Are You Living a Good Life? | James Patterson and Patrick Leddin

Most people hesitate before answering. This episode is about what to do with that hesitation. James Patterson https://www.jamespatterson.com/landing-page/james-patterson-home/ is the most popular storyteller of our time and has written more than 200 novels since 1976. Patrick Leddin https://patrickleddin.com/, PhD, is the author of the Wall Street Journal bestseller The 5‑Week Leadership Challenge: 35 Action Steps to Become the Leader You Were Meant to Be. https://www.amazon.com/Five-Week-Leadership-Challenge-Action-Become/dp/1400225302 In this episode we talk about: Why we're living in an "age of disruption" The five-step positive disruptor loop The one question to ask yourself when trying to identify your purpose And how disruption can improve your work, your relationships, and your family Get the 10% with Dan Harris app here https://app.danharris.com/membership Sign up for Dan's free newsletter here http://www.danharris.com Follow Dan on social: Instagram https://bit.ly/3tGigG5, TikTok https://bit.ly/3FOA84J Subscribe to our YouTube Channel https://bit.ly/3FybRzD Additional Resources: Disrupt Everything—and Win: Take Control of Your Future https://www.amazon.com/Disrupt-Everything_and-Win-Control-Future/dp/031659394X Judge Stone: A Novel https://www.amazon.com/Judge-Stone-Novel-James-Patterson/dp/0316579831 (with Viola Davis) Join Dan and Emmy Award-winning journalist Allison Gilbert at 92NY on May 17th for a live conversation about how mindfulness can deepen connection and combat loneliness, available in person and via streaming. Register here. https://www.92ny.org/event/dan-harris-with-allison-gilbert Join Dan, Sebene Selassie, and Jeff Warren for Meditation Party, a 3-day immersive retreat at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, NY, October 16–18. Grab your in-person spot here https://www.eomega.org/workshops/meditation-party, or sign up to livestream here https://www.eomega.org/workshops/meditation-party-livestream! To advertise on the show, contact [email protected] or visit https://advertising.libsyn.com/10HappierwithDanHarris This episode is sponsored by: BetterHelp — Online therapy, matched to your needs. Get 10% off your first month at https://www.betterhelp.com/happier Wix — Build a fully functional website with AI in minutes at https://www.wix.com/harmony

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

• 0:04Dan Harris?

  It's the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

• 0:18Dan Harris?

  Hey, gang. Today, I want to get you to chew on some provocative questions. Here's the first one. Are you leading a good life? Here's another one. Does any part of your life need a shakeup right now? Are you in a rut in some area of your life? One more question. In a world of constant change and non-negotiable disruption, how do you go from fearing impermanence to harnessing it at work and beyond? I have two guests today. The first is James Patterson, massively popular novelist, the creator of such characters as Alex Cross, and the holder of the Guinness World Record for the most number-one New York Times Bestsellers by a Single Author, 67. The second guest is Patrick Leddin, PhD, formerly of Vanderbilt University,

• 1:02Dan Harris?

  where he served as Director of the Program of Business Studies. Together, James and Patrick have written a new book called Disrupt Everything and Win. In this conversation, we talk about why we're living in an age of disruption, the five steps for handling disruption, what Jim and Patrick call the Positive Disruptor Loop, the one question to ask yourself when you're trying to identify your purpose, and much more. Quick note that if you are having any trouble dealing with all of the disruptions of the Trump era, there's an app for that, MyApp. It's called 10% with Dan Harris. And our thesis is that taking care of your own mind is not self-indulgent, even though we're in the midst of a bunch of emergencies right now. In fact, training your mind is a kind of community service,

• 1:47Dan Harris?

  because it allows you to respond to all the problems in the world and in your own life more effectively. If you sign up, you'll get guided meditations and courses from some of the world's greatest teachers. You'll get weekly live meditation and Q&A sessions, and access to this podcast with no ads. Also, if you want to meditate with me in person, I've got a couple of IRL events coming up. On May 17th, I'll be at the 92nd Street Y in New York City. I'll guide a meditation and take your questions. And then on October 16th through 18th, I'll be doing my annual meditation party retreat along with my co-conspirators and friends, Sabine Selassie and Jeff Warren. It's a weekend thing at the Omega Institute in upstate New York. It's really fun, lots of meditation, but also lots of Q and A and socializing.

• 2:32Dan Harris?

  It's awesome. Links for both events are in the show notes. All right, we'll be back with James Patterson and Patrick Ludden right after this.

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• 3:41Dan Harris?

  James Patterson and Patrick Ludden, welcome to the show.

• 3:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, thank you. Thanks for inviting us. Yeah, glad to be here.

• 3:48Dan Harris?

  Thanks for having us. It's a pleasure. James, let me start with you. How do we understand the word disruption?

• 3:55Speaker 03

  We understand it because this is an, it's kind of an age of disruption. I've never seen anything like it in my life. And there are obviously two kinds, very positive disruptions, which is why I've tried to live my life, positive disruption after one after the other, and then negative disruptions, which kind of every morning we wake up now and there's a negative disruption, something we feel, oh my God, terrorists, oh my God, whatever. I don't want to get political on it, but just a lot of things that happen. What Patrick and I, what our book is about, what disrupts everything and what it's about is primarily dealing with positive disruption to making the most of those and minimizing the negative.

• 4:32Dan Harris?

  Let me see if I'm understanding this correctly. So we, and I, come at everything from a Buddhist standpoint, and Buddhism, change is the fundamental reality. That's the first step in sort of understanding the world, your inner world and your outer world. So if I understand correctly, what you're saying is change is a non-negotiable fact. We're in an era of increasingly rapid and destabilizing change. We may not like it.

• 4:59Speaker 03

  Could be stabilizing.

• 5:01Dan Harris?

  Could be stabilizing, meaning we can harness this change to benefit our own stabilization?

• 5:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:08Dan Harris?

  Patrick, how's all this sounding for you? Is this on track with how you're understanding?

• 5:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, and especially with that point you made about change being a constant. I mean, there's a few constants we can kind of count on in life, Dan. Change, choice, that's another one we have as well. But change is a constant, and we talk about the idea that the status quo can be a very deceptive devil for people. They think that they get things just the way they want them and they want to keep them that way, or they're yearning for what used to be. But those things change, they move on. And what we're saying is that in these moments when disruption or change causes you to stop in your tracks for a moment, maybe instead of saying like, this is blowing up things the way I had them, I had them just the way I wanted to, maybe you could say, this is fertile ground for something new and different.

• 5:54Dan Harris?

  We're going to talk about the how of positive disruption in a moment, but let's just say on a high level, and I'd be curious to hear from both of you about how disruption has showed up in each of your lives. James, you referenced that you've tried to make disruption a practice, and I think in the book, you talk about a moment of clarity you had several decades ago on the New Jersey Turnpike. Do you mind telling us about that?

