The Person You Become Is the Person You Practice | John R. Miles - EP 801

In this episode, John R. Miles reveals why lasting change isn't discovered in a single moment but built through the habits, attention, and daily actions that shape who you become.

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

• 0:01John R. Miles?

  Hey friends, what if your biggest problem isn't that you're not doing enough, but that you've spent too long proving that you are enough? You can be successful, needed, and surrounded by people and still feel completely unseen. That's the problem I explore in my new book, The Mattering Effect. I show you how we become hyper-visible for what we produce while quietly becoming invisible to ourselves, and introduce the matter framework to help you reclaim meaning, autonomy, trust, time, energy, and reciprocity. Stop auditioning for your worth, start living from it. The Mattering Effect is available for preorder now at matteringeffect.com. Coming up next on Passion Struck. For years, I thought flourishing was the place you finally arrive at.

• 0:43John R. Miles?

  Turns out, it's not a place, it's a motion you repeat. So, the question that actually matters, isn't what will finally make me feel alive, it's this: What am I willing to practice today with no guarantee it changes anything? Hey, it's your friend John, and welcome to Passion Struck. I'm so glad you're here. Whether you're a longtime listener, or someone who just discovered the show, thank you for pressing play today. Maybe you've felt the life you were supposed to want, but you've quietly wondered why it still doesn't feel like enough. If that's you, you're in the right place.

• 1:25John R. Miles?

  Every week, I sit down with the world's top scientists, researchers, and thinkers to uncover what it actually takes to build an intentional life that matters. Thanks for joining me, let's get into it.

• 1:43John R. Miles?

  Hey, it's your friend John, welcome back to episode 801 of Passion Struck. Over the past few weeks, we've been exploring what it really means to flourish. What becomes possible when we stop performing for a room we can't see, and start showing up for the one we're actually standing in? But there's a question underneath all of that we haven't asked directly. Every time I talk about flourishing, someone asks me some version of the same thing. "Okay, John, so how do I actually get there? What's the breakthrough? What's the moment where it clicks?" Here's what I've come to believe, and I'll spend the rest of this episode making the case for it: There is no moment where it clicks.

• 2:27John R. Miles?

  A flourishing life isn't discovered, it's practiced. Not a lightning bolt, not a single decision, not a retreat, a book, a psychedelic weekend, or a New Year's resolution that finally sticks. Those things can open a door, they cannot walk you through it every day for the rest of your life. Only practice does that. I want to spend the rest of this episode showing you what that actually looks like in an old story, in my own life, in the words of a monk-turned-entrepreneur, and in the hard science of how a habit actually gets built into a brain. Thank you for choosing Passion Struck, and for choosing me to be your host and guide

• 3:12John R. Miles?

  on your journey to creating an intentional life that matters. Now, let that journey begin.

• 3:23John R. Miles?

  There's an old story that comes out of the Zen tradition. You may have heard a version of it. A young man leaves home to study with a Zen master. He's driven by one desire, and it's a good one: Enlightenment. He wants to wake up, he wants to become whole. So, the master puts him to work. Chop wood, carry the water from the stream, sweep the floor of the monastery. Every day, the same labor. No lectures on the nature of consciousness, no secret teachings whispered in the dark, just wood and water and the broom.

• 4:04John R. Miles?

  Years pass this way, and then, the way these stories go, something breaks open in him. A moment of stillness so complete, it rearranges everything. He experiences the very thing he came for: Enlightenment. Overjoyed, he runs to find his teacher. "Master," he says, "now that I'm enlightened, what should I do?" The master looks at him for a long moment. "Chop wood," he says, "carry water." The student is confused. "But, master, I already do that." "Yes," the teacher says, "before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.

• 4:48John R. Miles?

  After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water." If that sounds too abstract, too philosophical, look at John Wooden. The greatest coach in college basketball history didn't open his first practice of the season talking about championships or a tactical playbook. He sat his players down, All-Americans, feature pros, on the locker room bench, and taught them how to put on their socks and tie their shoelaces without a single wrinkle in the fabric. Why? Because a wrinkle causes a blister.

• 5:28John R. Miles?

  A blister keeps a player off the floor, and a player off the floor loses you games in March.

• 5:36John R. Miles?

  Wooden won 10 NCAA championships in 12 years, and every single season, it started with socks. He understood something most of us fight our whole lives. Extraordinary outcomes are built out of ordinary, unglamorous fundamentals, repeated correctly every single day, long before the arena lights ever turn on. Nobody's cheering while you're smoothing out a sock. That's exactly the point.

• 6:09John R. Miles?

