Passion Struck with John R. Miles - How to Flourish: The Art of Building Aliveness and Meaning | Daniel Coyle – EP 728

Episode Date: February 12, 2026

What if the secret to a meaningful life isn’t "high performance" but a state of being unusually alive?In this essential installment of the Passion Struck podcast, New York Times bestselling author Daniel Coyle joins John R. Miles to discuss his transformative new book, Flourish: The Art of Building Meaning, Joy, and Fulfillment (Feb 2026).The author of The Culture Code and The Talent Code, Coyle has spent decades decoding the secrets of the world’s most effective groups. In Flourish, he pivots from how we perform to how we feel, exploring why some environments—from a bustling Cleveland deli to the high-stakes world of Navy SEALs—vibrate with a "shared electricity" that others lack.Coyle argues that flourishing is not a treasure hunt we go on, but a treasure we create through intentional design. He unpacks the "science of presence," the shift from command-and-control to gardener leadership, and why mattering is the ultimate precondition for group flow. Through stories of miners trapped in Chile and strangers gathered at a long table in Paris, Coyle reveals how we can stop behaving like "attendees" in our own lives and start becoming participants in our own aliveness.This conversation explores the fundamental human need for significance in a world obsessed with metrics. How do we move beyond just "doing fine" to feeling truly, vibrantly relevant?If you are a leader, a parent, or anyone seeking to move from endurance to aliveness, this episode provides a powerful framework for cultivating conditions in which human significance is reinforced and flourishing becomes inevitable.Passion Struck is the #1 alternative health podcast and personal growth podcast dedicated to human flourishing and the science of mattering. It is ranked #1 on FeedSpot’s list of the Top Passion Podcasts on the Web, recognizing the show’s commitment to thoughtful, human-centered conversations like this one.Caraway’s cookware set is a favorite for a reason—it can save you up to $190 versus buying items individually. Plus, if you visit Carawayhome.com/PASSIONSTRUCK, you can take an additional 10% off your next purchase.Check out Kalshi and use my code SB60 for a great deal: https://kalshi.comCheck the full show notes here: https://passionstruck.com/how-to-flourish-daniel-coyle/Download a Free Companion Reflection Guide: [Link to Guide]Connect with John Keynote speaking, books, and podcast: https://linktr.ee/John_R_MilesPre-Order the Children’s Book You Matter, Luma: https://youmatterluma.com/Learn More About Daniel Coyle: https://danielcoyle.comFlourish: The Art of Building Meaning, Joy, and Fulfillment is available wherever books are sold.In This Episode, You Will LearnWhy life is not a "treasure hunt" but a process of "treasure creation"The distinction between high performance (efficiency) and aliveness (flourishing)How to transition from a "mechanic" mindset to becoming a gardener leaderThe science of presence: How responsive awareness serves as the "first move" of flourishingWhy mattering is a vital precondition for flow and group dynamismThe "view from the valley": How adversity can act as a catalyst for deeper connection and clarityHow to design environments—from dining tables to boardrooms—that prioritize human significanceWhy the "man box" and performance-based identity prevent men from experiencing true alivenessSupport the Movement. Every human deserves to feel seen, valued, and like they matter. Wear it. Live it. Show it. https://StartMattering.comDisclaimer The Passion Struck podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. The views and opinions expressed by guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of Passion Struck or its affiliates. This podcast is not a substitute for professional advice, diagnosis, or treatment from a licensed physician, therapist, or other qualified professional.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Coming up next on Passion Struck. Modern experience, I think, to feel like you're just a cog in a machine, to feel like you're not mattering. I find it to be a little almost near dystopian extent, normalize that kind of thing, where we talk about people and treat people as if they're simply computational beings and simply machines. But what it looks like is isolation,

what it looks like is loneliness, what it looks like is anxiety and depression, I think, in the end. When, you know, we are social animals, We are animals made of meaning without meaningful connection, without mattering, to use the language, without mattering, we're hollowed out. It is a core need of us to be in community and growing. Welcome to Passion Struck. I'm your host, John Miles. This is the show where we explore the art of human flourishing and what it truly means to live like it matters.

