How to Flourish (with Daniel Coyle)

Author Daniel Coyle talks with EconTalk's Russ Roberts on the art of flourishing: why it's a natural phenomenon rather than mechanical; how taking life's "yellow doors"--or detours from a straight, expected path--is often the key to a flourishing life; and why true flourishing can only occur in the context of relationships. They also discuss how the basic principles of flourishing have empowered people--from men trapped in a Chilean mine to senior citizens reliving their youth--to achieve remarkable things. Finally, they offer an exercise you can do for recognizing the ways that others have helped us to thrive.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to econTalk.org where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links to other information related to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006. Our email address is [email protected]. We'd love to hear from you. Today is December 18, 2025, and before introducing today's guest, I want to remind listeners to go to econTalk.org and click on the link for our survey of your favorite episodes

• 0:47Speaker 00

  of 2025. Voting closes this week. And now for today's guest. My guest is author and consultant Daniel Coyle. His latest book is Flourish, The Art of Building Meaning, Joy, and Fulfillment. Daniel, welcome to Econ Talk.

• 1:02Speaker 01

  I'm happy to be here with you, Russ.

• 1:04Speaker 00

  I feel like you cheated. I feel like you picked a title that you knew would land you on Econ Talk. So I'm very, I love the whole focus of the book. So many great insights and stories that I hope we'll get to many of them. Now, you define flourishing as, quote, "the experience of joyful, meaningful growth shared with others." That's a little different than what I would say. So I'm going to read it again. "The experience of joyful, meaningful growth shared with others." Why'd you pick that particular framing?

• 1:36Speaker 01

  Well, I started with what flourishing is not, right? It's not a machine. It's not a result of a machine. It's not the optimizable, maximizable process that you can predict. It's an idea from the natural world. And the natural world is really about how living systems develop. And living systems aren't machines. We often talk about them as if they were, but actually, they're much stranger than that, right? They're things where they find roots, and they grow from the inside out, not from the outside in. They can't be planned or predicted precisely. They're not controlled from the top down. They're generated from the bottom up. So this is how living systems develop. And with human

• 2:20Speaker 01

  beings, our substrate, if we're an ecosystem, is meaning.

• 2:25Speaker 01

  Is meaning. You can have all types of different kinds of living, but they all, as human beings, that is where we put our roots down. And so this idea is that, and joy is kind of an offshoot of it, when you visit flourishing people, they are often kind of creating this sense of surprise. And I guess the word aliveness is one that recurred again and again in my reporting, in the science, but also in this concept of what flourishing is. It's from the natural world. It's not predictable. It is something that, and the fun part is when you ask people to reflect on a time where they felt it, everybody kind of gets a smile on their face, and they start telling stories that have got kind of very similar elements to them. And so that was the fun part of the research, to take all

• 3:07Speaker 01

  these diverse places and say, wait a minute, there's a natural process going on here that has got some basic building blocks to it. It's a process that we don't have good language for necessarily. We use, oftentimes, we use machine-like language to talk about things. We want to be planned, we want to execute, we want things to be predictable. And I get to these places thinking, wondering what they'd be like, and a lot of them ended up being kind of messier than I thought. And flourishing is a messy process. If everything is totally neat, then you're probably not doing it.

• 3:38Speaker 00

  And one point, later in the book, you talk about red doors, green doors, and yellow doors. And I've said this before on the program, I think it's incredibly important. I think a lot of people think the secret to success is to say no. And it is true that if you try to walk through every door, you will find that you don't have time for the most important doors. Saying no is not horrible advice, but it's the yellow doors that you talk about, where you're kind of like, I don't know, this seems kind of outside my comfort zone, could be a waste of time, maybe I won't enjoy myself. As I've gotten older, I try to say yes to almost every one of those, and I'm rarely disappointed. First

• 4:21Speaker 00

  of all, there's the element of surprise. The word lagnap, the unexpected joy that comes along with something you didn't anticipate. And surprise is not a small thing, but it's not the only reason. A lot of it is also, you know, the point that you put at the end of that definition, shared with others. Why did you put that in?

• 4:44Speaker 01

  Well, all flourishing is ultimately mutual. These are independent ecosystems. These aren't little machines toiling away to get some result. All flourishing is interdependent growth. It's shared growth. And we've gone through, I think, if there's a lesson that modernity has taught us, it's kind of that these straight-line solutions, these planned, executed, information-based, modernity has kind of assumed that human beings are these computational beings, and we should decide our way forward on this straight-line path. And I think the lesson of the last few years has been, A, that's kind of a bummer. Like, self-improvement is a lonely slog. We know a lot of people that are climbing mountains of self-improvement, and they don't seem super joyful. They seem like the desire, the goal is to automate yourself in some weird way,

• 5:29Speaker 01

  the machine thinking again. And the other thing is that it doesn't actually work very well. Like, and there's this thing that you have, that you happen, William, and I think a lot of the people you've had on this, had on your podcast, would, their lives would kind of map onto this concept, where when you talk about a good life, or you talk about a good career, you talk about a good project, or you talk about a good conversation, they are not straight lines, right? They're always these squiggly lines. Now, why is that? And why are we so resistant to this squiggly path? I think it has something to do with a misunderstanding of the difference between complicated systems and complex ones. Like, there's two kinds of systems in the world. There's complicated, and there's complex.

• 6:13Speaker 01

  Complicated ones are ones that are put together the same every time. If I have an assembly line to build a Ferrari, and I do all the right things at the right time, and I put that on a piece of paper, that's how to build a Ferrari. There's not, you won't get a different result. Complex systems are a lot.

• 6:27Speaker 00

  And it's complicated, because it's...

• 6:28Speaker 01

  And it's complicated, it's extremely complicated. You need expertise. Like, you can't just do it, you need expertise. But that expertise is about putting A to B to C to D. Complex systems are like raising a teenager. Like, they're, they change. What you do changes the system, and it changes you too. So, our misunderstanding, the reason I think this yellow door concept seems kind of strange and counterintuitive, I think is that we have a fundamental, we're trained on this idea that the world is complicated, when in fact, this is a game, what we're in is this giant complexity game, where we are trying to navigate these new possibilities and these yellow doors, which, of course, to go back to what you were talking about, the, the green doors that we encounter are a clear signal to go forward, the red doors are a

• 7:13Speaker 01

  clear signal to stop, and the interesting stuff in life is at these curves, where you actually have a choice, and there's a yellow door and you go through, and sometimes that feels miraculous, like, when you look back on people's life story, they will often tell you a yellow door story of, "Oh, I didn't get into the school I wanted to get into, and then I was at a bar and I met this person and they changed my life." Well, that's the way the world actually is. It's kind of liberating to realize that you are, the problem that you're facing is not one that the world has, the world's filled with yellow doors. The problem is that the model you have in your head is a straight-line model in a squiggly world.

• 7:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, we don't like uncertainty, and we've talked about it a lot on the program. There's probably evolutionary reasons that it creeps us out and makes us run away and look for the green door, but I think modernity has this great gift, that for many of us, we're privileged and lucky enough to have lives where a yellow door that's a mistake is not a end of the game, you can just come back through a different door and you'll be okay, but we don't, that doesn't come naturally to us. Your book's divided into two parts, Presence and Group Flow, and I-

• 8:28Speaker 00

  Your definition of presence is, again, a little different from what I would have said. How would you define it? What do you mean by presence? And why is it important?