  I used to think this story was about humility. I don't think that anymore. I think it's the clearest correction I've ever heard to the biggest myth we carry about becoming a fully alive person. That somewhere out ahead of us is a finish line, and once we cross it, we graduate. We get to stop doing the daily unglamorous maintenance of being human, because now we've arrived. There is no finish line. There's just the wood and the water, and whether you show up for them today the way you did yesterday. What changes when you flourish isn't the task, it's the quality of attention you bring to it.

• 6:54John R. Miles?

  Same wood, same water, different person doing the carrying. That's the whole episode, honestly. Everything else I'm about to tell you is just proof of that one idea from a few different directions. Take a moment and let that sit with you. We're going to take a short break for our sponsors. While you listen, ask yourself, what's one thing in my life I've been waiting to feel ready for, that I could just start practicing badly today instead? When we come back, I want to get honest with you about a practice I almost quit. Not because it failed, but because it didn't feel like it was working. We'll be right back.

• 7:38John R. Miles?

  Thank you for supporting those who support the show.

• 7:47John R. Miles?

  You're listening to Passion Struck right here on the Passion Struck Network. Welcome back. If you're just joining us, we've been making the case that flourishing isn't a discovery, it's a practice. Chop wood, carry water, every single day, whether it feels transformative or not. About nine years ago, I read a book called The 5 a.m. Club by Robin Sharma. In it, he makes the case for the importance of setting a daily intention. Deciding out loud, before the day gets its hands on you, how you actually want it to go. It struck me enough that I decided to just start doing it. Every morning, out loud, an intention for the day.

• 8:29John R. Miles?

  Not a to-do list, not a goal, a verbal decision about the energy I wanted to bring into it before the day had any chance to talk me out of it.

• 8:41John R. Miles?

  For a long time, honestly, it felt like nothing. I'd say the words and then go get pulled into the same meanings, the same traffic, the same minor chaos as every other day. No lightning bolt, no moment where I felt the intention working. I remember thinking more than once, is this actually doing anything? Or am I just talking to my bathroom mirror? I almost stopped. It felt like a practice with no evidence behind it. But I kept going. And the reason I kept going wasn't some grand insight. It was something much older, something I'd already learned the hard way

• 9:26John R. Miles?

  years earlier as a runner. Anyone who's trained for a distance race knows that consistency doesn't show up as a straight line. You don't get faster the day after a hard workout. Some weeks you train exactly as hard as the week before, and you feel like you've gone backwards, but you keep showing up anyway. Because you already know from experience that the body doesn't lie about accumulated work. It just takes time to reveal it. I decided to trust that same law applied here. If consistency eventually shows up in your legs and your lungs,

• 10:08John R. Miles?

  I figured it had to eventually show up somewhere in the rest of a life, too. But here's what I didn't understand yet. I was waiting for proof before I'd commit to practice. That's backwards. The evidence doesn't show up before the repetition. It shows up after, sometimes long after. And usually so gradually, you can't point to the day it started being true. Because somewhere in the accumulation of nine years of those mornings, something did shift. Not any single day, the pattern of days. My days got more focused.

• 10:49John R. Miles?

  I noticed I was more optimistic, more driven to actually go after my goals. And just as importantly, more driven to serve the people around me instead of just getting through the day. Not perfectly, not every morning, but often enough and clearly enough that I couldn't call it a coincidence anymore. I hadn't discovered anything. I just kept saying the words, morning after morning, for nine years. Long after I stopped expecting them to do anything. Until one day, they quietly already had. I was rewiring my default state through repetition.

• 11:31John R. Miles?

  And that is exactly what a former Hindu monk helped me see with total clarity. A few years back, I sat down in episode 189 with a man named Don DePani. Before he became an entrepreneur and a sought-after speaker, author, and coach, he spent 10 years as a Hindu monk. Renunciate vows, a hut 10 feet by 10 feet, one blanket, one oil lamp, and the thing he kept coming back to over and over in our conversation wasn't some mystical insight about the universe. It was this: We are what we practice.

• 12:14John R. Miles?

  "Most people," he told me, "are practicing distraction all day long. Every time you reach for your phone mid-conversation, every time your attention scatters before it settles, you're not feeling at focus. You're becoming excellent at something else. You're practicing distraction and you're getting very good at it." Here's the part that reframed everything for me. Don DePani grew up struggling badly to concentrate. He was teased for it as a kid in a time and place with no name yet for what he was dealing with. It wasn't until he was in his mid-20s, a decade into monastic life,

• 12:55John R. Miles?

  that his own teacher finally taught him how to concentrate. Not motivated him, not inspired him, taught him like a skill, like learning to play piano. He puts it bluntly. "If a first-year engineering student has never been taught to solve a certain kind of problem and she can't solve it, we don't diagnose her with a disorder. We teach her the skill and then we have her practice it." Don DePani thinks that we do something very different and much crueler to kids who were simply never taught how to focus. Concentration isn't a trait you either have or don't.

