Good Life Project - Ari Weinzweig | How Business Can Change the World, One Life at a Time

Episode Date: September 6, 2022

Imagine, being in your 20s, fresh out of washing dishes at a local restaurant, borrowing just enough money to open a tiny, local deli with a friend who shared your passion for food, community, and business? Now, imagine that, decades later, that single decision would profoundly change the lives of not just thousands of regular customers, but millions of people, around the world? What my guest today, Ari Weinzwieg, didn’t realize, when starting Zingerman’s Deli with a $20,000 loan from the bank, and a degree in Russian History from the University of Michigan, was that he was seeding a revolution. Actually, in hindsight, maybe he did. Now 17 companies later and sitting as the CEO and co-founding partner of Zingerman's Community of Businesses, Ari sees commerce as an engine of impact, expression and service that changes people’s lives. Ari and his ideas have set off a global ripple of compassion, dignity, imagination, and aliveness in the world of business, inviting people to reimagine a profoundly different, radically expansive and inclusive way of defining success. Named by Inc Magazine as one of "The World's 10 Top CEOs," he’s forging a new way in business that rejects the norm and is grounded in purposeful vision, passion, and anarchy theory. He's written extensively about the values and beliefs that have kept the now iconic Zingerman's Delicatessen, his first business venture, afloat and successful for over 40 years in weekly newsletters and the numerous books he's authored, such as A Lapsed Anarchist's Approach to the Power of Beliefs and A Lapsed Anarchist's Approach to Managing Ourselves. In our chat today, Ari shares some of the brilliant happenings inside his head, ranging from the ways we can use history to guide us in work, life, and business today, a reclamation of anarchy as a tool for impact and equality, Ari’s natural laws of business and the importance of being in harmony with nature, the power of visioning, and the steps you can take to cast your own life and world-changing vision. This isn’t just about business, it’s about life.You can find Ari Weinzweig at: Website | InstagramIf you LOVED this episode you’ll also love the conversations we had with Donna Carpenter about how she and her husband, Jake, built Burton into not just a snowboard giant, but also a workplace that champions humanity.Check out our offerings & partners: My New Book SparkedMy New Podcast SPARKEDVisit Our Sponsor Page For a Complete List of Vanity URLs & Discount Codes.Solo Stove: Code GLP - $10 OFFClickUp: Code GOODLIFE - 15% OFF Unlimited Plan Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love is a naturally present byproduct of a healthy ecosystem. And the challenge is when you're in an unhealthy organizational ecosystem, where it's a lot about conflict and domination, crush the competition, win-lose mindset at work, but then go home and be loving to your spouse, your kids, and your neighbors. And it's very difficult to live that way because it's so incongruous. Whereas hopefully, and again, we're highly imperfect, but if we create an ecosystem in the organization where people feel that love and they become comfortable in it, it's just obviously so much easier to go home and continue on a pace, right? So imagine being in your twenties, fresh out of washing dishes at a local restaurant,

borrowing just enough money to open this tiny local deli with a friend who shared your passion for food and community and business. And now imagine that decades later, that single decision would profoundly change the lives of not just tens of thousands of regular customers, but millions of people around the world. Well, what my guest today, Ari Wanswag, didn't realize when starting Zingerman's Deli with a $20,000 loan from the bank and a degree in Russian history from the University of Michigan was that he was seeding a revolution. Actually, in hindsight,

maybe he did know that. Now, 17 companies later and sitting as the CEO and co-founding partner of Zingerman's Community of Businesses. Ari sees commerce as an engine of impact, expression, and service that changes people's lives. And Ari and his ideas, they've set off a global ripple of compassion and dignity, imagination, and aliveness in the world of business, inviting people to reimagine a profoundly different, radically expansive, and inclusive way of defining success. Named by Inc. Magazine as one of the world's top 10 CEOs, he's forging an entirely new way in business that rejects the norm and is grounded in purposeful vision, passion, and anarchy theory.

He's written extensively about the values and beliefs that have kept the now iconic Zingerman's delicatessen, his first business venture, afloat and successful for over 40 years in weekly newsletters and the numerous books he's authored, such as Elapsed Anarchist's Approach to the Power of Beliefs and Elapsed Anarchist's Approach to Managing Ourselves and so many others. He is read by, trained by, followed by so many people globally. And in our chat today, Ari shares some of the brilliant happenings inside his head, ranging from the ways we can use history to guide us in work and life and business today,

a reclamation of this word anarchy as a tool for impact and equality, Ari's natural laws of business and the importance of being in harmony with nature and the power of visioning and the steps that you can take to cast your own life and world-changing vision. This isn't just about business. It's about life. So excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist,

whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual

results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die.

Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight Risk. So it's interesting. I was actually watching a documentary last night on the making of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, which is fascinating, by the way. And they're sort of talking about the different songs on the track. And when it came to this sort of iconic song, Us and Them, which is really this deep exploration of how do we live in a world where people are profoundly different and not just constantly walk around othering other human beings.

And then they're talking about how they make sort of like the finale song eclipse, and it's all about the sun being eclipsed. But Roger Waters is saying, it's actually all about hope. It's about like what happens when the light comes out. And I was thinking to myself, this was 1973 when this came out, you know, and as you and I are having this conversation, you know, like we're kind of on the verge of 2023. So, you know, 50 years later, and these identical issues are still at the heartbeat of so much of what we're experiencing. And I was thinking about our conversation today, and so much of your philosophy seems so steeped in these ideas of balancing individuality, community, and hope, not just in business, but in life. And I was just, I was struck by how relevant everything that you pour yourself so

deeply into has been for so long in our human condition in business and beyond. Yes, fully agreed. Just processing how all of that has evolved over the years. Because in 1973, I was probably listening to that album very loud. As was I. Leave out the other parts of the context in which we were listening. But anyways, I agree. I said in a good way, business is life. Life is business. Not that there's not more to life than business, but I would suggest that what I've learned or one of the many things I've learned is just that when we do business well, then we're doing it in a way that's congruous with living a good life in the context of your podcast

and your project. It's meant to be the same. And it's taken me a lot of years to kind of understand that. But if we do our work well, then hope is a good, normal outcome. Positive beliefs are a normal outcome. Treating people with dignity is an appropriate and normal outcome. And it's really only the violation of that natural context that creates all those negative things that we all are so challenged by and frustrated with. Yeah. And it's interesting because you lay them out as these natural outcomes. And I think there's

a strong argument to also say they're also the natural mechanisms that lead to the outcomes, right? And yet it seems, and maybe this is my lens, I'm curious in your take, that so often they're not centered in the way we make decisions, the way if we build our careers, the way we build our businesses, the way we step into our own personal lives and relationships. I'm always wondering, why is that? If it seems so obvious on the surface, why are these afterthoughts or sometimes just out like rejected? Well, I'm paraphrasing. And if you want, I can look up the quote.

