Here's Where It Gets Interesting - How to Ensure the Stories of our Lives Don’t Stink with Donald Miller
Episode Date: June 1, 2022In this episode, Sharon talks with Donald Miller, entrepreneur, podcast host, and bestselling author, about the stories in our lives and how we live them. Our stories stink. When we fill our free time... with passive consumption, we’re left with a narrative void that doesn’t enrich our lives. Donald’s new book, Hero On A Mission: A Path to a Meaningful Life, sets up readers to create meaning and nuance in the story of their lives. Sharon and Donald also talk about the two-party system in the U.S. and what it would take to have an alternative system, or add a third party. Spoiler alert: it’s an uphill battle, but perhaps not impossible! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Hey friends, thanks so much for joining me today. So happy to have you here.
If you have already read any of Donald Miller's books, you know what a delight he is.
And if you're new to Don, then you're going to enjoy this conversation. We talk quite a bit about political parties, third parties, some of the things that he's
up to, but he is also an entrepreneur, just has so many interests and valuable things
to contribute.
So let's dive in.
I'm Sharon McMahon, and welcome to the Sharon Says So podcast.
Don, thank you so much for joining me.
Such a pleasure.
So nice to finally meet you.
It's an honor to be with you.
You are just like a massively bestselling author.
How many books have you written now?
Ten.
Ten that I'm willing to say I wrote.
I won't make you name any names.
I won't make you name any names. I won't make you name
any names, but are there any that you look back on? You're like, Oh no, that was not good.
You don't know. And I'm thankful mainly because I look back on it, right? I don't pull them off
and read them. I don't read Amazon reviews. So maybe you don't read your own books.
No, they've asked me recently to go back and read the audio book for some old books and I wouldn't do it because they're fine in my mind as they are.
They're not in my home and people like them and that's fine with me.
Don't poke the beehive and find out something.
I don't want to know who I used to be.
That's the bottom line.
I like who I am. I don't really want to go back and find out who I used to be.
What are most of your books about for somebody who's never read a Donald Miller book?
Yeah. Well, I started out writing essentially memoir, sort of subject oriented memoir. And
my first book was about traveling across the country in a Volkswagen camping van and it was travels with Charlie meets Jack Kerouac meets meets me at 23 trying to sound
like Steinbeck is what that book was in which I failed miserably definitely go read the Amazon
reviews on that one yeah don't read the Amazon luckily thank goodness nobody read it my wonderful
mother bought most of the copies and we were fine.
And then I grew up in a very, very conservative Southern Baptist church in Pearland, Texas,
at the time a small town south of Houston, now a very large suburb. And it was extremely
conservative. And when I ran out of money in Portland, Oregon, audited classes at Reed College
in my late 20s, that at the time had two distinctions. One was that the average IQ
was two points above genius. So these were the smartest people I'd ever been around in my life.
And the other distinction was that it was chosen as it is every two or three years
as the most godless campus in America. I spent three years there
auditing some classes, but also involved in kind of an informal, not associated with anything
Christian ministry, because I lived in the neighborhood across the street. And that
experience was so incredibly eye-opening and revealing and showed me how much baggage I had
had regarding having grown up in a conservative
church. My whole definition of the truth, if you will, was so concocted, you would honor the truth
as an objective thing outside yourself. And my idea of truth was completely subjective based on
tribal belief systems that stitched a group of people together, mostly Southern white males
and the people who are dependent on them. So I wrote a book about that called Blue Like Jazz,
and that book spent 42 weeks on the New York Times, and that lost my career. I wrote four or
five more of those memoirs and then just didn't have another one in me. And I wrote a book because
I'd done some consulting with Accenture about narrative structures as it
relates to project management. I decided, actually, I could write a book on how to clarify a marketing
message based on narrative structures. That book you would think would sell 37 copies and it sold
like 700,000 copies. So all of a sudden, my career switched from a writer to a consultant on helping
people tell their stories and invite customers into stories.
