The Tapes You’re Still Playing: How to Rewrite the Stories That Hold You Back | John R. Miles - EP 840

How to Recognize the Beliefs You Inherited, Challenge the Stories Holding You Back, and Choose What Happens Next

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Cheers to fall savings at Whole Foods Market, home of higher ingredient standards. This Halloween, share chocolates and candies made without that spooky high fructose corn syrup. Throwing a party? Make it easy with a berry chantilly cake. Ready to cook pizza? No antibiotics ever chicken wings. And sushi made fresh daily. Fall gatherings never tasted better. Save through November 3rd at Whole Foods Market.

• 0:27John R. Miles?

  Coming up next on Passion Struck. In 1979, a research team abandoned a stack of audio tapes. Interviews with college students, recorded over their years on campus. Then, the tapes disappeared into file cabinets, basement boxes, and cold storage. Decades later, a researcher found a clue that they might still exist. She spent a year opening boxes until she found them. And here's the part I can't stop thinking about.

• 1:06John R. Miles?

  When the students from those tapes, now grandparents, were finally able to listen to their own 19-year-old voices, they all said roughly the same thing. "I wish I had heard this sooner. It would have changed how I raised my kids." Now, here's my question. What if you're already playing a tape of your own? And you've never once listened to who recorded it? Most of us are. We hit play every day. And most of those tapes weren't recorded by us. Hey, it's your friend John, and welcome to Passion Struck. I'm so glad you're here.

• 1:51John R. Miles?

  Whether you're a longtime listener or someone who just discovered the show, thank you for pressing play today. Maybe you've built the life you were supposed to want, but you've quietly wondered why it still doesn't feel like enough.

• 2:06John R. Miles?

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

• 2:26John R. Miles?

  Welcome to episode 840 of Passion Struck and to our October series, The Architecture of Agency. We're all exploring the forces that shape how we see ourselves, make choices, and build our lives. The central idea running through this series and through my book, The Mattering Effect, is that the environments we inhabit influence how we experience our worth. And once you can see that influence, you get something back. The chance to choose how you respond. This week, I had two conversations that actually fit together better than I expected. On Tuesday, in episode 838, I was joined by Dr. Alexis Redding,

• 3:09John R. Miles?

  a developmental psychologist at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. And on episode 839 yesterday, John Acuff, author of 11 books, including his newest, Procrastination Proof. One studies what young people have always carried into adulthood. The other helps people finish what they start. But both of them kept pointing at the same invisible thing. Scripts handed to us by the rooms we grew up in that we mistake for facts. By the end of today's episode, you'll have a tool for those scripts. I'm calling it the Tape Check.

• 3:50John R. Miles?

  Three questions you can run on any belief you've been carrying around and a way to find out whether it's still true. Thank you for choosing Passion Struck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating a life that matters. Now, let that journey begin.

• 4:12John R. Miles?

  Alexis Redding grew up with an unusual kind of father. He was an archaeologist who spent decades excavating the workers' village at Giza. Not the pharaohs, the ordinary people history forgot. She told me she didn't realize until after he died, while editing his memoir, that she had spent her whole career doing the same thing. Her dig site was a university archive. She had learned that in the 1970s, a research team at Harvard interviewed students, then abandoned the recordings in 1979.

• 4:52John R. Miles?

  In 2016, she found a clue that the tapes might still exist. For a year, she pried open rusty file cabinets, and the archive staff pulled hundreds of boxes out of cold storage. Somebody had to open every last one. She did find them. Recordings of young people describing their daily lives, along with the essays they wrote when they were admitted, and the research team's notes. Here's what she expected. She and her colleague, Dr. Nancy Hill, both assumed they'd hear how different those students were from the ones in their classrooms today.

• 5:38John R. Miles?

  They pressed play and heard something else entirely. Students feeling lonely in the transition to college. Pressure to make it count and fulfill their parents' dreams. Big questions like, "Who am I? Who do I want to be?" And stress about a job market that felt completely uncertain. Alexis told me the differences were things like smoking in campus buildings and opinions about President Nixon. The substance, though, was the same. And then she said something that really stuck with me. "Once you hear that connection, you can't unhear it."

• 6:19John R. Miles?