But Gustav Landauer, who was a very interesting German anarchist, early 20th, late 19th, early 20th century, he was killed by the German army in the revolution of 1919. And he said, essentially, an answer to the same question, because people's parents aren't trained that way, and their parents weren't trained that way, and that people just continue on apace. And so said without judgment, because we're all just trying to figure it out. I mean, it's hard to detach from so much information that's being thrown at us all the time. And I'm not talking about social media. I mean, this has just always been true, right? So long before there was a web or telephones, I mean, you're in a community and people start to say stuff. And so it allows, you know, whatever it is, racist beliefs to circulate commonly, openly, anti-Semitic beliefs.

I'm reading a book about the history of Lviv in Ukraine and the onset of World War II. And it's not really intellectually shocking, but it's really shocking at the same time to go back to what, you know, in the same way that happens to people all over the world. But it's just people like you and me that were having a podcast on Monday and then getting moved out of your house into the ghetto the next day and a few months later getting sent to Auschwitz. And this is not unique to Jews in Lviv. I mean, it's clearly happens all over the world, but it's just examples of what people are surrounded by and how commonly those negative beliefs circulate and how difficult it is to stay

grounded and centered away from those. I mean, history becomes so important there. And it's interesting also. So you end up, before you sort of launch into the career that you've had for the last 40 years now, you end up actually, you end up at University of Michigan studying Russian history, but the history has never left you. Like, it seems like that you are this lifelong student of history, like deeply, deeply reading and studying and talking about it and writing about it and processing it. It goes beyond a fascination for you. My curiosity, why in your mind is it so important for us to understand what came before us? I just don't think we can understand what's going on around us, right? I wrote a piece not long ago. I've done a lot of work, which you've probably seen some of, but on the idea of organizational ecosystem as a metaphor,

and it's just sort of evolved organically when I started to write about beliefs and I started to think of them as the root system of our lives, because it just became so glaringly suddenly obvious to me as I started to understand their power, like that we don't, we barely, I mean, on your podcast you do, but in general, most of us are not raised talking about what we believe other than about sports politics and religion, but we don't talk about beliefs about how much work is too much work or about hope or about what a good cup of coffee is. We get in arguments over it, but we don't really talk about the belief that underlies it. Right. And so it was just an obvious metaphorical connection to roots because everything that clearly that comes above the

surface is always, we know, 100% tied to the beliefs, right? And this metaphor has evolved and gotten more complex in a good way. And it dawned on me a couple months ago that history is a little like a river because when you and I step into the river, it's easy to just sort of focus on where we are and look around us and feel the water. But the reality is it started a long, long ways before we got in. And all of the different sources are all contributing to what's in the river. And I guess I just don't really see how we can understand what's happening around us if we don't go back to what happened before to start to understand where beliefs came from, to start to see how we're either continuing that unconsciously or how we have an opportunity to take a different path going forward.

And I completely agree there. I think it's so interesting that so many folks, we don't pay attention to this. And I think those who are just innately fascinated by what's happened before us study it because it's a source of fascination for them. But I also, I feel like these days, especially if you say you want to devote a significant energy to studying history, whether it's in academically or just personally, people kind of raise an eyebrow because they're looking at it and saying, but what's the value? When you think about how you're going to invest your energy and contribute and build, what's the value of that? And it's almost like it's disincentivized to actually understand all of these things that happened before us that shaped and formed us and the way we see the world.

Yes, I certainly heard that when I was doing it in school. My excuse slash rationalization was I was going to go get more degrees afterwards. So it was almost irrelevant. But yes, that's certainly the thing. John U. Bacon, who's a friend and a very good writer, quite funny. And one of the few people who talks faster than I do when I get going. But he also was a history major. He has a new book out about coaching high school hockey, which is quite

good. But anyway, he says, when people ask you, like, why were you a history major? He goes, he's just really quickly, you just go, well, I wasn't really that interested in it, but the pay was just so high at those big history firms in New York, I couldn't walk away. And so it's, yes, it's kind of silly in that sense, but the reality is everything is history. I mean, whether we like it or not, there's no way around it. And trying to make decisions, whether it's in our business, our organization, our lives, and in the country, I don't really know how we can make good ones without understanding the context of what came before. And that goes both for me in terms of as a, whatever I started at 30 year old, starting to pay attention to what was going on in my family, not to blame anybody, but just to

understand the dynamics better and how it was impacting me and how I was unwittingly continuing on a lot of those paths until I became conscious of them. And I don't think it's a reach to say that's true in the country. It's true in Russia and Ukraine right now. It's true everywhere. I mean, if we're conscious of the patterns, conscious of the beliefs, then we have the freedom and opportunity to change it. I guess we always have the freedom, but if we're not conscious of it, we don't choose to use that freedom. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I wonder if also part of what goes on there is that if we do become really aware of where we came from and everything that came before us, and then we sort of like sit here as one individual in our

lives, there's a sense of futility that I know so many people are having now. I've had these conversations. This is actually something you've written about fairly recently, actually. You're talking about Irwin, your alums, when Nietzsche wept, and sort of like this relationship between despair and self-awareness. And it's almost like if you're going to say yes to self-awareness, which includes looking back in time, do we also have to accept a certain element of despair?

And then how do we go from there to hope? Well, as a person who was raised without a lot of emotional intelligence, clearly we all have emotions, but I'm not unique in that childhood. Understanding that we do have emotions and how they're playing out all the time was huge, right? And so despair, I wouldn't say is my favorite emotion. And I certainly don't live in it all the time. But it's difficult to really be in touch with how we're feeling and learn to manage it well, in my experience, if we don't have the whole range. So I metaphorically have come to compare emotion to the weather.

I have no influence over it. It always passes. Different weather forms impact me in different ways. Like today, that's like my perfect day. It's about 80, 78 in Ann Arbor, not humid at all, no rain, no snow, no anything. And it's terrific. But the truth is when it's gloomy and rainy all day, it impacts my mood, right? But I can't do anything to stop the weather. What I can do is change the way I respond to it by dressing appropriately,

by reaching out to other people who will help me reground myself in a more positive place, et cetera. So from despair to hope, I guess cognizance is a huge piece of it. Understanding that it's all temporary for both when it's good and when it's not so pleasant. And then understanding that it's a practice and having studied hope also, which I didn't know anything about. And writing about hope, it's actually something we can work at, just like building up your biceps or going to the gym. I mean, it's a practice that we can learn to work with, teach, use in our organizations, use at home, use everywhere. Yeah. The idea of hope as a practice, I think to a certain extent, right? It's like, oh,

so this is a muscle you can build. It's not like you either have it or don't have it. You're just subject to the will of the moment or circumstance. No, I think the moment clearly impacts our hope level, but just like when we're sick, we doesn't mean we're going to, I mean, unless it's a terminal diagnosis, it doesn't mean we're going to stay sick forever. And even then, it still seems from reading and talking to people, there's still a lot of room for people to manage. They respond to the illness. So there's no question.

