Afford Anything - James Patterson Shows Why Comfort Can Be a Trap

Episode Date: November 12, 2025

#659: Imagine that you’re at the absolute peak of your career. You’re the CEO of a prominent advertising company at the age of 36, but you feel like you’re driving in the wrong lane. It’s wrong.Then you make a hard career pivot and it works out beautifully.My guests today know exactly what that’s like. We’re joined by James Patterson, the author who has sold more than 425 million copies of his books. He has co-authored books with President Clinton, Dolly Parton, and now his latest co-author is Dr. Patrick Leddin, who also joins us to talk about disruption. Timestamps: Note: Timestamps will vary on individual listening devices based on dynamic advertising run times. The provided timestamps are approximate and may be several minutes off due to changing ad lengths. (0:00) Defining disruption versus gradual change (5:20) Positive disruption mindset and overcoming fear (8:12) Process for uncovering personal passions (10:25) Patterson disrupts publishing with six books per year (13:45) Research reveals 16 disruptive behaviors (16:30) Academia embracing different voices and perspectives (21:00) Mountain climber story shows gradual disruption (24:14) Framework for navigating career transitions (28:19) Limiting beliefs and psychological barriers (30:55) Being open to change versus stability (35:00) Taking ownership of disruptive choices (41:00) Mission versus purpose distinction (46:37) Advice for embracing positive disruption Share this episode with a friend, colleagues, and James Patterson book fans: https://affordanything.com/episode659 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Imagine that you're at the absolute peak of your career. You're the CEO of a prominent advertising company at the age of 36. But you feel like you're driving in the wrong lane. It's wrong. And so you make a hard career pivot and it works out beautifully. My guest today know exactly what that's like. We're joined by James Patterson, the author who has sold more than 425 million copies of his books. To put that in perspective, James Patterson has sold more books than the entire population of the U.S. and Canada combined. Forbes tracked his income, and over a decade, his total income, not his net worth, by the way, his total income is estimated at 700 million. In 2016, alone, according to Forbes, he made 95 million, just in that one year. He is someone for whom that career pivot worked out well. He is one of the most prolific and successful authors in history. He has co-authored books with President Clinton, Dolly Parton, and now his latest co-author is Dr. Patrick Ledin, who also joins us in this interview.

So this is a joint interview with two of them. Dr. Ledin is a professor at Vanderbilt University, where he teaches corporate strategy, negotiation, advanced marketing, and crisis leadership. He himself also made a big career pivot. He spent his 20s as an Army Ranger. then he built and sold a successful business and then he moved into academia as a professor of Vanderbilt. Both of these guys had huge success early in life and both of them utterly disrupted their lives in order to make huge career and life transitions.

And they did so multiple times. James Patterson was actually a PhD candidate at Vanderbilt before he disrupted that to enter the advertising world, which led to him becoming the CEO. of Jay Walter Thompson at the age of 36, and then he disrupted that again to become the famous James Patterson that we all know today. So it's disruption after disruption. Together, these two have researched how people navigate change, how people create positive disruption in their lives. They've researched how to turn disruption into a force for good, and they've published their findings in a new book called Disrupt Everything. And in our conversation today, we dive into what disruption really means, how it's different from the concept of mere change or adaptation. We talk about

why some people freeze while others thrive. And we talk about how you can develop your disruptive strengths. We also talk about creating disruption inside of industries or inside of organizations. James talks about how he went from publishing one book per year to publishing as many as six books a year, which totally disrupted the norms of the publishing industry. So, I should introduce this show, shouldn't I? I've just disrupted the format of our intro. Welcome to the Afford Anything Podcast, the show that knows you can afford anything, not everything. This show covers five pillars, financial psychology, increasing your income, investing, real estate, and entrepreneurship. It's double eye fire. And today's conversation resonates

with anyone who's looking to change careers, to retire early, to move abroad, to in some way totally disrupt your life, maybe to start a new business or a non-profit, to create some type of disruption, or to anyone who's interested in shaking up the norms and practices inside of your own industry or inside of your own company or organization. Anyone who wants to be a positive disruptor, you're going to enjoy today's conversation with mega bestselling author, James Patterson, and Vanderbilt Professor, Dr. Patrick Lennon. Enjoy. Welcome, James. Welcome, Patrick.

Thank you. Thank you. Hey, glad to be here. Terrific to be here, absolutely. Thank you for joining me on the show. I'd like to open by asking, what is disruption? How do you define this? Disruption is everywhere. It really is an age of disruption. Every day we wake up in something new is happening that's pretty stunning. The government is into disruption right now. We've got wars. We have health scares. We have AI. We have things happening in the workplace, has never happened before, at least not as rapidly as it happens. Change, television network, sports, incredible disruption in the sports world,

NIL, all sorts of things that people didn't expect to happen. Yeah, I would agree. And in building on that, they scale all the way down to our dinner table at home and our own careers. And people are disrupted when they get a work opportunity or they lose a job and everything in between. So it's from the big to the small and everything in between. And it creates incredible stress on us. And anybody, you talk to your doctor, they'll say stress is the killer. And one of the things we're trying to do is cut down people stress a lot. What is the difference between disruption and change?

Change is much slower and gradual. That's one piece. Patrick? Yeah, and oftentimes in organizations or in certain entities, change is kind of a decision we make internally. Like we're going to implement a new system. We're going to disruption oftentimes comes out of left field or from a customer call or whatever it might be. and it just turns things on the head. And oftentimes, in times of disruption,

you know, you think about in organizations, but the same in your family in your life. People freeze, people fight, people flee. We want to help them flip the script. Yeah, disruption is more of a tornado. It sounds as though. I mean, I think for a lot of people, disruption has a negative connotation,

but there are positive disruptions as well, and they're also intended disruptions. Yeah. My entire career is just one disruption after another, positive disruptions. I've had two very successful careers. as I started, I ran an ad agency. I was the CEO youngest one when I was 37. It was all disruption starting with, I came out at grad school at Vanderbilt and needed a job and I had no

marketing experience, no advertising experience. Jay Walter Thompson required you to put together a portfolio of sample ads. I did it in the Washington Jefferson Hotel, which is a horrifying place in New York City. So I bought them a portfolio and that was supposed to be the way it works. But I have a disruptive nature, positive disruption. I brought them another portfolio the second week. I brought them another portfolio of the third week. Then they hired me. They said, okay, the portfolios are pretty good and this guy has something, whatever the heck it is. And we can get into publishing later, but that was nothing but positive disruption after positive disruption. Yeah, absolutely. You mentioned like on the front end of that question about disrupting having a

negative connotation. And we would just say that, yeah, a lot of people have a limiting mindset. the idea that I just need to survive this thing or endure it or it's breaking something. We want to say, no, it's fertile ground. There's some opportunity within this. James, in the story that you just described as to how you got that job at J. Walter Thompson when you were young, you brought them portfolios for four consecutive weeks. They hired you in that fourth week. What I hear in that story is gumption and persistence.