Each week, I sit down with changemakers, creators, scientists, and everyday heroes to decode the human. experience and uncover the tools that help us lead with meaning, heal what hurts, and pursue the fullest expression of who we're capable of becoming. Whether you're designing your future, developing as a leader, or seeking deeper alignment in your life, this show is your invitation to grow with purpose and act with intention. Because the secret to a life of deep purpose, connection, and impact is choosing to live like you matter. Hey friends and welcome back to episode 728 of Passionstruck. In our last two conversations, we have been examining how choice culture, the mattering instinct, and inherited identity

scripts shape our sense of agency, dignity, and belonging, often determining who feels significant and who quietly disappears inside modern systems. Today we turn to a deeper question. What does it actually look like when people feel that they matter together? This episode continues the You Matter series by exploring flourishing as a collective condition, something that emerges when environments are designed to make human presence consequential. As we move toward the February 24th launch of my upcoming children's book, You Matter Luma, I've been reflecting on how early we learn, whether our attention counts, whether our voice shapes outcomes, and whether our presence changes the room.

Those lessons don't stop in childhood. They follow us into teams, organizations, communities, institutions. That's why my guest today, Daniel Cole, is so important. Daniel is the best-selling author of the culture code and the author of his newest book, Flourish, the art of building meaning, joy, and fulfillment. Daniel spent years embedded inside groups that don't just perform well, they feel unmistakably alive. From a Chilean mind collapse to a Parisian long table, from elite sports teams to nursing homes, he studied environments where people showed up differently, more alert, more responsive, more human. What he discovered is that flourishing doesn't come from

motivations, incentives, or charisma. It comes from presence. It comes from trust and judgment. And it comes from environments that quietly signal you are needed here. In today's episode, we explore what he first noticed when high performance gave way to something more vital. Why presence is the foundation of flourishing, how group flow differs from efficiency or coordination, why people disengage when they feel interchangeable, and why mattering is the precondition for vitality in any system. This conversation shows how flourishing emerges when people are treated as contributors, not components. Let's continue the You Matter series with Daniel Coyle. Thank you for choosing Passionstruck and choosing me to be your

host and guide on your journey to creating a life that matters. Now, let that journey begin. Picture this. You're trying to whip up dinner after a long day, but your pans are sticking like glue. the handles are burning hot, and cleanup feels like a full workout. Sound familiar? Yeah, I'd been right there. Frustrated, wasting time scrubbing, and honestly, kind of dreading cooking. Then I switched to care away, and wow, everything changed. From the very first sizzle of garlic in their ceramic skillet, I was sold.

Food slides right off. No oil pools, no scraping needed. It heats super evenly some of the same. veggies come out perfectly roasted every time. And the colors? Gorgeous on the counter, like modern art instead of boring pots. Best part? It's completely non-toxic. No weird chemicals leaching into my food, so I actually feel good about what I'm feeding my family. And clean up, literally wipe and done in under a minute. I reach for these pieces every single night. Carraway's cookware set is a favorite for a reason. It can save you.

you up to $190 versus buying the items individually. Plus, if you visit carawayhome.com slash passionstruck, you can take an additional 10% off your next purchase. This deal is exclusive for our listeners, so visit carawayhome.com slash passionstruck or use code passionstruck at checkout. Kiraway, non-toxic kitchenware made modern. I am absolutely thrilled today to welcome Daniel Coyle, one of my favorite authors. Daniel, how are you doing today? I'm doing great, John. Thanks for having me. I'm excited for

the conversation. Last week, I had the honor of interviewing Barry Swartz, someone whose work I have studied since he put out the paradox of choice. And I understand doing my research that he has had a major impact on you and your life and the books that you have written. I was hoping we might start there. Oh, I love that. I love that. It's incredible. It's funny how the world works. Isn't it? Like how serendipital is that you would have just spoken with him when I have his words tattooed on the inside of my eyeballs for the last few years? Because I bumped into them during kind of a low point. And I was speaking, I guess I was in my mid-50s and looking at the career, looking at the family, got four daughters, kind of looking at the big picture. And I bumped in a quote of his that said, people mistakenly think life is a treasure hunt.

And it is not a treasure hunt. It's more like treasure creation. And that stopped me, right? Because I think it's deeply true. It was definitely true to my experience. And it's true to how we're entrained to think about our lives. Like we think, oh, if we hunt these things down, we get them, we chase them, we achieve them, we have them, we possess them, that things will be great. And that's not true. There are so many success stories that have hollowness on the inside of them that we see.

