. There's a big part of the work I'm
Speaker 1: doing at the moment. How do I move out of
Speaker 1: the spotlight so I allow other people to move into
Speaker 1: the spotlight. And that's both requiring me to feed the
Speaker 1: good wolf in terms of a humility and in terms
Speaker 1: of a letting go of some things like status and
Speaker 1: control and authority. But it's also around um kind of
Speaker 1: not feeding the bad wolf, which is like what do
Speaker 1: I hold onto too long? Where am I protecting my
Speaker 1: ego too much? Where am I feeling fragile about stuff
Speaker 1: that I don't need to be fragile about. And so
Speaker 1: the power and that's parable for me is it's like
Speaker 1: just like your logo, which is like there are two
Speaker 1: wolves and you need to manage both of the wolves.
Speaker 1: You need to feed the good wolf pelts, you need
Speaker 1: to stop the bad wolf and make that an active
Speaker 1: choice rather than just a passive one. That's a great
Speaker 1: take and it made me think of you know, this year,
Speaker 1: for me, the main thing I'm focusing on. You know,
Speaker 1: oftentimes people pick a word for the year, and I
Speaker 1: picked the word love. But the reason I picked the
Speaker 1: word love to a large extent was because there's that phrase,
Speaker 1: you know, that the best way to get rid of
Speaker 1: fear is love. And what I realized is that there
Speaker 1: is a distinction and how I do my work when
Speaker 1: I'm coming from a place of just focus on love
Speaker 1: and service versus a place of fear about making it.
Speaker 1: And to your point about what I realized was I
Speaker 1: could spend lots of time I'm trying to figure out
Speaker 1: how to get more energy, how to get more creative,
Speaker 1: how to get more But the first and most important
Speaker 1: thing for me seems to be just pull the fear out, right,
Speaker 1: Just pull the fear out of the work, and naturally
Speaker 1: for me it comes alive in ways. And so what
Speaker 1: you just said, they're kind of resonates with me and
Speaker 1: kind of where my brain is right now. Well, how
Speaker 1: do you pull the fear out? Because that sounds like
Speaker 1: everybody's noting. There's nobody who's not nodding at the moment
Speaker 1: as they're listening to this, I'm like, it's letting more
Speaker 1: love in and pulling the fear out is hard, deep work,
Speaker 1: and I'm curious to know how you actually do that
Speaker 1: so that you can see the shift. Yeah, well, a
Speaker 1: few things. I mean, one is actively working on cultivating
Speaker 1: the love, so you know, in my life, it's moving
Speaker 1: my meditation practice more towards meta practice. But a lot
Speaker 1: of it is just what do I moment to moment
Speaker 1: put my attention on right. So, for example, we've got
Speaker 1: this program called Spiritual Habits, and there's a version one
Speaker 1: of it, then there's sort of an advanced version, and
Speaker 1: the advanced version we're running people through it for the
Speaker 1: first time, and some of those lessons are still being created.
Speaker 1: And about this time each week I'm going to deliver
Speaker 1: the lessons. Sunday will be the first time I've delivered it,
Speaker 1: and I can start to notice the gnawing of fear. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And so one thing I can do then is just
Speaker 1: turned my attention towards the care I have for the
Speaker 1: people in the group. You know, it doesn't solve it,
Speaker 1: but it is sort of a consistent reorientation. And I
Speaker 1: think the other one to write, and I think those
Speaker 1: of us who have enough need to do this regularly,
Speaker 1: is recognized I have enough. I've already won. Am I
Speaker 1: rich by no by no means? And I left a
Speaker 1: lot of money on the table when I left my
Speaker 1: corporate world. But I make it by and I'm not
Speaker 1: in danger of not making it by, And I can
Speaker 1: just kind of relax into that a little bit and
Speaker 1: remind myself of that. So that's kind of how I'm
Speaker 1: doing it these days. I've just come to the end
Speaker 1: of the three months leading up to a book launch,
Speaker 1: and even though this is my sixth or seventh book,
Speaker 1: I still found myself getting wound around the acts, all
Speaker 1: of how the anxiety about making it for the book launch,
Speaker 1: even though there's one part of me going, it's only
Speaker 1: a book launch, and it's just the day and it passes,
Speaker 1: and it's the it's the long game that you're playing
Speaker 1: that matters. All of that my intellectual conversation, but but
Speaker 1: my emotional thing is a kind of churn. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: there were three things that I use different kind of mantras,
Speaker 1: I guess in some ways that to help me manage
Speaker 1: this and help the people who work with me manage
Speaker 1: me as well. The first it comes from an article
Speaker 1: I read and I think g Q about the world's
Speaker 1: greatest free diver. You know, these people who take huge
Speaker 1: breaths and then they dive as far deep as they can,
Speaker 1: using nothing but their own body and a kind of
Speaker 1: a fin attached to their feet. And you know, it's
Speaker 1: one of the things which is like, you get this wrong,
Speaker 1: You're dead literally, I mean, it's not a metaphorically death
Speaker 1: it's a real death. And when I have a competition
Speaker 1: coming up, I just keep connecting to the joy I
Speaker 1: feel in doing this, to remember the joy. So I'm like, oh,
Speaker 1: that's helpful, remember the joy of it. And then the
Speaker 1: second thing comes from a spiritual teacher whose name has
Speaker 1: escaped me, but the story goes roughly like this is
Speaker 1: I think maybe in the Buddhist tradition of some version,
Speaker 1: and he's teaching. He's, you know, up on a little
Speaker 1: diets and there's hundreds of people seated a cross legged
Speaker 1: in front of him, and as he's teaching, halfway through it,
Speaker 1: he leans in and he goes, should I tell you
Speaker 1: the secret of my life? Because everybody's sitting down, like
Speaker 1: leans forward because they're like, yes, that's why we're here.
Speaker 1: And he goes, I don't mind what happens. And I
Speaker 1: was like, oh, that's so good, because you know, with
Speaker 1: this book launching, there's part of me that really minds
Speaker 1: what happens. I wanted to do well and be noticed
Speaker 1: and be talked about and be passed along all that
Speaker 1: sort of stuff. And you know, one of the mantras
Speaker 1: is just to go, look, I don't mind what happens.
Speaker 1: I don't mind. I'm committed to a process. I don't
Speaker 1: mind what happens. And then the third mantra that, particularly
Speaker 1: when I work with Angeley, who's on my my Little Team,
Speaker 1: she has it on her board behind her so I
Speaker 1: can see it when we talk in zoom. I read
Speaker 1: it and it's a saying we've already won, because like
Speaker 1: every time we're struggling, we're like, yeah, we've we've already
Speaker 1: won this game. Like, look at us. We're happy, we're content,
Speaker 1: we're resourced, we're doing work we love, we're serving people
Speaker 1: in the way we want to serve them. We've already won.
Speaker 1: What's happening at the moment is just miscellany. We've already won.
Speaker 1: It hasn't been a successful by any means. I've still
Speaker 1: been wrapped around the axle. But that that's that's decreased
Speaker 1: the anxiety a little bit. I love that we've already won.
Speaker 1: I think that is a great one. It reminds me
Speaker 1: of a quote I've heard, which is I won't get
Speaker 1: it right, but it's basically remind yourself that there was
Speaker 1: a time that you fervently wished for what you currently have.