• 8:36Speaker 01

  Well, what we're really talking about here is the way our attention systems work. And one of the things that the book really showed me in the research for the book, taught me, was that we tend to think about attention as a single thing. And we all know we're in this attentional crisis, right? Like, we all acknowledge this. We're in an attentional crisis. But what we lack is a clear model of what attentional health is, what it looks like. You know, like, it's like we're trying to eat well, but we don't understand the building blocks. We don't understand proteins, carbohydrates, and fats. So, the way attention actually works, and it's kind of an interesting backstory why we got off on the wrong track. Attention isn't just this narrow focus thing that we usually think of. There's actually two systems in play. One of them is task attention.

• 9:18Speaker 01

  It's narrow, it's focused, it's built on controlling things, it's built on predicting things, it treats the world as kind of a flat puzzle piece to be manipulated. But then the other type of attention is relational attention. Relational. And that means connecting to your whole wide world around you, paying attention to everything. And evolutionarily, this exists for some really powerful reasons. All of our ancestors had to do two contradictory things. They had to eat, which was focus narrowly on a target, identify it, categorize it, grab it. And pay attention to this vast fabric of reality, to storms coming in, to family, to nuanced interaction, to relationships.

• 10:02Speaker 01

  And the modern world has kind of privileged this narrow task attention over, and that's where presence comes in. Presence is the activation of relational attention that creates connective energy. It creates connective. It's the stuff that relationships are made of. We don't get relationships by treating people as objects and tasks to be accomplished. We get them by sort of stopping. And it happens in a moment of receptive stillness that occurs again and again. And when we have those moments of receptive stillness, when we stop trying to do And we and we simply pay attention to what's around us. We we see we see yellow doors. We see things and we come into a relationship with things in a different way.

• 10:46Speaker 01

  And the places that I visited from, you know, there was a little deli in Michigan that's grown into this giant business to a pro baseball team, to a school, they're all creating kind of this attentional architecture that that fuels and boosts relational attention to create shared presence, to create those moments of presence. And and that moment of presence is where we get meaning. It's where we get the meaning in our lives. And it treats meaning as kind of this renewable resource where you're fueling up on meaning and then doing some tasks.

• 11:17Speaker 00

  So some listeners may hear that and think, you know, that's

• 11:23Speaker 00

  that's nice, but I think it's a lot of hooey. A word, I don't even know if that's a word, hooey. I don't know where it comes from, but and I would have said that probably 20 years ago, but I am not that person anymore. And of course, you referenced the work of Ian McGilchrist, the master and his emissary and his past Econ Talk guest, where we talked about that, those two kinds of attention. And I encourage, let's just go back and listen to that episode to to look at. I would say read his book, but his book is quite dense and quite challenging. It's a great book. It's an extraordinary book. Read a lot of it anyway, at least, take a shot at it. But I want to say something just about these two kinds of attention to try to make it a little more

• 12:11Speaker 00

  clear for for maybe some listeners who haven't either experienced it or or read about it or hearing it for the first time. So for me, and maybe it's not for you. I'm curious your reaction to this. For me, when I'm in a conversation,

• 12:28Speaker 00

  too often, it's about me. Because that's my natural. Human impulse and my focus, I mean, I'm listening, let's be clear, and I'm paying attention to the other person, but often I'm doing that thing you mentioned, I'm thinking about controlling, which is, actually, I'm not thinking, it just happens, and it's very natural, and it's very natural for moderns, Ian would, I think, agree, and I think you'll agree, that the natural response is be thinking, what am I going to get out of this? What do I have to achieve here? You know, narrow, focus in, what's the goal? You know, the goal is to get the person to agree with me, to win the, to win the negotiation, to get

• 13:12Speaker 00

  the person to accept the deal, whatever it is. And if it's, if it's a friend, or more importantly, a partner, a spouse, it might even have a similar look to it if I'm not careful. You know, I have an interest here, she's got an interest. My natural impulse often as a self-interested human being is getting my way, or to say it more politely, control, to get the person to do what I want. And so often, I think, in our conversations, the phrase, oh, no, whatever you want, is a lie. It's just, it's a social thing to

• 13:53Speaker 00

  say, it sounds good, and it's supposed to win me points. But, and I, in the times when I can step outside that, which is the, the presence position, where my attention is not me, me, me, but we, we, we, or us, us, us, or just, this is an interesting landscape of interaction, I'm going to watch it and see what emerges. When I do that, it's extraordinary, some of the finest moments of my life, and I think the challenge is tapping into that, and I don't think it's easy.

• 14:32Speaker 01

  It's not. And the thing that's the hardest about it is you have to do something that we're allergic to, which is you have to surrender. It's not enough just to say, "Well, what's this other focus thing over here?" No, you actually have to let go. And that feels crazy vulnerable, especially when you're sort of learning to do it. But it's helpful, there's a couple of things that are really helpful here. One is to actually understand what's happening in your brain. This is a, as Ian says, Ian McGilchrist has, I think, in my mind, shown that our brain, the most connected entity on the planet, has this serious division, two unique centers of consciousness. You're literally turning off one and lighting up the other when you have that moment that feels wrong. Like, "I'm surrendering, this feels weird." But you know what?

• 15:14Speaker 01

  I'm actually activating this other slower, warmer, connective attention. And it's a muscle. The more you do it, the sort of easier it becomes. And I would say your experience probably has been that as you've gotten better at doing this, you've found yourself, "Oh, that's, that's good feedback." And the other thing to remember is that focus makes you blind. Like, there's, there's that famous experiment with the gorilla, where they have people counting basketball passes, and a gorilla walks in the middle, it's unmistakable, and pounce their chest and then walks off, and 50% of people miss the gorilla. Well, we're going through life counting passes and missing gorillas. And when you realize, when you have that little hint to say, "Am I really focused right now? Am I really certain right now?

• 15:59Speaker 01

  Do I have my kind of armor of certainty on?" That, I think, over time, can become a tell, a little, a little nudge, self-nudge, to say, "If I'm this certain, something's up." Like, maybe I should dial back, just take a step back and, and be curious. And that curiosity comes out over and over again as the most powerful kind of immediate tool to sort of ask, "What, what's going on here that I don't understand? Am I really that certain?" You know, we talk about the quality of your life being the quality of your relationships. Well, the quality of your relationships is the quality of your conversations. The quality of your conversations is the quality of your questions. Period.

• 16:43Speaker 01

  So, that, those moments of curiosity where you surrender control and step into that curiosity, step into that uncertainty, are, as, as you've said, I've had sort of same experience. It's really, really addictively neat.

• 16:56Speaker 00

  You know, one metaphor for this is...

• 17:01Speaker 00

  Riding a bicycle with no hands. So when you learn how to ride a bicycle first, you think, this is amazing. I can do this. I was, I think, seven when I remembered learning how to ride a bicycle. And then you learn to ride it without any hands, which is really, a really bad idea in general. But the, it's funny how fun it is. And it shouldn't be fun. It should be terrifying because you've, you're giving up control in some dimension. And I think the, the challenge of being aware that you want control and then accepting

• 17:43Speaker 00

  giving it up is really exhilarating. And maybe that bike metaphor will help us think about, to remember to do that. But it's, it's so, it comes, at least, I don't know if it's for every human being. It's certainly true for me. My default is control. I don't like traffic. I don't like, I don't like taking a cab anymore. I prefer to walk longer and farther than, than to take a, I don't own a car. I live in Jerusalem and I either almost always walk or take a bus. Now, buses giving up control too, but to some reason it's just not the same. Maybe it's because of those bus lanes. But with that, that one

• 18:25Speaker 00

  person, and I know where it's going. So I'm not really having to give up control. But when it's a driver and I don't know where he's turning, I, there's something now that's, that's just very hard for me. And similarly, I've talked about this with Michael Easter in our last conversation. It's very hard for me to hike without all trails or some form of Google Maps. Because I want to know, I'm, I'm going the right way. And if you can give a little bit of that up, it's so life enriching.