To what extent are those qualities related to positive disruption? Well, one way or the other, people either have that or don't. If you have a lot of gumption, you still need help in terms of you've got a great idea to fix things at work or to fix your team or you have a great idea for a product or a great idea for a novel or whatever. It will help you to move that thing forward in an orderly constructive manner. And in some cases, people don't have that and this really helps them to get started. Mel Gibbons has that book, Let Them, but she had a book earlier, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. And that's just a starter. It's because she was having trouble in her life at that point. And she just did this, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, get out of bed. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, make that call for that job interview. And a lot of people need that sort of starter, that first step, that get me moving, and then the second step.

Yeah, I would add to that that tenacity is definitely a principle, but we don't just start off with, hey, have tenacity, have some grit, get out there and make it happen. We start off with a whole process around think through things. Understand your strengths. Then it gets to applying your strengths, which is really when tenacity starts to come into play. All right. Let's talk through that process then. It begins with fire, and that fire is really anchored by your passions. A lot of people don't know what their passions are. A lot of people have never really heard an inner voice. It sounds a little bit esoteric. How do people start unearthing that? Some people, they'll look at it and they'll say fire inside. We explain it and they go,

check, I got it. Other people might say, I don't know those components. I don't understand how to uncover my passions. Hey, we got you too. The idea behind this is that we all have a fire inside. We have some bigger purpose, mission in life, and we want to see opportunities within disruption to actually throw some positive fuel on that fire. Or in some cases even to start the fire. Some people, I mean, it's kind of ashes, but there's a potential there for passion. And not in every single person, but in most people. For the people who are trying to unlock their passion. Would you recommend following a curiosity and seeing if that deepens or are there other prescribed paths? I think there are a whole lot of other different things. I mean, that's certainly

one of them. And some people, they kind of know their passions. They just, I'm not sure how to make these things happen or they can be afraid of it or they don't have enough confidence or something's gotten in the way or their family life has gotten in a way. So a lot of things are getting away of our passion. No, no, you're right. I mean, I think somebody might come to it and go, got it, move on. Other people might say, I don't know what that fire inside is. And then the question might be, what would you do, even if you weren't being paid for it? Start there and start to explore that a little bit.

And ask other people what seems to light your eyes up and start exploring that. But ultimately, it's about how do you live out that fire inside in the face of all the stuff that lay throws to you? James, I'd like to learn more about your story because before you started working with Patrick, you know, you were a lone wolf when you first started writing. Your first major disruption was rather than just publishing one book a year, you publish two a year, then three a year, and then six a year, which was enormously disruptive to the publishing process. In a positive way, I must say, if you look at their bank accounts. Right. Can you talk about how you worked through that disruption? So many things here are just looking at things and going, and we all do this. We all do this. that's not working as well as it could, or that's not working at all.

When I started to move up at Jay Walter Thompson, the New York office, when I started running, it was some of the offices were very good. New York wasn't very good, and people didn't want to go to work there. So I ran this ad on the back page of the Times once, and it was eight questions like, here are the ingredients on a can of beans, vinegar, water, whatever, heck, make it sound delicious. All of them were things where you could immediately find it whether a person could write and more important whether they could solve problems.

So there was a positive disruption, figuring out a way to hire people when they didn't think they wanted to come to Jamelter Thompson. And then in a book business, going from one book to two book or three, it started with three, actually. Just looking at it, where's the rule written that you can only do one book a year,

one book every two years? What is that rule? I'm sorry. It just doesn't make sense to me. So I challenged it. How did you find the time to do that? You know, a lot of it just has to do with the way you're brought up. My grandmother, she was great, eighth grade education, but she was brilliant. She gave me all the advice in the world, and she really was my prime motivator. And her thing was, you can do this. She said, you're not going to play in the NBA. So forget about that one. You can't go to your left as well

as you need to. I could dunk in high school. I was a little guy who I could dunk, but she said, You're not going to do a lot of stuff. And she had a line, hungry dogs run faster. And she also had a thing, go chop wood, which is basically stop talking about it and go do it. So a little bit of his tough love, too. You've got to get up off your butt. You've got to go do something. Patrick was an Army Ranger.

Army Rangers, that's a tough way to learn how to move on with life. When being disruptive in a field, and you've told two stories, one about how, as the CEO of J. Walter Thompson, you disrupted the way that hiring is done, was done. And the second was, as an author, you disrupted the pace of publishing. There are, of course, the internal sources of friction, time management being one, just creative barriers being another. But then there are the external sources of frictions that you encounter as well, pushback. Are there any overarching themes that you've found as you have had to navigate those, and which of the two do you find to be stronger, the internal or external sources of friction? It depends on a person, but Patrick,

your great in this area. Yeah, I think that probably one's stronger than the other, and probably it's predominantly internal, to be honest with you. It's getting in your own way sometimes can be a real problem. And that's why it's important to surround yourself with different voices who can help you think through things. But one thing we tried to help people do is recognize that in moments of disruption, you have to step back and discern what role you're going to take on, which hat do you kind of want to wear right now or need to wear? What's the context of the situation calling for? We encourage people to, hey, you have agency, make a choice here. And we also help them realize that they have some strengths. And the research is pretty strong behind us. We spent

over three years at Vanderbilt University, I did leading a team where we studied positive disruptors in the world. And we found these 16 behaviors that showed up in what they do. And we also found that nobody had all 16 of them, but they had some. And everybody listening to this has some. So the ability to discern like what role should I take on and which of these disruptive strengths do I have that I can apply and maybe who I can bring with me on this journey is really powerful. So it goes from, gosh, there's all these reasons I can't do this to what's going to stop me from doing this? It's a choice. And there's a path in front of me and I've got everything I need to do it. You know, Patrick, it strikes me.

So you are a professor at Vanderbilt. Do you see academia as at odds with the notion of disruption? Not anymore. Yeah, I think the world's caught up. You know, take Vanderbilt, for example, we never taught classes that were 100 people in general. We never taught anything online. Then COVID hit.

You better figure out how to do it. And we're seeing that across academia and just how things are shifting, whether it's questioning, should I go back and get an MBA? Are they just living at ivory tower and can't connect? I mean, I think I'm a pretty non-traditional professor at a Vanderbilt University, and I spent my 20s jumping out of planes and run around the woods in the next 15 years building a business before I sold it off and then jumping. jumping into the university. I think the fact that they would even bring somebody like me into a

classroom, even though I have on paper what you need, I think shows that we're open in many ways and need to be open and having some different voices in the conversation. But in general, I would put education right at the top of the list of ripe for disruption and it's either do out how to do it or it's going to do it to you. It's hard to imagine any business, any area, any industry that isn't right for disruption. You just like anything right now and you go, you better disrupt, even if you want to maintain the status quo. You want to maintain, you want to be Harvard, you want to stay Harvard, you're going to need to disrupt. When you think of education or organizations in general, there's a lot of senior leaders who kind of can envision where they need

to go to, where they need to take the institution or where they need to take the business or whatever it might be. But then they look at the organization they have and they're not convinced they have the leaders or the culture to help them get there. And what we're trying to do is help within organizations at least, help people realize that every job needs to be disrupted in some way. Every person needs to be a positive disruptor. So then all of a sudden it becomes, I'm a senior leader trying to take my organization in a new direction, and I don't know how I'm going to bring them to, I've got 80% of my people who are understanding what it means to be a positive disruptor, and they're willing to do it.