• 13:40John R. Miles?

  It's a practice skill, the same as any other. And here's where it gets, I think, genuinely profound. In that same conversation, I told Don DePani about my friend and Naval Academy classmate Chris Cassidy, who went on to become a Navy SEAL, then a NASA astronaut, and later chief of the astronaut office. Chris has said that the most important thing he ever learned was presence. But he didn't learn it in a moment of clarity. He learned it at basic underwater demolition school training. BUDs, forcing himself to concentrate hard enough just to survive one five-minute stretch at a time. He carried that same trained focus into combat.

• 14:25John R. Miles?

  And years later, on an actual spacewalk, when a fellow astronaut's helmet started filling with water from a defect in the cooling system, a real emergency hundreds of miles up, he said he doesn't even remember the specific actions he took to help. His body just acted. Years of practice focus took over before conscious thought could. When I shared that story, Don DePani's response is the same thing that rewired how I think about presence. People love to say, "Be present, live in the moment." Like it's a switch you flip. He pushed back hard on that.

• 15:08John R. Miles?

  "You don't practice being present," he told me. "Presence is the byproduct of being able to focus. You practice focus, the actual repeated boring skill of keeping your attention on one thing until you choose to move it. And presence shows up as the result." Chris was never trying to be present in that emergency. He just spent years practicing the thing that makes presence automatic, which means the fully alive version of you isn't waiting on the other side of some breakthrough. It's built the same way that astronauts' instincts were built.

• 15:50John R. Miles?

  Repetition long before the moment that matters. At this point, you might be thinking, John, this is a nice idea. But is there real science behind practice creates the person? Or is this just a nice story? There is, and it comes from two researchers I've had the privilege of talking to at length on the show. Dr. Judd Brewer, an addiction psychiatrist and neuroscientist at Brown, and BJ Fogg, who runs the Behavior Design Lab at Stanford and is the author of Tiny Habits. Let's start with Brewer, because his work explains the mechanism underneath everything I've said so far. Every habit Brewer told me runs on the same three-part loop:

• 16:35John R. Miles?

  a trigger, a behavior, and a reward. That's true of the habits that hurt us, things like stress eating, doom scrolling, even the habit of worry itself, which he discovered functions exactly like an addiction. And it's true of the habits that could make us more alive. The loop doesn't care which direction you point it. Here's the finding that stuck with me most. Brewer's lab found that it takes as few as 10 to 15 repetitions of actually paying attention to a behavior, really noticing with curiosity what you get from it for the brain's reward value for that behavior to shift.

• 17:18John R. Miles?

  Not willpower, not white-knuckle discipline. Attention, repeated a small number of times, physically rewires what your brain finds rewarding. He had a patient who'd smoked for 40 years. Nearly 300,000 repetitions of that habit loop, deeply automatic. And the instruction that finally worked wasn't quit. It was pay attention. Notice what it actually tastes like. The habit didn't get willed away. It got outcompeted. Brewer calls the antidote to our worst habit loops curiosity.

• 17:59John R. Miles?

  Not forcing yourself to feel calm, but turning toward whatever's happening and asking, "Oh, what is this?" instead of, "Oh, no." And here's the line that connects straight back to our theme. He told me people learn to make curiosity itself the new habit. Not something you wait to fill in a crisis, something you drill on purpose, in a meeting, in a hard conversation, anywhere until it's just how you're built. Even curiosity, arguably the most alive, most awake state a person can be, is trained, practiced, not discovered.

• 18:43John R. Miles?

  Now, here's where BJ Fogg's work meets Brewer's from the opposite direction. Brewer showed us how repetition rewires the brain, mostly by accident, mostly around habits we didn't choose. Fogg has spent his career asking, "What if you did that on purpose?" His method is almost embarrassingly simple. Shrink the behavior down until it requires almost no motivation or willpower to do what he calls a tiny habit. And then immediately after you do it, you celebrate. At loud if you have to. Tell yourself out of nowhere, "Good for me." Fogg's lab ran this with older adults dealing with mild to moderate depression.

• 19:27John R. Miles?

  People simply reconnecting with something they used to enjoy in tiny doses and deliberately feeling the win each time. The clinician running the study, who'd spent decades prescribing medication for depression, told Fogg afterward that the results were at least as strong as what she had seen from the drugs. A tiny, repeated, deliberately celebrated action. Not a breakthrough, not an epiphany, performing on par with medication for depression.