• 6:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, my first career, I was in advertising. I rose up at J. Walter Thompson, which definitely was the largest advertising agency in the world. And everything I did there was some reaction to disruption. The way I got in the place, the normal way was you would put together a book, a portfolio of advertising. I didn't know anything about it. I'd never taken any advertising courses or marketing courses. So I put together a portfolio and I brought it into them. And a week later, I brought in a second portfolio, and the week after that, I brought in a third portfolio. And that just disrupted the process. They'd never had seen that particular thing before, and that impressed them. So that was

• 6:59Speaker 03

  a disruption. At one point, I started running, I was still pretty young, but I was running their New York office. They had some good offices, New York wasn't one of them. And nobody wanted to go work there at that point. And I ran an ad in the New York Times, and the headline was right, if you want work. And then there were eight questions. One of them was, here are the ingredients on a can of beans, vinegar, water, whatever, salt, make them sound delicious. One of them was, sell a telephone service to Trappist monks. What I was looking for were, one, people who could write, but more important, people

• 7:37Speaker 03

  who could solve problems. I only ran it once, one time. I wound up hiring almost 50 copywriters over the next three or four years, just with that test. You could immediately tell whether somebody could write and whether they could solve problems. So that was a disruption. You mentioned on the Jersey Turnpike, I was at the CEO of Thompson North America when I was thirty seven or thirty eight. But I always, writing novels is what I loved to do. And I was writing novels at that point. And it was a Sunday, it was a beautiful day. I was down at Jersey Shore and I had to go into New York to work at Thompson on Sunday. And I'm driving in and the traffic in that direction was, it was like going at ten miles an hour. It was just unbelievable.

• 8:21Speaker 03

  On the other side of the bike, about every ten seconds, a car went past, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh. And after about an hour of this, it occurred to me, I was going into this place to work that I didn't want to be at. I loved writing books and was starting to get successful about it. My life is going in the wrong direction. I needed to be on the other side of the highway. I needed to be going in the direction of those cars that were going at a nice speed and heading to the sunshine. And soon after that, I told the people at Thompson that, you know, I would give them time, but I was leaving that business. And that was a very positive disruption for me.

• 9:05Dan Harris?

  I love all of those stories. And for you, Patrick, how has disruption shown up in your life?

• 9:11Speaker 04

  Well, I think most specifically for our conversation today. So Jim shows up in my class, James Patterson shows up in my class, I was teaching at Vanderbilt University, which I was pretty settled, honestly, Dan. I was been there for twelve years and ran the department for the university and I was teaching this class. And James came in as a guest speaker and he started off by asking the students a question, are you living a good life? And then he kind of gave it a pause, like let the beat hit. And he said, I hope you are. Here's how I went about living my good life. And he told a bit of the story he just told there. And as I was listening to him that day, I thought, this is really an interesting conversation about how do we deal with the curveballs in life and maybe choose to go in a new direction. And that caused me to make some choices that

• 9:55Speaker 04

  I disrupted myself. I'm no longer teaching at the university. I spent a few years researching it at the university and then we launched this book and off I went. But that was a change I didn't see coming initially. But that disruptive moment of him asking the students that question caused me to do the same thing in my own mind.

• 10:12Speaker 03

  And the talk that I gave, it was called The Power of Disruption. And I went through the various things in my business life and then the disruptions in terms of my publishing career. And one of the things I said to the kids that morning was that for some of you, you've been on a treadmill to get on another treadmill to get on another treadmill. And maybe you like that, but if you don't, maybe you need to disrupt your life. Maybe you shouldn't be here taking these courses and et cetera.

• 10:42Dan Harris?

  So the book is really detailed in terms of how to disrupt your life. And if I understand it correctly, the first key step is to identify your fire inside.

• 10:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 10:55Dan Harris?

  Patrick, maybe I'll start with you. What do you mean by that?

• 10:58Speaker 04

  What you mean by that is the idea that inside all of us, and it could be inside yourself individually, but it could be inside your family or inside your team at work. But there is a fire inside of us. We'll call it your why. Why are you here? What are you trying to achieve? And we talk about the fire inside because we use a fire analogy, Dan, for the entire book. But ultimately, for us, as we articulate it in the book, it's what are you passionate about? What are you talented at? And where's a gap in the world that you might be able to help close? What's your inner voice telling you you should do? And when you get clear on those things, then you can start to look at disruptions, maybe not as something that's blowing everything up, but as something that might be fuel that you can throw on that fire.

• 11:38Dan Harris?

  So how do you do that? This is like the fundamental question so many of us deal with. And not only once in our late teens or twenties, you know, what do you want to do when you grow up? But I think throughout our lives, we wrestle like, what should we be doing with our lives? What are your thoughts about how to run that process?

• 11:56Speaker 04

  Well, I would say, first of all, we don't spend a lot of time in this particular book talking about how to do that. There are other tools that you can use, although we do provide some tools and insight to help you do it. But ultimately, what we're saying is that you have to spend some time kind of getting to know yourself and thinking about the value you bring to the world. Jim, you say a really nice thing about what can I do most beautifully? And I think that's a really great question to consider.

• 12:18Speaker 03

  This isn't my language, and I don't know where it comes from. And I think it's more useful for people in their twenties or in college than it is for me at my age. But the language is, my time here is short. What can I do most beautifully? Which I think is really great in terms of clarity and focus and motivation. What can I do most beautifully? And that's going to depend on, you know, person to person.

• 12:41Dan Harris?

  That question can do a lot of work for you and you can do a lot of work with that question.

• 12:46Speaker 03

  And you know, another piece of it, this obviously sounds a little simplistic, but most of the things that we do that are worthwhile are simplistic. It's that first step in terms of the how. And it's getting people ready to take the first step and then taking the first step and then taking the second step. And for some people, the changes or disruptions in their lives might not be that complicated, might be fairly simple. In some places, it's going to be step after step after step. Mel Robbins, she heard the first book. She's a very famous podcaster and book writer. She talks about how she and her husband started a business that didn't work and she got very depressed after that and was having trouble getting out of bed. And I don't know, she was watching a rocket take off somewhere 10, nine, eight, seven,

• 13:31Speaker 03

  you know? And she came up with this very simple thing, turned it into a book, which was five, four, three, two, one, get out of bed. Five, four, three, two, one. Make the call for the job interviews. Five, four, three, two, one, you know, whatever. It motivated her to keep taking that first step, which is really important for people because they're caught in a rut or they're fearful or they don't have confidence in themselves. It's very hard for a lot of people to take the first step.

• 13:59Dan Harris?

  I think that's very true. Getting unstuck.

• 14:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, getting unstuck. Yeah, that's a book.

• 14:06Dan Harris?

  You want to do it together?

• 14:07Speaker 03

  Uh, maybe.

• 14:10Dan Harris?

  Okay. So Patrick, I'll send it back to you. You referenced one of these, but another key aspect of the book is to understand four fundamental facts. The first of which, and again, this is the one you referenced, the status quo is a deceptive little devil. Can you talk about that and any of the other four fundamental facts that we really need to understand?