And so much of success in life is about missions, having a mission. And one of the things we help people to do is to have personal missions. You know, we sold this book to Hach, who's my publisher. and they had two new people coming in to run his shed, and they had a mission. It was a different mission than what had existed before it. For that mission to work, they needed to have the editors disrupt the way they buy books and the way they edited it. They needed the sales department to disrupt the way they've been selling.

They needed the receptionists to disrupt the way they greet people. And insofar as you get buy-in, your mission works. and if you don't get buy-in, if people aren't willing to disrupt, which means change pretty rapidly, your mission isn't going to work. Or you might have a wrong mission. Yeah, you know, you hit the status quo. We call it a status quo is a deceptive little devil, and it's one of four fundamental facts that we uncovered in the research. And it is true. I mean, think about back to COVID. People were like, well, wait, can't we get back to normal? Or what's the new normal? And one thing we realize is, is things are constantly changing.

And we don't always recognize that or act that way. We try to have kind of bury our head or hope it goes back. So one thing is that status quo is deceptive. You think it's going to stay that way. It's not going to, which is good, too, if you're going through some tough times, you know it's going to change. But that's okay because the second fact is that you're wired to handle this. You have a big brain that can do cool things. You have experiences where you've gotten over challenging times, and you also have lots of resources. You have friends. You have family. You have coworkers. You may have some money that you can, you know, loosen up to do certain things. You also have technology. As disruptive as it is, it's a great resource. And then the other

to really quickly is that relationships in life really, really matter. As Jim and I were studying this, we're like, this is a really key thing that every relationship you have in life, if you think about it, is it a headwind or is it a tailwind? Is it pushing you closer to your purpose or holding you back? And what are you doing to other people? And then that last one I think is really critical is the idea, the fourth fundamental fact is that your time here is finite, make it count in ways that matter. And people fight change. It's a little bit in their nature. And if they fight change, it can create problems for them. Publishing, they fight change.

They've been doing things the way they've been doing for the last 50 years. You talked earlier about colleges, colleges, universities fight change. People that run shows fight change. They want to do things away. CNN wants to, they still want to put a person up there talking heads like they did in the 50s. For the most part, that's not going to work. It's not going to work terribly well unless that talking head is a magical. MSNBC has one talking head who's magical.

but that's a hard thing. But they fight it. They fight it. Everybody, people fight change. And Patrick and I, for the most part, we kind of change. Pretty much everything I've done in writing with co-writers, it's always been, okay, I'm kind of open. Let's give it a shot. Let's see what happens with it. What's the difference then between disruption and adaptation? Oh, I think adaptation would be very evolving too. I mean, I think about it's almost iterative nature over the course of time as opposed to disruption can very much be your next customer call. I mean that quickly or your results when you go to the doctor of a blood screening, something somebody says to you around the dinner table,

a phone call from somebody who gives you an amazing opportunity to go to a new city and take a new job. As positive as that might feel, it could be very disruptive to you and your family. So the next person you interview. Yeah. It could be a disruption. It could all of a sudden the show goes a little differently than you thought it would go because somebody came on and that's just the nature of that.

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Get your first year for 250 a month. Learn more at pceexpress.ca. You tell this story of a mountain climber who faced a disaster that resulted in amputation and the loss of life of one of his partners. And we see in that story disruption in that case as the result of a sudden disaster. But there are also more gradual disruptions that can happen as well. Can you elaborate on how to best brace for both types of disruptions? That story there starts with a very negative disruption, and then there are a series of positive disruptions. Yeah, there is. You're referring to Jamie Andrews story about losing his hands and his feet and his friend on climbing a mountain in the Alps.

Obviously, there's risk associated with a type of climbing, but there was a change in the weather, and they ended up spending five days on the mountain. And that was very, obviously, it could be framed as a negative disruption. Certainly, not framed, it is. I mean, you wouldn't wish that on your worst enemy to wake up in a hospital and be told they're going to have to amputate your hands and your feet. But he decided to go very incrementally in the idea of somebody brush my teeth today, I'm going to brush my own tomorrow, and started to take ownership. When I met Jamie Andrew, he actually traveled from Scotland where he lives to the United States and walked in to give a presentation.

I mean, it's one little disruptive choice he made after another. When you talk about ones that are more gradual over time, I think, to the idea of we had a chance to talk to, it happened to be another climber. but a young lady who was the youngest female North American to climb Mount Everest at 18 years old. We talk about the evolution of a relationship with her father where initially he was guiding her on small family hikes and then she became his peer because she became as strong as he was. And then at the end, as she climbed Everest, he stayed at base camp and she went forward. You talk to her father, his name's Rodney Westlake, you talk to him and you feel that disruptive

momentum that he felt over the course of time and he had a process his way through it too. I mean, and when you think about she got to the top of the mountain, yes, but he also stayed in base camp. The relationship was disrupted. So it happened over the course of time. What we found is that everybody we talked to, regardless of how it came out suddenly over the course of time, we just started to realize there's a pattern that they follow and there's a way that they look at things and the way that they approach things. And that's what we found is so intriguing in the research. Can you elaborate a bit more on the patterns that people follow who are successful at positive disruption? And not just what are they doing, but what is it that they're not doing? What are the things that they're avoiding? I would say the first step is discernment. So the thing they're not doing is reacting immediately. They're not just shooting from the hip or somebody said something to me and I'm just going to lose it type of thing. What they did is they discerned. So that's what they didn't

do. On the behavior side, they didn't focus on all the stuff they couldn't do well. They didn't focus on, I can't go left. So therefore, you know, Jim was referring to earlier on the basketball court. They said, what can I do? And I'm going to lean into that. to find some people around me who could do some other things. They leaned into their strengths, not focused on trying to build up their weaknesses. One thing that they didn't do is they didn't limit themselves and the ability they could have a big impact. There were people that may have just disrupted themselves, but others disrupted family, industry, society, and they didn't put those self-imposed constraints on themselves because they started to see what was possible.