  And when the graduates from 1975 finally heard their younger selves, they said it would have changed how they parented, grandparented, and taught. They'd have recognized that there wasn't as much difference as they thought. Hold on to that word. Tapes. Because John Acuff has a word for the ones in your head. He calls them soundtracks. Mindset loops we play on repeat, some of them broken. And just like those 1970s recordings, most of them were made by someone else in a particular room in a particular year.

• 7:02John R. Miles?

  This episode is about hearing yours. Let's start with the biggest tape of all. The one almost every generation plays about the next one. Kids these days. Alexis told me that every generation has told its own version of that story, and she noted it goes all the way back to Aristotle. She said nearly every one of those stories starts with blame, and no good solution ever begins there. When she and Nancy first heard the tapes, they had been carrying that same assumption themselves. So Alexis ran a test. I love this part.

• 7:45John R. Miles?

  She brought in a group of undergraduates, told them exactly what she was doing, and handed them transcripts from the 1970s. She gave them two highlighters. Green for anything that felt contemporary and familiar, pink for anything that felt different. And she watched student after student fill the pages with green. At the end, they kept asking her what the real test was. They couldn't believe this wasn't a trick. The idea that their grandparents' lived experience was so similar to theirs just boggled their minds.

• 8:25John R. Miles?

  Now, I'm not saying nothing has changed. Alexis isn't either. Her point is that the core emotion isn't new. What may be new is the intensity. And she pointed to research on rising perfectionism as an umbrella that can hold a lot of what we're all debating, from social media to declining autonomy. It isn't a single lever. And she was clear about something else I appreciated. The answer starts with young people, not about them. And then she said something I think every parent, teacher, and manager should hear. When we call this a transactional generation,

• 9:11John R. Miles?

  we shouldn't forget that they're picking up on what we've been putting down. They went through a process that told them, "Here's what matters most." They learned the tape from that room. I watched that with one of my own kids, who felt enormous pressure to do everything right, to get into schools they dreamed of. And Alexis said she hears the same thing, and that students describe it as duck syndrome. Everyone gliding across the pond while paddling furiously underneath. At Princeton, they call it effortless perfection. The tape says, "Nobody can show that they're struggling." Here's what she told me about rewriting that tape, and it's practical.

• 9:57John R. Miles?

  Swathmore, she said, makes all of students' first semester classes pass/fail. Freed from grades, students take a class in something they're genuinely curious about. Now, not every school can do that, so she suggests that students choose one course a semester to take pass/fail as their risk-taking course. And they often do well in those courses because they're lit up by the learning, not the outcome.

• 10:29John R. Miles?

  And the room can record a much kinder tape, too. Alexis said, “What happens in a student’s first 10 days may matter most.” At her own school, the dean told incoming online students, “You belong here. You were chosen.” Her LinkedIn feed filled up with people saying how much those two sentences mattered. Then she told me about an incoming student who walked up to introduce herself. Alexis stopped her and said, “Oh, I remember you. You were the one who wrote about...” And before she could even finish the sentence, the student burst into tears. Tears of meaning, Alexis called them. She felt seen.

• 11:13John R. Miles?

  She told me four things students need in order to belong, to feel seen, heard, valued, and encouraged. She told me those overlap beautifully with what I call mattering. That’s the architecture. The room records the tape, and a single sentence can change what it says. Quick pause here. If this episode is changing how you hear the rooms you grew up in, I’d love for you to explore my new book, The Mattering Effect: Creating a Life of Meaning and Worth. It’s about how we learn to measure our worth, why so many people feel invisible, and how we build lives and environments where people know they matter.

• 11:57John R. Miles?

  You can find it wherever books are sold or at matteringeffect.com. When we come back, I’ll discuss the research from John Acuff on the signs we carry in our heads and how to write new ones. But first, a quick break for our sponsors. We’ll be right back. Welcome back to Passion Struck. Alexis showed us how the rooms record tapes. Now let’s talk about what happens when we’re the ones still pressing play. John Acuff defines procrastination in a single sentence, and it’s one of the cleanest I’ve heard. It’s when your actions don’t match your intentions.

• 12:39John R. Miles?