It's a treasure creation. It's not a game. It's a garden, is what he was saying that I heard, right? And it's not a game to win. It's a garden you grow. And that's what it really knocked me for a loop a bit and sent me on this journey that has me standing in front of you now that resulted in this book. As you and I were speaking before we came on, you used that word grow.

And I was telling you that I think I like the word cultivate better. I think they express similar things. We can't just expect things to happen to us. And in my first book, Passion Struck, I wrote about this analogy that I think people people use the concept of autopilot too much. And so I tried to redefine it. I think the way so many of us are living, getting back to what Barry was saying, is we act out our lives as if we're in the game of pinball, but instead of being the player, we end up being the ball, bouncing off all the distractions of life instead of defining our path. And I really think that's what he means when he talks

about this cultivation. I couldn't agree more. I think it's deeply true. We're really taught that life is this sort of giant machine. And with machines are great for certain things. They're good at being predictable, and they create measurable outcomes, and they give you a result. But in the final analysis, that's an illusion. Life is, parts of life are a machine.

There's definitely parts of life. If I want to get my meals prep for the week, that's a machine-like activity in some ways, right? I need to get from A to B to C to D. But there's a whole other world that opens up when you start seeing it as a garden, when you start seeing it as moments. Because gardens don't work like games do. Gardens don't work like machines do. Gardens depend on you have to clear a space and you have to cultivate things, which means these small moments of nurture. That you're not like doing, following some script. It's where you're noticing some need and then responding to that need in real time in ways that creates something bigger, like a relationship, right? And relationships aren't games and relationships aren't machines. It's funny.

I was another walk of my life. I worked with Major League Baseball teams and we were interviewing a new candidates for a new manager. And one of the questions that came up during the conversation was, what do you do when you're isolated alone? It's lonely at the top. What do you do? And what this candidate said was,

I go inside out. I look for somebody I can help. And it just takes 10 seconds to make that little reversal where he goes and picks up towels on the clubhouse floor. or whatever he does, it looks for somebody to help. And I think that speaks to the way that we're built. We're not trying to always fix, optimize, maximize everything. We're not looking to automate things and be the best pinball ball.

What we're looking to do many times is to animate them with a sense of aliveness and connection and relationship and meaning. And that was a question that set me out right in this book is, what places are really good at doing that? We know what happens on the mountaintops of career, mountaintops of performance, but what's happening in the valleys where there are these moments of cultivation, these meaningful connections, and where there is, the thing that really defines flourishing is joyful, meaningful growth that is shared. Nobody can do it alone. You can't do it alone, but you can do it. We need other

people to bring out the best versions of ourselves. And so that's what I've found over and over again in those little moments that aren't scripted and then at games and you can't write an instruction manual for them. But there are rules. Like there are ways. There are ways. to cultivate gardens. And if you, and there are habits of and practices of attention and practices of action. And that's what I just got totally fell in love with the story of that, with the story. What are those rules? That's a mystery that really captivated me for the last five years. So Dan already named it. The book we're talking about today is his brand new book titled Flourish, the art of building meaning, joy, and fulfillment. It's a masterpiece just like his

previous books. But I want to go into this garden theme just a little bit more. I learned servant leadership when I was in the military, and I'm going to talk to you about that here in a second. And I used that servant leadership really well during my career as a Fortune 50 executive. Up until a point, Marshall Goldsmith has this great book, What Got You Here Isn't Going to Get You Where You Need to Go. And to tie this into the world we are living in today, I really contend that service leadership has served its cause, but what I really think leaders need to be in the future is something I call gardener leaders. I got this from talking to General Stan McChrystal and Keith Crotch, the former CEO of DocuSign,

and we were talking about eyes-on, hands-off leadership. And to me, that whole concept, Eyes-on, hands-off, is what really defines someone who is gardening their people. That the way they work with Aizon is that they give them instructions enough so that they can flourish, but then they're hands off because someone whose micromanage isn't going to flourish. But if you give them the right ingredients, they are. Does that analogy relate to you? Absolutely. I think the thing that I'm feeling most powerfully is how aligned that is with the way ecosystems actually grow.