And the other thing they didn't do is they didn't just move on to the next thing. They always step back and say, what did I learn? What can I do differently? How can I recommit to something new? And storytelling is really important to both of us and important in terms of getting people to understand, getting them involved, getting to stay involved. Every company has a story and that story either moves you forward or moves you back. When I was in advertising, we had Ford and in those days Ford was having trouble and it was Ford found on road dead or fix or repair daily. That's a bad story. Bill Clinton had a bad story initially, which was a pot smoking. And he changed the story in terms of what he accomplished in Arkansas. Sometimes we have to leave our job and move to another

job because we need to change the story. Sometimes you go in at your first job and you're still the kid there. And six years later, you're still the kid. And you can't get past and you have to leave because you're not the kid. Maybe you never were the kid, but you have to change jobs. with our family sometimes, it's very difficult to change the story. Mom and dad always kind of, well, you know, you've always been, but I'm not that way anymore, mom and dad. And it changes the story. Changing the story is important.

You were the CEO of Jay Walter Thompson by the age of 36, and yet you had to dramatically change your story to become an author. How do you know when it's time to disrupt inside of your organization, like if you had stayed at Jay Walter Thompson, versus when you hear that whoosh of traffic on the highway and you think, you know what, I'm driving in the wrong lane. It's time for me to, rather than disrupt within, I need to disrupt in a totally different lane. Frequently, it's harder than it should be. Sometimes it's just hard for us to step back and be kind of rational. I should have been able to step back at Thompson. There's some good things

about this. I love the people that I work with. One of the things, in terms of hiring there, I would only hire people who were talented and good to be around. So that was a pleasurable thing about the job. Interfacing with clients, I didn't like as much in terms of just what you had to do or not do in terms of promoting their projects or products. At that point, I was writing novels and beginning to get successful. I should have been able to logically figure that out, but I didn't. Patrick, you know, I don't know, his situation at a certain point, you know, he might have said, okay, it's time. it's time for something else yeah i think of it a little bit like when a disruption hits you have to think

a little bit about the emotions and process through them so you have to think about i i liken it a little bit to a roller coaster some people love to hold on to the bar and scream and other people like to raise their hand and smile and that's how he hit disruption at times but the ability to think like how you feel about this and what do you do with it you got to process through those things like when jim was talking about things he liked about his work and didn't you have to kind of process through that emotional piece before you make a good decision. And I think that for me, when James Patterson comes and asks my students, are you living a good life?

And then starts to tell about how he created his own good life. At that very moment, it was disruptive to me in that I was like, I want to study that. I want to know how people can take these disruptive moments, whether it's I'm driving in traffic and I don't want to go into the office today and I've kind of hit a limit or I got caught on the top of a mountain or whatever it might be. How do they do that and say, okay, I'm going to make a move and I'm going to see something good really come from this.

I'm going to innovate something new. And that was really interesting to me, which then when you have a good question that you're trying to discover, it becomes a great research piece. You have a terrific idea for your company or your team or a product or something you want to, a company you want to start yourself. You don't kind of know exactly how to take that next step. Right. Patrick, how did you know when you made the transition from being an Army Ranger to running a business

and then later from running a business to becoming a professor, how did you know when it was time to make those shifts? He was tired of jumping out of airplane. It takes a toll. For me, on the military side, I was just kind of good at the military. You know, they tell you to turn right, I turn right, tell you to turn left, I turn left, tell me to shut up, I shut up. I was pretty good at that. And then you just progressed.

I went to infantry school and airborne school and ranger school and did all those things. And my last job in the Army was a company commander in the 82nd Airborne Division. And I'd heard so many people tell me, enjoy the time as a platoon leader, enjoy the time as a company commander, because after that it all changes. And that was kind of all changes in that. You get away from the soldiers. You're doing a lot more staff type of things. And I was like, I love this part of being with the soldiers.

I don't know if I'll love that stuff. And I just decided at that moment, I heard that enough to me. I was like, I'm going to move in a new direction. And it was tough in many ways because you're on a pretty good. the path I was on was a good path, probably to high rank. But on the other hand, once you start to lose that passion around something, are you serving the soldiers in my case well? And that's when I decided I'm going to make a move. It wasn't that I lost the passion to make a positive impact in people's lives. I hope I do that across my whole career. But it was the passion

of I don't want to keep putting on the uniform and sit in a cubicle. For me, that just wasn't the right fit. So when I pivoted to coming out of the military, I still wanted to build something and do something cool and that's eventually started on a business and I ran it for 12 years and I was out of the country doing some work and I came back after three months out of the country and somebody said my boss would like to talk to you at their company and I said why he said because you've been gone for three months and your clients haven't quit and your employees haven't quit we're looking to acquire someone so that was an acquisition situation and in that type of situation when you exit it's tough too because it's like the business was our we had two children and then we had our

business it was like our third child at every meal my wife and I worked together on the business but we decided it was the right thing to do and move on to the next step. So sometimes, you know, other voices will help you figure it out. Sometimes situations arise and those disruptions like my boss wants to talk to you, maybe by your business, was a moment for me to say, I could hold on to what I have, which could be a perfectly good choice, or I can move and go in a new direction. Actually, this new company can take more employees to a whole other place that I probably won't get them either.

And sometimes it's the case of trying to help people get past their fears, their large fears, which is really important. And pretty much all of us have those fears. Okay, I'm not sure if this will work. I'm not sure if I really want to change. I'm not sure if I can do this. I'm not sure. So helping people to get comfortable,

don't be afraid of it. You don't have to make the move necessarily, but let's figure it out. And then let's see if you're still afraid or as afraid. It's hard for a lot of people to open their minds up. It just is. They have difficulty and helping people to open their minds up. You know, with our son, Jack, with Sue and I, my wife, it was always, let's just open doors for him.

Not that you should do this, but, you know, what would be like to do this? What's it like to play soccer? What's it like to take an extra math course? What's that like? And you don't have to do it, but let's just open the door and take a peek in there. There's a lot of times people, oh, I never would want to do that. Well, you don't know until you try it a little bit. I mean, constantly, people are always saying, I wouldn't want to do that.

I don't want to go to that kind of, I wouldn't eat that kind of food. well, let's try it. And very often people go, I live in Palm Beach. Before I moved here, I would have said there's no way that I will want to be in Palm Beach or deal with Palm Beach people or deal with Palm Beach. And I was wrong. It's delightful here. Sorry. And if I can make one additional point, I think this is a really critical thing. As we studied this, you might think, well, you're going to be a positive disruptor, which means you're going to change and you're going to change and you're going to change. That's not the game we're setting up here. We're not saying that at all. We're saying you need to be open to change, and there may be times you take that job or move or take on that project at work or have a conversation with someone.

There's also times where you might go, you know what, that disruption's out there. I was open to thinking about it, but I'm actually going to double down on stability right now. We already have a good product in the market. The way we go on family vacation is great, whatever it might be. But the point is you're making a conscious decision. And I would argue, Jim and I would argue, that in the face of disruption, if you say no to change, you might be the most disruptive person in the room sometimes. because you say, that's not who we are. We're not going to do that right now.

That's huge, huge with companies. We have to expand. We've got to do this. We've got to do that. I mean, that's destroyed so many companies. They expand and then, oh, what happened to them? Well, they just expanded too many times. They made too many bad decisions.