• 14:29Speaker 04

  Happy to. Yes, so there's four of them. I mentioned one of them earlier, as you said, Dan. Status quo is a deceptive little devil, that things are going to change. We talked about that a bit earlier. The second one is that it's okay that things are going to change because you're wired to handle this. And what we're talking about here is the art, you're wired to disrupt. Now, it's kind of an interesting thought because our brains like consistency and the ability to not burn off too many calories. It's kind of a thing that's grown through evolution over time. But we also have these brains that are incredibly creative, because we can think up new things and we can regulate how we use our time. And those are really amazing things that no other animal on planet Earth can do. We're also wired because of our own experiences. We've all had our ups

• 15:10Speaker 04

  and downs in life, and those down moments are usually followed by up moments. So we have the ability to say, okay, I got through that. I can get through this. And the third thing is that we have resources around us. We have friends and family, and we even have technology at our fingertips, as disruptive as that can be sometimes, can be a great resource. So we're wired with these things to kind of handle the fact that things are going to change. The third fundamental fact is that relationships really matter, Dan. There are headwinds and tailwinds in our lives. We have some relationships that are like, you're out for a jog, and they're behind you, pushing you along. And you have other ones that are blowing right in your face. And what we say is that you have to really take time to think about the relationships in your life, and are they advancing you forward? Are you advancing them forward? Are they holding you back? Are there some

• 15:53Speaker 04

  relationships that need to be disrupted in positive ways? And then the fourth one is that your time here is finite. Make it count in ways that matter. So our time on this podcast, our time on this planet are finite. Are we using them in really smart and great ways? Those are the fundamental facts that we tap into. We want people to recognize they're operating with these facts in place.

• 16:14Speaker 03

  And starting with when I went down and spoke in Patrick's class, and that first question was, are you living a good life? That's what this is about, helping people to lead a better life. I don't need the money with the lecture. I wasn't getting paid for that. But I was interested in getting these kids to think about their lives. Were they satisfied with where they were going, the direction, etc.? You know, I've been through a lot of things. Some of these things that I've been through, people might find helpful.

• 16:41Dan Harris?

  Absolutely. Just getting back to like figuring out your direction, your fire. One of the things you do, I believe, recommend in the book is that we all craft a mission statement.

• 16:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:55Dan Harris?

  How do we go about doing something like that?

• 16:58Speaker 04

  Well, we do give some advice in the book and it just to put it in perspective. And I say like, we don't spend a lot of time on the fire inside as far as helping you define it. Of the 30 some chapters in the book, the first chapter is really talking about this fire inside. The rest of it is talking about the disruptions that are going to be coming your way while you're trying to live this out. Part of that is because there's a lot of great stuff already written on helping people think through the purpose in themselves. Sometimes people will come to the book and be like, yeah, I already have this kind of defined. I appreciate you helping me remember to put it back on the front burner so I can look at it. Other people might need a little bit more work and we try to provide them some tools. But to answer your question specifically, it really falls back to those three areas. So if you really get clear on what are you passionate about, what gets you excited? Secondly is what do people come to you and they say, you're really good at this, Dan?

• 17:40Speaker 04

  You're really great at podcasting or every time we need something, we come to you. What are you talented at? Not just good at, but great at. James is great at writing books. And then thirdly, listening to your inner voice or saying what's needed in the world. If you get clear on those three things, you can start to craft a statement that says, here's why I'm here. Here's my mission, what I'm trying to do in life. And there's a tool in the back that helps people to do that. But ultimately, it's a very introspective, individual activity. For me to do it, quite frankly, I had thought a lot about my personal purpose many years ago. And it took me months to just craft that and think it through. Other people might just kind of know it intuitively.

• 18:19Speaker 03

  I'm kind of obsessed with mission statements. I think they're really, really useful for any company. It's interesting because almost any industry, almost any company you can think of, they need disruptions. You know, I was on CNN the other day with Caitlin Collins. And one, I talked about her life and the positive disruption she was making right now, where she is the White House correspondent for CNN. She does that all day. At six or 6:30, she gets out of that job. By nine o'clock, she's doing The Source. And that's an incredible disruption to her life for good or for, I don't know, hopefully it's working for her private life as well. But all of the CNNs and MSNBCs, now MSNBC Now, or whatever it

• 19:04Speaker 03

  is, they all need to disrupt drastically. All of the TV networks, now the average age of people watching network television is in the mid 60s. They need to disrupt. The movie studios are all, you know, having trouble. They need to disrupt. Pretty much any company you can look at, they need to disrupt. That's why we do something with Franklin Covey in terms of taking this program out to companies. And almost every company they go to, they need to disrupt, and we can help them. We can help your team at a company to move forward. We can help you as an individual, the program can. It's hard to think of a company that doesn't need to disrupt. That's just a period we're going through. And also, we try to do it to help people cut the stress in their lives, which

• 19:47Speaker 03

  is, I think, also important in terms of, you know, leading a reasonably good life.

• 19:52Dan Harris?

  I would imagine that cutting the stress in your life can allow you to be more creative and disruptive.

• 19:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, it can do that. It'll also make you saner. People drastically need to cut the stress in their life. So much stress out there. My God, it's a tough period.

• 20:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, Jim and I are out talking to audiences sometimes, and he'll ask them the question, I live in a good life, that question. And you'll get a lot of things, James, like, um, I'm getting by. I'm hanging in there.

• 20:18Speaker 03

  I don't know, Dan, but, you know, how many times, hanging in?

• 20:21Dan Harris?

  Yeah.

• 20:22Speaker 03

  Hanging in. That's not the ideal situation. Hanging in, I'm hanging, hanging from a thread.

• 20:28Dan Harris?

  I was talking about this last night with a friend. We're taking a walk after dinner, and this may be specific to the time in life in which I find myself. And Patrick, I'm guessing we're around the same age, but I think this is really true for everybody. But it feels acute for me right now, which is, any day I spend at age 54 tied up in unnecessary stress about my career is a huge waste of time, given how finite life is.

• 20:57Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 20:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, we're close. I got you by a few years. But yeah, we're close on that. And I feel the same way.

• 21:03Speaker 03

  Me too.

• 21:07Dan Harris?

  Coming up, James and Patrick talk about the five steps for handling disruption. It's what they call the positive disruptor loop.

• 21:19Speaker 05

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• 22:22Dan Harris?

  As I understand it, the central idea in the book, and you'll, Patrick, I'll start with you on this, you'll push back if I'm overstating the centrality, but the central idea is this positive disruptor loop, I think, and it consists of at least five factors: disrupt, discern, behave, achieve, and refine. Am I right about the centrality? And either way, can you just say a little bit more about the loop?

• 22:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, first of all, you're right. It is the central model, if you will, Dan, that we use in the book. And what it is, is in the process of studying these positive disruptors, you come out of the classroom, where James talked to my students, then started a research project for a few years at Vanderbilt, where he had a chance to interview hundreds of people to get their story. And I jokingly say, and it's true, really, they're unsung heroes to household names. There's people, everybody knows their name when they hear it, and there's other people you've never heard of before, but we captured their story because they did some really interesting things. And ultimately, we stepped back then and said, okay, what's the pattern? What do they typically? Do. And what they tend to do is there's this disruptive moment that happens and it could be something that just stops them in their tracks like a quick conversation or a time on the turnpike in Jersey where the traffic's going the other direction. It could be a huge

• 23:28Speaker 04

  new project or an opportunity to move to another city or all sorts of things, a conversation with your doctor about the results of your test, whatever it might be. But this disruption happens, and I think we're all the disrupted, but then some of us choose to be disruptors. Some of us choose to use that as a catalyst. And what we found is the most effective people, the thing they do when the disruption hits is they don't just react, they step back and they discern. So the first step is to discern and say, okay, this thing happened. So what? What could I do? What's the opportunity in here that I might be able to take advantage of? Or what role should I take on? And we give some roles and examples of that. And then the second step then says, okay, now if you're going to do that, if you're going to take on that role, what strengths do you