• 18:53Speaker 01

  Uncertainty and vitality are inversely related, or directly related. Uncertainty and vitality, the more certain you are, the less vital it seems. When you were saying that bike thing, I mean, one of the most vivid memories of my life was biking from the base of my parents' street to my house, which is like a half a mile, with no hands, like make it all the way. I could, that is, like, I've had a lot of memories in my life. That one is top right up there. There's something about that vitality, that aliveness that that uncertainty gives you. And similarly, meaning and mystery are also related. You know, there's, we're talking so far about kind of these moments of surrender, which are really important, but there's a different sort of type of presence too, where you're leaning into something mysterious.

• 19:35Speaker 01

  And, I mean, I'll use the word sacred, but more in the sense of sacred things are things that are like endlessly a source of insight. Like, every time I go to the forest, I have an insight. Every time I have this conversation with this person, I have an insight. That's what, I think that down deep is kind of what sacredness is. And having these moments of, where you really lean into something mysterious together. I mean, in the, in the, in the book, I start with the story of those Chilean miners who were down at the bottom of the mine, you know, not a position anybody should want to be in, 2,000 feet down. It's like Lord of the Flies for the first half an hour. And then, we know what happened. They eventually came together and got a ton of camaraderie and formed a little civilization

• 20:18Speaker 01

  down there and survived in these unsurvivable conditions. But what turned them around wasn't some leader saying like, "Okay, guys, I have a plan." They weren't going certainty. What turned them around were these moments of surrender and leaning into this, this mystery together. Like, why are we here? Why are there 33 of us? And, and the leader, at one point, the supervisor, everybody was scared of, walked to the center of the circle, took off his white helmet and said, "There are no bosses and no employees." Now, that's a really mysterious and meaningful thing to say. But leaning into that, into that mystery together, you know, along with kind of these momentary, you know, organic acts of surrender, there can also be these moments of, of, you know, you could call it ritual, you can call it presence, you can call it whatever you

• 21:02Speaker 01

  want, but you're still lighting up that relational attention, letting go of your normal to-do list and your sense of control, and leaning into something that's way bigger than you. And the world's filled with possibilities and opportunities to do that.

• 21:17Speaker 00

  Well, you know, I often use the phrase larger than ourselves. We find meaning often in things that are larger than ourselves. And sacredness for many people is religion. It's a connection to the divine. But it's also a connection to another person because that's larger than ourself, right? A relationship is by definition larger than just me. And so many of our, I think, most meaningful moments come from those connections with other human beings. And I just want to say, I do want to be fair to introverts who don't want to always connect to other people.

• 21:56Speaker 00

  And I hope to be interviewing Susan Cain in the coming weeks on her book Quiet, which is about the fact that some people like to be alone sometimes. So I don't want to overstate the universality of relationships, but I think for most, almost for many, many people, it is the most powerful way of getting outside ourselves, whether it's with another human being, whether it's with the divine, whether it's with a cause. I think these are the things that inspire us.

• 22:27Speaker 01

  And in all the cases, the cool part is that we kind of disappear, which is kind of wild, right? Like in all the, all those moments that we're talking about, there are moments where our ego kind of shrinks and vanishes and poof, we're gone. And that feels fabulous. It's not just that it feels fabulous, it creates that meaningful connection. And I think, you know, too often we understand meaning as kind of information, like meaning is I'm learning something or I'm seeing some literal explicit thing there. Well, really, I think what we're talking about in all these cases is this experience of connective energy where there is a mystery that we're connected to and we're trying to lean into that and have this experience of aliveness.

• 23:11Speaker 01

  And going through the world like a machine, being productive, getting results, that's part of life. But where I think it becomes powerful is when you nest one of those intelligences within the other, when you are being controlling in the service of those higher relationships. I think that's one way to think about the two attentional models and the way this works the best. It's when I think, when that narrow, because all these flourishing places are controlling a lot of things. All these places I write about, the deli and the team, they're accomplishing a lot in the world. They're not just blissing out on meaning, but they've, I think the way to think about them is they are using control in the service of these larger relationships. So to Ian McGilchrist's point, it's the master and his emissary.

• 23:56Speaker 01

  The master would be, you know, the foundational piece is relational awareness and relational attention. And the servant of that is controlling attention, not how we often flip it around in the modern world.

• 24:10Speaker 00

  Talk, hang on. Talk about the time traveler house and the idea of awakening cues, which I think is really interesting.

• 24:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a story, Ellen Langer is a professor at Harvard and she went, as certain professors can only do, did this kind of wild experiment in the 70s. And she took an old monastery and retrofitted it so that everything in it was from 1959, as if, you know, the Dean Martin records and a copy of Portnoy's complaint and all the furnishings and the TV was swapped out for a black and white. And she invited people in their 70s to come and live there for a week. And the people showed up and at the time, you know, one of them had a cane, they were kind of shuffling in there and they spent, and she didn't give them any sort of constraints at all. It was just come live here and see what happens.

• 25:04Speaker 01

  And she did another group where they, she asked them, pretend like you're living in 1959. That's your only instruction, pretend.

• 25:13Speaker 01

  And after a week, and they measured all of their physical characteristics coming and going, their psychological characters coming and going. And what they saw as they left was this extraordinary bloom of vigor, energy, possibility, humor, camaraderie. At the very end, one, a couple of members of the group, one of the grad students.

• 25:32Speaker 00

  This is the group that had the 1959 furnishings we're talking about, not the other group. That was sort of the control group.

• 25:39Speaker 01

  Not the other group. That's right. There was a control group that lived there without instructions, but the group that said, "Look, pretend like you're living there." Those are the ones who had this bloom of vitality, energy, connection, humor. And there was a, one of the graduate students brought a football to throw around at the end, and a couple of the, of the older people joined in the game. And as Professor Langer said, "Nobody would mistake it for the NFL, but at the start of the study, this would not be considered possible." And what that story really kind of captures is the fact that meaning and connective energy are not about, they're not an increase of information. They're an experience of reception.

• 26:21Speaker 01

  They're an experience of stillness, where you're activating your relational attention. And the term awakening cues is what I saw in all of the places that I visited for the book. What I saw at places where they are intentionally creating these spaces, where people can let, drop their armor, where they spark a question, where they spark a mystery, and where people lean into it together. Much like in that, in that time traveler house. "What are we doing here? All this stuff is here. Let's, let's let go of our, our old habits. Let's, let's try this." And it's a giant yellow door, you might say. And when they step through it, it changes them. And so I, I think this concept of awakening cues speaks to, I think it speaks to attentional health, first of all.

• 27:06Speaker 01

  This idea that if you go through life like a machine, focus, focus, focus, produce, produce, produce, and never have these sort of cues and spaces around you, man, life goes by pretty quickly and pretty thinly. But when you take the time to stop for a second and, and, and fire up that, that relational attention, and really look at what's going on you and live your way into it, that's when life gets transformed.

• 27:29Speaker 00

  So I'm, I'm somewhat puzzled by that, the house story. And I, it's a beautiful story. It might even be true, but I'm, I'm curious.

• 27:40Speaker 00

  What she thought happened there, why, why did the decor and the knickknacks that were laying around that were youth from these people's youth?

• 27:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:56Speaker 00

  So I get that.

• 27:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 27:58Speaker 00

  But, but I'm skeptical as to why that would trigger this vitality. What was, what was her theory? How do you understand it?