And now that great company is no more or they're half of what they were. They lost the fire inside themselves. They lost the connection to that. Yeah. Right. They stray too far from the core. And so that's why in the framework that you've, created, you know, the fire is anchored by passion, talent, and your inner voice, but then the

foundation underneath that are values. Can you talk about that? A lot of times in organizations, they'll say something like, these are the things we value. Integrity, collaboration, communication, trust, loyalty, have fun doing all these things. You know, that will be sitting on the wall. But the question is, what do you really live out? What does integrity even mean? So when we talk about values, we're saying you need to have values individually. You need to have values as an organization. values ultimately tell you what will I stand for and what will I not put up with? What will I not stand for? And you need to be clear on those things because in moments of disruption, you're actually hitting a moment of choice and you can choose to move closer in alignment with those values or you can choose not to. And if it's in my family and I'm the parent, my kids see it. If I'm living out my values or not, my team at work sees it. My colleagues and friends see it. So the ability to make sure we move out in ways that align with our values are really critical. Because that's the anchor. You mentioned earlier that relationships can be a source of both headwinds and tailwinds.

Sometimes those relationships push you to act in a way that is not in accordance with your values. When that happens, it can be difficult to say, these are my values, because it comes off sounding like unwarranted stubbornness. How would you deal with a situation like that? Well, I would be a little bit different in the way I would phrase it in that I wouldn't say that the relationship pushed me to do it. I would say I chose to do it. I made that choice to do that, and that is a choice. And I don't necessarily think I need to challenge somebody like my values or XYZ because in doing that, that becomes confrontational. I think you just need to realize that relationships do hold you back and relationships do lift you up. And you do the same thing to

others. So keep that in mind as well. But there's also the reality that there's some relationships where you might be like, this person is a terrible headwind and I've tried to address it. And you know what? I just need to kind of terminate this relationship. That's a doable thing if they're on the way kind of to the periphery or on the outside of really, but what if it's a family member? That's a very different thing. In that case, you make your own choices in life, but you may just say, okay, I got to put some boundaries in place around this and figure out how to make this work a little

bit better because I still want to maintain a relationship with that person. All we're trying to help people think about is we realize that it's like going for a jog, is the wind behind your back and you all of a sudden feel like you're the next Olympic athlete, or is the wound in your face? And we know it when we walk into a meeting somewhere and you're like, oh my gosh, I didn't know this person was going to be in here. And that's a headwind. And we need to address it as opposed to let it sit because not addressing it, it doesn't get better. We have to choose to disrupt it. And with the relationship, that can make the relationship stronger, make it work addressing them. Or in some cases, you just, you may have to say that this is not

workable. But if you're rational about it, I mean, you see a lot of people, you go, oh, my God, why are they doing this to each other? You know, once again, it comes down to that fear or not being open, and it's hard for people. And we try to make it a little easier to examine these things in a rational manner, and then, you know, hopefully make things better, or in some cases you just have to make a difficult decision. You know, I want to go back to, James, when we were talking about some of the ways that you have been disruptive throughout your career, we covered the decision to break the mold of publishing only one book a year and to go all the way up to six books a year. But then you did something that was also disruptive and quite different, which is you started co-authoring books with a wide variety of different people.

And that was really, no pun intended, that was very novel. Can you talk through... Once again, it just seemed like a very logical thing to consider. There's no reason. But if you look around the world, if we're going to actually save our world, it probably means we'll eventually learn how to collaborate. Here's a good thing that works somewhere. Let's try it somewhere else because it works. Sistine Chapel, some amazing painters up there, you know, painting the same and collaborating and making it great.

Advertising tends to be collaborative, writer, art director, maybe a producer, getting together and figuring out how to make a, relatively short film and how do you make the best film and I knew all this so I always thought it would be kind of a useful thing to do not scary and probably a good thing and obviously not everyone should collaborate on things and I started doing it with a couple of friends there was one friend in particular and we said let's just write this little novel both of us were writers and we tried it and it was fun and we were used to it because we both worked in advertising. We were comfortable with that for a while now, collaborating with famous people like President Clinton, and we've done three novels together. And President Clinton, first of all,

he reads everything. He's a massive reader. He reads, reads, reads, he doesn't sleep. He's a vampire. Now, he doesn't sleep. And among other things, he likes mystery novels, just doesn't escape every once in a while. So the notion of writing a mystery with him was sort of interesting. And also, especially the books that we wrote, he brings authenticity, which is really useful and important, and it doesn't appear necessarily in most mysteries. With Dolly Part and the same thing, she brought authenticity. And she's a storyteller. Country music, more than most, rap is this way too, weirdly. But country music and rap in particular are storytelling forms of music. All of her songs are her famous songs, her stories.

She was fascinating to work with. She was a hungry dog, for sure. I met with Dolly down in Nashville, and we talked for about three hours about. We started out, maybe we'd do some kids' books, and then we started talking about an adult book, and I had a little idea and a quick little outline for the possibility of one.

She said, well, leave the outline with me, and I'll think about it. Two days later, she called up. She had some thoughts on the outline, and she had already written seven songs, to go along with this novel, which was about a country singer in Nashville. That's just her nature to be a hungry dog, to go out and chop wood, and she's still that way. You've talked about chopping wood.

Sounds as though the tendency to go out and chop wood, the tendency to just go out and do. it is a core component of all of this? It depends on the person. You can make some small gains. I wrote a book, the number one dad book, How to Be a Better Dad in One Hour. It's another one like this where my objective is to make things easier for people. There are a lot of men out there, especially younger men who are kind of lost and overwhelmed. And you're not going to be the breadwinner anymore. You have to change the way you're thinking about life. You may not find somebody to love. There are a whole lot of things. And the notion about that book was I knew a lot of men will not sit down and read the 400-page book. So I tried to figure out a way to

condense as much as I could. And I did a lot of research. I kind of read everything I could find on that subject and then talk to hundreds of dads about, well, how do you do it? What are your tricks? What have you figured out? And try to put as much as I could into this book. And my guarantee was, I guarantee you, if you read these 100 pages, this one hour, you will pick up at least a couple of things that will make you a better bother. And that's a pretty good use of an hour. But once again, the spirit of it was, and it's just the way we were brought up, which was to work in the soup kitchen. We do a lot of charities. I've given away $240 million right now. And that's it. I don't take credit for it. It's my mother and my grandmother. That's the way we

were brought up, you give. That's the deal. Don't take any credit for it. Just that's what you're supposed to do. So similarly with the dad book and to some extent with this book, yeah, we have some thoughts that can help people. There's a section in which you talk about the distinction between mission and purpose. Can you elaborate on that idea? Each of these have distinct meanings. You hear like vision, mission, purpose, all these type of things. There is a distinction between them like a vision is like where are we going to go over time and a mission is what are we going to do and how are we going to get there and a purpose is why we're doing these type of things we didn't want to belabor the point as we were talking about it because we as we were going through the

research most people just talked about hey what are they trying to do and and why does it matter to them we just kind of kept the conversation at a fairly simple level and jim even talks about his own mission and give some examples of missions and we just want people to think that through about why am i here where am i going type of thing but we weren't really getting too much into the corporations deal with all these different terms, because that's just not where people live. Well, it strikes me that there's disruption at the corporate level, or at the organizational level, I should say, and then there's disruption at the individual level. And I think at the individual level, a lot of people are looking for a sense of purpose in their life, but many

people don't necessarily think about, kind of have a mission statement for their own life. Yeah, I would say that we purposely made a choice early. on to talk a bit about purpose and the importance of it, understand the fire inside yourself. But quite frankly, we didn't belabor the point on that. We leaned more into the idea, okay, once you know what this is, how are you going to handle disruptions? And the reason we did that is there's a lot already written and said about sitting back and thinking about your purpose. And in many ways, it's a introspective component that takes a fair amount of time.