And that's what I do now. And I love it. I'm crazy about my job.
Do you love working with business owners? Do you mostly work with small business owners or
like medium size or what? It's mostly small businesses. I've worked with about 10,000
now, small businesses, helping them clarify their message and explain to the public, the customer base, what they do. I do have about 30% of my
time as volunteer. And so I volunteer with nonprofits. I volunteer with black owned
businesses and I volunteer with independent politicians who are fighting back against
the extremism that I think is taking
over the country. Do you think people are born with an entrepreneurial streak or is it entirely
a learned behavior? I don't know. I mean, who knows? But my sister, all her life was a florist,
Sharon, and she's in Houston, Texas. And she would send me pictures of these beautiful flower arrangements that she did.
And I said, how much does something like that cost?
And she said, well, the budget for the banquet was half a million dollars or something like that.
And I said, Jennifer, what are you being paid?
And she said, $25 an hour.
I just texted back, you need to own the company.
Like, what are you doing?
And she was like, no, that's not me.
That's you.
That's not me.
Well, three years ago, her bosses came to her and said, would you like
to buy the flower shop? And she got on the phone with me and said, should I do this? And I said,
you should. And I got really nervous because I asked myself that question. Was she born a team
member? And I was born an entrepreneur. Her whole life was just being a team member making 15 to $25 an hour, which isn't
bad, but she did buy the flower shop. I partnered with her financially and she just fell into
entrepreneurialism as, as easy as like slipping on your favorite pair of jeans. And so who knows,
maybe that's something that people are just afraid to try. And if they just tried it,
they'd be great at it. I really don't know. I tend to think that everybody has my skillset and that's obviously not true. I don't
have their skillsets. We are different, but who knows? I wonder if there's something related to
risk tolerance that some people have an innate personality temperament that makes them more
risk tolerant and thus more interested in entrepreneurial
endeavors? Well, I have zero risk tolerance, but I have an enormous amount of risk ignorance.
But see the fact that you're ignorant of the risk means you're willing to tolerate it.
That's exactly, I have no idea. We're in rapids all the time yeah that's exactly
it tell everybody what if because if they haven't read here on a mission yet what does that even
mean what what would they expect to get out of your book well years ago I dealt with a season
and I think it's probably about two years of fairly serious depression I wouldn't have known
that at the time but but looking back, I was
like, wow, those were some dark thoughts. And then I weighed 387 pounds. I'm at 215 pounds now.
I was just in bad shape and spiritually, emotionally, physically, the whole thing.
And victim mindset, right? That's where I was. And I, you know, kind of figured some things
out and started moving forward and wrote some books. But what I would find is that if I was
working on a project, in hindsight, if I was working on a project and excited about some
hopeful thing I could do in the world, I would be pretty okay and pretty healthy. And then when I
accomplished that, releasing a book or whatever, I'd crash. And
this would be a pattern, you know, get something done, crash, get something done, crash, maybe
twice a year. And I decided to take a break and have some fun and rode my bicycle with a group
of friends from Los Angeles to Delaware. It took seven weeks for us to do it. We rode 3000 some
odd miles. And I knew once we got into Washington, DC, or even close to the Atlantic ocean, I knew
you're going to deal with the biggest depression of your entire life.
As soon as you get home, because this is one of the most fun things you've ever done.
It's one of the hardest things you've ever done that this community has gotten to know
each other and love each other so much.
And it's all going to be gone.
It's going to be from the highest of the highs to sitting on the couch and not having anything to do.
So I got graciously saved from that happening when I was in a bookstore and bought Victor
Frankel's book, Man's Search for Meaning.
And I read Man's Search for Meaning on the plane on the way home.
And he basically laid out how not to crash and how to experience a meaningful life.
And it was a very practical prescription.
Have a project that occupies your mind and your time.
Have an optimistic perspective on challenges and suffering, because life is indeed hard.