I mean, as I wrote an essay about it in part four of the leadership series that I did, I mean, I'm in a high hope bubble. This is a big, big advantage that I have and probably you have too, because it's not just about money, although clearly financial systemic bias, et cetera, all these are enormous factors. I'm not trying to at least minimize those, but hope is a factor that provides an advantage or a disadvantage that is not really talked a lot about. And I started to realize that I'm in this high hope ecosystem, right? And the metaphor for hope is the sun. So I'm like living in a really sunny place and the things that you need to have hope, I both have around me and I work at it a

lot. And so it allows my hope level to stay high. And then I'm just a history major, like you said, but starting to read people who actually know science and study it, it's just obvious that the benefits of having hope both manifest, both physiologically, it manifests in people's work, it manifests in your relationships, and it's free. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever,

making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. watch getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes the apple watch series 10 available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum compared to previous generations iphone 10s are later required charge time and actual results will vary mayday mayday we've been compromised the pilot's a hitman i knew you were gonna be fun on january 24th tell me how to fly this thing

mark walberg you know what the difference between me and you do you consider yourself sort of like wired for hope as a kid? Or do you think this is something that has really changed in a meaningful way as you've grown? I'm going to say both. So I think it's clear that I grew up in a relatively hopeful setting. The six elements, I'm going from memory, but the six elements that I came up with on the Hope Star, one is having an image of a better future, a picture of a better future. And certainly I didn't come from a family that was despairing and hopeless. I mean, we had our multiple dysfunctional, moderately dysfunctional family issues, probably not dissimilar to yours, but clearly there was always the belief it would

get better. You know, we could make it. The second one is that we have a path to get there. And certainly that was lots of coaching on, you know, dude, you got to go to college, you know, do this, you got to do that. So lots of that. The third thing is that we as individuals matter, certainly for better and for worse. That was true in my family as the oldest kid in a good educated middle-class family. The fourth is that our work matters. These are different. One is that we matter as a human being. The other one is what we do matters. Certainly, that was clear to me. The fifth is that the little things matter, which certainly I'm just thinking back and reflecting on your question was also absolutely true. And then the sixth is that

we were part of something greater than ourselves, which clearly was true. So yes, I had all of those, but I certainly wasn't trained in how to create hope or how to help advance hope or build hope. And so that's really something that I only came to understand in the last five, six, seven years is that we can actually work at it. And so just like, you know, if somebody was born with advantages, whatever they were, financial or physiological, you can also squander them. And so, yes, I grew up with it, but I would have been completely clueless if you would have asked me even 10 years ago what to do to make more hope happen. Yeah. It's interesting that those items three and four, I matter and like the work that I do

matter so often. I feel like we conflate those and we feel like actually if that number four, if the work that I'm doing in the world doesn't matter, then I don't matter. We derive our own sense of meaning just as a human being from the thing that we do rather than saying, do I have meaning just because of the simple fact of my existence? And I think on the one hand, if we do work that really genuinely is deeply meaningful to us, it can be a powerful, you know, like that coupling of three and four can be great. But if we don't, you know, it can also be this double negative that kind of just really takes us down. Yeah. And those are beliefs, of course.

And in a good way, a lot of this learning, I mean, clearly it was helpful to me as an individual, but the biggest benefit really was in realizing the impact that I was having and could have on the people that we work with, right? So in a leadership role, of course, we're hiring people with less hope. I mean, it's, you know, we're in the food business. It's not like, and the reality is there's low hope in all walks of life. And it's not really, although certainly reality is there's low hope in all walks of life. And it's not really, although certainly Maslow's hierarchy or whatever manifestation of that impacts and the

disadvantages that people need to overcome. Nevertheless, I've met people that make way more money than I do, and they're pretty low hope. So it really realizing the power in a good way that I have as a leader to help some new staff member to come in. And by just running through those six things, it can be done. I mean, I've internalized it by this point, so it's not like I'm trying that hard to do it, but it can be done as a practice. And those six things, I'm confident you could do them in our world. If you're working with somebody for eight hours, you could do it for all 10 people you

worked with and take you two minutes, five minutes per person. I mean, it doesn't take a lot. It can be as simple as just asking a heartfelt, authentic asking of somebody how their child is doing, how their mother is doing, how their school project is going. Remembering to ask, we have some high school students working. Awesome. How did that paper go last week? Like, I mean, it's under 30 seconds to ask and then take time to listen to the answer. So helping them understand that they matter. And then also to appreciate the little things, which is in a good way, something I work hard at now. And I grew up in a setting where it was

more the other way, which is appreciating all the things I should have done better, which was implicitly meant to say how much they cared about you, but it didn't really work all that great. But anyway, so just the power that we have to build hope and then understanding that hope levels can change the community. Hope levels change the school system. Hope levels change the organization. Hope levels change the way people parent or the way they partner with their significant other. I mean, these are all huge impacts that we're having every day. And back to the history stuff, we can be cognizant of it or we can live in, I don't know, denial might be too strong, but we don't even realize it's happening. Yeah. I mean, the way you describe it also, sort of like hope as a practice and the way that you step into it in the context of leading an organization, a community, actually a community of organizations that forms this bigger community. And then being in service of a much broader community of clients and vendors, patrons.

And it's interesting, right? Because what you're also sort of giving lip service to without using the word, but I know you have used the word very expressly is, is this notion of love. And again, this is one of the things that, you know, if you came out of a traditional MBA program, which I know you did not, the idea of leading with love, like if somebody had a class in there, my guess is you get three people enrolling in that. And like every other person in the school would be rolling their eyes at the notion of centering this ideal of love as like, it's so soft. It's like, no, the way you succeed is kill or be killed. That is the classic way of business. And you've completely turned that on its head.