We show up and say in this project, all right, get clear on your purpose. but now let's talk about how you live that purpose out once you walk out that door and life hits you with the good and the bad. Right. So AI is the new frontier of the ultimate disruption. How should people be thinking about the way the AI is going to disrupt every facet of our lives? And how do we incorporate this into this conversation? The first step I think is don't spend time being fearful because it's not useful. President Clinton and I talk all the time about if something happens today, as it so often does, it's disturbing.

If we can't do something about it, we're not going to let it. We're trying not to let it ruin our day. And if we can do something, we do it. So with respect to artificial intelligence, let's not spend a lot of time worrying about it because it's not useful. It's not helping anything to sit there and worry about it. And if there are things that you can do, you know, like in your work, if it's already,

like Patrick, you had a, you were talking to somebody who had an experience. Yeah, absolutely. So there was a gentleman I was talking to who was talking about AI. He was concerned about AI. So it wasn't just an abstract concept or something he saw on the news. It was like really happening in his life where he said, I'm a writer at work. I get paid to write. And my CEO just read a presentation or gave a speech that was completely written by AI.

And he's like, I'm concerned. Am I going to lose my job? Talk about a disruption, right? Not the abstract disruption of AI, but the real one in his life. And I just started asking him some questions to think through. And then one of them was, do you see a world where with the existence of AI, you could actually be more valuable and not less valuable to your company? And he thought about it.

He said, yeah, I think I can. And I said, okay, well, in our research in this project, we identified five roles that people take on in the moment of disruption, which of these make sense. And he picked one. And I said, great. let's talk about what your strengths are, your behaviors, and he labeled some, and all of a sudden he walked out, he'd go like, I kind of have a vision of what can happen, and I can see how I can change my behavior in a way that'll add so much more value. So in that type of situation,

it took the AI is, you know, changing the world and it's disruptive to what's it mean to you and what can you do about it? When we talk often about technology, there's an expression out there that says we overestimate the impact that's going to have in the short term and underestimate it in the long term. So right now, AI, to many people, is the savior and other people is the devil. And the question becomes, all right, what's it mean to you specifically? Let's really get our hands wrapped around it, because that's where we live. Which one of those roles did he choose? He chose to be a trailblazer, which folks listening, that means he's going to go toward change and move out independently, which meant he's going to learn as much as he can about AI. And he's going to

take that over and take on the role of then of Torchbearer, which means he's going to lead a movement in the organization to help educate and help people understand. how to use AI. The positives and the negatives because we know there's a lot of investment going on in organizations around AI and there's also a lot of chatter going on right now saying we're not getting the return on investment we thought we'd get from it. Our AI is doing things we didn't expect it to do. It hallucinates constantly. So him understanding that as well as how to use the tools, all of a sudden made him a person who's possibly on the line to get crossed off at some point if there's cuts to suddenly being the guy that people are going to. So he didn't just

choose one role. He chose one. And then he moved over to another one. at the right time, which is what we find is that, because it's not a fixed personality thing, we find that people move from one role to the other as the situation evolves. So essentially he made himself indispensable by being the go-to guy when you've got a question about AI. It's the difference between saying disruption's going to destroy everything to disruptions fertile ground and do something cool. Are there any other things that people should be thinking about as we approach the AI

future, not just in terms of work, but in terms of how it'll affect family, how it'll affect relationships, how it will affect every element of life? I think part of it is just get real about is it going to affect you and get perspective from your, rather than this worldly, and especially fear, just being afraid of things. It's not useful. It's just not, I mean, is it going to have any effect on you in terms of what you do as far as you can see? And if not, I mean, it's not that you can't talk about it and have interesting talk about it, but the amount of time that's being wasted in terms of people talking about AI that doesn't go anywhere. It's just not

helpful. If it's going to affect you or if you can see it affecting you in the near future, whatever, then it probably it would behoves you to spend some time with it, talking about it, but don't waste a lot of time. The same thing happened early on with the internet. And we had some of the same

years, but this is, I think, a more intense than the internet change was, but it will be. And just an incredible amount of time wasted. At Thompson, what I said is, nobody knows where it's going. We're going to sell tours on the Internet for people, for our clients. We will take them on tours in terms of what exists right now. Here's the Internet.

Here's what's happening. And we will get you to pay for it. So that was a positive use of the Internet for right now. Yes, you're going to know more than you knew about it. We'll bring you up to day as much as we can. And we will get paid for it. Yeah, when we think about the Internet, obviously a big disruption. and it's here to stay.

Y2K bug was going to crash everything. Didn't quite happen. If you think about the Internet of Things was something we all talked about for a while in a way. AI, I think it's different. It's going to be here forever. It's going to be here for the rest of my life. It's going to continue to be more generative.

You can't get away from it. Teaching in a classroom, think about how you deal with AI in the classroom. What do you give writing assignments that students can just hand over to an AI device or something in AI that's going to generate the homework form and you can't really tell who did it because you can't?

So what do you do there? You have to disrupt the way you teach. All of a sudden, you're doing more things in the classroom. You've seen the blue books come out and people are writing the actual essays in the classroom. Or you use it as a tool and say, all right, I'm actually going to use this thing to create the prompts that we talk about in class. And students will throw ideas and then we'll go from there. So I think it's a tool, right? So like any tool, you can use it for its intended purpose, even as that evolves. You can use it as a crutch. These are all the reasons I can't do things because of this thing. You can use it as a weapon and hit people over the head with it. And I just think it's a tool. And you just have to say, okay, what can we do with it?

And one of the best things you can do is you get smarter about how it's impacting your world. And that's pretty much all you can do. And in Patrick's case, or anybody teaching in college or even high school or anywhere right now, it's a real issue and it's an everyday issue. Right. You know, you mentioned Thompson in your last answer. And another thing struck me, which is you became the CEO at the age of 36. There were, I would assume, people who had been there longer, people who were older and who had been there longer. Yes, there were older people, by golly.