• 28:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, the way I understand it is that these things are kind of redolent with memory. Well, two things, they're out of their old, old habits, right? They're leaving their apartment, they're leaving their house where everything's in a groove, all their behaviors in a groove. They're thrown into this new place where they need to self-organize, where they need to figure it out. So that's a different sort of, that's a fresh kind of autonomy. Autonomy gives energy. But the other thing was that these, these things brought them back and sort of resurrected these memories that were there, ready to be encountered again. Like my memory of making that bike ride, which I hadn't thought about, and that energized me in some way. And that idea, I think, where, you know, I don't, she, she went on to study a lot of the health impacts.

• 28:52Speaker 01

  She really focused on the body and health and has quite a body of work on that kind of stuff. For, for the purposes of this connection, I think it, it made me see how that often meaning with relational attention, meaning is waiting for us. It's, it's the same way in those people's lives, those memories were there, waiting to be sort of resurrected. What it took was that intentional yellow doorstep to get, create a space where they could be awakened.

• 29:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm again, just, just a little skepticism. I, there are many, probably decades of my life where there were some unpleasant memories. And I have, I kind of like Dean Martin, but not so much. If it was Frank Sinatra records, I'd like it more. Uh, and I'm not sure that the Dean Martin would spark, you know, good memories. But the idea of forgetting the, the time traveler part of it, the, the idea of creating this, a quote, older environment, or time traveled environment, you know, the idea of doing something different is very powerful and.

• 29:59Speaker 00

  When I moved to Israel, which wasn't an easy decision, which I did five years ago, somebody told me it would be like a shot of epinephrine into my heart. It would, the radicalness of leaving the country you grew up in, going to a foreign country where many people don't speak your language, where the habits and norms are different, it would just vitalize me. And it probably has, I don't know, I haven't studied it, but it is a change. Forget whether it's old or new, change would seem to be not the worst thing.

• 30:36Speaker 01

  Well, and I think it gets us into that second piece, the group flow. Like, when you have to self-organize and navigate towards something with some constraints, you unlock a lot of vitality, which, again, sounds kind of woo-woo. It's interesting how we lack clear scientific language to talk about some of this stuff. A shot of epinephrine to the heart is what it does feel like. But when I do talk to people about their flourishing experiences, a lot of time, the model that comes up in their head, and it doesn't exist concretely as these things, but the underlying structure of what they describe is what you describe, which is, I went to this place with other people, and we kind of figured it out together. And we didn't know what was going to happen, there was a high degree of uncertainty, there

• 31:17Speaker 01

  was a high degree of challenge and difficulty, but almost like, I don't know, like a flock of birds going through a forest, like, we self-organized, we figured it out, and we grew as a result of that. That's the story they tell. And in some ways, that story, I think, has some powerful echoes with the way our ancestors grew up from hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years, in small groups, navigating, tough stuff, growing and figuring it out together. But in some ways, it speaks to this idea from complexity science, really. We've gone through the last, I don't know, since the Enlightenment, basically, trying to imagine the world as a machine.

• 32:00Speaker 01

  But this new wave of complex dynamical systems theory is showing us, I think, kind of clearly why these experiences, your experience, flourishing people's experience, and it has to do with constraints, with gradients, with all this language that's not that great, but basically, it's making the argument, if I can sum it up really clumsily, it's, life and our experiences are not machines, they're rivers. There are rivers, and for a river to go from being a puddle or a lake to being a river, a couple of things have to happen. You need a gradient, like you need to be moving towards some horizon. That's good, you need a gradient. And now you need riverbanks, right? You need something to say, "Go here, but not here."

• 32:45Speaker 01

  Like, you can't go anywhere. This is the gradient, here's the riverbank. And the third thing you need is freedom. Like, the river can't be frozen. All the molecules have to be able to move around and go where they want to go. And so, these places that I visited over and over again, you know, were recreating those three elements. Like, we want people to have autonomy. You choose what you want to do. When you got to Jerusalem, nobody was saying, "Here's where you do Monday, this is where you do Tuesday, here's where your breakfast is." You, like, being there and self-navigating with freedom is what created that vitality. There's a constraint, you're not going to a different city every week, like, you're staying here in this place. And there's kind of a horizon, kind of a gradient you're flowing toward. And I see this over and over again.

• 33:30Speaker 01

  Like, one of the most vivid examples for me is this crazy experiment that this guy named Peter Skilman did. I don't know if somebody's talked about it on your show before, but the spaghetti tower experiment?

• 33:43Speaker 00

  I don't think so.

• 33:44Speaker 01

  So, Peter Skilman, he got groups of four. The question was, "Who can build the tallest tower with the following materials?" Like, 20 pieces of spaghetti, a yard of scotch tape, and a single standard-sized marshmallow.

• 33:56Speaker 00

  Is the spaghetti cooked or uncooked?

• 33:58Speaker 01

  Uncooked. Excellent question. Yeah, the cooked one never works.

• 34:03Speaker 00

  Different game, different challenge.

• 34:05Speaker 01

  Extremely difficult, that's right. So, 20 of rock or raw spaghetti, and who can build the tallest tower? Go! Single, standard-sized marshmallow, has to go on the top. That's the rule. Can't go on the bottom, has to go on the top. So it is four-person teams of CEOs, of lawyers, of MBA students, and of kindergartners.

• 34:24Speaker 01

  If you had to bet who's gonna win, most of us would probably bet on one of the adult teams. In fact, the kindergartners win, and it's not close. And the question is, why? Well, because all the adult teams do this thing where they try to organize themselves. They try to plan, and they have roles, and they talk, and they do all this stuff to foul up the flow. The kindergartners, they eat all the marshmallows, and then they save one, and then they start just jamming stuff together in a completely, in a chaotic way. It looks extremely messy. But what better way to solve? And it's actually a deceptively tricky problem, because relatively, the marshmallow's really sort of heavy, and the spaghetti has no stability sideways.

• 35:06Speaker 01

  So it's really sort of tricky, but what better way to solve a tricky, complex problem than to like, try stuff? And then it tilts this way, puts something in there, tilts this way. You can't, they're arm over arm, they're a perfect inflow group brain, solving problems as they emerge. Like, group flow is like, shared agency in motion. And that's what great teams do, and that's what we see in the natural world with schools of fish and flocks of birds, and that's what we feel in our own lives when we're on great teams. It feels like pickup basketball. It feels like, well, I'm not gonna ask my boss if I should fix this piece of the tower. I see the problem, I'm gonna fix it, and then you fix that, and you fix that, and who had

• 35:50Speaker 01

  the great idea? Well, great teams, you always get that same answer, where it's like, you ask them where the great idea came from, or where the great breakthrough, they're like, we don't really know. It just kind of bubbled up, bubbled up from what we were doing. And that is, that's the state that I saw over and over in these groups, whether it was scientists or business people, like, they were good at getting in the flow.

• 36:12Speaker 00

  So I think of these kind of cues, I mean, there's different kind of...

• 36:20Speaker 00

  Ways that we can live more vividly and flourish. But for me, when I read your book, I was more focused on this question of tapping into the deeper forms of attention, the more relational kinds. And you know, there's meditation, there's prayer, there's poetry, there's psychotherapy. These are ways, I think, that the ones that, these are the ways I know of. I would add fiction, maybe, to the poetry part. Yeah. And maybe there's some others, but these are the ways we try to stop, take a pause, take a breath, be still, and access something that we don't naturally

• 37:04Speaker 00

  access, this outside ourselves connectedness thing. And I want to use an example that you give in the book. And some of you may have heard this, and I'm going to change it a little bit. There's going to be a 10-second thing in the middle. I'm going to, the original version, but I'm going to make it 20, which is an eternity. You'll, you'll find out. But here's the, the exercise. So I want, if you're listening at home and you're not driving, I want you to close your eyes and consider this, the following, see if you can join me. So many people have helped us become who we are.