So many of our models in the business world came out of the military, came out of kind of machine thinking. We want to execute, have a plan, have checkpoints. And when you use that language, you end up in training yourself on these mental models that it is about machines and control and prediction. And yet the world we live in is not super predictable. as we know. And the idea of having a rigid machine, our mental model of business as some rigid machine whose job it is to do like any machine, the same thing over and over again that is controlled by an outside person, a leader who can flip the switches and get the outcome they want,

I agree with you. It feels outdated. It still works for simple stuff. If my mail shows up every day, that's great. Love that machine. That's fabulous. Let's keep it going that way. But in a world where so many of us work in domains and live in domains where it ain't

same every day, where there are forces and everything speeding up on us all the time, and there's innovation and creativity that's required. The idea of a machine is outdated. What you really want is a greenhouse of kind of fast-growing stuff and a deep understanding of we need to grow people, first of all, like we need our people to be continually learning. And to be what I've heard described, I think accurately, as an R-LOW, an adaptive, resilient learning organization, where you are continually at real time adapting to the shifting ground in which you live. And so a leader's job in that place is very, it couldn't be more different than the machine leader, right?

You need to continually be creating conditions where you can generate awareness, agency, new ideas, give people opportunities to develop, embrace messiness, I think. That's one thing about ecosystems and gardens. If you're a gardener, like, you get dirty. Everything around you gets a little dirty. And that's not a bad thing, actually. I don't think you would trust or appreciate a Gardner who looked like he was from a laboratory somewhere.

Having that embrace of imperfection, which actually just helps create cohesion and trust and understanding all the research would absolutely support that it's these moments of embracing the mess that create the cohesion that great groups embody. But I'm drawn to your term. And I've heard it. It might interest you that I heard it at one of the baseball teams I was visiting just the other day. They said, we need to think like gardeners. We need our coaches to think like gardeners. We need our managers to think like gardeners. Because the fact is, we're a living thing.

We're a living ecosystem and living ecosystems need that kind of nurturing, attentive actions and a deep sense of connection. What makes a garden grow is the connection to that same earth. And for us human beings, that means meaning. That means community. And so all the stories that we have, I think, in business and sports, in technology. When you really scratch the surface of a lot of success stories, what you find is a thriving community. They're growing new people all the time. They're trying new stuff. They're adapting. They're making a little mess sometimes. They're not perfect. And their leadership is not serving, as you say, their leadership is creating conditions. And sometimes that condition is complete hands off. But they're creating conditions

where things can grow in the right direction. So providing a clear horizon, providing guardrails, you don't want your garden to just grow anywhere. You want it to be here and not over there. So creating guardrails, creating agency, and creating really a clear horizon to go toward, and ends up being. I love that.

Eyes on, hands off. Dan, I've heard that several professional sports teams have started reading my book. And in chapter 12, I wrote this whole chapter on Gardner leadership. That's so cool. Hopefully there's some connection there between the two. I know Jim Murphy, who wrote Inter Excellence, was taking my book to some of the teams that he works with. And also golf coach, Sean Foley uses it with golfers he coaches. So maybe the ideas are expanding.

That's nice. Well, and sports ends up being a beautiful place to test this stuff out because I think because performance is so transparent, because camaraderie is so transparent, because growth is so transparent where in some business domains it's harder to see. So the fact that sports try stuff out first I think is promising and great. Dan, I want to take this whole concept that we've been having and now take it to one of the groups that you've worked with closely, which is Navy Special Warfare or SEAL teams as many people know them. I myself didn't go to Buds. I had hoped I could have gone to Buds, but I got injured my senior year at the Naval Academy playing rugby. My father is actually UDT Class of 16, so he preceded me, which made me want to do it. But I end up serving

the National Security Agency, and I got really lucky because at the Academy, we have sponsor families, and my sponsor dad ended up getting promoted at NSA. In fact, he was the top civilian leader at the National Security Agency. He asked me to take this concept of inserting integrated teams into the SEALs. So I went from the unit that I was stationed at and got reassigned to Naval Special Warfare Unit 10. What I observed when I did that switch is that in the SEAL teams,

there's this concept of the brotherhood that you hear them often talk about. And I found that in their groups, it wasn't that they just perform well, but they felt unusually alive, which is something that you really capture in flourish. And this is fundamentally different from high performance. And I was hoping you might be able to explain it.