No more, though. Who did not ascend to that position. You did something very special when you were in your 20s and 30s. There was something about you that was different in your performance that led you to become the CEO by the age of 36. And then you repeated that performance. It made a whole career switch, but also did something very special that made you stand out amongst authors. What is it that's so different?

Well, I think part of it I just recognized a real skill that I had that, one, I enjoyed it, which is the skill to communicate. And in terms of advertising, it is that skill. And in terms of books, obviously, it is that same. skill, that ability to collaborate in a lot of different ways. And in the book world, I've written mysteries. I've written nonfiction. Most recently, the Idaho murders. I wrote the first big book on Jeffrey Epstein back in 2016, children's books, because Jack, our Jack was a kid. He's a very smart kid. He wasn't a big reader. I started writing a lot of kids' books. But I just recognize, one, I love to do it, you know, communicate, tell stories, and I had a skill set there.

But, you know, once again, just in terms of solving problems, when I took over the New York offices, I said to people don't know how to work there. And what I did, I just looked around. I said, well, here are the people that I think can really help me right now and make this company a whole lot better, this office a whole lot better. And I chose two women, one was 28, one was 29, and a 74-year-old guy. and those, they become the three big people in the company in that office. Why?

Because they really know what they're doing. The end. I don't care that Linda Kaplan has only been in the business for four years. She's great at it. I don't care that this other guy is 74 years old. I don't care. It's irrelevant. No dumb rules.

What I'm hearing is decision making that was formed in large part by trusting your instincts. Yeah. Yeah. actually in the research on this project we found 16 behaviors these are disruptive behaviors we didn't find anybody who maxed all these things and when i'm listening to jim talk right now i'm like okay one of the behaviors is trust your instincts and some people have that nailed other people not so much i was actually talking to an audience about a year and a half ago or two years ago during the research we'd go out and talk to audiences and i was talking to this big group is at a hotel that

had a casino and i said to them how many of you believe that you know everybody has instincts worth trusting and a lot of hands went up and I'm like seriously you all think that and they're like I don't know I said go to that casino at 2 a.m. and tell me if people have good instincts. Jim has good instincts which is one of the you know my instinct about gambling I don't yeah guaranteed not to lose so trust your instincts is one that people have some people who are positive disruptions don't have great instincts maybe they don't have an experience or whatever it might be then they surround themselves with somebody does have a good gut Jim also has the ability to say smart things and that's one of the 16 behaviors. So as I'm listening to him talk right now, I'm ticking off the ones in my

mind that these are the ones that he has nailed. And does, sorry, Jim, you don't have all of them nailed, but nobody did. There's all these really cool combinations of people who do amazing things. The point being is we learned in the project and in the research is like, you've got some strengths. Lean into them. But another piece of it is also to recognize some of the things you don't do as well and accept it. Yeah. Walking in your own shoes. And I don't do certain things well at all. I can't fix my, there's a lot of things I can't do very well. That's okay. That's fine. I think a lot of guys are not great at accepting things that they don't do as well, or they let it overwhelm them. They let it defeat them. I'll meet people and they go, they apologize because

they don't read a lot. You don't have to apologize. It's okay. What do you do? Oh, you think a lot or you don't. Are you raising your family well or whatever the heck it is? Let's talk about the stuff that you, it doesn't matter. You don't read my book. So what? Good for you. And some people are really good at, and I've been with all types, either actors or directors or whatever. And some people really, Ron Howard is wonderful at accepting that and realizing how lucky he is. And when people, we've been out to eat a few times. And always people will come up. And very frequently, they say, we loved you on the Andy Griffith show when he was opie. And he's such a job. And he's such a And it's like, well, thank you so much.

It's really wonderful. I have won a couple of Academy Awards, but don't worry about that. And part of it, I mean, people come up in restaurants or whatever. And I always try to be, you know, yeah, well, this is great. And thank you so much for, you know, sharing. After all these years, does it feel real? Yeah, or not. It is real.

You know, one of the things about raising Jack, our son is the notion of my dad writes a lot of books or what. My dad writes too many books or what? Hopefully he's okay with it, but that's the end of it. That's not a big deal. And, you know, he's gone to good schools and run into some people who have famous parents and whatever. And most of his friends are pretty cool about it. I didn't do it.

Yeah, I'm a Kennedy, but I'm not the Kennedy. And that's a good attitude about it, and so far as you can do it. And same thing here. I write a lot of books and I, you know, it's not a big thing. It's fine. It's okay. I'm lucky. And Patrick, from your side,

How is that experience for you, like the two of you partnering on this project that you both clearly, very deeply believe in, but coming from such vastly different backgrounds, can you describe that? Yeah. Jim mentioned different partnerships, right? Sistine Chapel, sometimes I mention Lennon and McCarthy. Whenever you're partnering with somebody, there's a bit of a dance and you have to figure out how it's going to work out. And I just felt that once we started down this road, not only was whatever I would have produced on my own been substandard to this, but also I'm going to learn a lot in the process. I mean, we spent nine months on the outline of the project that we were working on when it became a book. We spent a few years working on this over the course of time. And actually, the entire time, we never even talked about like, what's this deal going to look like if we ever strike it somewhere until we got to the very end? And we just said, you know, Jim asked me what you think is reasonable.

And I told him what I thought. He said, that sounds good. Let's go forward. So it really was a partnership. And if you look at the book we wrote, you wouldn't know who wrote what. Yeah. I mean, other than some lines jump out at me sometimes. I'm like, oh, yeah, I wrote that line.

There's other times where I'm like, that was really good. I wish I could write more like him. But I don't think if somebody would read the project, they'd even know. And that's part of a partnership. In terms of the partnership, I don't love to research. I should do more even with the novels. Patrick is much more skilled. Also, because, and I think this relates sometimes to professional athletes, why some of them

don't become very good coaches for other people, because some of the stuff just comes to them rather naturally, and they can't explain it. They can't, they just, well, you just do this. And, you know, Patrick is much better at explaining some of these things so that people who necessarily don't have the instincts, okay, I can follow this. And a lot of the toolkits and things like that, that I would never be able to do those in a million years. It's not me. And it's recognizing what I can't do and what I can do.

And Patrick recognizing what he can do and he can't do as well. Yeah. And so what I hear is a lot of finding, you talk about strengths. So there's that element of finding people with complementary skill sets. But what's interesting to me about this is that there's the recognition of playing to your strengths is not, conflict with also having a growth mindset. Because I think, Patrick, you alluded to that earlier when you said, hey, it's not a fixed mindset thing. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it is definitely not limiting yourself. It's definitely, the world is exciting. You mentioned AI. What can I learn about it?