• 24:11Speaker 04

  have? What things do you have that you can bring to the table? And we had a chance in the interviews to call out 16 positive disruptor behaviors. And the nice news is we all have some of them, and nobody has all of them nailed. And there's no perfect combination. We all bring stuff to the table. So what do you bring to the table? And the next step then is to achieve. Okay, what can you do? And disruption, as we talk about in the book, it starts with self first. This is an inside out exercise. We disrupt ourselves. Jim disrupted himself that day on the Jersey Turnpike and decided to go a new direction. And then from there, you might disrupt relationships, you might disrupt your family, you might disrupt your team, or your organization, or your industry, or society. And we give different examples of that. And then the next

• 24:51Speaker 04

  step or the last step is refine. And refine is just about, after you do something, don't just go on to doing the next thing, but step back first and say, okay, what did I learn from this? What went well? What can we do better? Et cetera. And we actually interviewed a couple of retired four-star generals from the military to ask them, why is the military so good at these after-action reviews, Dan? When they finish a training exercise or a real-world exercise, they're kind of brutally honest about what went well and what could we have done better. And we were like, why do you do that so well? And the answer seems pretty straightforward. It's like, well, because we have life or limb at risk here. But remember that fourth fundamental fact, your time here is finite. Make it count in ways that matter. We also have a lot at risk. So how do we make sure that we learn from it and move forward?

• 25:36Speaker 04

  And our argument would be that if you follow that loop over and over and over, that's how resilience over time is built. It's not built by going into a classroom for two hours and saying, okay, you're going to come out of there more resilient. It's built by learning and trying and testing and leaning into your strengths and gaining results and then getting over an obstacle and then doing it again and again and again and all of a sudden something that knocked you down five years ago, you just step over that so easily.

• 26:01Speaker 03

  In there, you mentioned family and family is very important in this book and overlooked in most business books. How does the family deal in that decision making when one of the parents has to look for a new job or has to consider working harder or working less or whatever it is? And how does the family get involved in that? Or your partner, whatever, your friends that are very important to you and bringing them into the process. Most business books don't deal with that, but that's an important thing for most people and becoming more and more important, which I think is a good thing.

• 26:32Dan Harris?

  Yeah, I completely agree with you on that. So let's spend some more time on the different aspects of this disruptor loop, given its importance for your work. So again, disrupt, discern, behave, achieve and refine. Disrupt, I think, is self-explanatory or we've already explained it, which is that changes are going to happen and you either are, it's happening to you or you're making them happen.

• 26:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, to put a fine point on it, Dan, I would just say it can be small. It can be big. It can be unique. It can be ubiquitous. But if it stops you in your tracks and causes you to pause and maybe opens up a door for something new and different, it's probably something worth labeling as disruption at that moment.

• 27:10Dan Harris?

  Well said. So the second one is discern and an under discern, you've got these five specific roles. Patrick, you made a reference to them, but you didn't list them, but I'll list them. Trailblazer, fire chief, firefighter, torchbearer and tinder gatherer. James, maybe you could walk us through, just remind us of what the discern part of the loop is and what these.

• 27:31Speaker 03

  No, Patrick has to do all of that. He's the trailblazer guy and I'm the storyteller.

• 27:39Speaker 03

  And one of the things in the book is, I mean, there are, for every one of these, these things that we talk about, there's a story which helps to illustrate it because we both feel, me even more, that stories are so essential in terms of people understanding, paying attention. I went from being a poor public speaker to being pretty good when I just started telling stories. I'd just tell one story after another and people listen. So that really helps and it also makes the book much more readable. A lot of business books are pretty tough to read. This one, we have the story and the stories are, you know, they're, I think they're pretty fascinating. One of Patrick's favorite is the car wash.

• 28:17Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a great story. I'll tell the story and then I'll tell you about the five roles, Dan. So there's one person we interviewed in the process, which was a guy named Tom DiErie. And Tom DiErie lives down in Southern Florida, just kind of north of Miami. And he tells us this story as we're interviewing him about how when he was 22 years old, he's finishing up college and he kind of thinks he knows what he wants to do in life. And he's putting out his resumes to the big consulting firms and plans to live in Manhattan. But at the same time, he has a younger brother who's 20, so a couple of years younger. And he's on the autism spectrum. His name is Andrew. And Tom goes home at the Thanksgiving holiday and he's watching his brother and interacting with his father and talking about it. His father expressed some concerns about what's Andrew going to do in his life.

• 29:02Speaker 04

  So Tom goes to Andrew's school and after a week of his school, seeing what Andrew's learning, what he's going to be able to do, Tom's disrupted. In that moment, he's like, you know what? I'm not going to pursue going to work in consulting. What's more important to me is family and my brother. I'm going to figure out how to do something with my brother. You fast forward a year or so, they open up a car wash. Tom's like, I know nothing about car washes. I know nothing about leading people with autism, but we're leaning into hiring people with autism and giving them jobs. You fast forward to today, they have three car washes in South Florida. They have 100 employees, 90 of them are on the autism spectrum. They're more profitable and more productive than other car washes. And we just lay out how, that's a nice, easy, you know, kind of buttoned up, perfect story, but it was not easy.

• 29:45Speaker 04

  There's lots of little steps and equipment breaking and Tom not knowing how to fix the equipment. Or employees at filling the car isn't detailed quite enough yet. They want to keep going at it. Him having to encourage them to stop at that moment, but also just how Tom's brother found a place in the world and Tom's brother, Andrew, talks about, we have him on film where he talks about, my name's Andrew Diary. This is where I work and it's a great place and I have lots of friends here. And it's just a really powerful story about that moment, that conversation at the dinner table at Thanksgiving that Tom could have said, yeah, I'm worried about Andrew too, and I'm going to go pursue this job anyway in Manhattan, which could be perfectly fine. That could have been the choice he made. It's not a judgment of that, but it's a judgment where he says, but in his case, his judgment was, that's not fulfilling to me. That's not what I feel like I'm here to do. So that's a great story.

• 30:31Speaker 03

  And also the stories, there are a couple of purposes. One, to help people understand better what we're trying to get through to them and they also inspire.

• 30:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 30:39Speaker 03

  Which is really important. People go, I can step forward. I can do some things. I can be better at my job, et cetera. I'm sorry, Patrick, though you were gonna.

• 30:46Speaker 04

  No, no, no, no, no, you're great. I'm going to go back to what you were just saying there. Every story is not going to resonate perfectly with everybody and that's okay. Some stories you might read it and go, this one's not clicking with me, then just keep moving. And some things you got nailed down and just keep moving. And the one thing we, Jim says really nicely is that this isn't a one size fits all book from the fact of like, you have to do all of these things and you have to do what all of these people did. That's not what we're saying, but you might find something that moves you along. There's five roles coming from the university side. It's like, it's a perfect two by two. So if people envision there's a two by two block, so four blocks, four quadrants. And the quadrants, the two at the top are going toward change and the two at the bottom are going toward stability.