• 20:03John R. Miles?

  Fog does offer one caution that I think belongs in this episode, right alongside everything else. He told me, "Practice is just a tool. Grit is just a tool. Tiny habits are just a tool." The harder question underneath all of it, he said, is this: To what end? What are you actually practicing your way toward? Chopping wood and carrying water only means something because of the life it's in service of. So, as you take any of this and start applying it, ask yourself that question honestly, before you ask which habit to build next. But notice what both of these researchers are pointing at, from

• 20:48John R. Miles?

  completely different ends of the same idea. Brewer shows you can't think your way out of who you've become. You have to practice your way out. Fog shows you can't think your way into becoming more alive. You practice your way in, tiny rep by tiny rep, celebration by celebration. Neither one of them is describing a discovery. They're both describing a practice. So, let's get back to where we started. A flourishing life isn't discovered, it's practiced. The man in that old story didn't get a different life once he woke up. He

• 21:28John R. Miles?

  got the same wood, the same water. What changed was invisible to anyone watching. The quality of attention he brought to carrying it. John Wooden won 10 championships, teaching grown men how to put on their socks. Not because socks matter, because he knew greatness never announces itself in advance. It just shows up disguised as whatever ordinary thing it is in front of you today. My friend Chris Cassidy didn't discover presence on a spacewalk 500 miles above the earth. He'd already built it, one practice rep at a time, back on the ground, in the

• 22:11John R. Miles?

  dark, in training, nobody was watching. And the patients in BJ Fogg's study didn't have a breakthrough that cured their depression. They had a tiny action, repeated and celebrated, until it built something a single insight never could. So, here's what I'll leave you with. Stop waiting for the moment it clicks. It's not coming, or if it does, it won't be the thing that changes your life. The practice is the thing that changes your life. But remember Fog's question, because it's the one that keeps the practice honest. To

• 22:51John R. Miles?

  what end? What's the wood you could chop today? Not for its own sake, but in service of who you're actually trying to become. What's the water you could carry? Not because you're finally ready, but simply because it's today. And today is when the practice happens. Here's one small way to put that into practice today. Pick one tiny version of the thing you've been waiting to feel ready for, and do it before you finish listening to this episode. Don't wait for motivation. Don't wait for clarity. Just chop the wood. And if today's episode gave you something worth carrying, share it with someone who needs

• 23:36John R. Miles?

  to hear that flourishing isn't a finish line, it's a daily practice. Personal recommendations are still the best way these conversations find new listeners. If you'd like to keep exploring these ideas, follow Passion Struck on Apple Podcast or Spotify. Subscribe to the Passion Struck YouTube channel and download this week's companion workbook through The Ignited Life on Substack. Everything you need is linked in today's show notes. That closes out our month on flourishing. We started by waking up from autopilot. We learned how to teach our nervous system that a new way of living is safe enough to repeat. We faced how our environment is quietly shaping who we become, and how there's no such thing

• 24:19John R. Miles?

  as private becoming. And today, we landed on the practice underneath all of it. A flourishing life isn't discovered, it's built, one rep of chopping wood and carrying water at a time. So, next week, we're going a layer deeper. If flourishing is something you practice, the obvious next question is, what's actually happening inside your brain when you do? That's the new series, Starting Monday: How Your Mind Learns, Changes, and Heals. All of August, we're going straight into the neuroscience that makes everything we talked about this month even possible. How your brain physically rewires itself around what you repeat, how old patterns get unlearned, and how healing actually happens at the level

• 25:04John R. Miles?

  of neurons and circuits, not just willpower. And we're kicking the series off with one of the most respected brain health experts in the world, Dr. Daniel Amen. Dr. Amen has spent decades studying brain imaging, and he's built his entire career around one radical idea. You're not stuck with the brain you have. You can change it. And when you change your brain, you change your life. If you've ever wondered whether your struggles with focus, mood, or self-control are really about willpower, or about what's actually happening inside your head, this is the conversation that reframes the whole question. You won't want to miss it.

• 25:44Speaker 01

  If I was an evil ruler, and I wanted to create mental illness, I have this thought experiment in my book, The End of Mental Illness. I'd create American society. Every commercial is online gambling, alcohol, fast food, pharmaceuticals. We are being brainwashed in such a bad way, and is stealing.

• 26:19John R. Miles?

  Until then, remember, the life you leave behind will always be shaped by the life you choose to practice today. I'm John Miles, and until next time, live passion struck.