I mean, there's that constant yearning to learn something new. And one of the behaviors we found is this idea that things can get better. One person we interviewed, she started a company back in the 70s fashion line called Notori. She still runs it today. She's about 80 years old. Every month she travels to the Philippines where she owns a plant, visits with the people who are producing the garments, and then sits down with her 100-year-old mother and talks about the bookkeeping. I mean, that's somebody who's constantly learning, producing a new line of clothing every fall,

every spring, and the idea of realizing things can get better is really an important mindset. And I think one thing we found is that what holds you back from being a positive disruptor, isn't your yearning to be a negative disruptor to be difficult or cremogen. What holds you back from being a positive disruptor is a relentless pursuit of comfort to try to go back and maintain these things. And positive disruptors by definition are learners. They're constantly moving forward. And your roles may change.

I mean, your role in the company, your role at home or whatever, it may change over time. This year, maybe you have to be this in the team, and next year it's something else. Eventually, you may run the team, which run the company. But that's part of it. There are different things where you, as time goes by, your role can change radically. Sometimes learning to do one of the lower roles or lower roles, one of the different roles is useful in terms of moving forward, moving up, if you want to move up. Right. It rounds out your skill set and makes you appreciate that area better.

But you mentioned, Patrick, you mentioned comfort. And it seems as though the big antithesis of what we're talking about, the antithesis of the positive disruption that we've been discussing, it's comfort, it's a false sense of security, it's stubbornly clinging to what is, to the illusion of what is. And comfort might not even be the best word because there's nothing wrong per se with comfort. You can be on a successful team and be very comfortable with the success. But there is something about the negative, the laziness sometimes. There are some really bad things about it just burying your head in the sand. You know, this used to be a great, we used to make a lot of batteries here and da-da-da-da, and it went away. And there's nothing we can do anymore.

And just to be angry. and it's human nature, but it's not useful. That's the best way to move forward in life. James, your hat says Unreliable Narrator. What does that mean to you? A nice way of saying you're a liar. No, there are certain kinds of novels, and I've written a couple where the narrator is totally unreliable.

You're listening to them, it's first person. So you just assume that they're telling you the truth, and you find that as it moves on that they're not telling you the truth. So a friend of mine gave it to me, Michael Lupica, one of my best friend. He's a co-writer. And so, yeah, I think it's humorous. I like humor.

Humor's great. Humor gets you through stuff. Do you prefer co-writing? You seem to be doing mostly co-writing projects these days. No, I do one or two of my own every year. But what I love is at the end of the project, and it doesn't always happen, you hope it will, that you go, I'm really happy that I did that, that really worked that well. And it doesn't always happen.

Sometimes you get to the end of the novel. It's like, I don't know why you. didn't click the way I hoped it would, but it didn't. Or you make a movie, which are complicated because you have so many people involved and so many egos. And a lot of times the way Hollywood is structured now, it's not just the person in the movie, it's all of their people, which really gets it out of hand, and it's not useful for the project usually. There's a piece of language. It's not mine. I don't know where it came from, but I think about it. It's guided me for the last couple of years like doing the novel with Viola Davis. What it is is my time here is short.

What can I do most beautifully? What strikes me is that what often is good advice for an organization is also good advice for an individual. Exactly. We have one life. And one thing is, if we try to compartmentalize things too much, I think we cause problems for ourselves. Yeah. So the idea of recognizing, boy, if I can get good at this with the relationships at work, that'll probably help me around the dinner table if I even have one anymore. So the ability to say this is applicable everywhere

because it's based on some really good thinking and some really good practices that other people are using. If it was just one person's narrative story about how they lived a great life, it might be useful to you. You might be able to apply it. But this is the voices of many.

And when you get to a certain number of many, you start to realize there's some real wisdom here. Right, right. Well, thank you for spending this time with us. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Where can people find you if they would like to learn more? We're pretty easy. He's James Patterson.com and I'm Patrickleddon.com. Beautiful.

Thank you to James Patterson and Dr. Patrick Ledden. What are three key takeaways that we got from this conversation? Key takeaway number one. Your disruptive edge comes from doing the things that others won't. James Patterson didn't just submit one portfolio in order to, to land his first job, he submitted four consecutive portfolios over four weeks. And that completely disrupted the normal hiring process. And that kind of relentless approach became his signature throughout his career, constantly questioning the status quo and saying,

you know what, why can't I go above and beyond that? I just look at it and go, where is the rule written that you can only do one book a year, one book every two years? What is that rule? I'm sorry, it just doesn't make sense to me. So I challenged it. That's the first key takeaway. Key takeaway number two, fear is expensive. If you're stuck in a job or a situation that's just not working, fear keeps you from making the move that could ultimately transform your income.

And maybe there would be short-term pain, but there would be long-term growth. James Patterson was a Ph.D. candidate that's a lot of sunk cost at the time that he left Vanderbilt. He then became a successful CEO. That's a job that most people would want to keep, especially at 36, but he knew that he was in the wrong lane. And so he took a huge gamble, becoming an author. You know, a lot of people identify with this idea that authors and artists that necessarily equates to being broke, especially fiction authors. But he became a fiction author and then decided that he was going to publish at a wildly prolific volume and over time amassed 425 million book sales.

And sometimes it's the case of trying to help people get past their fears, their large fears, which is really important. And pretty much all of us have those fears. Okay, I'm not sure if this will work. I'm not sure if I really want to change. I'm not sure if I can do this. I'm not sure. So helping people to get comfortable, don't be afraid of it. You don't have to make the move necessarily, but let's figure it out. Fear is expensive, particularly when it comes to opportunity cost. That is the second key takeaway. Finally, key takeaway number three, the story that you tell yourself determines your salary ceiling.

Sometimes you need to leave a job because you're still seen as the kid even after six years of proving yourself. If you're in an organization or in an environment, maybe you're in a social environment where your environment, where your environment around you is telling you a limiting story about yourself or if you inside of your own head are telling yourself a limiting story about yourself. Well, changing that narrative is your key to getting a higher income and better opportunities.

Sometimes you go in at your first job and you're already still the kid there and six years later you're still the kid and you can't get past and you have to leave because you're not the kid. Those are three key takeaways from this conversation. with James Patterson and Dr. Patrick Lennon. Thank you so much for being part of the Afford Anything community.

If you enjoyed today's episode, please do three things. First, subscribe to our newsletter, affordanything.com slash newsletter, where today, in fact, we are sending out a newsletter all about the 50-year mortgage, about things that are happening right now. So we talk in our newsletter about stuff that we don't cover here on the podcast. So please subscribe to our news. It's absolutely free. Affordanithing.com slash newsletter. Second, please share this episode with the people in your life. Share it with anyone you know who's a

fan of James Patterson's books or a fan of reading mysteries. Share it with fans of Dolly Parton or fans of the fiction writing of President Clinton. They co-authored three books together. Share it with all of those people and more because that is the single most important way that you spread the message of F-E. Finally, please open up your favorite podcast playing app and leave us up to a five-star review and write a few words about what you enjoy about the show. Those reviews are incredibly meaningful. And they allow us to go out and book incredible guests. So thank you in advance for doing that. And thank you for being part of the Afford- Anything community. I'm Paula Pant. This is the Afford- Anything podcast. And I'll meet you in the next episode.

Thank you.