Well, the kill or be killed is a set beliefs, going back to our earlier conversation, that people just accept because that's how we get trained. And I would suggest, having studied it, it's actually inaccurate, it's unhealthy, and it doesn't lead to much good. Unless judging good is short-term fame and fortune, then maybe it works. But in terms of if you change your frame, if you change your beliefs, if you change your vision to say that you're trying to create a holistically sound regenerative ecosystem, whether it's your family or your organization or your community or even a country, it's not going to happen out of that set of beliefs because for many reasons, my study of anarchism as a University of Michigan student, and then again, as an adult business person, reminds me, taught me to learn, just undo the hierarchical thinking that I had been like everybody raised with, everybody in the US,

pretty much, not everybody, I'm sure there's exceptions, but most of us, many of us have been raised with hierarchical thinking and the hierarchical thinking leads almost inevitably to somebody's better and somebody's worse. And so it just has become clear to me, like, if I don't change that thinking, then even though my desire, my values might talk about equity, I'm going to create inequity inevitably because it's very difficult to not fall back into that old model of hierarchy, right? And then when it manifests in bad ways, really overtly bad ways, it becomes violent. And that violence can be anything from crushing your competition to dominating the market

to all those things. And then it goes further because it becomes racism. It becomes the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It becomes anti-Semitism. It becomes misogynistic leadership practices. And that connection is not getting made very often, but I really believe it's just a continuum of the same thing. But it's interesting to me. I'm nodding along and at the same time I'm thinking what I'm hearing you talk more about is the notion of recognizing the humanity of every person, no matter who they are. Right. Which, of course, I agree with.

You know, it's sort of it is it's steeped in dignity, which, which again is another subject that I know you care deeply about and have written about. And I think a lot of folks would nod along and buy into, yeah, we need more of that. That has to be the ideal. Raising an operating system around not just dignity, but sort of like, as you described, based in a small part on Bell Hook's writing, love is a verb. Like, let me actually operationalize this. Yeah. It's a whole different level that we're talking about there.

Yeah. And yet at the same time, it's incredibly wonderfully, joyfully practical. Yeah. It's just a practice. And it's no different than driving on the right side of the road. If you just moved here from Ireland, it would be incredibly awkward. If you've been here for five years, it's going to seem pretty normal. For 10 years, you almost forgot you ever used to not do it. And if you go back to Ireland, you're going to have to be

very uncomfortable. I started to understand that love is a, my belief, love is a naturally present byproduct of a healthy ecosystem, right? So that means that it could be your family, it could be our organization, it could be a basketball team or a jazz band or a church choir or whatever, but in a healthy organizational ecosystem, love is present. And at the same time, we can consciously choose to come into everything we do. And I certainly don't get it perfect, but come into everything we do, whether it's cooking or brewing a cup of coffee or talking to a kid or talking to a coworker or having an extremely difficult conversation, which could include talking to somebody that we really disagree with. And if we consciously choose to bring love, as you said, bell hooks taught me

that love is a verb, not a feeling. And that was like, that totally makes sense. And in a healthy ecosystem, it's so much easier. The challenge is when you're in an unhealthy organizational ecosystem, where it's a lot about conflict and domination, et cetera, et cetera, love isn't present. And then in a not healthy way, I would suggest we're telling people to live this domination, crush the competition, win, lose mindset at work, but then go home and be loving to your spouse, your kids and your neighbors. And it's very difficult to live that way because it's so incongruous. Whereas hopefully, and again, we're highly imperfect, but if we create an ecosystem in the organization where people feel that love and they become comfortable in it, it's just

obviously so much easier to go home and continue on a pace, right? And so the impact is pretty huge and it does make a difference. No pun intended, right? Of course, of course. If I'm getting this right, what you're arguing is that the absence of love is actually the unnatural state, that it exists, it flourishes, it literally would be centered in any context. If you basically create the container for it and remove the barriers for it, it's almost something that like we actively, without realizing it,

create structures that remove it from the experience of what we do, whether it's relationships, life, business. Yes, absolutely. I was helped along this path of understanding. Umberto Maturana, the Chilean biologist who passed away during the pandemic, sadly, not from COVID, I don't think, but just did some awesome work. And his writing, which is not easy to read, and I blamed myself for not

speaking Spanish until I asked my Spanish as a first language speaking friend who said, no, it's hard to read in Spanish too. But anyway, it was hugely insightful. And he shares his belief that human beings are naturally loving animals. This goes back again to the businesses win, lose. He's saying that's completely inaccurate. And I believe he's correct. And he also says in the context of our concern, yours, mine, and everybody probably listening to this about climate crisis, et cetera, is that if people are not careful, if human beings

are not careful about this and we don't focus on love, that we will evolve into non-loving animals, right? Not in your and my lifetime, but over the generations, that natural selection will evolve away from it. And so, yes, absolutely. If we treat each other with dignity, if we create a healthy setting, if we work on hope, then love just manifests because nobody's born wanting not to be loved, I don't think. And this all, again, manifested for me going back to study anarchism, again, as an older person, not as a student, it's all in there, right? Because it was all, like you said, about honoring the natural humanity of human beings. And so Emma Goldman wrote about love, Kropotkin wrote about love. It was a big part of it in a way that was trying to respond

to the dehumanization of the industrial model, dehumanization that was happening all over the world and still is. Yeah. I mean, Gustav Landau, who you referenced earlier, also centered that a lot as an anarchist. You've mentioned this word anarchism a couple of times now. And I just want to parse that a bit because typical person hears that word and they're like chaos, madness, you know, like absolutely. That's not, when you talk about that, you're almost using it in an opposite context. Yes. That's another example of inaccurate beliefs. So anarchism, there's a couple lines from Alexander Berkman, a friend, lover, colleague, coworker, whatever, of Emma Goldman for decades. And I could look it up, but he basically said that the general belief about anarchism is

it's rock throwing and violence and destruction. And that is still the commonly held belief. He said it's actually the opposite of all that. And that's what I'm interested in. So were there anarchists who have been violent? Yes. Were there anarchists who threw rocks? Yes. Were there anarchists who didn't behave well? Yes. But I don't think you're going to find any made up grouping of human beings that didn't do those things. So there's Jews who did it. There's white people who did it. There's, you know, I mean, it's everywhere, right? But we don't want to judge any group by the behavior of a few people on the periphery. And really, of course, anarchism of all things, there's no proper definition. It's up to everybody to do what they want to do. The core of the work

at that time and still now for many people is getting rid of government. That's not my issue. I'm much more focused on how we behave, what I do, and really the understanding that anarchism is about involving the people who are part of the organization and designing and running the organization of thinking in a non-hierarchical way so that the person we might have just fired last week is no worse a human being than I am. And they have a lot to offer the world that for whatever reasons, it didn't work out in this, even in this caring, constructive setting, but I don't need to treat them with any less dignity than I would treat you meeting you on this podcast. And to really

choose positive beliefs about human beings and to create systems that can actually engage people. And I don't mean we've got this down. I mean, we mess it up daily, right? But it's really about involving people. And two big ahas for me. One came from reading an Emma Goldman quote from her essay, Anarchism and Other, well, it's called Anarchism and Other Essays, but it was one of the essays in the book in 1910. And her quote on that was, I read it and I'm like, this is how we're trying to work. And it was all about the passion of the scientist. And I'm like, this is what we're trying to do. And the other thing that blew my mind going back to Gustav Landauer was he said, we have no political beliefs. We have beliefs against politics.