• 31:29Speaker 04

  And then the two on the left are going toward individual, moving out individually. And the two on right are going out collectively. Okay. So we have these four blocks. So the top left then would be moving toward change individually. And we call that person a trailblazer. So this is like the quintessential startup person who gets an idea and goes and starts a business. You can see that like they're moving toward change. They quit their job. They move cities. They do whatever and off they go. And we talk about a person in the book who does just that, a lady named Josie Natori, who came from the Philippines back in the 19 Sixties was the youngest female vice president at any firm on Wall Street in the seventies and quit it to start Notori, which has been around for about 50 years and they make pajamas and undergarments and things like that. So she's a trailblazer.

• 32:11Speaker 04

  But you don't have to quit your job to be a trailblazer. You might be the employee who decides, hey, I'm going to learn about this AI thing, or I'm going to be the employee who hears customer issues three times. I decide I'm going to figure out what the problem is there. So you can lead out and trailblaze.

• 32:25Speaker 03

  More and more companies are, they want trailblazers, not troublemakers, trailblazers, people that are bringing positive energy and ideas. Some companies unfortunately do not encourage that, but a lot of companies now more than ever do, they want trailblazers.

• 32:38Speaker 04

  Exactly. And then the other side of the moving toward changes is moving toward change with other people, kind of creating a movement and that's a torchbearer. You might start as a trailblazer and then you move over to be a torchbearer and you bring other people along with you. Once you figure something out or dig into it. So that's moving toward change. The lower part is moving towards stability and this kind of throws people for a loop. When they pick up the book, they think it's called disrupt everything. Notice it's not called change everything. Change everything would suggest like turn everything over. What we're saying is you need to be open to the disruptions that are going on and then make a choice in that moment. Sometimes you might move toward change. Sometimes you might move towards stability.

• 33:16Speaker 04

  I might double down on something I'm already doing and we call those people firefighters and fire chiefs, individual movementist firefighter and collective movementist fire chief. One example, they're not in the book, but they ran our research around it and we were talking to them is Dillard's department store. Was an example. I don't know if you know them, Dan, but your listeners might not, but it's a 80 some year old, family owned business, department stores kind of compete with the Nordstroms and the Macy's of the world. And just like everybody else being in the retail space during COVID or leading up to COVID, even with technology started putting their stores online. And people were shopping online and there was some degree of cannibalization between people buying stuff in the store and people buying stuff online, but the net was bigger. So people liked that at the business.

• 33:57Speaker 04

  And then when COVID hit, of course, they brought your goods to your car to keep you safe outside. So you'd have to come in the store and then maybe they started putting racks in the store where people could come in after they ordered something online and just pick it up and take it with them. And up until that point, I would say that Dillard's was probably. Moving with the same change the rest of the industry was. But at one point along the way, they said, hold on a second. We see where the industry is going with this. And there's a good chance that if we keep going down this path, a sizable part of our in-store footprint, our square footage, is going to be warehouse, where people are coming in, getting their stuff and leaving. If we keep going down that path, we lose who we are, what makes us special. They realized they weren't competing just against other stores. They were competing against the couch.

• 34:42Speaker 04

  They had to get people up. So they said, we're not going to go that far down. In this moment, we're going to actually seek some stability and create a movement that says internally that says, you know what? What makes us great is the in-store experience. Now, here's the neat part. From a business perspective, if you were to invest in Dillard's in 2020 and hold on to their stock for four years, it went up 1,200%. An 80-plus-year-old retail store beat out companies like Amazon or Tesla, or whomever you were looking at at the time, which is pretty darn incredible. But they did it by going after stability. And we would argue that in the face of everybody else chasing a change, if you're the person, or the family, or the business, or whatever it might be, that says, nope, we're not going there. We're going to double down on who we already are or our values.

• 35:27Speaker 04

  That can be the most disruptive thing you can do.

• 35:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, one of the disruptive things for a lot of companies, they spend an incredible amount of time and energy talking about artificial intelligence and doing nothing, just talking about it. What is it going to be? What will, you know? It's incredible for a lot of companies, incredible waste of unbelievable amount of time and energy and money and not accomplishing anything. That's another area. How do you intelligently, sanely, economically deal with questions like that? Because it really comes down to what can we do positively right now to take advantage? And the other piece of it, how do we protect ourselves?

• 36:06Speaker 04

  Actually, in the process of doing some research around it, I was talking to this one guy who was concerned about AI, just individual concern about AI. And we're not talking organizations or industries. Just one guy saying, you know what? I'm really concerned about AI. And I said, why is that? And he said, well, because my job for my company is I'm a writer. I write copy. I write marketing materials. I write stuff sometimes that our CEO reads. And he said, our CEO just read something. He's like, I swear to you, 90% of it was written by ChatGPT. And it was. And he said, I feel like I'm just gonna lose my job. And in that moment, I just said to him, hey, do you see a world where you could be more valuable to your company, not less valuable with AI existing? And he said, yeah. I said, okay. After he thought about it,

• 36:48Speaker 04

  he said, yeah. And I said, all right, which role would you have to take on? And that's all I'm asking him to do. And he just thought about it. He said, I think I need to be a trailblazer for a while. That doesn't mean I'm gonna start, you know, quit my job and start an AI company. It just means I'm gonna get smart about AI, smarter than like my company expects me to. I'm gonna lean into this thing. And then maybe down the road, I'll move over and be a trailblazer and kind of lead a movement in the organization to help them use how we can use it more effectively. So that's what we mean by the roles. And the roles are not a personality thing, although you might have tendencies, like you might tend to be more of a trailblazer, but they're not personality things. What they are, they're roles that you choose to take on. And it's like putting a hat on. You can choose to take that role on. And sometimes you might feel compelled to do something, but then you have to look at context and say, okay, my family matters to me. Is that the right role right now? My company matters to me? Is that the right role

• 37:33Speaker 04

  right now? The fifth role, just to kind of close the loop on that, sits right in the middle. And we call it a tinder gatherer. And what that is, is that's gathering firewood, just like you would to build a fire. And sometimes you go in this role because your job is to analyze it more, think about it more, not just make a knee jerk decision. So you're gonna spend some time thinking about which role you want to take on after that. And sometimes some people are just really good at that role. They live in that role and they allow and help other people to do these things. And actually, early on in the research, James said, hey, you need to talk to this gentleman who's been my representative. Was your publicist, Jim, for a long time? Bob?

• 38:09Speaker 03

  My agent.

• 38:10Speaker 04

  Your agent for a long time. And you said, you need to talk to him. And I did. And I was like, oh, he's a trailblazer. I don't know, Jim, if you can tell anything about Bob. But it's really a quintessential person who helped other people take off in their roles.

• 38:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was my agent, a lawyer. It's interesting. He died recently. Wonderful, wonderful guy. Was actually one of the most amazing, the memorial for this guy, he handled just about everybody as an agent in terms of their books, and he handled both sides, Republicans and Democrats. And the memorial service for him, I've never seen a more emotional, 800 people there, none of whom needed to be there. And that included the Clintons, the Bidens, that included the head of Fox, that included the head of CNN. It was just an amazing, amazing thing. And he had said at one point that if you ever put all my clients in the same room, it would be World War III. But here they were, and they didn't need to be there.

• 39:06Speaker 03

  And I spoke a bit, and I said that with Bob, Bob hated to be called an agent. He just hated that idea. And he loved being a lawyer. He thought it was really a respectable thing to do. And I said, well, I personally, I'm not really that keen on agents or lawyers. So I called Bob my bookman, or shortened it my bookie. Bob was my bookie instead of, I didn't want to call him an agent or a lawyer.

