SYSK TRENDING - A Different View of Success

What does it really mean to be successful? Most people would probably say it's about making more money, climbing the career ladder, earning recognition, or becoming well known. But what if we've been measuring success all wrong? After spending years traveling the country as host of Dirty Jobs, Mike Rowe met thousands of people whose work is essential but rarely celebrated. Welders, plumbers, linemen, mechanics, farmers, and countless others showed him that fulfillment, purpose, and success often have very little to do with prestige—and a lot to do with attitude, craftsmanship, and showing up when it matters. In this fascinating conversation, Mike challenges many of the assumptions we've come to accept about work, education, persistence, efficiency, and what it really takes to build a satisfying life. Even if you don't agree with all of his conclusions, his perspective is thoughtful, refreshing, and guaranteed to make you reconsider some deeply held beliefs. Mike Rowe is creator and longtime host of Dirty Jobs, founder of the mikeroweWORKS Foundation (www.mikeroweworks.com), host of the podcast The Way I Heard It (https://mikerowe.com/podcast/), and author of the bestselling book The Way I Heard It (https://amzn.to/34Dikog). PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS WAYFAIR: Ready to upgrade your home for way less? Head to ⁠⁠https://Wayfair.com⁠⁠ right now to shop all things home and get your space ready for less. RULA: Thousands of people are already using Rula to get affordable, high-quality therapy that’s actually covered by insurance. Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Rula.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to get started. QUINCE: Elevate your summer wardrobe. Go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Quince.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada, too! SHOPIFY: It's time to turn those "what ifs" into CHA CHING with Shopify Today! Sign up for your $1 per month trail and start selling today at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Shopify.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ INDEED: Get a $75 Sponsored Job credit to help get your job the premium status it deserves at ⁠https://Indeed.com/PODCAST⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Do you want to hear about visionaries creating a better world? People working in conservation, exploration, science and tech alongside storytellers imagining and creating a better future. I'm Alex Honnold, professional rock climber and founder of the Honnold Foundation, bringing you season six of Planet Visionaries. This season, I speak to guests like National Geographic photographer Tom Pechek and Anna Rattman, executive director of the Jane Goodall Institute, USA, in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. Watch Planet Visionaries on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:32Mike Carruthers?

  What does it actually mean to be successful? If you ask 10 people, you'll probably get 10 different answers. For some, it's money. For others, it's status, prestige, or recognition. But what if we've been looking at success a little too narrowly? What if some of the happiest, most fulfilled people define success in ways that rarely make the headlines? That's why today's SYSK trending topic is a different view of success. Today, we're talking about alternate ways to think about success with someone who's spent years meeting people from every walk of life. Mike Rowe has traveled the country highlighting jobs most people never think about.

• 1:15Mike Carruthers?

  And through those experiences, he's come away with some interesting and sometimes surprising ideas about work, fulfillment, and what really makes a successful life. It's a fascinating conversation, coming up right after this.

• 1:31Mike Carruthers?

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• 2:00Mike Carruthers?

  And shop.com is actually a really clever idea. It brings lots of different stores together in one place. So, instead of bouncing around from website to website, you can search across stores, find what you're looking for, and track your orders, all in one place. Clothes, electronics, gifts, things for the house, all kinds of stuff. And whether you win or not, it's worth knowing, but with a thousand chances to win a thousand dollars, I'd certainly take a look. Enter to win the $1 million Shop Cash giveaway from now until November 1st. Just go to shop.com. There are so many ways to win.

• 2:44Mike Carruthers?

  That's shop.com. Shopping designed around you. No purchase necessary. Restrictions apply. Official rules available at shop.com.

• 2:59Mike Carruthers?

  Did you ever watch the Discovery Channel TV show Dirty Jobs? It was fascinating to watch people do jobs that are dirty, gross, disgusting. And they even had people doing jobs you never even knew were jobs. It's just that somebody's got to do them. One of the things that show did was make its host, Mike Rowe, a pretty popular guy. In addition to Dirty Jobs, Mike also hosted the show Somebody's Got to Do It on CNN, and he has been a commercial spokesperson for Ford and other companies, because he has a great set of pipes. He also has the Mike Rowe Works Foundation, which he started.

• 3:40Mike Carruthers?

  That foundation champions blue collar jobs and the people who perform them. Mike is also the host of a podcast and author of a book, both titled The Way I Heard It. And he has some very sound insight and advice from the trenches for anybody who wants to work and get ahead in life. And that advice is a lot different than what you've probably heard before. Hi, Mike. Welcome to Something You Should Know.

• 4:06Speaker 02

  Mike, thanks for having me.

• 4:08Mike Carruthers?

  So despite the image I think a lot of people have of you, you didn't really grow up as a blue collar guy working in these blue collar jobs. That's not who you are. You kind of made your way into that world through your television show, but that's not how you got into the business. So, explain your story.