And when I read that, I'm like, I totally get it because the misconception, which even I kind of held still was that anarchism is a political alternative and it's actually the antithesis of politics. And I'm not saying I don't vote because I have the same strong feelings you do right now, I'm sure. But that's not my point. But my point is that it's really a way of life. And it's really about how I treat the next human being that I interact with. It's about how I treat myself and really creating a healthy, loving, dignity-based, hope-based, engaged ecosystem that we can all come out ahead. And there's some really fascinating work that was done. Mutual Aid got a lot of attention again during the pandemic, but it was Peter Kropotkin's book from 1902, which again, disputed this business's win-lose. And he

said, we're essentially, what Maturana said, the healthiest are the ones who are helping each other, the most generous, the most caring. And to phrase that as sort of like under the mantle of anarchism is, I would imagine, jarring for most people. It's interesting because when I was thinking about this, I was thinking, well, when I thought about anarchism, before I started to really deepen into your work in a small part, to me, there were these three elements that showed up. One is, this is what we don't want. Let me invest energy in dismantling it. The second one is, this is what we believe, and those beliefs will enable what is possible. And the third is, this is what we hope to create in the place of what we don't want. I think when most people think about the idea of anarchy, they're thinking about that first part. It's all about the energy that's just sort of like madly invested in the tearing down and discarding the things. Well, but let's actually bring everyone into the conversation and let's figure out together what we believe in our hearts. And then let's do the work of figuring out what can we build that is better and more expansive and more inclusive in its place based on those beliefs. And if you fold all of those into this, it's like, yeah, there is this one way that people tend to invest energy.

But also, I don't know if you've read the work of Gene Sharp. He passed a couple of years ago. He was a professor emeritus who went deep into the dynamics of nonviolent revolution and developed this whole methodology. In fact, he developed a pamphlet called From Dictatorship to Democracy, which is sort of like the guidepost for many're talking about is this notion of so many people focus all the energy on trying to tear down the oppressor, the dictator, the source of pain. The reality is that the most successful revolutions actually build something that is so much better in its place that whether that old thing exists in name generally or not becomes largely irrelevant because the power has all moved away from it. Because what you've built in this place is so much better, so much more inviting, so much more appealing that you're taking all the pillars of power that supported the old thing and you're just putting it under the new thing. And it really like, so messaging as a central thing, tear down this thing actually is distracting and it doesn't make what you want to happen, happen. Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, a couple of things. So one is having studied beliefs and started to realize, which again, I knew nothing about beliefs until consciously, at least up until six, seven years ago. I mean, is that I don't believe it's possible in the same way that gravity goes down, not up. I don't believe it's possible to get positive outcomes from negative beliefs. And that's not to deny the problems. It's just, we can have, I've come to understand negative beliefs about a problem or positive beliefs about a problem. The negative beliefs would be we're stuck, we're screwed. You can make up a lot of those versions the positive beliefs were this is a very serious problem we have responsibility to do something if we work at this for the next 30 years

we can make something happen uh and we can do something about it and the idea of destroying certainly is an element of that work in anarchism and many other things too. But I, and I, I sort of get the theoretical, uh, and destruction is creativity, et cetera, but, but I don't really believe we can create something positive by just tearing down. And I took me a long time to understand that. And I think as a, I would say as an 18 year old, I was certainly there, but it's, so it's not a judgment of that feeling. And, and again, I'm not saying we got this down. I mean, we screw this up every 15 minutes. It's more, and it's evolving into the next book, which will take a while because books take a while, but hopefully a pamphlet will come first on this ecosystem metaphor because then it's not pillars and it's not a building. It's an ecosystem.

And like I live with a farmer, I mean, the idea that like no one thinks like in a month, you're going to change the soil, like of a farm that was farmed industrially for 50 years. Like nobody goes, dude, we'll have this totally straightened out and give me 60 days. Like it's not going to happen. I mean, we know it takes a long time. We know it takes years. And yet when we go to work, we have this industrial model like, dude, just change the engine out and it's going to be fine. It just doesn't work that way. So

I think in the context of creating a better option for the future, it's understanding that it's never done. So no matter what we've created today, we got to keep working on it. Like nobody, no farmer goes like, okay, I got it. I'm going to kick back now and just work 10 hours a week. It does. Farms don't work like that. Ecosystems don't work like that, you know, and that we embrace in a beautiful way and a joyful way and a positive way that we want to go work because we're creating something special. It feels like the more funny you bring up your girlfriend and like the farm examples. I wonder if the more connected we are to nature, the more, the more bound up we are in the fact of everything is an ecosystem and things happen in their time and you just have to devote yourself to this. And the more disconnected we get from nature, the more we leave those expectations and we just want to manufacture instant.

And so much of our society has become largely disconnected from nature and natural rhythms. Yeah. And in fact, like, and now we're disconnected from the notion of everything happens in a larger context and it takes effort over time and cooperation and collaboration. A hundred percent. I mean, I, you know, I'm a, I'm a city kid. So I grew up in Chicago, completely disconnected from nature. The only time weather probably really mattered a lot was like

either for an activity I was personally going to partake in or for some sports event. Like if the bears were playing and it was really windy, then it would impact the game. But I still at a deep subconscious level, probably still feel really comfortable sitting on some hot asphalt on a sunny day you know but in recovery from that and realizing just over years like just what you said right and so um i was just listening to uh andrew huberman talk about resilience and it's obvious and i'm sure he's not the only one talking about it but that one of the key elements is connecting with nature and i'm like oh well i i came inside inside grudgingly to do this because I really want to go do this outside and wireless, but in respect for the quality of your podcast recording, I came inside. But

I run outside every day, like nine degrees, 99 degrees. I just, I'm outside. If I can work outside, it's nothing to do with the pandemic. I just like it. So I'm like, oh, it's funny that I'm getting all this time outside and it's tied to resilience, which is clearly important. So yes, Marie Bouton, going back to anarchists, whose book Ecology of Freedom came out quite a while ago, and I read it years after it came out, but it's been a while. He showed me what's now become more effectively understood, which is that human beings are part of nature, not dominating nature. And he's the one who showed me, again, what's now commonly being embraced in a good way, which is that as long as we think hierarchically, like we're in charge of nature, it's going to continue to cause the problems that manifest in the climate and the crisis that's impending or the problems that are growing, whatever terminology you want to use. And so

this whole thing, again, I think plays out in the organization. Like if I'm the founder of the business, it doesn't mean I'm up here and the business is down here. I'm in the organization, and yes, I have a responsibility to lead, and yes, Paul and I are signed on the loans, and blah, blah, blah, blah. But I'm still just a small piece of the reality of our organization. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing.