• 39:32Dan Harris?

  I think you're referring to Bob Barnett, who was actually my lawyer for a brief period of time as well. And he's a wonderful, wonderful man.

• 39:38Speaker 03

  Oh, really? Okay. Yeah, I am. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 39:41Speaker 04

  So you can see when we sat down with the publisher, and we said Tinder gather, and they said, tell us about that role. And we said, Bob Barnett. They're like, we get what you're talking about here.

• 39:50Dan Harris?

  No argument here about the amazing nature of the dearly departed Bob Barnett.

• 39:58Dan Harris?

  Coming up, James and Patrick talk about some more ways of leveraging disruption for a better life.

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• 40:40Dan Harris?

  To get back to the positive disruptor loop, so we've talked about disrupt. We all get what that means. Discern is to kind of figure out like, okay, which of these five directions do I want to go in? Trailblazer, fire chief, firefighter, torchbearer, tinder gatherer. And then the next step is behave. So Patrick, why don't you start again on what behave could look like and then we'll bring in James to be the color man.

• 41:01Speaker 04

  Okay, that sounds good. So behave is the second step after discern. So discern and then behave. And behave is really about getting clear on the strengths that you bring to the table. And as we went through the process of studying this, we started to realize there were certain strengths in people that came up time and time again. There were 16 of them. And 16 is a big number, right? It's hard to remember 16. And if somebody reads it and goes, my goodness, I have to have all 16 of these things. A, we try to make it easier for you to digest by organizing it a certain way. And B, nobody had them all. Nobody had them all nailed. So don't, rest assured, you don't have to have all of them. And there's no perfect combination. I wish there was. I wish it was like if you had number one, seven, and 10, you're going to nail it. Because it didn't exist that way either. But the beautiful

• 41:45Speaker 04

  thing is that we all have strengths. So let's figure out what we're good at when it comes to being a positive instructor. How can we lean into those? And maybe if we need to bring some other people around who can help us out. So the way we organize the 16 is we call it the anatomy of a disruptor. And it's a head to toe kind of organization with each body part of the eight body parts we pick having two behaviors. So I'll just say a couple of them really quickly, just to give you a feel for them. One example would be brain. We start at brain. And some people, the behavior they have is they're really good at looking deeply at something to garner an insight. So they're paying attention to what's going on around them. They're not just sleepwalking through every situation. And occasionally they'll pick up on something, go, hey, I wonder why that's that way. And they kind of think about it for a while. They maybe do a study, they ask questions

• 42:28Speaker 04

  to try to figure out the insight. And insight is something that is valuable, and few people know. I mean, if everybody knows it and it's valuable, it's not really an insight. If everybody knows it and it's not valuable, it's not an insight. If you're the only one who knows it and it's not valuable, it's not an insight. It's got to be something few people know, and it's valuable. And some people are really good at gathering insights. Some people are really good with their eyes of casting a vision. That's another one. Some people are really good with their feet, which is standing firm in the face of doubters. So we go through the eight body parts and just lay out these various behaviors. And then for each of them, each of the body parts, we tell a story of someone who has those behaviors pretty well nailed down.

• 43:09Dan Harris?

  And is there a way to, I guess my curiosity is what more should we know as a takeaway in terms of developing some of these?

• 43:17Speaker 04

  Well, one is to know what they are, right? So if you don't know what they are, it's hard to say if you've got them or not. The second one is you can actually do a little assessment in the book where you can score yourself and see how well you're doing. You could ask other people to do it as well because sometimes we lie to ourselves whether we know we are or not. But also just to look at each of the stories, because each of the sections where we talk about the body part and we share the behavior, we then have some reflection questions for you to consider and a little challenge. So those reflection questions are just something that can cause you to pause for a moment and think about that behavior. Where is that showing up in your life? Have people ever told you you're pretty good at that thing, whatever it might be? And then a little challenge, nothing massive, just something you might try today to see if it affirms that you're pretty good at that thing or confirms it for you? Or does it make you say, oh, maybe that's not my one?

• 44:00Speaker 04

  For example, there's a behavior in that it's trusting your instincts. And I remember Jim and I were talking about this early on and I'm like, hey, don't you think most people have instincts worth trusting? He's like, absolutely not. No, they don't. And I was talking to this group early on in the research, I was going out, one thing we did, and we were doing the research, but we were also going out and testing it in front of audiences, just talking about it to see how they react. And I was talking to this one group at a hotel that had a big casino in it. And I said, how many of you think that people have instincts worth trusting? And like 80% of the room raised their hand. Yeah. And I was like, really? What if you went outside a casino floor at 2:00 AM? Do you think they all have instincts worth trusting? Setting aside the fact that maybe they've already had a few drinks and they're like, yeah, we get the point.

• 44:40Speaker 03

  And also this fallacy is in life about trust your first impressions and stuff. Our first impressions are wrong so much, man. We pass up so many people. One of my best friends, he was to me, one of the great catches in New York, nice guy, interesting, funny, whatever. And he would just freeze up when he would meet a girl and they would all go, oh, I don't know about this guy, you know, blah. Wrong, wrong first impression, man. And we're constantly doing that with first impressions. And the other is just so many just being able to question what's going on. Well, our son is 27 and he's just questioning what's going on there. Is there a better way to do this? I'm friendly with Steve Schwarzman, the Blackstone guy.

• 45:22Speaker 03

  And at a certain point, he and Pete Peterson, they just said, there's a better way. Then they started Blackstone. You know, in the book business. When I went in, it was like you do a book a year or every two years, and that's the deal. And I went, why is that? Maybe, but what's the rule there that I'm missing? I remember there was a meeting, and I went in, I'd had, I'd started the Alice Cross books, and they were very successful, so they were listening to me a little bit. And I said, this year I want to do three books. And I said, I want to do Alice Cross. He said, good, good, good. And then there's another thriller, Summer House, that I want to do. And I said, okay, oh, that's great, great, great. And then I tell them another story, Suzanne's Diary for Nicholas, and it was a love story, tragic love story. And

• 46:03Speaker 03

  when I told it, the head of Little Brand started crying. And then at the end of it, he said, well, we want to do the Alice Cross in the summer, but we don't want to do the love story because it's not your brand. And I said, well, I don't really think of myself as a brand, but I think this is a really good story. And I think if there is a brand, it's that when James does a book, it's just going to keep you reading. And then you'll self-select whether you want a love story or not. And they reluctantly did the book, Suzanne's Diary. It's now the second biggest own book I've ever had. So it's just like, does that make sense, what they're doing in the company? And then, you know, another thing in the publishing world was writing with co-writers. And they go, well, what's that all about? And I said, well, I don't know. I think it would be good, because in advertising, you work with other people. You generally will work with an art director

• 46:47Speaker 03

  and a producer. So you get used to working with a team. Patrick and I obviously worked as co-writers. Since then, I did a book with Dolly Parton, three, actually, with President Clinton. I have one with Viola Davis coming out this year, and then one with Mr. Beast. Do you know who Mr. Beast is?

• 47:03Dan Harris?

  Of course, yeah, viral superstar.