Speaker 1: You know, like you know and That's a really good
Speaker 1: one for me because I'm like, yeah, I've already won.
Speaker 1: That's a great one. And then the previous one about
Speaker 1: I don't mind what happens. You know, there's a zen
Speaker 1: phrase that goes something along the lines of the way
Speaker 1: is easy for he who has no preference, right, And
Speaker 1: of course we have preferences, right, We're always going to
Speaker 1: have preferences, but when we move them from it's got
Speaker 1: to be this way too. I prefer it's this way.
Speaker 1: It's a lot easier. I think that's a great way
Speaker 1: to lead into your book, because your book is about
Speaker 1: doing work that matters, and i'd love to tie where
Speaker 1: we've been to the book, and the way I would
Speaker 1: tie it there is to say, you know, in doing
Speaker 1: work that matters, and in your book there's a fair
Speaker 1: amount of figuring out what do I mean by that
Speaker 1: and getting specific about what that is, which is a
Speaker 1: way of setting ourselves up in a way to mind
Speaker 1: what matters. And this is a question I've asked over
Speaker 1: and over on the show, which is sort of how
Speaker 1: do you balance for those of us who have ambition
Speaker 1: And we can talk about ambition because I think you
Speaker 1: define it well, but for those of us who have ambition,
Speaker 1: how do we balance that with also just being able
Speaker 1: to appreciate exactly what we have today. I'll hand it
Speaker 1: over to you after that partially formed question. Well, there's
Speaker 1: a lot there, but I think I'm not sure this
Speaker 1: is a balancing thing. I don't, sorry, I know how
Speaker 1: to balance it exactly. I think it's a tension, and
Speaker 1: I think you sit with the tension that, on the
Speaker 1: one hand, you have absolutely hopefully found something that is
Speaker 1: a worthy goal. That's the language we use in this
Speaker 1: how to Begin book. It's a worthy goal. It's thrilling,
Speaker 1: it's important, it's daunting. You've worked it and you've drafted it,
Speaker 1: and you've tinkered with it, and you've kind of poked
Speaker 1: at it, so you can kind of say, yeah, I
Speaker 1: care about this, I care about making this commitment to
Speaker 1: something like this. It matters enough to me. But I
Speaker 1: do think that once you have the goal, the secret
Speaker 1: is to stop worrying about the goal. It's a paradox,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's misdirection in some ways, you know, kind
Speaker 1: of like a magician. It's like look over here, when
Speaker 1: actually the world's happening on the other side. Because the
Speaker 1: emotional heart of this new book is the phrase, we
Speaker 1: unlock our greatness by working on the hard things. And
Speaker 1: we don't unlock our greatness by crossing the finish line
Speaker 1: and holding up the trophy. We unlock our greatness by
Speaker 1: working on the hard things. It's in the doing that
Speaker 1: we get to see the best version of ourselves emerge
Speaker 1: and become defined and just kind of evolve. So, you know,
Speaker 1: twenty five years ago I read the definition of change
Speaker 1: and it was in the context of kind of organizational change.
Speaker 1: There was some really going I read all the books,
Speaker 1: you know that it's all bollocks. This is what change
Speaker 1: actually looks like. We set a target, we run like
Speaker 1: hell towards it for a bit. After a while, we
Speaker 1: stop and we look around and we go, now where
Speaker 1: are we And we set a new target and we
Speaker 1: run like hell towards that. I thought that was a
Speaker 1: pretty good description of actually what change mostly feels like.
Speaker 1: And you set your target, you go, this is definitely
Speaker 1: worth it. But then you get seduced into in a
Speaker 1: good way, into doing the work, because you know, the
Speaker 1: irony is often when you hit your target, like, that's great,
Speaker 1: celebrating that for the moment, but now what's next? You know,
Speaker 1: you have that kind of like that next whatever the
Speaker 1: next thing is for you. I sit with the tension
Speaker 1: of it. I keep coming back to the worthy goals
Speaker 1: I set myself and work with on my team, and
Speaker 1: we talk about it and we check on it. But
Speaker 1: then we specifically work in six week cycles. At the
Speaker 1: start of a six week cycle, we go, what could
Speaker 1: we really achieve in six weeks that we would be
Speaker 1: proud of? And then we work really hard for six weeks,
Speaker 1: and after six weeks we stop and angs and I
Speaker 1: look at each other and go, well, how is that?
Speaker 1: What do we learn? What worked? What does that tell
Speaker 1: us about us and about the work and about the goal.
Speaker 1: And then we to kind of reset, and then we
Speaker 1: do another six weeks sprint. I think that's the answer.
Speaker 1: That's an answer. That's half an answer. You asked me
Speaker 1: half a question, I'm giving you half an answer. So
Speaker 1: it's a perfectly balanced dialogue, fair enough. And as you
Speaker 1: were talking in it made me reflect on kind of
Speaker 1: where you end the book, which is you talk about
Speaker 1: a piece of paper you've got on your desk. Can
Speaker 1: you share that, because I do think it kind of
Speaker 1: speaks to this. Yeah, It comes from the German poet Walker,
Speaker 1: and the English translation of the poem is called The
Speaker 1: Man Watching, And it's an amazing poem. And I'm not
Speaker 1: a religious man, and it draws the Biblical imagery in
Speaker 1: a way that I think is extraordinary, even though I
Speaker 1: don't have that kind of tradition. That's important to me.
Speaker 1: But it talks about wrestling with an angel. And you know,
Speaker 1: there's a very famous story in the Bible about Jacob
Speaker 1: wrestling with the angel, and the way this poem tells it,
Speaker 1: it's like, you know, you ought to be clear. The
Speaker 1: Angel doesn't wrestle with just anybody or everyone. You know,
Speaker 1: you have to be doing something that matters for the
Speaker 1: angel to wrestle with you. And you will always lose
Speaker 1: when you wrestle an angel. That's the way it works.
Speaker 1: There's no there's no chance of victory, but you are
Speaker 1: shaped in a way in that moment of engagement with
Speaker 1: an angel that is extraordinary. And the final lines of
Speaker 1: the poem say something like this, his goal is not
Speaker 1: to win, but to be deeply defeated by ever greater things.
Speaker 1: And that for me fields powerfully resonant. Because I'm in midlife,
Speaker 1: I'm like fifty three or something, or fifty four, somewhere
Speaker 1: like that, early fifties, early mid fifties. Somebody once said,
Speaker 1: and I'm now old enough, and I've been around long
Speaker 1: enough to know that I can take on a bunch
Speaker 1: of things that I can probably win at. You know,
Speaker 1: do okay at get some form of recognition in terms
Speaker 1: of money or status or whatever. I can do that.
Speaker 1: What's the constant call for me to stop me kind
Speaker 1: of settling into a stagnant version of myself is to
Speaker 1: take on ever greater things, be deeply defeated by ever
Speaker 1: greater things. And I love the permission to take on
Speaker 1: ever greater things, and I love the permission to be
Speaker 1: deeply defeated. That feels amazing to me. I mean, it's
Speaker 1: what you were saying earlier on Eric Around. You know,
Speaker 1: there was a time and I was longing to be
Speaker 1: in the position I am right now. You're like, it
Speaker 1: is time. This is the struggle I wanted, yea, yea.