And have a community, or be so interested in art and nature that you stop staring at your belly button,
pulling lint out of it and trying to figure out what the meaning of life is, because that's going
to drive you nuts. And really what he was saying is, you got to be distracted from nihilism,
because if you go down that rabbit hole, you're not coming out. So instead of going home and
crashing, I got involved in a big political campaign. I found another story.
I started a mentoring organization and I didn't crash. And I haven't crashed since. That's been more than 10 years ago. And so for 10 years, I've wanted to put, but Viktor Frankl can be
very hard to read, hard to understand, clinical in his descriptions of this. And so I thought,
if I ever have the chance to put the cookies on a lower shelf, I'm going to do this. And so I thought if I ever have the chance
to put the cookies on a lower shelf, I'm going to do it. And that's what Hero on a Mission is.
It's a way to live life that you enjoy it and experience a deep sense of meaning and stay off
outside of chemical issues, brain issues. You stay off anxiety and depression for the most part.
And I stand by it because it's
worked for me for 10 years. I mean, life hasn't been happy. There's been tragedy has struck my
life. It's been difficult to figure things out. I've made mistakes. I've been anxious plenty of
times, but I have never struggled for meaning. And what I mean by that is I'm always very
interested in my own story. It's never boring. And I'm grateful for
Viktor Frankl for that reason. I have always wondered this, and I don't know that any one
person has the answer, but let's say 150 years ago, psychology as a field is not what it is.
People would have mental health struggles that would go undiagnosed and there was
no treatment and it was very stigmatized, et cetera. Of course, all of those things are very
true. But I wonder, I've often wondered if some of our more recent sort of descent into anxiety,
depression, other mental health issues is the fact that we have invented incredible amounts of free time
for ourselves that we have the time to stare at our belly buttons well i would say well invented
free time for ourselves yes you're 100 right in my opinion from my view and done nothing to fill it
nothing to exactly it's just what's to fill it. Netflix. We have not accepted the agency to direct our own stories and make something interesting happen because we've become more and more dependent on outside leaders.
And by that, I mean corporations, political leaders, religious leaders, whatever, to actually dictate a story to us.
religious leaders, whatever, to actually dictate a story to us.
And most stories that are dictated to you do not have you in mind. They have whoever's dictating the story is going to be incentivized by that, not you.
So our stories stink. Bottom line, they just stink.
You know, we're driving around in expensive cars, living in expensive houses that we can't afford.
Our children are distracted by something on TikTok. We don't eat dinner anymore. And as
parents, we haven't invited kids into a story that is more interesting than whatever's going
on on their Instagram. And I think you're 100% right. I think it's led to psychological angst
and what Viktor Frankl would call a narrative void, an existential vacuum. I called it a
narrative void. That is, we don't have a story that we're living into.
It's as though we're sitting in the theater of our mind,
watching a blank screen,
and the story of our college and family ended,
but we didn't start a new one.
So now we're just sitting there watching a blank screen
and we're feeling the angst of that.
I'm Jenna Fisher.
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wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you
get your podcasts. I'm not romanticizing the past because there's actually a lot of bad things that have happened
in the past. Women had no rights. Lots of people of color had no rights. I'm not romanticizing
the past and thinking we should go back to 1850. Not at all. But I wonder if when you woke up in
the morning, there was so much to be done to even subsist that you did not have time to be like,
my life is meaningless. Yeah. There was such a great, there was a great meme going around like
eight or 10 years ago. And they would just take something that somebody was thinking about on
TikTok and basically say, how in God's name do you have time to even ask these questions?
It was just really, it was revealing, right? Yes, very much so. Well, one of the things that
I found interesting about your work is your thoughts about sort of the political system
in the United States and your work with independent candidates. I read with interest a recent post that you had about democracy, just sort of in general, and about how extremism in the United States is actually
an incredibly dangerous path that many people are following leaders with stories that they
want to listen to in the moment. They're following them down the proverbial path. And that's true on all
ends of the spectrum. This is not an indictment of one end of the spectrum. And that extremism
can take a very dangerous turn. I would love to hear your thoughts about that.