The depth, it's so interesting because I think what the seals are really, they're obviously good at breaking down doors. They're obviously good at collaborating to do these incredibly intricate, very difficult operations together. But one of the skills that I think is underrated is their ability to create meaning, create meaning together, have these moments where they stop and really connect. And where they also express what being a seal means. You've noticed, we know there's obviously other groups that do special warfare, right?

There's Delta, there's Rangers, there's all these different other groups that are basically the same thing, these small teams that do stuff. But the SEALs seem to have a unique ability to express what that connection means. They're really good, for example. They have a lot of mantras. Even the SEALs, like we do three things. We shoot, move, and communicate. And we're the quiet professionals. Yeah, right.

And the only easy day was yesterday. All these little things and they're cheesy. And yet having that kind of shared language creates these moments of deeper connection and deeper meaning. They're very strict about keeping the team small. And there's something about that number. Having a very small number of people on a team creates places where every voice can be heard, where you can have these conversations. And one thing they're especially good at, I think even better than some of the other groups,

is having these hard meetings called an AAR where, as you're familiar, like it's an after-action review, and it's right after you finish an operation or a practice run and you circle up and you ask three really hard questions together, right? And it's usually led not by the commanding officer. It's usually led by an enlisted person. And it would be like, what went wrong? What do we do wrong? What do we do right? And what are we going to do differently next time? And that's hard to do. Like that shared vulnerability that they have is they're really good. at it. And I guess the other thing that I've noticed with them that's unique is just the sheer amount of hanging out time, downtime, empty time, where maybe you're working out, maybe you're practicing,

maybe you're just shooting the breeze, but you're waiting around. So all of these moments of stillness where they're creating meaning, where they're creating connection, where they're creating relationships. As we were talking before, relationships aren't a machine. You don't just exchange information and now we're close. We don't just exchange faxes and now we're deeply connected into some shared meaning. It requires these moments of expression, of risk, of vulnerability, of connecting to things bigger than yourself. And I think they really deeply embody the DNA of what that looks like. Because if we were to do a kind of a comparison of, okay, they have these super deep relationships, what does that, how does that compare to the typical set of office friendships or

something like that. It would be just the differential of the, and yet in the seals there, there's like doing a lot of stuff that doesn't look important and they're hanging out and they have these cheesy mantras and they're joking around and all that stuff ends up adding up to create what really is the meat of real relationships. Before we continue, I want to pause for a moment. Conversations like this often surface a quiet realization. Flourishing depends on whether people experience their presence as meaningful. Inside the ignited life, each episode, episode in the You Matter series is paired with guided reflection prompts designed to help you examine where your environment support presence and where they quietly drain it. This week's

prompts focus on noticing where people feel psychologically necessary, identifying where systems reward contribution versus compliance, clarifying what helps presence stay alive in your work, relationships, and communities. You can explore them at the unitedlife.net. And as we move toward February 24th, I want to share something very close to my heart. My new children's book, You Matter Luma, launches that day, a story created to help children learn early, that their presence counts before the world teaches them to measure worth through performance or comparison. You can pre-order UMatter Luma at Barnes & Noble or go to you matterluma.com. Now, a quick word from our sponsors. Thank you for supporting those who support the show. You're listening to PassionStruck on the

Passionstruck network. Now, back to my conversation with Daniel Kuo. well. When I think of that, another high-precision team that uses a similar concept is the Blue Angels. After every single flight, they spend hours going through it. Same thing, each one of the aviators is asked to evaluate the same three questions. What did they do well? What did they do poorly? And what could they improve on next time? So this stuff really works. The other thing that both of them do, for my experience with deploying with them, is that before we ever went on an operation, we would imagine ourselves performing in that operation.

And we would do a dry rehearsal before we ever went out in the real world multiple times. So we could live through and imagine what we were going to walk into, what we were going to enter when we went into the operational domain. So smart. So smart. Yeah, in all these cases,

you're not informationing your way to success, right? You're relationshiping your way there. You're constantly creating spaces. And if you were to look at all these teams from above, you'd see the same thing, like this pattern where they circle up as a little group and talk and then they go do something together. And then they circle up and talk. Then they go do something. And it's almost like a heartbeat of high performance teams where action reflection, action reflection. And it grows. It's something you don't have teams that walk in and all of a sudden they're great. It takes time to get that way because you're growing. gardening something in that heartbeat where you're going.