• 47:05Speaker 03

  Mr. Beast. And you go like, well, you know, Jim's a little older than Mr. Beast, who's 27, and you know, but you know, it's a great collaboration, and really cool. But once again, you just break, and it was not to break rules, but just because you just question things and go, what does that rule have to do with anything? You're not doing it to break the rules per se, you just question, question, question, question, I think.

• 47:27Dan Harris?

  You know, it's interesting that you said a moment ago, and I agree with you, Jim, when you said that sometimes there's too much of an unhelpful cliche around trusting your gut. And it can be true to a certain extent. But with you... Your gut, at least the common denominator in many of these stories, is that you trusted your gut and it really paid off.

• 47:45Speaker 03

  I do trust it, but I tend to question and think it through. And I just had the chancellor from Vanderbilt in here, and guy's really, really, really, really smart. And he considers in general, the college system, it needs an overhaul. And I think they're doing it there at Vanderbilt, like so many other things that need overhauls. And they're doing it in a big way. But what he does before he makes a move, he tries to think it all the way through. What are the obstacles? What could get in the way? Where could this thing screw up? What's the hard? And sometimes when you go out that far and you go like, I can't figure out how to get past that obstacle. So you don't make that move. And that's what my instincts would be. I'll follow something out and I'll go, you know, this is good, this is good.

• 48:27Speaker 03

  I don't know how to really take it to that final step or the next to the final step, and I'll back off of it. I don't think I've ever done anything where I really consider it to be risky, which is weird, because people think, oh, all these things should be so risky. And, well, I don't know. I wonder if Elon Musk thinks he's doing risky stuff. In theory, yes. Electric car, in theory, very risky. Space probe, in theory, very risky. But apparently, he has the ability to think these things through and go, nope, I know how to do this, and it's doable. And, you know, Jimmy Donnelly, Mr. Beast, he has very good instincts about, especially in the arena that he's playing in, the videos and all that. He knows what the right moves are.

• 49:08Dan Harris?

  So for you, Jim, it's about instinct and then, you know, careful execution. And I wondered, Patrick, to get back to the disruptor loop, we've gone through discern and behave, we're now at achieve. Is what I just said about instinct plus proper execution and planning, is that relevant to the achieve factor?

• 49:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, it definitely is. Proper execution and planning is definitely, you know, thinking through the obstacles. What's going to get in our way? What can hold us back? And how can we work to round those obstacles or mitigate them or eliminate them or transfer them to somebody else to deal with? Definitely.

• 49:41Speaker 03

  It's huge. It's huge. You know, I'm 280 pounds and I want to be a ballet dancer. I don't know. Let's think this through. You know, I mean, that's another thing in terms of people's dreams. Some of the dreams are very reasonable and some of them you want to be a dancer, but you're probably not going to do it professionally. Maybe, probably not. Sorry, Pat. Go ahead.

• 50:00Speaker 04

  No, you're fine. There's is actually a part around instinct that to me plays out so strongly in this section of the book. When we were out talking about it, I remember one time Jim and I were on the phone after I was out talking to an audience, he said, okay, what resonated with this group? And I said, well, I think when I was talking about disrupting your family, that really resonated because I told a story. And then people came up and talked to me about it afterwards. And he said, what was the story? And I told him it ended up to be the only personal story that's in the book, other than Jim's introductory stories. But I told a story about my parents. I was prompted by somebody who was doing something, asking you to think about the roles you fill in your life and pick out the ones that are your key roles right now. So they said, you know, you might fill out, you may have 20 or 30 roles in your life that you're filling, like I'm a husband and I'm a dog owner and I'm a project manager

• 50:45Speaker 04

  and I'm whatever, but which ones are really critical right now? And I picked out a handful or so, and one of them I decided to pick was son, S O N. And then they said, okay, assess yourself. Are you doing an ordinary job, an extraordinary job, a really poor job? What are you doing? And after I looked at the roles, I said, you know, I'm kind of struggling with the son thing. It's not like I'm a bad son. My parents wouldn't join the podcast right now and say, let me tell you about this kid. But it was just not that great. And at this point, I'm around 40 years old and I started saying like, why is it that it's not that great? So I guess you could say I didn't have the language for it, but say that was a disruption for me, just doing that little assessment. So I looked at it and I said, well, when I call my parents, it's usually once a week. Frankly, kind of obligation, I call and check in. I was living in Louisville, Kentucky at the time. They were living in Chicago, which is where I grew up at.

• 51:30Speaker 04

  I'd call them up and the conversations were almost the same every time. What's the weather? What's the traffic like? What's on your schedule this week? We both would exchange and then we'd hang up. And I'd kind of check the block mentally. And after I looked at it, I said, could I be a little better? Like, could I ask them some questions? They raised five kids. I had two kids. Maybe I could ask them some questions. Guess what? They were pretty smart about kids. I would tell them about when I was traveling, what I was doing or send them a postcard while I was on a business trip. And it just changed the relationship. And I remember a few years later, after I started doing this, I got a call from my brother. He said, hey, you need to come home. Mom's gotten really ill. And I said, all right, I'll be home this weekend. And he said, no, you need to come home now. I was traveling, so I flew back, grabbed my wife, Jamie. We drove up and we got to my parents' house.

• 52:14Speaker 04

  And if you've ever heard that conversation where someone's the last person to show up, I was the last person to show up. I was the fifth of five kids to show up. Saw my mom, she rallied for a little bit, and a couple hours later, she passed away. Then you get into the whole rigmarole of planning a funeral and doing all that. And when it's all over with, I remember sitting back at my dad's house the day of the funeral. Now it's my dad's house. And I said to my wife, I'm so glad that I did that. I focused on my role as son. And she said to me, you're still a son. And across the room is my dad, and my dad's the no guy. My mom's always been the yes, like, Mom, can we go here? Yes, Dad, can we go there? No, we're fine, you know, that type of personality. And I said, oh, yeah, I'm still a son. So I walk across the room and I said to my dad, I said, hey, Dad, I travel a lot for work. Do you want to come with me sometime?

• 52:58Speaker 04

  Fully expecting him to say, absolutely not. And he said, where are you going? And I grabbed my phone. I'm like, I'm going to Topeka, Kansas. And my dad goes to Topeka, Kansas with me. And then he goes to Florida with me. And the whole point on that is I didn't do anything massive to blow up my life. I just did a few things differently and stuck to it for a while. My dad's 94 now, he's almost 95. And I see him so much differently than I, he wasn't the no guy that I thought he was. He was a guy who had five kids and three jobs growing up on the South Side of Chicago. That's who he was. He was busy. He was the guy who like, didn't always say, I love you that much. It just wasn't wired into him. But he's a great guy. And our relationship is so much different now.

• 53:39Dan Harris?

  I love that story. Is there more to say about the achieve piece before we move on to refine?

• 53:46Speaker 04

  I mean, just from a organizational context, because Jim mentioned this book is a business book. It shows up in different spots in stores. It's kind of funny. It'll show up in the business part, it'll show up in self-help. I don't really care personally where it shows up at, as long as people pick it up and check it out. But from the business side, absolutely. If you can get more people in your organization when they get hit with a disruption, when something changes or a new system gets implemented, or customer expectations change, or you name it, to go, all right. What's my vision for this thing? What could we do? What are the obstacles I can run into? And how could I test this thing? If you could just get them to do those three steps over and over and over in the achieve step, you're going to go a long way because all of a sudden it's not you as the leader trying to carry the whole company up the mountaintop.