• 37:47Speaker 00

  Some of them are near, some are far away, some are even in heaven. All of us have special ones who have loved us into being. Would you just take, along with me, 20 seconds to think of the people who have helped you become who you are? Those who have cared about you and wanted what was best for you in life? So let's all take 20 seconds and do this exercise together of thinking about people who have loved us into being and helped us become who we are. Go.

• 38:43Speaker 00

  Okay, so that's about 20 seconds. And whoever you've been thinking about how pleased they must be to know that you thought of them right now and to know the difference you feel they've made. And that's the end of the exercise. When I was on Silent Meditation Retreat, we had a, I remember there's 60 minutes or 90 minutes of, it's called a gratitude practice, similar to this. The instruction was, "Think about people who have loved you and who've been kind to you and good to you." And I remember thinking, first time I did this, "Well, I can't do this for 90 minutes. This is ridiculous. In two minutes, five minutes, I'll be done and I'll have no one else.

• 39:26Speaker 00

  I'll just have to sit around and twiddle my thumbs." That was not the case. And I encourage anyone at home listening to do this exercise over a longer period. It's, you know, I thought of people I had thought about since they had been in my life when I was a child. I thought about my parents in great depth, much greater depth than I thought I could conjure up. Thought of my siblings, my friends, my loved ones, my wife, my teachers. My, it just, but it's not just, "Oh, there's my friends and there's my wife, there's my teachers." Take each one and go back, start as early as you can, when you're as young as you can

• 40:11Speaker 00

  in your childhood, and think about who was kind to you and who treated you with love and kindness. And it's an overwhelming experience.

• 40:22Speaker 00

  I found it extraordinary and probably cried like a baby during a good chunk of it. And when I came back from that retreat, I called people who I had not talked to for years and just told them thank you and they cried. So I recommend this practice. But the one I just did, which I took from your book, it's from Fred Rogers of Mr. Rogers Neighborhood. And you linked to a, you gave the link to his 1997 Emmy Award where he did this on stage. And it's a great moment. And it's a script for him. He's obviously knows it by heart. He's not reading it. He's done it so many times on his show. And it's

• 41:06Speaker 00

  really trite and corny and silly and sentimental. And it's really important, in my view.

• 41:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. I couldn't agree more. And it really, you know, spotlights a bunch of things. But one of them is that I think the modern world pulls us further from those kind of moments. Like, I think most, most groups of people throughout the history of the world have spent a lot of time thinking about their ancestors and thinking about having moments like that where they're routinely in there. There's a beautiful one that the Maori use where they kind of picture themselves holding hands with every ancestor, the chain of their fathers and mothers, all the way back. And they're the ones who are in the sunshine right now. But the others are in the shadow, but you're still holding hands. And it's just like this, it takes five seconds to describe. Everybody gets it. It's this incredibly powerful thing. And, you know, we would call these things rituals, right? We would call

• 41:57Speaker 01

  what you just did, we'd call what Fred did, a ritual. And I think we sometimes have consigned ritual to the realms of superstition and the past and its magical thinking. But when you look at it through this lens of relational attention, when you look at through this lens of flourishing and vitality, it's anything but. Like, it animates us, these moments of where you actually stop and you give up, you give up, you know, the usefulness. This is not a useful exercise. We get nothing measurable. No result comes from it. It's not predictable. So you're operating in this relational space. And that's why it's effective. And I think even when you extend that to other cultures, like, you know, when you see these,

• 42:41Speaker 01

  when you go to Europe, I don't know if you're struck by this at all, but like if you're in, if you're in Spain during siesta or it's five o'clock, all of a sudden, everybody is on the street. Everybody's got this ritual. It doesn't make sense. They've closed their shops. They could make way more money, but they, they, they all go out and everybody does the same thing together in this common space. And it's wonderful fellowship. And I think a lot of Americans that visit these kind of places are really struck by how, how vitalizing it is and how bad we are at it. It doesn't mean we have to be bad. It doesn't mean that, you know, we're, we're locked into being this way. But these small changes in, in creating these spaces, whether it's through the rituals like Fred uses, or whether it's, it's like literal spaces for people to gather, has

• 43:26Speaker 01

  that same vitalizing effect.

• 43:29Speaker 00

  So I just want to say something about Fred Rogers for a second, just because your book really prompted me to think about him and I have not thought about him at all since I saw the Tom Hanks movie. So I go back and I look at the Emmy speech that you, that you suggested. And what's, there's a couple of things that are strange about it. One is, I think it's Tim Robbins who gives him the, the actor who gives him the award. And the only thing Tim Robbins talks about in giving the award is, is that Fred Rogers gave kids a strong sense of self-confidence that they were special. And I thought, yeah, that was part of the show.

• 44:14Speaker 00

  But this exercise we just did is actually, it's much more than that. It's about, it's not self-centered. It's not about self-esteem. It's about recognizing you depend on many, many other people and that they've been kind to you. And gratitude was another huge part of that show. And I know Fred Rogers' show, Mr. Rogers' Day, because...

• 44:38Speaker 00

  I'm 10 years older than my little brother. He's not so little anymore. But when he was a little boy, he would watch Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers. And I kind of, and I'd watch it with him sometimes, and I kind of enjoy Sesame Street. And I'd hate Mr. Rogers because Mr. Rogers was boring. And he's, I was a teenager. I was, you know, my brother was, say, four, and I'm 14 or five, and I'm 15. And I'm watching, and it's like, this is boring. He's so square, so unhip. And I look at him now, and I watched that clip of him doing this really embarrassing exercise in front of 3,000 people. And you can see some of them are crying from doing it.

• 45:22Speaker 00

  And I realize, I really didn't appreciate him enough. He, the adjective that comes to mind now is not sentimental. It's not trite. It's not square. It's not boring. It's decent. He exuded decency. And decency is so out of fashion in modern culture, as are sentimentality and squareness, unhipness. It's all in our world, irony and wit and disdain. And when you see a man who has, he doesn't appear to have an ounce of disdain in his body.

• 46:05Speaker 00

  And he's just a decent human being, encouraging little people to become decent human beings. And you realize, huh, that's a shame. It's a shame that's gone. I don't know if it's still on rewind, you know, replay somewhere. But, but I, I want to give Fred his due. He earned it.

• 46:24Speaker 01

  Amen. Yeah, no, incredible. And he's, his, I would say decency. When you're saying that, I was gonna say, God, the courage it takes to be decent. You know, that's, I think, these two qualities that he embodies was this curiosity about other people. And he would be brought in after Kennedy was assassinated. They talked about it on the show. He was really early on helping people work against racism. He was so curious and connective and always connecting to this fabric of people. Whenever there was a disaster, he would say, look for the helpers. Always that sense of curiosity, combined with a courage. And I just like that as a combination. It feels like.

• 47:08Speaker 01

  Curiosity kind of opens up that space and lets you notice the door, but you have to be gutsy to step through it. You cannot just remain, "Oh, I'm so appreciative and curious about other people. Aren't they great?" You actually have to do the scary thing, which you did, reaching, calling your friend. You didn't just think of them, you called them. And, and that is, I think, that action step that, that speaks to kind of what that group flow piece feels like, you know? It's not just that you're radiating with meaning and it feels good. In order to flourish, you actually have to step into the uncertainty, see what happens, navigate. Maybe the conversation with your friend doesn't go great at first and you've got to kind of re-figure that out, or maybe it goes great and now you've got an opportunity to explore something else.

• 47:50Speaker 01

  So it's, it's a great combo that I think he embodies that curiosity with, like, incredible courage.