I think we're in a dangerous spot. The wonderful thing that usually
happens in America is it self-corrects. And I hope that we self-correct on either end of the spectrum.
In my opinion, I'd be curious your opinion. We are thinking more and more in binary and less and
less in nuance when truth lives in nuance. And we're choosing our tribe. Jonathan Haidt wrote a really
good book called The Righteous Mind that explains kind of how this stuff works. So, you know, what
I'm doing about that is trying to push a narrative that the parties are like a married couple. They're
like the Millers, but they're awful and they're renting
a house from you and they're destroying the house and it's time to kick them out.
And my villain in the story is twofold. It's a two-headed snake called the Republicans and
the Democrats. So I'm part of a third party effort. The party hasn't gotten started yet.
We don't have a name, but it's a serious effort. But I hope that that party
brings with it a message and a boat, a lifeboat, if you will, for the overwhelming majority of
Americans who don't see Republicans or Democrats as hopeful. And I also hope that the Republicans,
Democrats self-correct and come back to the middle because they would have some political cover to do
so. That's kind of what I think about as I get older.
I'm 50 and I've got a daughter.
I got married late, so my daughter is 10 months old.
I understand the angst of,
is my daughter going to be able to grow up
in the same country that I did?
In my opinion, I think the country's gotten a lot worse
and a lot better at the same time.
I think people's rights have been improved.
There's more opportunity now than there ever has been.
There's not enough.
And that's largely where I'm at.
What to do about that.
I think you, you need to get behind candidates who have good messages, who can, who can point
out these problems and create something in the middle.
There's more independent people who identify as independents now than there has ever been.
It's more than 50%
of the body politic identifies as independent. And so there's an opportunity there.
I know in my community, roughly 60 to 70% of people feel like neither party represents their
view as well. And that they are constantly voting for the lesser of two evils, or they feel like they have to, in many cases, throw away their vote on a third party candidate. So, you know, currently the system is set up so that if you vote third party, you're doing so for reasons other than wishing to affect the outcome of the election.
to affect the outcome of the election at the presidential level.
It's the two parties have set this up. I mean, you know, yeah, it's all on them. In some ways you can't, you know, in Texas, for instance,
if you want to have a third party on the ballot in Texas,
the state legislature filled with Republicans and Democrats has to vote on
whether or not to let you on the ballot.
But do you think they're incentivized to let somebody else on the ballot?
No, so they're not going to.
And so they've set it up
where you got to join out of the right of the left
and any more of the right or left
are getting further and further away from each other
and less and less Americans identify.
You know, I just don't think, you know,
I have some views
and they're probably center right views,
but I also worked for Obama, right?
I was on a task force for fatherless and healthy
families for Obama and greatly enjoyed the experience. And he did every single thing we
wanted him to do on that issue. So our country needs some psychological work. And we need a
narrative, a vision in the middle that is truly engaging and enticing and better than the narrative
that either the right and left are
pitching. If a Republican is in the White House, the Democrats don't want to pass the bills.
And if the Democrats are in the White House, the Republicans don't want to pass the bill
because neither side wants to give the other side a win. Of course, America doesn't get what it's
what it wants because these two feuding married couples can't seem to get along or get a divorce and we're stuck with
them. And that's got to change. I hear that all the time. People, people tell me that all the
time. Like this is terrible. This is the worst. None of these people seem to care about their
constituents. All they care about is eking out a win for themselves. They're not in it for the
American people. They're in it for the wrong reasons, et cetera, et cetera. And then when they are looking
for an answer to that problem, there is no one in sight. There is nobody to look to.