Speaker 1: So let's move into the book itself. The book is
Speaker 1: called How to Begin, Start Doing Something that matters, And
Speaker 1: it really is about how to begin. That's the whole
Speaker 1: focus of the book. It is not a how to
Speaker 1: keep going, how to have a five year plan. It's
Speaker 1: it's about how to begin. And so you have three
Speaker 1: broad I don't know if you want to call them
Speaker 1: steps that make up the foundation. So walk us through those. Sure,
Speaker 1: So the three broad sections, first of all, to find
Speaker 1: a worthy goal, like how do you actually get a
Speaker 1: goal that's worth taking on? The second broad step is
Speaker 1: commit This is the three steps. This is the kind
Speaker 1: of the deepest work. WHI like, are you really up
Speaker 1: for this? I mean, really you really up for this?
Speaker 1: Because we've all had goals that we've kind of abandoned
Speaker 1: too quickly, too easily walked away from, and some of
Speaker 1: us will have some regret around that. This is how
Speaker 1: to minimize regret by you really going. Am I out
Speaker 1: for it? And there's some tests around that. And the
Speaker 1: third broad step is to cross the threshold. I can't
Speaker 1: promise how to get people to the end of the journey,
Speaker 1: because once the journey starts, who knows. But if I
Speaker 1: can get you to take three bold steps across the threshold,
Speaker 1: you know it's game on. Something exciting is happening now,
Speaker 1: And I'll give you some tactics around how you can
Speaker 1: sustain the journey, but we don't get into how you
Speaker 1: finish the journey, because that's that's your adventure to plot out. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I do think the thing that's interesting about it, though,
Speaker 1: is that by beginning well in the way that you
Speaker 1: lay out, you make it more likely you'll stay on
Speaker 1: the journey totally. You know. That is a key motivator
Speaker 1: of of why I wanted to do this, which is
Speaker 1: like I have I have a graveyard of abandoned projects
Speaker 1: and things that some of them when I'm delighted that
Speaker 1: I stopped working on, but some there's some of them
Speaker 1: I've got some regret around. I wish I why did
Speaker 1: I stop that that felt like it could have powerful
Speaker 1: and for lack of focus or lack of courage or
Speaker 1: lack of understanding about what I was taking on, and
Speaker 1: I stepped away from it. And I am just trying
Speaker 1: to increase the odds that you find something that likes
Speaker 1: you up and that you have the courage to cross
Speaker 1: the threshold and get going on it, because once you
Speaker 1: do that, I mean it. Gerta who says like beginning
Speaker 1: as a madness or a boldness to it something like that,
Speaker 1: So I'm like, let's get to that madness, that boldness,
Speaker 1: that magic beginning something that's right. And I think what
Speaker 1: you're doing in the book balance is sort of the
Speaker 1: two extremes that I see people go to. There are
Speaker 1: people who just start boldly fifty things over and over
Speaker 1: and over and over. Right, that's one type of problem
Speaker 1: by not preparing for it. And then the other extreme
Speaker 1: is we never get across the threshold. We have a
Speaker 1: tendency to get stuck in thinking about it. And I
Speaker 1: think that the book does a nice job of sort
Speaker 1: of threading the needle between those two to make sure
Speaker 1: that you know whichever side you tend towards. There's things
Speaker 1: in the book that pull you back to the middle
Speaker 1: point that allow you to get through. Well. Eric, you know,
Speaker 1: the writer Jim Collins Good to Great Fame, has a
Speaker 1: metaphor that's helpful for this It is helpful for me anyway,
Speaker 1: and he says, look, a good strategy involves bullets and cannonballs.
Speaker 1: And even if you're kind of anti war or anti
Speaker 1: guns like I am, I guess this is still a
Speaker 1: helpful metaphor because he says, look, firing bullets, which low
Speaker 1: risk experiments, helps you figure out what the real target is.
Speaker 1: And you want to fire a bunch of bullets until
Speaker 1: you finally go this is it. And that's kind of
Speaker 1: the process of trying to work out what you're worthy
Speaker 1: goal is. And then once you figure out what the
Speaker 1: target is, your fire your cannonball. I mean, you commit,
Speaker 1: And Colins says, and I think this is the point
Speaker 1: you're making is some people spend their whole life firing
Speaker 1: bullets and they and they never have the courage to
Speaker 1: fire a cannon ball. So they dabble, they do little bits,
Speaker 1: they kind of make small steps, but nothing big happens,
Speaker 1: so they don't bring their attention to it. And other
Speaker 1: people just fire the cannonball way too early, Like I
Speaker 1: haven't thought this through at all, but I'm going to
Speaker 1: invest my life savings into it, and it goes wrong
Speaker 1: because it almost always goes wrong, and they are taken
Speaker 1: out of the game because they've no longer got the
Speaker 1: resources to be able to commit to something in the
Speaker 1: way that they want to. So this whole idea of
Speaker 1: slow down a little bit so that you can go
Speaker 1: fast when it's time to go fast, I think it
Speaker 1: is a really powerful way of thinking about this golf setting. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I think that analogy is really good for sort
Speaker 1: of illustrating those two extremes. So let's move into these
Speaker 1: three steps a little bit more. You do talk about
Speaker 1: setting a worthy goal, and I love how you say
Speaker 1: that a worthy goal in twines ambition for yourself and
Speaker 1: for the world. Say a little more about that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So the quick backstory of this is after The Coaching Habit, which,
Speaker 1: as you said that the introduction was this kind of
Speaker 1: amazing best selling book that has taken off. I wrote
Speaker 1: a second book with The Advice Trap, which was written
Speaker 1: because whereas I knew some people read The Coaching Habit
Speaker 1: and when I love the seven Questions on the Ball
Speaker 1: and I'm using them and it's changing the way I'm
Speaker 1: leading and interacting with other people, there's a bunch of
Speaker 1: people who went, I love the questions, I just don't
Speaker 1: use them. I was like, why is it so hard
Speaker 1: to shift our behavior even when we want to shift
Speaker 1: our behavior? And The Advice Trap was a bit a
Speaker 1: deep dive into behavior change and what are the hidden
Speaker 1: resistances to change that we all have. And I got
Speaker 1: to the end of that book and put it down
Speaker 1: in the world, and I was like, I've made a
Speaker 1: good start on that, but I still haven't quite cracked
Speaker 1: the formula around behavior change. It's a big thing to
Speaker 1: try and crack. So I started to try and write
Speaker 1: a book on Okay, let me have another go at
Speaker 1: thinking around behavior change and trying to find a way
Speaker 1: of making it accessible and understandable for people. Wrote a
Speaker 1: first draft, send it off to some friends. My friend
Speaker 1: Misha two days later emailed me and went, I've read
Speaker 1: the first fifty pages of your book, No idea, what
Speaker 1: it's about. It's not very good? Is that? Like, oh,
Speaker 1: you know, everybody knows first draft suck, but sometimes you don't.