• 47:58Speaker 00

  And I hated that he put on that sweater and, and did all these things the same way every time, and I didn't realize that children love routines. That's a ritual for them. That's why they want to hear the same story over and over again. Does, they never get tired of it.

• 48:15Speaker 01

  No.

• 48:15Speaker 00

  Let's shift gears. Let's talk about Julie Cameron and morning pages, which I had never heard of. Such an interesting exercise.

• 48:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, it's kind of in this, in this category of how do we turn on our relational attention? How do we let go of control? And Julie Cameron was an interesting person. She was a journalist for Rolling Stone, screenwriter, got, suffered from alcoholism early in her life and had a, kind of had the rock and roll lifestyle, you know, writing Rolling Stone cover stories. Things kind of went sideways for her. She ended up kind of in her early 30s, kind of washed up in New Mexico with an infant daughter, divorced, and, and trying to get sober. And a friend of hers, she was trying to write, she was trying to write, trying to write, having no luck, and a friend of hers gave her some advice, which was just like, "Stop trying to be good." Like, "Stop trying to write good stuff. You should just worry about the quantity."

• 49:09Speaker 01

  And so she put a Post-it note above her desk that said, "Okay, God, you handle the quality, I'll handle the quantity. I'll do three pages every day." And she did. And she didn't even think she just walked to her, walked to her and started scribbling whatever was on her mind. Oh, I have a headache and the, the cockroach is crawling across the, the porch or whatever. And what she found was that this process, three pages a day, no matter what, whatever, whatever you express, ended up being extraordinarily vitalizing and liberating for her, both as a person, as an artist. She started to teach some classes. All of a sudden people are passing around her handouts like they're the sacred writ. Um, she on a whim publishes a book. Um, it's now sold millions and millions and millions of copies.

• 49:54Speaker 01

  It's called The Artist's Way. And it's a series of exercise built on letting go of control and built on creating meaningful connection in a, in a creative sense. But it's not just artists who have benefited from this book. When you look at the people who regularly do morning pages, it is a incredible, a dazzling variety of skilled people who make this part of their routine. Why does it work? Well, there's no task, there's no control. You're simply surrendering to whatever comes out and it, it's really powerful.

• 50:27Speaker 00

  Do you do it?

• 50:28Speaker 01

  I, I, this is my problem. I, I, I struggle with like, I'm used to writing with a goal. And so it's very hard for me to let go of that and stop. I catch myself, oh, I'm really trying to put the spin on that phrase. That's a really nice one. I start judging. Um, but when I do, it really is powerful. It's a, I, I do it maybe half the time, but I need to make it every day.

• 50:49Speaker 00

  My guess is it's harder for writers than it is for other types of artists, right?

• 50:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, we should do something else. Morning pottery or morning dance or something, some other form that we're not good at.

• 51:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's probably true. I, I have never done it. I love the idea of it. I think it's fascinating that the, um,

• 51:09Speaker 00

  The last thing I want to talk about with respect to control is John Gottman and Julia Schwartz's insights into marriage. And give us a little bit of an introduction to that. I want to come back to one very specific thing they say. What's their general strategy for thinking about marriage and how to have a good relationship?

• 51:35Speaker 01

  This is a good story. I mean, for many years, the relationship business, like there have been a lot of different programs to improve relationships. Back in the, back in the 30s, I think they had a scorecard where you, you know, if you deduct or add points depending on how your partner behaved. And a lot of these systems were built on this idea that a relationship is a machine that needs to be fixed. And when you fix machines, you find the broken part and you replace it. So that's where a lot of, that's the model around which a lot of therapy, relationship therapy used to be. And Gottman and Schwartz were kind of a unique couple. He was a scientist. He had something called a love lab in, in

• 52:17Speaker 01

  University of Washington where he would track in real time with video cameras and recorders. He had couples come in and talk, and then he would see what their patterns of behavior are. And Schwartz was a top clinician. And they came together and their insight was, well, what if relationships aren't machines? Like, what if they're not machines? What if they're like these living systems? And the whole thing is to get people to pay attention to each other in a different way, to stop controlling each other and start like responding in the relationship, responding. And so they developed a series of sort of moves. They're kind of like yoga class. Like, one of them is like turn toward, which is whenever your partner makes a bid for your attention, maybe they clear their throat, maybe they walk

• 53:01Speaker 01

  in the room and kind of have a look on their face. Do you turn toward them when they share something difficult? Do you turn toward them? Are you neutral or do you turn away? And Gottman's research will show that turning toward is an incredible indicator of a healthy relationship. Turning away or being neutral is an indicator of a bad relationship. And so there's a whole bunch of these different things they talk about, you know, kind of figuring out the love maps of your people are scanning. My favorite one is scanning for appreciation. Like our task attention loves to scan for problems. Like, oh, there it is again. There it is again. There's that pattern. We're really good pattern finders, right? Pattern, pattern, pattern. And that could be death to a relationship.

• 53:45Speaker 01

  But scanning for appreciation replaces that with curiosity. It clicks on your relational attention a little bit. So the lantern goes on. All of a sudden you're looking around and go, oh, that was really nice. Like, that was really thoughtful. Oh, thank you. Right? And so it's these, it's all of their stuff can be viewed through the lens of these attentional systems where instead of focusing and trying to control the other person, you're actually in kind of a dance with them, responding to what they do and they're responding to what you do. And I mean, the track record shows that it actually works, unlike some of those other systems which you're designed to fix and replace.

• 54:24Speaker 00

  The thing I found interesting, and I've seen this at durations of this, is where you're in a, an argument or some kind of disagreement or some kind of other interaction. And one person has to limit their verbal responses. They can ask a question, but they can't comment, say.

• 54:45Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 54:46Speaker 00

  Or they can comment, but they can't defend. They can, and you give some, a couple of examples in, in the book of dialogue where, you know, one is a mock dialogue and one is an actual video where, you know, if

• 55:05Speaker 00

  One of the partners, or they take turns playing this role as listener. And of course, my observation on this is that is that pattern, pattern, pattern thing. The biggest challenge of a longstanding relationship, whether it's a friendship or a marriage, is the rut, you know, the script. You know, one person says something, the other person responds the way they've responded the last 20 times with that cue. And then that, we all know what the person's going to respond back. And you're kind of locked in this unhealthy ritual of back and forth. And the idea that one way to break that is to change the rules of the game, put the

• 55:48Speaker 00

  riverbank up a little differently and force you into a different channel, I think is really interesting.

• 55:55Speaker 01

  Really interesting, right. And that rut, I mean, there's a bunch of different ways we could take this. That's the complexity dynamic system. Like, let's put it, let's build, these are how we respond to ruts, right? Let's put up a new riverbank. Let's have a new constraint. Let's have a new horizon, maybe is another one. And from an intentional point of view, there's this other sort of shift, I think, when we look narrowly at our partners, we do see those patterns. But when we scan for appreciation and really look at them, there was something somebody said, I'm going to butcher it because I don't know who said it, but it was something along the lines of like, my wife now, my love for her is all about her becoming more mysterious as I get to know her.

• 56:37Speaker 01

  Like, the more, I'm so in love with her that I barely know her, was kind of the takeaway. Like, she's such a mystery. I didn't appreciate what a mystery that she really is. And to your point earlier about how we're all the product of these millions, this ocean of little interactions and people that we've had, that's a really mysterious thing to know a person, to really know a person is to lean into that mystery. And so to almost kind of flip that rut and say, okay, yeah, it can feel like a rut through this lens, but when I change, when I change the lens, like, holy cow, there's so much here I don't know. And that's kind of, that's energizing, I think.