  That’s all it is, a gap between who you say you want to be and what you’re doing. He also said something funny and true about why that gap is so wide today. Procrastination, he said, “is the most well-funded fear in modern history. Nobody funds your inner critic, but every distraction in your life funds the delay.” But when I asked him whether procrastination is really about delaying action or delaying identity, his answer took us somewhere deeper. He said it might start as identity, and then it ends up with action. If you believe you’re not a writer, you won’t spend time writing.

• 13:23John R. Miles?

  He described meeting people in their 30s who say, “I’m not athletic because when they were seven, their sister was the athletic one and they were the smart one. They got a label and they’ve been living against it ever since.” That’s a tape, recorded in a particular room in a particular year. John calls the people who write them “signs in your stands.” Imagine your life as a stadium, and someone in the crowd is holding up a sign. His example was an executive in their 40s who keeps pulling back from leadership opportunities, even sabotaging them.

• 14:04John R. Miles?

  Pull the thread, and at 17, someone in authority told them, “You’re not a natural leader.” And here’s the line that got me. They believed it in the moment because they didn’t know they had permission not to believe a person in authority. Then they played that tape for 30 years. He told me about our mutual friend Stephen Scoggins, whose father used to say, “Scoggins don’t get ahead, Scoggins get by.” Imagine hearing that as a boy. And as Stephen got more successful, he kept bumping into the boundary his father had drawn.

• 14:44John R. Miles?

  John told me about a mentor named Ted Bocelli, who drew a diagram on a napkin back when John worked at Bose. The founder sets the boundary of a big rectangle. The CEO, nervous about going over the line, draws a slightly smaller box. Then the president draws an even smaller one. Then the director of marketing, then down the chain, a nestling doll of even smaller boxes. By the time it reaches a young copywriter, he told John, “You don’t get a soccer field to play in, you get a postage stamp.” That’s the architecture of agency in a napkin sketch.

• 15:27John R. Miles?

  The room shrinks the box a little at every level, and eventually we mistake the box for who we are. And it travels between generations, too. John told me that three women from his oldest daughter’s sorority each said to him, “My generation will never be able to afford a house.” He said that’s how it works. It starts as a fear. What if I can’t afford a house? Then it becomes a belief. Then it becomes a law. My generation can’t. And at that point, why bother? John called that one of the most destructive tapes there is.

• 16:09John R. Miles?

  Because if you don’t think what you do matters, you don’t try. He pushed back with his own story. A house in the worst school district they could afford, an hour from work, a freelance side hustle on top of a full-time job, 150 a week food budget. He said he didn’t know they were poor. He just thought they liked camping. His point wasn’t, “It was easier back then.” It was that we need to share how we actually did it, because the tape our generation placed for the next one is that it’s the hardest it’s ever been.

• 16:53John R. Miles?

  I thought about Alexis’s grandparents’ tapes when he said that. What if each generation shared that messy middle instead of the verdict? And I have a tape of my own. When I was about 38, I thought I was doing it great, until I looked at my Naval Academy classmates. One had gone on to become a governor. Another flew on the space shuttle. John’s response when I told him, “You’re going to feel behind, John. That’s a human thing,” he said. And Instagram shows it to you now. The tape says, “You’re behind. Somebody else is always having the rocket ride.”

• 17:36John R. Miles?

  And here’s the good news John offered, which I think is the most important thing in this episode. You have permission to write some new signs. So what do we do with a tape once we hear it? The temptation is to argue with it or to replace it with a slogan. I don’t think either works. I think you test it. In 1901, Wilbur and Orville Wright had a problem. Their glider wasn’t performing the way the published aerodynamic numbers said it would. They could have done what most of us do, which is to try harder, build a bigger glider, and hope.

• 18:20John R. Miles?

  Instead, they questioned the numbers everyone else was trusting. They built a small wind tunnel and tested wing shapes, one after another, until they had data that they could believe. Two years later, they flew a Kitty Hawk. The published numbers hadn’t come from a villain. They had simply been inherited, and the rights were willing to check. That’s what the highlighters were when I was talking about the Harvard experiment. Alexis built a small wind tunnel for a belief everyone shared, and the results came back green. And it’s what John asks of us.

• 19:02John R. Miles?