Speaker 1: You kind of want to hear it. You kind of
Speaker 1: don't want to hear it. So I'm picking through the
Speaker 1: rubble of this draft, and the phrase that came out was,
Speaker 1: you know, we unlock our greatness by working on the
Speaker 1: hard things. I was like, God, it that feels like
Speaker 1: the thing to basis book around. So this is how
Speaker 1: the worthy goal idea came out. So for the first
Speaker 1: time in a long time, I was really sitting with
Speaker 1: the literature and the and the research around goals. I
Speaker 1: was like, I don't really like any of this. I
Speaker 1: don't like smart goals because a smart goal is a
Speaker 1: formula of reduction and tidying up. Keep it specific, keep
Speaker 1: it measurable, keep it actionable, keep it timely. It's all
Speaker 1: about the kind of the logistics and the doability of
Speaker 1: the goal, without ever asking is this the goal? Is
Speaker 1: this the right goal? And then the other acronym people
Speaker 1: really know are be hags, bold, hairy, audacious goals is
Speaker 1: another Jim Collins idea. Unlike the bullet cannonball man aphore,
Speaker 1: which I love, be hags. It's a great hawk, but
Speaker 1: it tends to be organizational, you know. It's like a
Speaker 1: really big vision, like in twenty years time, this is
Speaker 1: what we're trying to be. And it just felt that
Speaker 1: it was inaccessible for most people. Be hag just felt
Speaker 1: too hairy and too audacious. I'm like, what's the middle ground?
Speaker 1: That's immensely it's a terrible name. Yeah, well, he's good
Speaker 1: at metaphors. I don't like the idea of hair in
Speaker 1: my goals. Um. I mean, there's a whole bunch of
Speaker 1: things that are wrong with that. I would agree with that,
Speaker 1: but it worked. I mean it's a phrase that's caught on.
Speaker 1: So I'm like, okay, so we've got to find something
Speaker 1: in the middle here. It has to be thrilling, Like
Speaker 1: you have to get a goal that likes you up,
Speaker 1: that you care about, that you can invest in, because
Speaker 1: you're talking about a chunk of time of your life
Speaker 1: that you're about to spend on this. It's got to
Speaker 1: be meaningful for you. And I wanted something that would
Speaker 1: counteract the tendency that some of us have, which is
Speaker 1: too adapt goals that have an obligation to them. I
Speaker 1: should be doing this, I ought to be doing this,
Speaker 1: so it's expected that I'm doing this. You know, this
Speaker 1: is the thing I need to be doing now because
Speaker 1: and lots of us carry that weight of that, either
Speaker 1: through external pressures or sometimes internal pressures that were like
Speaker 1: I should be doing this by now. And thrilling allows
Speaker 1: you to throw that off and just go what makes
Speaker 1: me rub my hands together and go, oh, yeah, this
Speaker 1: is the goal for me. But if it's just that,
Speaker 1: you've got kind of like the worst of self help,
Speaker 1: which is like, oh, it's all about me, It's all
Speaker 1: about staring at my navel and anything that makes my
Speaker 1: life feel better. It becomes salt cistic and narcissistic and
Speaker 1: self indulgent. I'm like it needs to be more than that.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's a place for self indulgence, don't get
Speaker 1: me wrong, but for a worthy goal, I wanted to
Speaker 1: be important and important is about serving the world in
Speaker 1: some way. And reading a book by Jacqueline Novogratz, who
Speaker 1: is the founder of Acumen, which is a kind of
Speaker 1: cool nonprofit venture capitalist firm, and she wrote a book
Speaker 1: called a Manifesto for a More Revolution. In that was
Speaker 1: the phrase what if you could give more to the
Speaker 1: world than you take? I was like, damn, I wish
Speaker 1: i'd written that. That's a great phrase. So for me,
Speaker 1: I hang important on that. Can you leave the world
Speaker 1: better than you found it? How do you give more
Speaker 1: to the world than you take? And in that you
Speaker 1: have a goal that serves you and serves the world.
Speaker 1: You have internal motivation and external motivation. And the third
Speaker 1: element is daunting, which is like, how do you find
Speaker 1: a goal that will help you grow, stretch you break,
Speaker 1: you crack you open a little bit so that you're
Speaker 1: on the edge of your competence and your confidence and
Speaker 1: your experience and your sense of self so that you
Speaker 1: have a chance for that next version of you to
Speaker 1: emerge because you know you're not feeding the same wolf.
Speaker 1: You know, the wolf you feed today is not the
Speaker 1: wolf you fed five years ago or ten years ago.
Speaker 1: You're looking to feed a different wolf. You're looking, in
Speaker 1: some ways find the next version of the good wolf.
Speaker 1: And to that you've got to be on the edge
Speaker 1: of who you are. And that's what the daunting pieces
Speaker 1: around and want something that makes you go, this makes
Speaker 1: me a bit sweaty, like I know how to start this,
Speaker 1: but I don't know how to finish it necessarily. That's
Speaker 1: when it's daunting. In the process. You talk people through
Speaker 1: really writing three drafts of this worthy goal, and I
Speaker 1: want to read something you wrote for reasons beyond just
Speaker 1: the way they're used in the book, Because I tell
Speaker 1: people about this often. I say, you know, people who
Speaker 1: are even best selling authors struggle with a new book, right,
Speaker 1: And you wrote, you know, the step one is to
Speaker 1: write a crappy first draft. And you said this is
Speaker 1: true of every draft. I'm not the first to say it,
Speaker 1: but I can attest to its truth. The first draft
Speaker 1: is always crappy. The first time I write anything. It's
Speaker 1: thoroughly mediocre. It's tepid and confused, it's over stuffed and
Speaker 1: under baked. It's too specific and too vague all at once.
Speaker 1: I love that a because it talks about how you
Speaker 1: can be bad in so many ways all at once.
Speaker 1: But I also think it's so important that people here
Speaker 1: from people who have been very successful, yeah right, that
Speaker 1: this is hard and the first thing that comes out
Speaker 1: of you sucks, you know. And so this was a
Speaker 1: great opportunity to reiterate something that I end up talking
Speaker 1: to coaching clients about often. Well, let me support you
Speaker 1: by telling the story of the coaching habit. I spent
Speaker 1: three or four years pitching that book to a New
Speaker 1: York publisher. They kept turning me down, like, Michael, we
Speaker 1: love you, we love the idea, but we don't love this.
Speaker 1: You just go away and have another coin doing this.
Speaker 1: I'm like, okay, And literally I wrote six versions of
Speaker 1: that book, each one that got turned down, and I
Speaker 1: finally said to this publisher, all right, I got lost,
Speaker 1: but I found it again, and I'm really clear what
Speaker 1: I want this book to be. It's a really crystal
Speaker 1: clear vision now and this is it I'm putting on
Speaker 1: the table, and it's a yes or no decision. It's
Speaker 1: not I go back and write an eighth draft it's
Speaker 1: like yes or no, and they went no. That was
Speaker 1: I was surprised im, so I'm so sure I was
Speaker 1: calling their bluff. But but no, they called my bluff
Speaker 1: and I was like, man, yeah, they published another book
Speaker 1: of mine and sold a hundred thousand copies, which is
Speaker 1: pretty good. You know. I really thought they would bet
Speaker 1: on me even if they didn't fully bet on the idea.
Speaker 1: And they won't. No, Like, ah, don't know. That was
Speaker 1: one of the best things that happened to me because
Speaker 1: I then went away and I self published a coaching habit,
Speaker 1: and I meant to control of it. And when I
Speaker 1: wrote that version that came out in the world, it
Speaker 1: didn't take me long at all to write that version
Speaker 1: of it, because I spent six years writing eight different
Speaker 1: versions of it before I finally had a book that
Speaker 1: looks effortlessly written and simple. I'm like, oh, the blood
Speaker 1: on the sweat and the tears that soaked those pages.