• 4:27Speaker 02

  Well, the micro version of the micro story goes like this. I was born in Baltimore, surrounded by tradesmen, growing up, persuaded and convinced I would follow in their footsteps, but realizing later in my teenage years, the handy gene was recessive. Got into entertainment, made a living for a few decades. In my early 40s, I decided that I'd like to try something different. So I hosted an episode of Evening Magazine from a sewer with a sewer inspector. Was essentially baptized in a most unfortunate fluid. Was prevented from doing my typical hosting job by roaches and rats and everything else you would expect to find down there.

• 5:11Speaker 02

  Dirty Jobs was born out of that segment. Ever since, I've been impersonating not a host, but a guest. That's where my career, such as it is, changed and took off. So for the last 15 years or so, I've been tapping the country on the shoulder and saying, hey, you should get a load of this guy, or you should meet her. Four or five different shows, all with different titles, all basically do the same thing.

• 5:40Mike Carruthers?

  So in your travels and all of the people that you've met and who have done all these different kinds of jobs that you've portrayed on your TV show, what's the big takeaway that you get that you think people could really appreciate?

• 5:55Speaker 02

  Well, the single biggest thing that happens when you stop impersonating an expert is you become humble in ways that you didn't even know you weren't. And I guess maybe the big lesson to come out of Dirty Jobs was a continual debunking of platitudes and bromides. So much of what passes for good advice these days winds up on photographs and pictures that get framed and hung on the walls in conference rooms where we get to read about the importance of things like persistence and teamwork and passion and all of those things. On Dirty Jobs, I learned there was a...

• 6:40Speaker 02

  A corollary, or a dirty truth, if you will, to just about every existing bromide that was out there. And the big one was, follow your passion. You know, we spend a lot of time today telling kids, in particular, the key to job satisfaction is to identify the thing they're passionate about, and then do whatever it takes to get that job. On Dirty Jobs, it was a very different philosophy. I met people who were passionate about their work, but weren't led by their passion. People who looked around, identified an opportunity, maybe a septic tank cleaner, for instance, and then worked hard to become good at what they did, and then expanded, and then found

• 7:24Speaker 02

  a way to be passionate about it. So, just one example, there are thousands of others, but in a very general way, Dirty Jobs gave me a chance to question, and maybe reconsider, a lot of what passes these days for conventional wisdom.

• 7:40Mike Carruthers?

  Well, I think that's so, so true, because the advice of follow your passion implies that, A, you have one, and B, it could be turned into a career, which, chances are, not true, and that people who are very successful, septic tank cleaners, or brake shop owners, or dry cleaners, probably don't lie in bed at night talking and dreaming about dry cleaning and septic cleaning, and yet they're successful at it. They're not passionate about it, they don't live it and breathe it and sleep it, but they're good at it.

• 8:13Speaker 02

  Right. Oftentimes, what happens when I suggest you shouldn't follow your passion, but rather bring it with you, is all people really hear is, well, you just want me to embrace some version of drudgery, or you don't want me to follow my dreams. And it's not really, it's not really that binary, you know, it's uh, the, the funny thing about Dirty Jobs was if, if you looked at the people we featured over ten years of shooting as a group, you would find a very passionate collection of people. You'd also find forty or fifty millionaires, unlikely looking millionaires, but nevertheless, you know, there's a lot of cognitive dissonance in the show. And the big reason for it, I

• 8:58Speaker 02

  think, is because they valued passion so much that they didn't allow passion to lead them. They simply put it in their pocket and said, look, I can be passionate about anything, but if I want to make a living, the first thing I have to do is figure out where the opportunities are, and then become competent, and then become highly skilled, and then figure out a way to love it. So it's not a question of living one way or the other, it's really just a question of, are you gonna take the uh, the well-worn path, the road less traveled, or the reverse commute?

• 9:33Mike Carruthers?

  Let's talk about efficiency, because we do seem to be in a love affair with efficiency, that we not only get things done, we want to get more things done, and then we want to get those things done faster so we can do even more things, and we want to be more and more efficient. What's your take?

• 9:50Speaker 02

  We look at technology as a kind of panacea, and I certainly think that technology is going to shape the future, there's no doubt about it. But the question becomes, is technology a symptom of an efficient society, or an effective one? And I'm not an expert on this, but I do believe there's a real difference between the ideas of effectiveness and efficiency. Huxley said, for instance, that the greatest threat to total freedom was total anarchy, but the second greatest threat was total efficiency.

• 10:34Speaker 02

  And if you look at the conversation happening today around artificial intelligence, you know, and then the robots are coming, you know, it's it's easy to understand why why efficiency can overreach. And if we're completely focused on being as efficient as possible, we sometimes get get over our skis. I think on Dirty Jobs, you met people who understood that there's really no extra credit. You're either effective or you're not. And if you're effective, if the thing you're doing is accomplishing your goals, you don't get the extra credit really for for going much beyond that. So it's a bit controversial.