There's no one in sight because the systems won't let anybody else pop up. And so that's the challenge. And I think that the climate is right
to meet that challenge. Whether or not it gets met, I don't know. But the media isn't incentivized
for a third. Stories work best when there's a villain and a hero, not when there's kind of a
villain and kind of a hero and kind of a third party villain here. That doesn't work. We need a good guy and a bad guy. So on Fox News, the bad guys,
Democrats and on MSNBC, the bad guys, the Republicans and CNN. It's mostly the bad guys,
the Republicans, but they're a little more favorable, a little more objective, maybe.
But then you've got Breitbart and you got Newsmax. They've all chosen the narrative. And then they
they don't present objective news.
As you know, it's subjective based on what the people, the confirmation bias that their their listeners have.
So they don't want a third party. So now you can't get any media attention.
You can't get on the ballot. You know, it's going to take a lot of money and a really great message to break through.
And I hope that that happens in America.
through. And I hope that that happens in America. How can people help with that? What, like the people who are listening to this, who are like, I hope it happens to Don, what am I supposed to do
tomorrow? Well, for now, if you follow Donald Miller on Twitter, you'll see pictures of my,
my beautiful wife and my daughter, and probably occasionally my dog in the next year,
you're going to see a lot more. I'm not running by the way, I'm not going to run,
but you'll, you're going to hear a lot more about that.
I know people are very hungry for alternatives. They're, you know, like people
ask me this all the time. Where are the reasonable people? They're everywhere looking around and I
see almost nobody that's reasonable in leadership. You're going to love this story. I met a guy named
Pierce Bush and became friends with him because he was head of an organization called Big Brothers,
Big Sisters in the state of Texas. And I had a mentoring program. So I was I really like Pierce, we hit it off is very, very reasonable, good guy. He decides
he's going to run for Congress in the district in Texas that I grew up in Pearland. And I said,
Pierce, let me fly down and go door to door with you. I'll show you where the good ice cream is
where the good cheeseburger is. At one point, he stops. We've knocked on 20 doors. He's introduced himself. But we have this app that is taking us to only
Republican primary voters. So we're skipping three houses and going to this one, skipping to them
across the street, going over here. At one point, he said, Don, I want you to notice something,
because I've been doing this for months now. He said, look at the houses in which we've knocked
on doors. And then look at the houses that we've skipped. He said, do you see a difference?
And I couldn't see a difference. I said, no, I don't see a difference. He goes,
the houses that we've knocked on doors have no cars in the driveway. The houses that we've
walked past have two or three cars in driveway. I said, oh yeah, that's actually true.
What does that mean? He said, Don, think about who we've talked to today, older retired families whose kids are gone and they're sitting around
watching Fox News and they're being scared to death. He said, that's who decides who the
Republican candidate will be. So if you're a center right Republican, you don't even get a
candidate. You don't get one. You get and Pierce lost that race, the primary. He came in third place,
even with the Bush name in the state of Texas. He comes in third place, and he lost to a sheriff
who wanted to build a wall around Brazoria County. This is how ridiculous this system is. So by the time, if you're a center-right, reasonable Republican, your choice is a sheriff who wants to build a wall right through a toll bridge in Brazoria County. And who are you going to not let in? People from downtown? This makes makes no sense but that's where we are
okay but that's not answering the question of what are people supposed to do
they're supposed to give me a minute
you know what they're supposed to feel the toothache a little longer until we're all
pretty desperate for medicine.
No Advil for you.
No Advil.
No dental care.
That's exactly it. You wait until that tooth is black and cracked.
Aren't you afraid though, Sharon?
It's going to get worse.
It's a great point that in the past,
there has been a clearly defined bad guy, especially throughout the middle 20th century, clearly defined bad guys of Nazi Germany,
Khrushchev, you know, clearly defined lines of we're on this the side of the white knights over here and y'all are who knows what
and now we have so many different versions of who is actually the bad guy that this is part of what
is allowing extremism and conspiracy to flourish you know what i mean? Like the, the stories that people are able to quickly communicate
to people is disturbing. And I think that'll get worse. That's the downside of Elon Musk buying
Twitter, right? I don't, I haven't figured that guy out yet. I don't know if he's good, good for
the world or not. And it's pretty clear. These autocracies are not good.