Speaker 1: You have no idea. So I have a question for
Speaker 1: you about that process. How much did the ideas in
Speaker 1: the book change and the core concept in the book
Speaker 1: change versus the presentation of it over those iterations, so
Speaker 1: the fundamental idea stayed the same, which is, I am
Speaker 1: trying to unwird coaching because I had a very clear frustration,
Speaker 1: which is, I think coaching is a really powerful technology
Speaker 1: of personal change, and it gets wrapped up in obfuscation
Speaker 1: and woo nous and black box nurse, and you have
Speaker 1: to be a people person to do it. There's a
Speaker 1: whole bunch of barriers that make coaching feel inaccessible to
Speaker 1: a whole bunch of people. Sometimes that's because of barriers
Speaker 1: of privilege. I mean, coaching remains a very white, very
Speaker 1: middle class, very middle aged profession. Sometimes it's a barrier
Speaker 1: of kind of expectation, which is like, look, I'm a
Speaker 1: marketer or an engineer or a doctor. I'm not a coach.
Speaker 1: I don't want to be a coach. I'm like, okay,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna unwird coaching and I'm gonna make it feel
Speaker 1: like an everyday way of showing up and being with
Speaker 1: each other. And that idea didn't change. How I wrote
Speaker 1: the book changed a lot once they once they you
Speaker 1: was going to be like, here are my favorite hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty questions. So I wrote that book and it sucked.
Speaker 1: It was like the most boring book in the entire world,
Speaker 1: and then I played around with the order of questions
Speaker 1: and I played around. At one stage every chapter had
Speaker 1: an amusing inverted commons anecdote about me in my life
Speaker 1: because I wanted to role model vulnerability and failure. So
Speaker 1: I was like, here's a funny story. And my editor
Speaker 1: was like, is this a biography or actually a helpful book.
Speaker 1: I'm like, it's meant to be a helpful book. She's like,
Speaker 1: can you cut all the stories out because we just
Speaker 1: don't care. I was like, okay. So it went through
Speaker 1: a lot of shaping, but the core idea that's what
Speaker 1: kind of kept me going. It's like, this is why
Speaker 1: you want a worthy goal, which is like, I'm a
Speaker 1: purpose here which I'm really trying to trying to answer to.
Speaker 1: That's just helpful in you know, thinking through how things evolved.
Speaker 1: I'm kind of moving us along here, but so we
Speaker 1: find a worthy goal. We worked through these drafts. There's
Speaker 1: lots of great questions in the book about different ways
Speaker 1: to think about them and how to find you're thinking
Speaker 1: and trying to get to a worthy goal that really
Speaker 1: speaks to who you are and what you want to accomplish.
Speaker 1: And in the book, you do a really nice job.
Speaker 1: I said this before we started talking of talking about
Speaker 1: you doing this for two goals that you had. So
Speaker 1: I'm wondering if you could share what your two goals
Speaker 1: were that you sort of iterate throughout the book on. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So one was a business goal, which was to stop
Speaker 1: being the CEO at Box of Crayons. So I founded
Speaker 1: a training company twenty years ago thereabouts, and I'd become
Speaker 1: clear that I wasn't very good as a CEO. I mean,
Speaker 1: I was kind of okay, but it's mostly because I
Speaker 1: was blagging my way through it, and and I didn't
Speaker 1: have any accountability because there's my company. I don't know
Speaker 1: that word. Say that again. You were blagging your way
Speaker 1: through it. I think it's British. I was kind of,
Speaker 1: you know, bssing my way through it. Yeah, it's kind
Speaker 1: of like putting up a front and tap dancing over
Speaker 1: thin eyes. That's all kind of wrapped into blagging. And
Speaker 1: so I'm like, okay, I needed to step away from that.
Speaker 1: And you know, in the book, I wanted to role
Speaker 1: model how that changed. Because the goal starts off with
Speaker 1: me stop being the CEO. That felt most real, like
Speaker 1: I just don't want to stop doing this because I'm
Speaker 1: not very good at it, and it's also taking me
Speaker 1: away from the work that I feel I can best
Speaker 1: do in the world. And then that evolves as I
Speaker 1: go through different iterations. And then the other one was
Speaker 1: to try and launch a new podcast, do a new podcast.
Speaker 1: And I've done podcasts in the past, but I had
Speaker 1: this idea for a podcast that I felt was really
Speaker 1: nourishing on a personal level. This isn't about business. This
Speaker 1: is just about a creative project that I was excited by.
Speaker 1: And the worthy goal starts with this idea of a
Speaker 1: new podcast in the world, and so the goals start there,
Speaker 1: and then they sort of evolved. Through these three drafts,
Speaker 1: you get get clearer and clearer. So let's talk about
Speaker 1: the stepping away is CEO? How did that goal and
Speaker 1: maybe the first telling of it the first version of it,
Speaker 1: which I think you said, was to stop being CEO
Speaker 1: of a box of crayons. What was the final version? Yeah,
Speaker 1: because the first version is really easy. I just stopped
Speaker 1: being the CEO. It's actually not that hard. All it
Speaker 1: does is then is caused chaos all around me as
Speaker 1: I walk away from the role of CEO. You know,
Speaker 1: things burn, and it evolved to something like a gracious
Speaker 1: transfer of power. So this felt, you know, the same,
Speaker 1: but radically different, because the one was about me just
Speaker 1: stopping doing the thing that wasn't great for me anymore,
Speaker 1: and the other one spoke to a deep value of mine,
Speaker 1: which has talked about right at the very start of
Speaker 1: the show, which is around how do I enable others
Speaker 1: transfer power to others? Step out of the spotlight so
Speaker 1: others can step into it. And it's a it's a
Speaker 1: very foundational partner of the work I want to try
Speaker 1: and do, which is around how do I give power
Speaker 1: to people who don't yet have the power that they might.
Speaker 1: And so once I understood that this was about a
Speaker 1: transfer of power, then I understood all the ways that me,
Speaker 1: as a founder can screw that up, because founders in
Speaker 1: the is for screwing up transfers of power. Like, no,
Speaker 1: I definitely want a success, but I'm just gonna keep
Speaker 1: my fingers and these pies and make these decisions and
Speaker 1: kind of muck it all up. So it created a
Speaker 1: commitment which was around I'm managing a process that is
Speaker 1: about how I grow as a person and as a leader,
Speaker 1: how I understand where my vulnerabilities are as a leader
Speaker 1: and what might undermine this transfer of power and how
Speaker 1: do I manage that? And you know, how do I
Speaker 1: support Shannon who stepped in the CEO to be the
Speaker 1: best CEO that she could be. So it became radically different,
Speaker 1: even though from the outside it was the same thing,
Speaker 1: which is me stopping being CEO and Shannon becoming a CEO.
Speaker 1: This desire and core value around stepping out of the
Speaker 1: spotlight so that others can step into it and giving
Speaker 1: power to people who haven't had it. Can you share
Speaker 1: a little bit about the evolution of that goal for you,
Speaker 1: where it sort of started to show up for you
Speaker 1: and how it sort of grew into being a value. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because it's a new realization since we talked last era.