• 11:17Speaker 02

  A lot of people have written a lot of books that take a different approach, but I'm still fascinated by history, the Luddite Rebellion, which showed us, I think, in just about every way, shape and form, that every time we panic over an existential threat like robots coming or like some new technology coming, we're always wrong. We're always wrong. And as long as we can focus more on the upside of remaining effective than efficient, then I think it's likely we'll be less anxious about a whole list of things we're not going to be able to control anyway.

• 11:56Mike Carruthers?

  And that is so right that we're always wrong. And we're always wrong in the wrong way. We're always it's always it's everything's going to be worse than than it turns out to be. It's never like people never say it's going to be great and then it turns out to be worse. People always say it's going to be worse and it turns out to be not so bad.

• 12:16Speaker 02

  That's right. You know, the bad news is we're almost always wrong. The good news is that's how you advance.

• 12:27Speaker 02

  You know, on a, on a personal level, the reason Dirty Jobs worked so well for me was because it was the first thing I ever did professionally where I wasn't evaluated on my ability to be correct. I was evaluated on my willingness to try. So as a, as a lab rat or a human guinea pig, I was able to manage expectations on television in a way that's very different than say David Attenborough, or Jane Goodall, or Jacques Cousteau, or any of the other myriad of experts who hang their entire reputations on the business of

• 13:07Speaker 02

  being correct. I hung mine on the business of failing good naturedly and then learning in the wake of whatever humiliation I was asked to endure, learning about how to do it better. And when you show the viewer that process, when they, when they see you try and fail, it's not nearly as bad as we're brought up to imagine. In fact, what is trying and failing but for Don Quixote and Sisyphus and a long list of literary figures who remind us that it's the journey, not the destination?

• 13:51Mike Carruthers?

  Well, that's very reassuring to know that, you know, failure isn't fatal. Mike Rowe is my guest. He was the host of the TV show Dirty Jobs and he now has a book and a podcast, both called The Way I Heard It.

• 14:05Speaker 03

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• 14:35Speaker 04

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• 15:01Speaker 04

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• 15:05Mike Carruthers?

  So, Mike, as we're discussing, failure may not be fatal, but, but a lot of times, people think it is, you know, and if you screw up on your job, you could lose your job, or you could get demoted, and that people go to great lengths to avoid failure, when sometimes, failure could be the best thing to ever happen to you.

• 15:24Speaker 02

  If you're in the business of telling stories, especially, I mean, life, of course, I agree with everything you just said, but in the business of telling stories, if you eliminate failure from the narrative, then you don't have a tale.

• 15:40Mike Carruthers?

  Right.

• 15:41Speaker 02

  You, you, you don't even have a fable. You have, you have nothing. It's just another story of how I did it. And the shelves are littered with people who are anxious to tell you how they did it. But if you dig into their stories, even their success stories are defined by their failures. So, I'm certainly not the first guy to come along and say, "Don't be afraid of failing." What I'm trying to say is, you have no hope of succeeding without it.

• 16:12Mike Carruthers?

  I know some of what you talk about, a lot of what you talk about, runs contrary to what we've been led to believe. A lot of the platitudes, as you say, on office walls, about teamwork and, and passion and perseverance and all this, that there is a different view, and you take that different view. And so, let's talk about that.

• 16:36Speaker 02

  Well, if you think about all of what passes for good advice, you can really just give me a topic, and I can give you the dirty jobs corollary to it. Teamwork, for instance. I mean, we're... We spend a lot of time talking about the importance of working as a team. And obviously, there are tons of examples where that makes perfect sense to understand and embrace. But it's so easy to go too far. And that's typically what we do. When we take a gem or a kernel of good advice, we we become slavish to it.

• 17:17Speaker 02

  And our current obsession with teamwork, I think, is another good example. If you take a close look at everybody on the team, you won't find any two people getting paid the same salary. You won't find any two people with the same basic talents. You'll find individuals. And those individuals, to a man, will have come from other teams. And most of them will wind up on still other teams. And there's something about, there's something about the mercenary that that I love. There's something about the freelancer and the jobber that I think is so uniquely American

• 17:58Speaker 02

  and something we were able to really plumb on Dirty Jobs. And I hate to lose that. You know, I hate to see people become so assimilated with the squad or the platoon or the regiment or the team that that they lose that sense of eating what they kill and understanding. For instance, that the mastery of a skill or a trade, something I talk about a lot, has benefits that go way beyond the paycheck. It's basic competency, you know? So to sum up, teamwork is great, but not at the expense of individuality. Efficiency is fine, but not at the expense of effectiveness.