  When someone tells him they feel stuck, he says, “Addition a goal. Pick one new thing, 15 minutes a day for seven days in a row, and see if it lights you up. If it doesn’t, you have permission to pick a different one. A small test, not a life decision.” So here’s the tool I promised you at the beginning of the episode. It’s called the Tape Check. Question 1: What’s playing? Say the tape out loud in one sentence. “I’m behind. I’m not a natural leader. My generation will never get ahead.”

• 19:44John R. Miles?

  Now ask which room recorded it. That’s John Acuff. Question 2: Whose voice is that? And what year was it recorded? Who said it? How old were you? And what was that room rewarding or running from? That’s Alexis Redding. Question 3: Does it hold up? Test it and rerecord. Run the smallest experiment you can, then write the next line. That’s the Wright Brothers, Alexis’s highlighters, and John’s new signs.

• 20:27John R. Miles?

  Now, I want to run the tape check on a scenario that many of us carry, the thought that we're not a natural leader. So let's go through this step by step. Question one, what's playing? The thought in our heads that we're not a natural leader. Question two, whose voice are we hearing? What year? Maybe for you, it was a teacher. Maybe it was a boss when you were 17 or 22 in a room that rewarded loud confidence over quiet curiosity. And then question three, does it hold up? I want you to go get two highlighters. Make a list of every time someone followed your lead, asked for your help, or trusted

• 21:12John R. Miles?

  your judgment, and I want you to mark it green. Then I want you to take the pink marker and mark where it doesn't fit. After the exercise is done, I bet you're surprised to notice how much green there actually is. Now re-record it. Alexis shared a story she tells her students. She had applied to doctoral programs once and didn't get in. She told me she wasn't ready. She hadn't yet figured out the work she wanted to do, and she had written the application she thought they wanted. So she took a year off, and the next time, it was her on the page, and they took it.

• 21:56John R. Miles?

  She told me she tells that story because students need to hear, not the tidy version, and not it'll all work out, but here's what it felt like when I was uncertain. That's the new tape. Not a hollow slogan, a true story with the messy middle left in. And if you can't rewrite the whole thing, John has a rule for that, too. Some beats none. If you wanted to run three miles, but only have time for two, two miles matters more than zero. The smallest honest line beats a perfect script you never record. And then there's one more thing from Alexis.

• 22:41John R. Miles?

  When she advises students, she never gives just one suggestion. She always gives two, because a young person hears one suggestion as a direction. Two keeps the door open, and I think that's good advice for talking to ourselves, too. When the tape says there's only one path, ask yourself for a second one. So here's where this leaves us. You didn't record most of the tapes you play. Your family did, and your school did, and your first boss did, and a room you were in at 17 did. That isn't an excuse, it's an opening.

• 23:24John R. Miles?

  Alexis found 1970's tapes that let two generations finally hear each other. John showed us the signs in her own stands, and the right rathers showed us what to do when the numbers don't match the lift. Test them yourself. Your assignment tonight happens in two moves. First, run the tape check on yourself. Name the tape, identify the room, and test it with one small experiment. And second, record a better tape for someone else tomorrow. Tell someone they belong here, or share the messy, unpolished middle of your own story.

• 24:07John R. Miles?

  You have the power to rewrite someone else's soundtrack with a single sentence. Next week, we begin a brand new November series that I'm titling, "The Art of a Life Well-Lived." We're going to do an exploration of how we nourish ourselves, discover what matters, and build lives guided by purpose. We're opening with my friend, Lee Cotton, in a conversation about food, nourishment, and the everyday choices that shape how we care for ourselves and experience life. It's a fitting place to begin a series about what it means to live well with greater awareness and intention.

• 24:47Speaker 02

  When I was struggling in my late teens with my issues surrounding with food, that word "matter" was something that I didn't feel like I mattered. So if I shrunk myself or disappeared, it wouldn't really matter, and that was the way that I controlled it with food. So that is a very profound statement when it comes to food and nutrition. Those words, "I matter," those two words, very important.

• 25:11John R. Miles?

  If you know someone who's currently trapped listening to an old, broken tape, please take a moment to share this episode with them right now. And don't forget to hit subscribe or follow wherever you listen or watch, if you're on YouTube, so you don't miss the start of our November series. Until next time, remember, you can't un-hear it once you've heard it, and you get to decide what plays next. I'm John Miles, and as always, stay curious, stay intentional, and stay passion struck.