Speaker 1: So when we decided that Shannon was going to become
Speaker 1: the CEO, we hired a coach for two years, a
Speaker 1: year before and a year after, and so I spent
Speaker 1: a year kind of getting used to the idea of
Speaker 1: not being the CEO Box of Crayons, which is not
Speaker 1: a small thing because it was a company I founded
Speaker 1: and I led and been the face of for eighteen
Speaker 1: years or something. So there's a lot of me wrapped
Speaker 1: up in that, and I was also finding it very
Speaker 1: difficult to imagine what would happen after box of crayons, Like, Okay,
Speaker 1: I'll just rip out the thing that I've devoted twenty
Speaker 1: years of my life too. Now what's just aential crisis.
Speaker 1: I don't really want to have an affair or buy
Speaker 1: a red car. So what do we go all by?
Speaker 1: You know, by a twenty tho dollar bike where like
Speaker 1: for us? So how will I? How will I manage this?
Speaker 1: And I dreamt about possibilities, but they all felt a
Speaker 1: bit plus or minus five percent similar to what I
Speaker 1: had already been doing. And then I had this breakthrough
Speaker 1: experience with a woman called Aaron Wheat Taste in Colorado,
Speaker 1: and she does a process called the dig d I
Speaker 1: G And when I read about it, I was entirely
Speaker 1: skeptical about it because this is what she promised you to. Look,
Speaker 1: I'll sit down with you for two three hour conversations,
Speaker 1: will do it in person or we did it virtually,
Speaker 1: and you'll talk to me and in real time I
Speaker 1: will create your operating system out of the words that
Speaker 1: you use. I'm thinking to myself, well, this sounds totally
Speaker 1: woo woo, and I'm not that great at kind of
Speaker 1: woo woo stuff. I'm also a pretty good facilitator, so
Speaker 1: I'm like, if you're a bad facilitator, we're over, because
Speaker 1: I'm a terrible at being facilitated by a bad facilitator.
Speaker 1: So I was like, oh, like, this is probably a
Speaker 1: waste of my money and time. But there were a
Speaker 1: couple of testimonials on her website from people I admired,
Speaker 1: so I was like, I'll give it a crack. And
Speaker 1: I'm a bit lost anyway, and I was like, I
Speaker 1: probably know what my words are going to be. You know,
Speaker 1: they're going to be coaching and creativity and possibilities and
Speaker 1: all the stuff that I'm kind of immersed it at
Speaker 1: the moment. So I went through this process with Aaron,
Speaker 1: which was brilliant. She is a brilliant facilitator and I'm
Speaker 1: not quite sure how she pulls us off, but she
Speaker 1: does an amazing job a kind of in the moment
Speaker 1: co create with you what your ecosystem is. And it
Speaker 1: turns out that I have three words. One word is confidence,
Speaker 1: because one of the ways I show up in the
Speaker 1: world is a humble confidence, Like I'm grounded in who
Speaker 1: I am and the flaws I have, but I'm also
Speaker 1: confident about who I am and the flaws I have.
Speaker 1: The other was onward, which is about a sense of
Speaker 1: progress and about looking to the future. And then the
Speaker 1: word of the heart of this is the word power.
Speaker 1: And you know, it turns out that I've got stories
Speaker 1: from my past which are all about disrupting the status quo.
Speaker 1: Even though I took all the boxes of privilege, you know, white,
Speaker 1: straight male, Rhodes scholar, over educated, English speaking, ridiculously good looking,
Speaker 1: blah blah blah, all of that. You know, I'm constantly
Speaker 1: trying to disrupt some of that stuff. And I've got
Speaker 1: story stretching back as a wee boy doing that. So
Speaker 1: I was surprised by all three of those words. I
Speaker 1: wasn't expecting any of those words to show up, but
Speaker 1: it for me was what unlocked a new world of
Speaker 1: permissions and possibilities around what I could put my my
Speaker 1: attention to. And that was significant part of helping with
Speaker 1: this transition and also helping to figure out what my
Speaker 1: next thing was. And so how did confidence, How did
Speaker 1: that word lead you forward? We've talked a little bit
Speaker 1: about the power word. How did the confidence word leaved
Speaker 1: you forward? In some ways, there's a reminder and encouragement
Speaker 1: to show your working. Just as we were talking about,
Speaker 1: you know, in this book, I showed my stories and
Speaker 1: I'm like, here's me going through this, and here's me
Speaker 1: trying to write a book, and here's me trying to
Speaker 1: do a podcast, and this is where I got it wrong,
Speaker 1: and this is how I figured it out. And you know,
Speaker 1: the feedback I get where people going, it's really helpful
Speaker 1: seeing that, and you don't see it that often because
Speaker 1: you know, history is most typically written by the winners,
Speaker 1: and it makes it sound like everything was easy and perfect.
Speaker 1: I'm like, I'm confident enough in who I am to
Speaker 1: kind of say that, look the more interesting thing to
Speaker 1: talk about other struggles rather than the victories. And I
Speaker 1: can role model a confidence around it's okay to to
Speaker 1: be in struggle and kind of be defeated by ever
Speaker 1: greater things. So I think that's that that's the confidence
Speaker 1: comes from around I teach by how I try and
Speaker 1: show up in the world around that that makes sense.
Speaker 1: I do think there is a certain amount of confidence
Speaker 1: needed to have the vulnerability to show struggle. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: it's so much more interesting, you know when you go
Speaker 1: to a conference in those days when we went to
Speaker 1: conferences and somebody introduces the speaker and they're like, and
Speaker 1: Mary won the bronze medal in her under ten freestyle
Speaker 1: fifty meter race, and then she was the high school.
Speaker 1: Well this and this is a list of achievements, and
Speaker 1: it's like both more ring and intimidating at the same time.
Speaker 1: When I'm introduced my little thing is like Michael was
Speaker 1: banned from his high school graduation. Michael left law school
Speaker 1: being sued by one of his law school professors for defamation.
Speaker 1: Michael was fired. Here, Michael as worked as a laborer
Speaker 1: and managed to knock himself out digging a hole. I've
Speaker 1: got an endless monel of stories of meat stumbling around.
Speaker 1: I'm like, look, I've achieved a bunch, but the more
Speaker 1: interesting things around how human I am and your human too.
Speaker 1: Sol's connect in a way that I can serve you
Speaker 1: best as a teacher. So let's move on to number two,
Speaker 1: which is to commit. Yeah. I really like this section
Speaker 1: because it really talks towards an idea that shows up
Speaker 1: in the coaching world sometimes in the behavior change world.
Speaker 1: I think you illustrate it very well, which is sort
Speaker 1: of this competing priority thing. Yeah, I say I want this,
Speaker 1: but there's all sorts of other things that are going
Speaker 1: on under the scenes that I haven't acknowledged. I think
Speaker 1: you've got a great coaching question around this too, write
Speaker 1: I can't quite remember it, but it's basically, in order
Speaker 1: to do that, what are you going to not do
Speaker 1: or what are you going to give up? Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: exactly the question. To kind of tip my hat to
Speaker 1: the intellectual forbearers of this. You know, there's a guy
Speaker 1: called Ron Hifitz who's a leadership writer in Harvard, and
Speaker 1: then to educational psychologists Bob Keegan and Lisa Lahy wrote
Speaker 1: a book cord Immunity to Change and Immunity Changes a
Speaker 1: really powerful idea wrapped up in a book that's a
Speaker 1: little under edited. It could be, could be, it could
Speaker 1: be a little tighter, I think in terms of my
Speaker 1: preference for books anyway. So this kind of tries to
Speaker 1: building some of that and face the heart of what
Speaker 1: it takes to commit. So basically asked two questions, it
Speaker 1: says this, First of all, imagine having to find a
Speaker 1: worthy goal you decide not to take it on. You know,
Speaker 1: you walk up to it and you walk away from it.