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charge time and actual results will vary. I think this brings us nicely into a conversation around visioning because how do you then create a mechanism that invites everybody who's part of this ecosystem, this organization, this community to all be facing in the same direction? To sort of say, okay, so this is what we're down for. And we see where we're going, not just tomorrow, but next year or five years from now, 10 years, 15 years from now. And we understand why it matters. And I know this has become a really central part of the work that you do and, you know, across the entire community of Zingerman organization. So my big curiosity is like when

this word visioning, what are we actually talking about when we're talking about visioning? Well, it's like anarchism. There's a lot of different perspectives and I'm not here to tell you ours is right any more than I'm here to tell you my perspective on anarchism is right more than anybody else's. It's just mine. The way we use, I mean, certainly the term vision is widely used, well under, you know, well frequently discussed, et cetera, et cetera. And I don't think anybody argues against vision, but what is not common is a definition of what vision actually is. And ours is quite different, certainly from the way it's taught in business schools and the way it's commonly applied. As you know, I'm sure I have a new pamphlet out about visioning that is one more, I don't know, whatever, the 10th essay I've written on it, but is to share the story of

how visioning has radically changed our lives organizationally and personally for the better and how this process, which I'm happy to share the history of back to our history comments and how it helped us, but we wouldn't be here without it. If we were, we would have just followed one of the paths that everybody else, you know, we would have sold Zingerman's to some big company. We would have gone public. We would have opened up 300 Zingerman's all over the country. And I'm pretty confident had we followed any of those, I wouldn't be here. If I were here on this podcast, it would be telling you all the lessons that I learned from not walking my own path, which you've probably interviewed many people who have burned out or regret what they did. and not that they're bad

people. They just went along with the beliefs and the path they were told was the right way to go. And then later woke up one day or one year or one week and it's like, why am I doing this? And visioning allowed us or gave us a tool that helped us to not do that. So the way we do visioning, it's a story. It's a story of your own life written as if it's already happened at a particular time in the future. We like mission statements also. I've written about our application of that too. Our version is pretty close to what a lot of people do. We view it like the North Star being in the metaphor, like when you're having a dark, difficult day, which we all have,

I have plenty, I can take a deep breath and remind myself of the mission, which like the North Star in theory, you can find it. If you're not a Chicago City kid, you can find the North Star and move in the right general direction. Vision is different for us because it's time constrained. It's far more detailed. So the business school version, I say this with respect, but the business school version of vision is also generally like a four or five line statement that I am not smart enough to understand how to differentiate that from the mission statement, even though they go over it with me over and over, I still don't really quite get it. But so for us, the vision is a detailed, emotionally engaging, nuanced story of your future. And the way we do it, it includes both strategic details the organization to be. It could be roughly, not to the penny, but roughly how

much in sales you're doing, or if it's in your case and you're raising money, it might be how many donors you have. And it doesn't matter if it's eight or 10, but eight and 800 is a radically different way of being in the world. And they're both good. It just leads you on a different path towards a different life. So our vision, which we wrote between 2018 and 2020, is set in 2032, which will put us at the 50-year mark, which is almost miraculous in the food business. And it's about 10 pages long. I mean, it describes how we relate to our food, how we relate to each other, describes the way we give service. It talks about in prose, not in bullet points, our commitment to the community, our decision to only open businesses within the Ann Arbor area. And they're not really rights and wrongs. It's just

telling the story that you want to tell in the same way that whatever a great musician isn't doing an analysis of which kinds of music are selling better and slicing and dicing it up and creating a song. Like they're writing from the heart and then figuring out a way to make it appealing to themselves and also hopefully in a way that sells enough that they can make a living. But I don't think anybody who's really an amazing artist is going out and doing a detailed market study of what styles of art are selling the most. Like they're painting. And this is the same thing. And I love the quote from Thelonious Monk, the jazz musician, who said, a genius is a person most like himself. And that's really what this is. So the vision for us is not a strategic analysis. It's an inside out exercise. And that's huge. Yeah. I mean, I know you've, I'm going to read you to you. You wrote, visioning is a bit like coming home, home to ourselves, home to a community of our own choosing

home to a future that fills us with hope. When the vision comes alive, you'll likely feel the positive energy it evokes. That last line in particular really resonated with me because there have been times where I have written sort of like in my own version of like, this is me like down the road. And I know it's not right until I literally feel my body shaking. There's something about writing the truth in the future, in the present also, but like visioning, if I don't have a physiological reaction to what I'm writing, to me, it's not mine. I'm sharing some vision that I think pieces of it I'm supposed to have until I get to the place where this is me.

This is me coming home. And for me, the tell is literally, it's physiological. My body responds to whatever's coming out of my brain. It makes sense. I mean, this is back to what you brought up about connection with nature. The visioning process, that certainly makes sense. I will say it's my belief that everybody knows how to do this. Back to love is natural. Same with vision. Every child knows how to do this. We all did it when we were four or five or three. We created all kinds of stuff. getting trained through social pressure, social beliefs, family beliefs, et cetera, self-doubt. We start to constrict it. And then a small minority of people pushes ahead anyways. And then society starts to dub them visionaries. And that leaves the other 99% of us as just sort of dumb followers waiting for the visionary to lead the country or lead the company or lead the art world or whatever, lead social change. And I've really, again, in the spirit of anarchism or humanity or

whatever frame you want to put it in is to really believe everybody's capable of it. We're more than capable of it. We just need to recover what we lost through social pressure. And part of the process as we learned it from Stas Kazmierski, who taught it to Paul and I in 1993, and he learned it from a guy named Ron Lippitt, who was at University of Michigan Institute of Social Research in the late 50s, 60s, and 70s. And he had worked with Kurt Lewin. So, I mean, this has a long history behind it, but we, ironically, it came from University of Michigan, but hardly anybody, no one there was using it until they relearned it from us, which is like Deming going to Japan and then everybody in the United States realizing what they could have used in the first place. But anyway, part of what Stash taught us is what he called hot pen. And essentially,