• 57:14Speaker 00

  And of course, it's true for ourselves, right? We think we know ourselves. We think we know why we do this or that. We don't realize that. Something happened to us when we were younger that made this rewarding for us or painful for us, so we gravitate toward or run away from certain types of of activities or interactions. And curiosity is very powerful if you can manage to keep it about yourself. And it's even better when you can do it for your friends and loved ones.

• 57:45Speaker 01

  All these little flips, I mean, I don't know, is the parable of the long spoons, do people know that one?

• 57:51Speaker 00

  I don't know.

• 57:51Speaker 01

  Is that a familiar parable to you?

• 57:52Speaker 00

  No, I don't think so.

• 57:53Speaker 01

  I didn't, I didn't know it. So I'll share it, just, just kind of because it's a guy goes to God and says he wants to see heaven and hell. So God, okay, I'll show you hell first. They go to open the door and there's a pot of delicious stew and all these people starving around it because the spoons are really long and they can't reach the spoon back to their mouth. They can't, the spoon will not, so they're starving and they're miserable. And, and the guy says, all right, cool, I got it. Let's go see heaven, go see heaven, exact same situation. It's long spoons, delicious stew, people are feeding each other. And so the, you know, it seems like we're having, in our conversation, we've hit that over and over again. It's like, it's not like some big mountain to climb or some giant

• 58:38Speaker 01

  new sport you have to learn. It's more like, oh, there are these little toggles, little flips, like if you flip the thing you're doing, if you flip from control to relationship, good things can happen.

• 58:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, I did know that, actually. I didn't think that was what you had in mind. But I think, again, I'll just say this and then we can move on because I want to come back to marriage. But it's so hard to keep those in mind. And the reason I think parables and good stories are important is that they have a chance of settling in and helping us remember.

• 59:12Speaker 00

  I want to just, I want to leave the Gottman Schwartz insights with this, the four horsemen of the relationship apocalypse, meaning the signs of a really bad relationship or marriage that's in crisis. Criticism, defensiveness, stonewalling, and contempt. And you say, all signs that your attention has narrowed and that you're treating your problem like an object that can be controlled rather than a person to connect with. And I just think all those emotions, criticism, defensiveness, stonewalling, and contempt, we're very judgmental.

• 59:56Speaker 00

  We have, we feel those emotions naturally, often about everybody, many people around us, because it's always about me, naturally. And so, I actually think they're not actually signs of, necessarily of a bad relationship. What they are is they're warning flags that say, oh, remember, it's not about you.

• 1:00:20Speaker 01

  That's good, that's good.

• 1:00:23Speaker 00

  So, give up some control, you moron, and improve your friendships, your relationship with your spouse.

• 1:00:31Speaker 01

  That's so good. It's true, right? I mean, those are all, those are all things where you're grounded in certainty. Like, I'm certain in each of those cases, right? I mean, this armor of certainty. And it is, it's great to see it. Maybe it's not, apocalypse might be, might be put on a little too strong there, but it is, it is maybe a sign of a red flag, we'll say. Yeah.

• 1:00:53Speaker 00

  I mean, just to take one, defensiveness.

• 1:00:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:57Speaker 00

  I know that I'm a better husband and a better colleague at work when I'm not defensive. But I'm just listening. You have something? I did something that bothers you.

• 1:01:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:10Speaker 00

  I don't want to do something that bothers you. So, let me hear it. That sounds great. I'll try not to do it again, but... The armor just, just comes on like Iron Man, you know, when his, when his suit comes on, and all of a sudden.

• 1:01:26Speaker 01

  That's really good. That's really good. Oh my God. That's going to be the, the gif. I don't even know how to say it. Is it a gif of Russ getting armored up here?

• 1:01:35Speaker 00

  I'm sure AI can do it.

• 1:01:36Speaker 01

  That's what it feels like too. And it feels good. It feels good to wear that armor. That's the thing. I love wearing that armor. Like, I really like it. So it's very difficult.

• 1:01:44Speaker 00

  Because I'm right. I'm right.

• 1:01:46Speaker 01

  I'm right every time. I've never not been right.

• 1:01:48Speaker 00

  I didn't do that bad thing. That's your problem.

• 1:01:50Speaker 01

  That's your problem. Right, right. And the fact that we, you know, if you're getting out of it, does feel like you're naked. It does feel strange. It does feel really scary. But the more you do it, and the more you realize, hey, well, we just created something together. I don't have power over you. I have power with you. And that's where that preposition changes a lot.

• 1:02:09Speaker 00

  Let's close. It's the second half of the book, but I, I want to just talk about one piece of it, which is about group flow. And this lovely idea, it's just an appli- for me, I don't know if you meant it this way, but for me, it's an application of the first half of the book, which is the beautiful mess. And what is that? What's the beautiful mess? And if you want to talk about the Cleveland Guardians, you can, or any, anything you want.

• 1:02:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's really, the beautiful mess is this idea that we're kind of allergic to things being disorderly these days in the modern world, right? Everything in our life is kind of tight and dialed down. And when we see a mess, we sometimes have the, the response like, uh, something's wrong. We need to fix that mess. In fact, that's exactly the wrong response. Natural flourishing, natural growth cannot help but be messy. The mess is not a problem. It is the doorway. That mess is a doorway. And I did experience that. I've done some consulting with the Cleveland Guardians, Major League Baseball team, and started about 13 years ago. And they're, they're a very small team. They don't have the money the Yankees do. They don't have the money a lot of teams do. And so instead of having to buy talent, they have to develop it. They have to grow it.

• 1:03:18Speaker 01

  And a baseball team is like a, it's like a school system, right? You have sort of, you know, low A, high A, double A, triple A majors, and there's about 180 players in all those teams, and they're, you're trying to make them better. So we had all these brilliant ideas on how to make the team better. I had written a lot about talent and growth and coaching. And we showed up at spring training and shared all those great ideas with all the coaches. You should do this. And strange thing happened. They didn't change. They didn't listen to our brilliance, which is strange. But then the next year, we kind of did the same thing. But the third year, we were with this guy. He's a former, he's out of the military, out of the Navy SEALs. And he said, you know, instead of telling the coaches what they should do,

• 1:04:00Speaker 01

  what if we got them into groups and asked them this question? Tell me about the best coach you ever had. And then see where those conversations go. So we did that. Coaches, small groups of coaches, talking about their best coaches. Super messy. Like completely, it was not as neat as delivering a PowerPoint. But out of those amazing conversations came these incredibly insightful. These coaches are really, really smart. And they dug into saying, oh, this is what, this was what made this coach good at connecting. This is what gave that coach that knowledge. This is what gave the coach that trust. And out of that, we were able to build a model of excellence, which then we gave back to the coaches and said, hey, is this what you guys said? Is this what we believe as a group?

• 1:04:43Speaker 01

  So instead of kind of the certainty of armor, delivering truth, we created this messy conversation, which then sprung off all these different experiments. Where it was like, how do we give our players more ownership over their swings? And their pitching motion? Well, let's have these camps where the player leads it. Or let's have this other camp around doing all the little things that win games. And all, out of those conversations came all these little experiments. So we didn't treat the organization as this machine to fix. We treated it like this, this river, where we set up constraints, put a horizon of everybody learning and getting better.

• 1:05:22Speaker 01

  And over the last, I mean, it's, baseball's a really, really, really competitive environment. And the Guardians have yet to win the World Series. But for the last, I think 13 years, we've won as many games as the Yankees and have spent $1.7 billion less than they have. So we're adding up to more. We're developing players. It's messy. It's not some clean, perfect plan. And I think that's why it works.