Speaker 1: What are the prizes and punishments of that decision. What's
Speaker 1: the benefit for maintaining the status quo? What's the loss
Speaker 1: by maintaining the status quo? And the truth is, there
Speaker 1: are benefits for your not taking on your worthy goal.
Speaker 1: You don't risk reputation and relationships and money and time
Speaker 1: and expectations of yourself and expectations of others. All of
Speaker 1: that stays pretty safe and the kind of lockdown. But
Speaker 1: if you've defined your worthy goal, well, you understand the
Speaker 1: price that will get paid, look just by you, but
Speaker 1: by those that your worthy goal would serve if you
Speaker 1: actually took it on. So you kind of weigh up
Speaker 1: prizes and punishments, and you hope that kind of the
Speaker 1: punishments away the prizes are kind of it's a bit
Speaker 1: of a mind flip, so that you're like, you know what,
Speaker 1: not doing this, the cost to me in the world
Speaker 1: is greater than the comfort to me by not doing this.
Speaker 1: And then you ask the same basic question, but this time,
Speaker 1: imagine that you're fully committed to the worthy goal. You're like,
Speaker 1: I'm I'm going to push my chips in I'm going
Speaker 1: to go all in on this. What are the prizes
Speaker 1: and punishments of that decision? Where the prizes kind of like, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is what I would get, This is what I
Speaker 1: would get in growth and change in status, an opportunity
Speaker 1: and impact, all of that great stuff. But it also says,
Speaker 1: but what's at risk if you were to really commit
Speaker 1: to this? What's the opportunity cost? What's the reputational cost?
Speaker 1: Who will you piss off? Because you will annoy some
Speaker 1: people if you take on a worthy goal, because you
Speaker 1: are disrupting expectations. You are making choices, which means, as
Speaker 1: you just said, you'm saying yes to some things that
Speaker 1: you're saying no to other things, and you're weighing this
Speaker 1: up as well. And in weighing these two questions up,
Speaker 1: you'll get a sense of yeah, I am really committed
Speaker 1: to this or no. Sure. But if you're not sure,
Speaker 1: that's a great outcome as well, because then you go
Speaker 1: back to the first part of the book and you're like,
Speaker 1: let me take another crack of this worthy goal, because
Speaker 1: I want to get to a place where I'm like,
Speaker 1: as best I know, my best guess is that I'm
Speaker 1: up for this game. H I love that idea of
Speaker 1: really thinking about prizes and punishments from both directions or
Speaker 1: comforts and costs. It often seems to me that you
Speaker 1: could almost sum up the downside to a worthy goal
Speaker 1: a lot of times with its comfort, right, all kinds
Speaker 1: of comfort, the comfort to watch you know, Netflix show
Speaker 1: seven nights a week and eat popcorn. But I'm always
Speaker 1: amazed by particularly as I get older. But I don't
Speaker 1: think it's unique to me. I see it in in
Speaker 1: lots of older people, how comfort begins to become a
Speaker 1: higher and higher value. I agree, and I mean, Eric, roughly,
Speaker 1: how old are you? I will be fifty two in May.
Speaker 1: We're pretty much peers in terms of that. And I
Speaker 1: do think that for people of our age, many people
Speaker 1: are coming to the crossroads. You know. There's an American
Speaker 1: writer called David Brooks who read a book called The
Speaker 1: Second Mountain about this, which is like, your first mountain
Speaker 1: is your career, and you claim it to get status
Speaker 1: and money and all the stuff that a job hopefully
Speaker 1: gives you. But at a certain point, you won that
Speaker 1: game and you have a choice to make, which is
Speaker 1: like do you climb the second mountain and the Second
Speaker 1: Mountain tends to be more about legacy and meaning and
Speaker 1: impact in the world, and so certainly for one audience
Speaker 1: for this book, I hope people who are asking themselves, Look,
Speaker 1: I'm not on TikTok, so i might be old, but
Speaker 1: I've got another thirty years left, Like, I want a
Speaker 1: good life. I don't want to just play golf and
Speaker 1: watch Netflix and where stretchy trousers. Although stretchy trousers are
Speaker 1: quite comfortable, ts are pretty good exactly okay, And the
Speaker 1: technology has come along way really so flattering. I find
Speaker 1: the wide waistband just holds my stomach in nicely. But
Speaker 1: it's an of the story. So this is really for
Speaker 1: people who are like, in some ways I'm still at
Speaker 1: my best, Like I'm wise, I'm smart, I'm resourced. I've
Speaker 1: collected some scars, so I have some wisdom along the way.
Speaker 1: I've got a better sense of who I am, better
Speaker 1: than I've ever had before. How do I play that hand?
Speaker 1: And hopefully it's not just watching Netflix. So there's a
Speaker 1: lot of good stuff on nefing, really a sweful lot
Speaker 1: of great TV these days. It's really daunting. Yeah, yeah
Speaker 1: that's true. So yeah, comfort is is something that I
Speaker 1: want people to be nourished. I want self care. I'm
Speaker 1: not sure I want that much comfort. Yeah, I find
Speaker 1: it a thing I am sort of consistently battling against.
Speaker 1: Or I don't even love that term, but I'm on
Speaker 1: the lookout for. You know, there are certain signs I
Speaker 1: see in people becoming old. And I'm using that word
Speaker 1: in the negative sense of it, you know, because we
Speaker 1: all hopefully we do get old like chronologically, but there
Speaker 1: is a certain stereotyper negative to it. I think excessive
Speaker 1: comfort is certainly one thing I see. Uh. The other
Speaker 1: that I'm always on the lookout for is always thinking
Speaker 1: that the past is much better than the present. That's
Speaker 1: what I look out for. And then um, there's a
Speaker 1: third and I seem to have lost it. Oh, it's
Speaker 1: getting bad at technology, which I am like, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna go on TikTok necessarily, but I want
Speaker 1: to know I could. Yeah, I get so, you know, cryptocurrency,
Speaker 1: and I just it's you know, sort of that new
Speaker 1: it's continuing to learn piece. The other thing that I'd
Speaker 1: add to that, Eric that I read about recently was
Speaker 1: getting to a point where you think you're you're you're
Speaker 1: dumb that the next ten years or twenty years it
Speaker 1: basically going to be the same. And the exercise that
Speaker 1: I heard this person talking about his name I can't remember,
Speaker 1: was like, look, how fi you've come in the last
Speaker 1: ten years. It's like a long way. It's like unimaginably
Speaker 1: different to what you actually thought was happening. And basically
Speaker 1: this is a common answer. It's like, how part of
Speaker 1: you come in the last ten years? The human answer
Speaker 1: is a long way. And then the second question is
Speaker 1: how much do you think the next ten years are
Speaker 1: going to be pretty much the same as our now?