They're not good for their own people.
They're not good for the world.
There's been such an increase in the level of deception.
And when truth becomes confusing, there's always a crash, always.
And that's happening more and more.
And I don't know how you pull out of that.
I don't know if it's a temporary disruption or permanent fixture, at least for the next 40, 100 years. But I think
it's a good thing and America's ripe for it. And it would be the comeuppance for two parties who've
let the bitterness and anger control them and blind them. And I don't think these are bad people,
by the way. I just think the incentives are aligned
to make them bad and make them do bad things. There's a couple of things before I let you go
today. One of the things that I have said many times that prevents the proliferation of third
parties, of course, the deeply entrenched power structure within the two-party system is absolutely
one of those things. The second thing, of course, is the money that is behind the two-party system,
the huge money powerhouses that exist within these machines. The third one is the electoral college.
The electoral college prevents third-party candidates from gaining traction because 48
out of 50 states use a winner-take-all system. Another thing, as long as we're on this high
horse, rank-choice voting. Rank-choice voting inside of primaries. You know, Bill Walker is a friend, a new friend, and I meet with him often now. He's running for governor of Alaska, and he got rank choice voting passed in Alaska. And I didn't trying to either be your number one or your number two choice.
And that means if my opponent, if there's five or six candidates in a primary, my opponent,
the one who's the front runner, I can't attack them because then I'll make their followers
mad.
So what it does is immediately overnight makes the political discourse civil.
And so I think where we can, we need to pass ranked choice
voting, which, by the way, the parties don't want. No. And, you know, it's very much incentivized
that they stay in power. And that's a problem. I do think it's going to be interesting in the
2024 election because the Republican Party has just said our candidates will not participate in any of these debates i i mean i see that coming
so that's going to be very interesting because of course the debate commission is made up of
half republicans half democrats and now like just we're not going to have debates anymore okay all
right that's interesting that's an interesting development are we going to develop an alternative debate commission or is it just going to be organized by news organizations it's
going to be like the cnn debates and the fox news debates it's going to be a circus that's what it's
going to be and you know i've said it many times if you keep voting for clowns you're going to end
up with a circus right now people have people have to care. This is the point
that I like to make is that if you want better candidates, you need to start caring earlier.
Yeah. Cannot arrive. You need to find the candidates in these primaries and get behind
them, invite them over your house and have them speak to your friends and get started early. Get
your kids started. You're right. But when the two people are left, when our binary choice is left, it's slim pickings. You can't just show up on November 3rd and then
be like, I hate both of you. No, it has to start way earlier in the process. If you want better
candidates, you have to support better candidates early. Yep. Yes. Okay. Well, where can people follow you on Instagram?
It's at Donald Miller. That's my name. And you can pretty much get around from there. I mean,
if you follow me on, on Instagram, you'll eventually hear about books and whatever else
I'm doing, but, uh, I'd be grateful because anybody who's listening to your show is somebody
I'm probably going to get along with. Wonderful. So nice to meet you. Thank you so much for coming. I really
appreciate your time. Thanks, Sharon. Thank you so much for listening to the Sharon Says So podcast.
I am truly grateful for you. And I'm wondering if you could do me a quick favor. Would you be
willing to follow or subscribe to this podcast or maybe leave me a rating or review, or if you're feeling
extra generous, would you share this episode on your Instagram stories or with a friend?
All of those things help podcasters out so much. This podcast was written and researched by Sharon
McMahon and Heather Jackson. It was produced by Heather Jackson, edited and mixed by our audio
producer, Jenny Snyder, and hosted by me, Sharon McMahon.
I'll see you next time.
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