• 1:05:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's fascinating. You know, I'm interested in education and it's an interesting application of that question of how do you make people wiser? And we have a particular philosophy here at Chalum College of letting people discover things in the books that they need to discover and own and think about rather than telling them what's in the books. We try not to lecture to them what the books are about.

• 1:06:19Speaker 01

  Cool.

• 1:06:21Speaker 00

  It's an amazing thing, but many people with PhDs are not taught that way. So if you ask them what their best teacher was, I'm not sure they'd ever get there. But it is a really amazing example of the challenge of getting people to change their behavior in any way, which is impossible, you know?

• 1:06:46Speaker 01

  That's right. That's right. You don't, you don't sort of do development to people, right? You don't do, we want them to grow. You don't do growth to them. You create the conditions where they can. So set up the constraints, set up the horizon, allow them the autonomy and freedom to be that river that can move toward that horizon.

• 1:07:01Speaker 00

  Yeah. My wife introduced a math reform in the school she was the head of the math department in, and she went to visit one of the teachers after they'd gone through the training. And they were teaching the way they taught their whole life. They didn't do anything from the reform they were supposed to be implementing. And my wife said, "What about the thing we just did?" Oh, she said, "Oh, that doesn't work." Okay, well, you know, it's possible it doesn't, by the way. I think both my wife and I would admit that the teacher could be literally correct, but that is the human response when

• 1:07:45Speaker 00

  they're told to change. Oh, we tried that.

• 1:07:49Speaker 00

  It doesn't work, or it can't work. But what it really means is, I can't change, so leave me alone.

• 1:07:55Speaker 01

  I can't change, and I think we'd all behave that way.

• 1:07:58Speaker 00

  Oh, my God.

• 1:07:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. That's right. That's right. That's right. And I think we'd all can empathize with that teacher a little bit, because I think we all behave that way in our own lives. I certainly do. When somebody comes in with a great new idea, I can instantly, my task attention can think of 150 reasons, and it's risky. Why should I change? Right? I really need to be brought in. And so that empathy, that conversation, that question, that curiosity approach, isn't like being nice. Like, that's the thing. We think of it as like, oh, what a, what a, what a nice person. It's like, yes, they are nice, but that's, that's elemental to the what they're trying to create, which is a bubbling conversation where you're actually a part of it, instead of being, both of you being armored up.

• 1:08:41Speaker 00

  We had David Marquet on the program, talking about leadership and the importance of distancing, and stepping out of a situation to think about it more thoughtfully. And his leadership style, in a very stressful world of a nuclear submarine commander, was very hands off, and very much in the spirit of what we're talking about. And it's a very scary leadership style. To give up any control is hard, because, well, we all, I think we all understand why, but especially for a leader, who's going to get judged on the results? And you're basically saying, I'm going to trust the process. I'm going to trust that the boat's going to go down the river, and get

• 1:09:26Speaker 00

  closer to the horizon, and not go over the waterfall and splinter. And I, I think about this a lot, you know, in my job as, as president of a college. I think about it, the general issue. Of leading an organization and trusting process. Very hard, very hard.

• 1:09:48Speaker 01

  Very hard, very hard. And the places that I've seen that do it really well, they spend a lot of time on the front end, a lot of time. I would call it teaming. Teaming is the process where it's like, we're not going to just sort of get together in a room for 10 minutes, describe a goal and go for it. We're going to spend a lot of time like talking about how are we going to interact? What's this going to look like? How do you like to communicate? What's, what, what have you done that's similar to this? What are you excited about here? And we're going to spend a lot of time describing what we're not going to do. And we're going to spend a lot of time describing the horizon so that we understand deeply where we are trying to go and where we are not trying to go. And this process, which, you know, it's helpful to write it on a paper. It's helpful to return to it, like partway through a project to have it.

• 1:10:32Speaker 01

  Some organizations call them flight check-ins where it's like, hey, we started to talk about this. How do you still feel about it? What's energizing you about it? Are we on track? You know, where do you think we're going to be? What do we not want to do now? What assumptions do we need to revisit? Where you're in the river, but you're continually circling up together to form kind of a group brain and, and really get some consensus around what's happening and where are we going?

• 1:10:59Speaker 00

  Yeah. The last example I would use is, and then I want to close with something else. But the last example is, you know, I think as we need the head of something, when you have responsibility and you give, you charge someone with the task and they fail. And the easy response is to say, well, they're not good at that or they're not good at their job or they're not good at that. But of course it's on you too, because you need to help them get to where they need to go. It's absurd to think they're going to do it on their own. You've got to give them the guidance and tools and freedom and you've got to give them the security and trust.

• 1:11:40Speaker 00

  And so I, you know, I think the challenge of leadership generally is you need to give up control, but you also have to take responsibility when you, when you delegate. And delegating is, is scary. But it's also comforting because hey, it's not my responsibility anymore, but it always is.

• 1:11:59Speaker 01

  That's right. That's right. That's right. No, it's, it's tough. The good leaders I know are good at doing it, are good at taking that responsibility and understanding they're on this squiggly path. And so you don't get to the cliff if you're constantly checking the path, right? You don't, there aren't any surprises because you stay calibrated with the people who are in. And if you need to change direction, you do.

• 1:12:20Speaker 00

  Yeah. Let me close with a question for you, which I think you mentioned a little bit in the book. But you know, you tell a lot of stories. We couldn't tell all the, we told some of the good ones, but there are others in the book that are also powerful and funny and fascinating. But you did a lot of, you had a lot of interesting conversations. You did just read Ian McGillicuddy's book. You went and visited it, which I'm jealous of. It's phenomenal.

• 1:12:46Speaker 01

  Oh, you gotta go.

• 1:12:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, maybe, maybe you'd let me come see him. But how did this change you? You know, I don't know. I'm sure it took a while to write the book and to talk to the people and to think it through. And do you feel any more, do you have any more flourishing in your life from this? Or is it, was it just a fun project?

• 1:13:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, the ironic answer that I should probably give here would be that I've completely withered. This, this topic has destroyed me and now I'm just a husk of a man. That would be, that'd be fun to say, no, the truth is that it, the stuff, I mean, I, the secret is that all writers do books for kind of selfish reasons. In some ways, I really needed this and wanted this. And, and so now that I understand it, it has, I've gone through some yellow doors lately and it's been really fun as a group of friends that I have now that I would not have had if I hadn't, you know, a friend of mine invited me climbing one day. And I don't like climbing. I don't like heights. I think it's fussy and stupid indoor climbing. But this friend was like, you should go. And I said, yellow door, I go and.

• 1:13:50Speaker 01

  Then it turns out to be kind of fun. And we go every week and then it turns into, oh, let's go on a ski trip. And, oh, do you guys play music? Yeah, everybody plays guitar. Let's play some music together. Where some of our kids all live in New York, we're going to have a battle of the bands this spring where some old dude, me and my old dude friends are going to go play against my daughter and her friends. So, yes, that's something that would not have happened. And it's again, that sort of, you know, these pathways opening up and being alert to them. It's not like transformational, though. It's not like, oh, I'm a wholly new person. You know, I'm the same person. I'm a little more aware of possibilities and a little more trusting that when you step

• 1:14:35Speaker 01

  into that uncertainty, that you'll be met with something good and also some good people.

• 1:14:39Speaker 00

  My guest today has been Daniel McCoyle. The book is Flourish. Daniel, thanks for being part of Econ Talk.

• 1:14:46Speaker 01

  Thank you, Russ.

• 1:14:54Speaker 00

  This is Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. For more Econ Talk, go to EconTalk.org, where you can also comment on today's podcast and find links and readings related to today's conversation. The sound engineer for Econ Talk is Rich Goyette. I'm your host, Russ Roberts. Thanks for listening. Talk to you on Monday.