Speaker 1: It's like we have mostly and we've got this neural
Speaker 1: bias in our brains, like we think the future is
Speaker 1: going to be pretty much the same, even though the
Speaker 1: evidence from our past tells us that a whole bunch
Speaker 1: of stuff changes. And I think part of that resistance
Speaker 1: to that spiritual sense of oldness that you're talking about,
Speaker 1: which is starkness and comfortness and no longer growing, it's
Speaker 1: just to go, oh, you're not done yet, and the
Speaker 1: world's not done with you yet, so you know, rub
Speaker 1: your hands and jump in and jump in. Yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: going to come with a question out of left field
Speaker 1: that has been on my mind a couple of times lately,
Speaker 1: and since we just talked about lots of great TV,
Speaker 1: here's my question. And this is a guy who's got
Speaker 1: a podcast about books. So for a lot of my life,
Speaker 1: I regarded reading a novel as a vastly superior activity
Speaker 1: over watching, say a TV show or a movie. Maybe
Speaker 1: it's because I'm getting old, but I've started to revise
Speaker 1: that view a little bit, and I started to look
Speaker 1: at like, well, what do I get out of a
Speaker 1: really well done television series and is it that different
Speaker 1: than what I get or do out of a novel?
Speaker 1: And I'm kind of curious your thoughts on that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean I have a master's degree in literature. Yeah,
Speaker 1: my wife has a PhD in literature and a master's
Speaker 1: degree in library science. So in case you're worried you're
Speaker 1: thinking about where our natural biases, it's towards books. And
Speaker 1: there's stuff on the TV that blows my mind about
Speaker 1: how good it is. It's extraordinary kinds of how it's
Speaker 1: produced and nuance that it has and all of that stuff.
Speaker 1: I think one of the gifts of fiction is it
Speaker 1: allows you to create empathy with a character you might
Speaker 1: not otherwise understand. You might never get inside the skin
Speaker 1: of somebody. So you have somebody like me who's a
Speaker 1: kind of left leaning liberal, over educated, this, that, and
Speaker 1: the other. I can read a book by a young
Speaker 1: black science fiction writer and understand the world and a
Speaker 1: point of view that I could never self generate. I
Speaker 1: think with a TV show, you're never in the skin
Speaker 1: of the characters. You're you're looking at a story unfold,
Speaker 1: and there's something that stories tell you that are about
Speaker 1: the rhythms of life and the kind of archetypes of
Speaker 1: characters that you can meet in the world. So I
Speaker 1: think you get that as you do in books as well.
Speaker 1: But I think a great book will trump a great
Speaker 1: TV series. And as an example of that, I'm just
Speaker 1: finishing reading a science fiction series called The Expanse, which
Speaker 1: is amazing and I don't even like science fiction, but
Speaker 1: this is a nine book series written by two guys.
Speaker 1: It's co written, even though it's a single named author.
Speaker 1: That's a norm the plume of these two guys. I
Speaker 1: think they worked as assistance to J. A. A, the
Speaker 1: dude who wrote the Game of Thrones books. Anyway, it's
Speaker 1: a sprawling opera. It's available as a TV series as well,
Speaker 1: I think on Prime I think, and as good as
Speaker 1: the TV series is, and it is pretty damn good,
Speaker 1: the book is just another level up because you're in
Speaker 1: the brain of meglomaniac, and you're in the brain of
Speaker 1: the rebel forces and in you know, you're in the
Speaker 1: brain of the the plucky hero in a way that
Speaker 1: the TV show can't fully immerse human. There's been a
Speaker 1: lot of studies showing that fiction does grow empathy, and
Speaker 1: I've kind of wondered, you know, how different is the
Speaker 1: empathy that's generated in fiction than there is in a
Speaker 1: TV show, Because a well done TV series you end
Speaker 1: up really pulling for people you never would call for.
Speaker 1: Right if it's done well, you become very sympathetic to everyone.
Speaker 1: But your point about being in the brain of and
Speaker 1: and the other point that you made that made me
Speaker 1: think was like any book I've ever loved and the
Speaker 1: movie of it, I've always thought the book was better.
Speaker 1: The one thing I do think, and this is kind
Speaker 1: of goes both directions. As I was thinking about, with fiction,
Speaker 1: you're generating all the visuals yourself, but you're also generating
Speaker 1: them at least in my case, almost entirely from things
Speaker 1: that I've seen, or even if somebody's describing something I
Speaker 1: haven't seen. It hovers around my memory in some way,
Speaker 1: which is both positive and negative, Whereas a TV show
Speaker 1: or a movie can show me things that my brain
Speaker 1: could never even reading it could see. So I think
Speaker 1: there are trade offs. I guess for me, for a
Speaker 1: long time, the gap was like, you know, a book
Speaker 1: was like a score of ninety and a TV show
Speaker 1: is like a score of fifteen. And I think the
Speaker 1: gap is closed in my book still win, but the
Speaker 1: gap has certainly closed. I love the Lord of the
Speaker 1: Rings movies. I mean they're amazing. Yeah, But some ways,
Speaker 1: watching that, as extraordinary as it is, that world building
Speaker 1: has lessened my experience of reading the book, because I
Speaker 1: remember reading the book and just going I can't even
Speaker 1: see the edges of this wald. Yeah, it's like it's
Speaker 1: gonna vastness, whereas the movie it's constant within a screen. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Some of that might also be about how strong people's
Speaker 1: visual imaginations are. I do not have a good one.
Speaker 1: Like my visual imagination that's just not one of my strengths.
Speaker 1: So it also makes me think a little bit when
Speaker 1: you're saying that about like the movie diminishing the books,
Speaker 1: Like it's the reason that when I was a ten
Speaker 1: year old, I thought music videos were like the cool thing,
Speaker 1: But as I got older, I was like, I do
Speaker 1: not want to see a music video because this piece
Speaker 1: of music means so much to me and it connotates
Speaker 1: something to me. I don't want anybody trampling on that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I like that. Okay, Well, you and I are at
Speaker 1: the end of time for the main conversation going to
Speaker 1: continue for a few minutes in the post show conversation
Speaker 1: because we did not really get to talk about crossing
Speaker 1: the threshold, So you and I'll do that in the
Speaker 1: post show conversation because I dragged this down a ludicrous
Speaker 1: fiction versus TV talking. Yeah, but I was monologuing a bit,
Speaker 1: so apologize if I'm not talking too much. No listeners.
Speaker 1: You can get access to this post show conversation other
Speaker 1: post show conversations, add free episodes, a special episode I
Speaker 1: do each week called Teaching Song and a Poem, and
Speaker 1: all kinds of other stuff by going to one you
Speaker 1: feed dot net slash join Michael, Thank you so much
Speaker 1: for coming on. We'll have links in the show notes
Speaker 1: to the book, and is there a website you want
Speaker 1: to point people to? Yeah, sure, like how to Begin
Speaker 1: is the website for the book. And then if you
Speaker 1: want more about me in general, MBS dot works is
Speaker 1: the website for that. Perfect, And again there'll be links
Speaker 1: in the show notes you can just click on through
Speaker 1: to those. All right, thank you, Michael, so much fun
Speaker 1: to have you on again. I'm really glad we got
Speaker 1: to make this happen. Yeah, it was a alike. Thank you.
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