if you're an English major, which I'm not, it's free writing. And so this process is a huge piece of what makes this work so well and helps us to short circuit the constant chatter that probably everybody who's listening to this has at some level in their heads. I certainly have it. I won't assume for others, but the critical voices and the advice and the parents and the professors and the articles that we read or whatever was on the Good Life Project podcast last week that we're trying to follow along with what we learn. And it really makes us write from the heart in a much more meaningful way that the overthinking that I'm certainly prone to is far less likely to happen. And that to your point,

when it works well, there's a different feeling than the feeling that comes from arguing over whether the market is going to go for 16 ounce or eight ounce, or whether red is a hot color or pink. It's like, it's not the question. The question is, what do you, what will you feel best about? And if you say red is what gets you going, then let's figure out how to make red work in the marketplace. And we can't always, but more often than not, I believe that we can. And when you pursue it with passion, when you really believe in it, when your hope level is high, et cetera, and you're willing to do the due diligence that, you know, because

there's a lot of work to make it happen, good things come from it. Yeah. Which again, so much of what you offer is contrary and to sort of like the traditional business advice, which is start with a pain point, start with a market, start with, you know, like, okay, so how do I solve their problem? And then back into it, the business model, and then maybe, maybe potentially never think about how you, your humanity, your values, your beliefs, your expression as an individual is going to come into the experience, but probably

not because that's really not what business is about. So I love how you're basically taking that pyramid and turning it upside down and saying like, no, that's not the way to step into it. So for those who, you mentioned that a lot of us kind of like intuitively knew how to do this when we were kids and maybe it's been drummed out of us by all sorts of different things. You also graciously share a bit of a straightforward process and a menu to walk people through. Can you thumbnail that? To write a vision?

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And again, as you said, there's a whole lot more in the books about how to do it. But I mean, essentially, and just to be clear, because I didn't say it, we practice this visioning work, not just for the organization overall, but for each business within our community businesses. We practice it for each project. People write visions for new jobs they're creating. I've written visions to help me manage my way through difficult conversations. I speak, well, before the pandemic, I spoke to a lot of different audiences. When I was particularly nervous, I often would write a vision for the session. One time I read the vision out loud to the audience from the stage

and it works because when they hear my vision and I talk about my vulnerability and how I hope they're going to feel like, duh, it's more likely that they're going to be more patient with me and be on my side. And I really did it just to calm my own nerves. But so the, this process it's a recipe. So as I always say, like in the same way that, cause I'm a line cook at heart, when you learn to saute, it doesn't really matter what you're sauteing. The basic technique is identical. It's just you adapt to the ingredients. So the first thing is to pick the topic that you're going to write about, right?

So it could be the Good Life Project podcast. It could be your relationship at home. It could be your vacation you're going to take in the fall. It could be a new blog post that you're going to, I mean, it really is for anything, right? So first you pick the topic, then you pick the timeframe. So I mentioned our current vision is for 2032. When we started talking about it this time, we had 2030, Maggie Bayless, the founding partner of Zing Train, our training business pointed out, which was awesome. She's like, if we did 2032, it would put us at the 50 year mark. And that'd be pretty cool. And we're like, okay, let's change it to 2032.

If it's for Christmas dinner in a few months, don't put 2032 because you'll do nothing for the next 11 years. If you're trying to change your ecosystem, don't put this coming Christmas because it's not going to happen, right? So it's really trying to get a rough estimate of the timeframe. But then once you have that, you can begin the real work. A little sidestep of a technique that we learned from Stash is what he called PROUDs. I think in positive psychology, they call it priming, but it's basically getting yourself in a good creative space because it seems clear from studying it, creativity levels are higher when we're in a good positive state of mind.

So PROUDs is, I don't know if I love the word, but that's what we learned from him. It's basically listing either facts or feelings that have felt good in your past. They don't need to be related to the vision. It's just to put yourself in the right space. So it could be my second grade teacher loved that poem I wrote to, I was so happy that we created this new position last year to really worked out great. What I got Tammy for a gift or, you know, whatever it might be. I mean, it can be little things, but it's just to put your brain in the right space. So first is pick the topic. Second is pick the timeframe. The third is to do these prouds to get yourself in a good frame of mind. you got time for a couple minutes of it.

And then you can begin. When you begin, a couple things that we teach people. One is to go for greatness. The key is greatness is subjective. It's your greatness, not your mother's, not your father's, not society's. But we want to encourage people to push their envelope. We want to include a lot of details so that it's nuanced. And this includes emotionally engaging, meaningful details. So if you like music like I do, you might say what music is playing. If you like dogs like I do, you might say what your dog is doing. If you like coffee or food, you can put those in too. And so really, it's a much more literary process, not the sort of bullet-pointed business list. It's critical that we write from the heart.

Again, it's not an intellectual exercise in what we should do. It's coming from the inside out, what we would like to do. And then part of this is what I mentioned Stash taught us to call the hot pen. So once you start writing, then you continue to write nonstop. So if you come to a Zing Train two-day seminar to do this for the Good Life Project, they'd probably have you writing nonstop for about 40 minutes, 45 minutes, 35 minutes. That said, having done this for many years now, and by the way, I was super cynical and skeptical and not really thrilled with this when I first heard about it 30 years ago. But if you were doing it for this podcast with me, you could probably knock it out in seven minutes.

So that's how you get going. It's also, I forgot to mention, but we always write draft at the top because it's a draft. And that act of writing it can help free you from trying to get it perfect, trying to get the A plus, trying to get your grammar square or whatever little things can get in our way emotionally and intellectually. So that's how we start. And to be clear also, just referencing what you said earlier, you're writing as if you were in that future state. It's sort of like, this is what, like, so if it's 10 years down the road and the topic is where the podcast is, it's like, as if it's happened and now we're describing all, whatever metric, whatever variable, whatever like element is meaningful to us. That's what we bring into that.