• 54:27Speaker 04

  It's a thousand different people running little experiments about what they see can happen in the face of this disruption. And that's a pretty cool thing.

• 54:36Speaker 03

  Well, let me go backwards to Patrick's story about his dad. That's a great achievement. We don't think of it in that area. We think of achievement, well, you know, in business or, you know, in your regular life, I think it's even more important personally. You became a better father. You became a better mom. But it's the same tools that are going to get you there, the tools that we're talking about in business. That's why I think the book is, it's one of those unusual books that it is a business book and it is a self-help book.

• 55:05Dan Harris?

  Yeah. And I would just amplify your argument, Jim, by saying that in my experience and in my opinion, frankly, the better your relationships with your family, the better you're going to do at work.

• 55:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, 100%.

• 55:19Speaker 03

  Yep, yep, yep.

• 55:20Speaker 04

  You know, it's funny though, to me, I spent my twenties in the army. I was an army ranger years gone by. So I jump out of planes and run around the woods and do things that people would consider bold or courageous. But making those phone calls to my dad and mom and sending postcards in some ways was a little bit more different type of courage that wasn't always that bold, but it was causing me to change how I saw things. And I think that was really key.

• 55:48Dan Harris?

  James, I know that Patrick is supposed to do the heavy lifting on the various lists and all that stuff in the book, but the last piece of the disruptor loop is refined. And I feel like you're more than qualified to talk about it. You have disrupted in so many ways, but I think most famously in the publishing world, as you launch these various projects, to what extent you come back, learn and use those learnings to refine how you move forward?

• 56:14Speaker 03

  Well, every book, what it's about is for me, not all writers do this, but I start out with a long outline. When I started the Alex Cross series. I wanted to make sure I got it right if I could. I wound up writing a 320-page outline. And that's where the short chapters came from. And every book that I do, it's about refining. When Patrick and I did Disrupt Everything, it was about refining. We kept refining. We kept doing it over and over and over again. James Clear, when he talks about Atomic Habits, it took him years to write that. He kept refining, refining, refining, making it better, fixing it. As I said, we added a lot on families to the book when we realized that that was so important. And this book is relevant to families, extremely relevant to families.

• 56:59Speaker 03

  Maybe more important for a lot of people to their families than the work part of it is. During COVID, you're stuck in a house a lot, obviously. And I wasn't going to do this in a million years, but I started writing an autobiography. And I just started writing down story after story after story. That's all my autobiography. It's just nothing but stories, one after the other. And I found that because it was the autobiography and I was so invested in it and my passion was so good, I found that I was paying attention to writing sentences more than I had in a long time. And my writing got better. My writing in the last couple of years, I think, has been the best it's ever been. And once again, it's that refining. I'm paying more attention to the sentences, to the paragraphs, to the page, to the chapter,

• 57:44Speaker 03

  refining, refining, refining.

• 57:46Dan Harris?

  Yes.

• 57:46Speaker 03

  And at a certain point, you just have to say it's biscuits, meaning it's over now. We can keep writing this forever. But well, we're not going to do that. We're going to move on and do another book.

• 57:56Dan Harris?

  I'm nowhere near as accomplished or prolific a writer as you are. But in my experience, the most important part of writing is rewriting. So.

• 58:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, sure, for most writers. There are a couple that for whatever reason, boy, they can spit it out and spit it out. That first draft is pretty magical, but that's rare.

• 58:14Dan Harris?

  This has been phenomenal to talk to both of you. Let me ask you both the two questions I always ask as we're winding down. One is, is there something that you were hoping to get to that we haven't gotten to? Anything that we've missed here? Patrick, I'll start with you on that.

• 58:27Speaker 04

  No, I don't think so. I think we hit all the highlights. The thing I would just want to make sure that people take away from this is the idea that you don't have to change everything. You can just take that one step to begin moving forward and that one step might make all the difference over the course of time. I don't want people to read this and think this is the diet book that tells them they have to change everything they do. It's not that. Maybe it's to see what already they're doing well and add a thing or two to it.

• 58:52Speaker 03

  Yeah. You know, when I go out and I speak, especially because we do a lot of philanthropic stuff and I'll go to groups and there'll be a big group of librarians or teachers or whatever. And one of the things I always say is we sat here for an hour and we talked a lot. Don't pat yourself on the back because you listened for an hour. We didn't do anything. All we did was talk about stuff. So all we're doing here is talking about stuff. It doesn't mean anything unless you go do it. So, you know, even if you go to the library, go check out the book. And I'm not to sell books per se, but because we haven't done anything yet. But if it's interesting to you, then do something. It's all about doing things. You know, do it for yourself. Do it for your work life. Do it for your family. Do it for

• 59:33Speaker 03

  your partner, whatever, you know, whatever your situation is. Take another step. Take that first step to move forward with your life. And you kind of do now because if you don't keep moving forward, I really think this is going to be the future of people in this country. If you're not moving forward, there's going to be a lot of pain in people's lives.

• 59:53Dan Harris?

  James, I'll start with you on the second closing question, which is, can you just remind us of the name of the book and frankly, anything else you've written or put out in the world that you want to? I know you've, that's a, that's a long list.

• 1:00:04Speaker 03

  You disrupt everything and win is the book that Patrick and I did together, which as I said, it is that unusual business and self-help. And I love the idea of helping people. The two things I have coming this year, which I think are stunning to me, the book I did with Viola Davis, the novel, it's the best novel I've ever done and she's a big piece of it. She's great to work with. She's very tough in a great way, a great way. And she just kept pushing, pushing, pushing to make sure these characters got stronger and stronger and stronger. And then the book with Mr. Beast, which is going to come out in September, which is also pretty amazing. Because his notion is that every individual, we have the ability to make some change within

• 1:00:46Speaker 03

  the world. And he preaches that to kids. And I think that's a really good thing in terms of motivating kids to, no, you can do something. You can do something. You can make things better. You can make things better for yourself. You can make things better for the people around you. And it might be a small group, or it might be a larger group. So those two projects, in particular, have me passionate and excited, which is very cool. I don't work for a living. I play for a living.

• 1:01:13Dan Harris?

  Amazing. Anything to add, Patrick?

• 1:01:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, as he said, the books disrupt everything and win. And my biggest focus these days, honestly, is going out and talking to audiences about the book and working with executive teams to help them think about the disruptions facing their business and really just trying to create a movement of positive disruptors in the world.

• 1:01:30Dan Harris?

  Well, Godspeed. James Patterson, Patrick Leddin, thank you to you both.

• 1:01:34Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 1:01:34Dan Harris?

  Great pleasure.

• 1:01:35Speaker 03

  This was great. Thank you, Patrick. You're the best.

• 1:01:37Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 1:01:42Dan Harris?

  Thank you again to James Patterson and Patrick Leddin. Great to talk to them. Don't forget to check out my new meditation app if you want to learn how to handle disruption more seamlessly. There's a 14 day trial if you want to try before you buy. You can get it at danharris.com. Finally, thank you very much to everybody who works so hard on this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vassili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.

• 1:02:31Speaker 02

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