• 18:41Speaker 02

  And passion is worth embracing, but not if you're going to follow it around and let it take you down a rabbit hole to the point where you wind up being one of those contestants on the early episodes of American Idol who learned at 22 years of age, not just that they couldn't sing, but learned that lesson on national television.

• 19:06Mike Carruthers?

  And that always fascinated me that they would get so angry as if they really didn't know that they couldn't sing, that they really believed that they could, that if now given this chance, they were going to become stars, when objectively, as a viewer, you could tell the person couldn't sing.

• 19:26Speaker 02

  As a viewer, yes, but as the individual, no. Look, Mike, remember, we're the clouds from which the snowflakes fell. And if you tell somebody, for the entirety of their youth, that the key to getting what you want is to simply want it real bad, and that if you're serious about becoming an American Idol, and you never quit, but put your head down and just follow that passion, well, then, yeah, that's going to lead to a young man or woman standing there in front of three judges and an audience of millions, demonstrating for everyone that they simply

• 20:09Speaker 02

  don't have the necessary talent, and they're never going to get it. Can they get better? Sure. Are they going to be an American Idol? No. They'd be better off focusing, probably, on being an American icon.

• 20:26Mike Carruthers?

  Well, that one thing you said about teamwork that I want to comment on and get you to comment back is this idea of teamwork that really seems to be everywhere now, that everybody's part of a team, to me, has always been kind of counter-human nature, that there is something in us that we have the need to accomplish something that's ours, not be part of something, but to be something.

• 20:55Speaker 02

  I think that... That's exactly it. The trick is the balance, you know, if you go too far toward the individualistic side of it, then you'll never assimilate and you'll never be a part of anything larger than yourself and you'll be viewed by and large as a loner or an eccentric or just a selfish dude. And so it's bad to go too far that way. If you go too far in the other direction, then I think, I think you're going to wind up like a lot of people today because what's the logical extension of a team that becomes too, too much of a

• 21:38Speaker 02

  team? I think we call them tribes, right?

• 21:41Mike Carruthers?

  Right, right, exactly.

• 21:42Speaker 02

  And once you're in a tribe, well, you know, you've got your own colors and you've got your own theme song, you've got your own customs. And so you're either, are you a friendly tribe or not? And what do you do with somebody who's not in your tribe? Do you welcome other, others? I, you know, it gets, if you go too far in either direction, then it starts to break down. So I think, I think companies and businesses and families and relationships and, and, and, and sports franchises, I think we all in some way, shape or form have to come to terms with where we are in that whole team individual thing.

• 22:27Speaker 02

  And I think, I think it changes and I think that change is okay. It's, it's fungible. Cal Ripken played for the same team for 20 years and it served him well and he became a Baltimore icon and a lot of other successful players did the exact opposite thing. So as much as we love the idea that there's a playbook for all of this stuff, I think part of what we have to do to stay sane is remind ourselves that there isn't. There is no playbook but for this giant compendium of evolving advice that applies in different

• 23:11Speaker 02

  degrees to different people. So you said something earlier that struck me. You used the expression cookie cutter.

• 23:21Speaker 02

  That really and truly is the enemy, I think, of everything you try and do on your podcast. And it's also the enemy of so much of what's happening today when it comes to education, for instance, telling an entire generation that the best path for the most people is a four-year degree. That's a cookie cutter approach to education. And that approach has left us with about one and a half trillion dollars of student loans on one side, and on the other side, over seven million jobs that don't require a four-year degree that employers are struggling to fill.

• 24:03Speaker 02

  So much of what happens comes from this idea that good advice is good for everybody in the same way. That's why the shelves are full of advice books, and that's why those platitudes and bromides wind up hanging on office walls and conference room walls. And that's why, that's why we're so enamored of them. I just saw one the other day that said, persistence, exclamation point. And it was a picture of a bunch of people in a, in a rowing shell, you know, working hard as a team, being persistent.

• 24:45Speaker 02

  And I'm like, what, what is inherently good about staying the course or being persistent? It only makes sense if you're going in the right direction. So be wary of advice. Be wary of taking it. Be wary of giving it and understand who might be listening.

• 25:07Mike Carruthers?

  Well, you certainly have a different and unique perspective that, well, it literally comes from being in the trenches with all those people doing all those dirty jobs all those years. And I appreciate you sharing it. Mike Rowe's been my guest. Mike was the host of the TV show Dirty Jobs on the Discovery Channel, and Somebody's Got to Do It on CNN. He is the founder of the Mike Rowe Works Foundation, and he has a book and podcast out, and both of them are titled, The Way I Heard It. There's a link to both of them in the show notes. Thanks for being on Something You Should Know, Mike.

• 25:41Speaker 02

  Sure thing.

• 25:42Mike Carruthers?

  And that wraps up this SYSK Trending episode. I'm Mike Herthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.