Yeah. Thank you for clarifying that. So absolutely. You're in that future date. So if we were writing a vision for the coming year at Zingerman's, we might say it's whatever, the end of August 2023. And we would write as if we were already there. So sometimes it's helpful to put dates in. on a long-term vision, she would early on say how old her kids would be because that was a super concrete, like when her older son was eight and it's going to, he's going to be 18. Like it's easier to put yourself into that mental space. It's essentially an affirmation at that point. The beauty of this though, is you're not really done after the draft at some point after you work on it. And I can talk if you want about how to do that, but once you've worked on it, at some point after you work on it, and I can talk if you want about how to do that, but once you've worked on it, at some point you finish and you decide to run with it. And at that point, you're able to start sharing it with people and they also can now see where you're

going. And even if it's strictly a personal vision, it means that the people in your life can help you better because instead of giving you unsolicited advice about how to go to the vision that they quietly have for you, I'm sure your mother had one for you, probably didn't include podcasts. Once they know where we're going, even if they don't like it, this is where we're going, right? So once they know where we're going, people's decisions and our own decisions are more easily shaped to get to where we're going. When you hire people in an organization, it's much easier. Like if they don't like the vision, I don't judge them as a human being, but it's a terrible job for you. Not because you don't have the skills, but we're working to create a mid-century modern house and you want to build

Gothic. It's not one's better than the other. It's just not a good fit. So there's a lot of manifestation, a lot of that manifests from having a documented vision that can be shared. Certainly the people who do this unconsciously, the visionaries share it in a way that gets people's attention and there's nothing wrong with that at all. I just have found as you have more going on, it's a lot harder to get the communication to happen effectively. And because we live in a writing based society, it's just much more coherently accessible to people when they can read it. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, curiosity too. And it sounds like you did this, especially with the most recent one.

Because the way you're describing it and the way I think about it, and this can apply to any domain in life like you just described. And it seems like there are probably ones where this is a solo effort, at least for a lot of the early stage. But in the context where you're doing it for an organization, a community, a business, a venture, some quest, do you suggest bringing others into the visioning process? And if so, how early, um, like, do you get your takedown first and then bring them in? Or do you just invite everyone in at once and say like, let's go at this?

There's different ways of doing it. I mean, it's a whole nother podcast probably, but I, so there's an essay in part one of the book called 12 natural laws of business. They're like gravity. I mentioned this briefly earlier in the context of one of the next 12 natural laws. That's not in that essay, which is about positive beliefs. But the first one on the list, and it's not hierarchical, just coincidence. But the first one on the list is that every healthy organization.

And later I realized every healthy person who's achieving what they want in their life. And that could be staying at home as a parent, or it could be being a billionaire. It's up to them. But everybody who's living the life of their choosing in a meaningful way has envisioned that future, right? It's just a natural law. This is really just allowing us to get it down in a documented way that I think is ultimately more effective for more people than just having it in our head. In terms of how you get more people involved, there's different methodologies that we use. One is going quickly like you as the leader who owns the business or whatever, you do

your own draft and then you share it when you're ready with other people to gather feedback. Another way can be done where you have a leadership team or there's 12 people in your organization and you bring all of them in and you can do it a little bit inverted from what I described by what we call brainstorming images of success. So it's 10 years down the road, what's Good Life Project podcast look like or what's the good life project look like? And they put images up there and then you collate the images. And then, then you sit down and people write the hot pen process underneath the headline. So it's a little bit different way of doing it. But there there's, they're just sort of different riffs on the same theme.

The truth, my truth, my belief is even an autocratically written vision without getting anyone else's input, but it's clear and shared is better than no vision. Because at least people can opt in or opt out if they don't like it. And it's not how we do it. We're much more in the spirit of anarchism that we're trying to get as many people's input as possible. So here at Zingerman's, we run the whole organization by consensus of the partners. So that's a group of about 21 people have lost track. It includes three, what we call staff partners that serve two-year terms. So that's where we make the final decision.

But it's a consultative decision with the rest of the organization. And because we already had a vision, we're not in a hurry. We can take our time and work on it because the old one is still in place. And so it took a couple of years. The truth is you could do it much more quickly if you were feeling time pressure to get it done. I love that. And it's also, I think it's helpful for me to hear for our community here because it gives context, you know, because nobody operates in a vacuum and you're always doing that dance of what is the vision in my head? What are the elements of it that are so dear to me that if they weren't a part of it any longer, even if it accommodated other people's contribution, I wouldn't be drawn to it anymore.

So I think it's a really interesting dance. And the way you describe it, I think it's the way that you're going to get to that place is going to be unique to each person, to each vision, to the project, to whatever it is, and to create the space to allow for that. It's absolutely the beauty of it. And in part four of the book,

which is the one on beliefs, which has the hope essay and stuff, I shared more additional beliefs that I had gleaned in the years since we started doing this work. And one of them is that I believe the visioning works because of exactly what you just said. Like if you say, what do you do? Oh, I'm a podcaster. What do you do? I'm a history professor. What do you do? I'm a hockey player. You're already in a category, right? With whatever thousands, millions of other people. But when you write a vision this way, there is never, unless somebody copied and pasted, there is never an identical vision ever. It's impossible.

And so it honors back to what you brought up. I don't know how many hours ago, but what you brought up, like it's honoring the uniqueness of every human being, which again, is a core belief in it. For me in anarchism, it's a core belief of all of this philosophy that we're talking about over the last hour and change is just to really honor that humanity. And so if somebody, you know, writes a personal vision, it's not going to be the same as anybody else's vision in the whole world. No matter how many billions of humans there are, it'll always be unique. And that's, I think, incredibly powerful. That's what gives it usefulness is that it is so distinct and aligned. It feels like a good place for us to come full circle in our conversation as well.

I feel like we could go down a whole bunch of tangents that would each take us. We can do another one. I'm not going anywhere. So in this container of Good Life Project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? All the things we're talking about in the context of ecosystem, it's all of it. It's purpose, it's positive beliefs, it's joy, it's making a positive difference. It's helping other people around us to have hope. It's learning. It's growing. It's helping, in my case, the organization and through the organization, the people who are part of it and through them, the community and through conversations like this in a wonderful way. I just was on a Zoom call with a woman in Denmark that's learning with this. And it's not like we got all the answers down, but it's just trying to help people in a way that allows them to adapt it in an ecologically sensitive way to their own ecosystem

rather than having this universe like, this is what you should do. So a good life would be helping other people to live a good life. Thank you. Hey, before you leave, if you love this episode, say that you will also love the conversation that we had with Donna Carpenter about how she and her husband, Jake, built Burton into a snowboarding giant,

but also a workplace that champions humanity and really changes the game. You'll find a link to Donna's episode in the show notes. And of course, if you haven't already done so, go ahead and follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app. And if you appreciate the work that we've been doing here on Good Life Project, go check out my new book, Sparked. It will reveal some incredibly eye-opening things about maybe one of your favorite subjects, you, and then show you how to tap these insights to reimagine and reinvent work as a source of meaning, purpose, and joy. You'll find a link in the show notes, or you can also find it at your favorite bookseller

now. Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch Series X is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X.

Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing.

Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're gonna die. Don't shoot him, we need him! Y'all need a pilot? Flight Risk.