Let's circle up and have a hard conversation about what really happened. Now, let's go do something else. Now let's come back and talk about that. And if any of us do that, we get closer, more cohesive and more high performing. As I was listening to your conversation with Adam Grant, which is a great conversation for those of you who want to tune into another podcast with Dan on it. You talked about something that I learned in the SEAL teams. I often get this question. What did you learn from your time?

being in the Navy. And I talk about this concept of transition points. We end up thinking about our lives and how we flourish at our peaks. We often tend to think when we're in the military or doing an operation when it comes to a SEAL team, that that's the peak experience. But what I really learned from experiencing them is that it's the valleys, or what I now call the transition points where it matters the most because it's in those transition points that you're accumulating your microchoices

that eventually determine the flourishing in that moment. In that interview with Adam Grant, I heard you talking about this, and I thought maybe you can comment on it. I think it's deep. I think there are these, when you look back in the history of so many great groups, so many flourishing groups, you go back a few years and what you find is a crisis often. It's true in the history of the Seals. It's true in Pixar. It's certainly true in the baseball team that I work with here in Cleveland,

the Cleveland Guardians, where there's this sort of reckoning where you are seriously encountering real existential adversity. Existential adversity. Are we even going to be together? Are we going to be around? A valley, a deep valley. And that valley is really hard to go through, but what it creates is this clarity, this clarity. And so teams that can develop the habit, you might say, of turning toward each other and toward the adversity at the same time, like turning, there's a temptation when you hit that to isolate. There's a temptation to feel sorry for yourself. It's a temptation to look elsewhere, to get out of that situation.

But these teams, I saw it really vividly. I think I tell the story in my book, The Culture Code, but there was the San Antonio Spurs lost probably the most heartbreaking game in the history of the NBA in the finals a few years ago. I think it was 2013 finals. Miami hit a few last second shots. they were all set to celebrate the series win, the championship. They were, I think, 23 seconds from winning.

The odds of winning were above 99%, but ball bounces the wrong direction three times in a row, and they end up losing the game. They're devastated. They are absolutely broken. They had champagne in the locker ready to go. But what their coach said is we're still going to the restaurant where we were going to celebrate. Get on the bus.

We're going to the restaurant together. And they went, and he gathered the players at a center table. And as the bus pulled up, the observer said the coach was Greg Popovich. He looked as broken as a person could be. He was absolutely spent. He'd given everything to this game and they'd lost. The bus pulled up. He stood up, straightened himself up, took a deep breath, and then started warmly greeting

everybody as they came in the restaurant, greeting their families, pouring wine for people. People said watching him was like seeing a dad at a wedding. Like he just was absolutely locked into making sure everybody had a great time. And by the end of the night, like they had reconnected. They had processed together. They had turned toward each other in their worst moment. And that became the foundation for the next few years at San Antonio. They actually kept the unopped champagne bottles and they popped them the next year when they won.

It's really cliched. It's so much of this stuff, it sounds like a cliche at first. Oh, adversity. You should stay tough and everything. And it's a cliche partly for a reason that there's like a deep truth to there that those moments do both reveal character, but also give you the opportunity to grow that character together. And the story I see over and over in the places that I visit for the new book is that same instinct, like experiencing adversity and then turning toward that adversity with other people

and creating community. That's what's happening in each of these places. And that's what Papa's doing that night. He was creating community. And that's what we see. That's that this deep pattern that we see in flourishing. places, people, groups, and businesses is this turning toward and this community that is ready to be unlocked and gets awakened.

So given we're in the middle of the Winter Olympics, I want to go into winter sports next. And I want to tie back Barry Schwartz into this. Barry told you about how you need to cultivate your life. I have been doing a tremendous amount of study now on mannering. and connectedness, which are actually two different things. Connectedness is what a lot of people think of when they think of mattering. And it is a relational aspect. But to me, mattering is the solo human operating system on which connectivity sits. So when you think of the communities that we reside in, oftentimes we think we just have to find a community, whether it's a church

or a special operations team, or perhaps Toastmasters, we think all of a sudden the community just happens to you, but you actually have to cultivate yourself into it. And where I wanted to go with winter sports is in the Olympics and Alpine skiing, which is probably one of my favorite events. And what you found in the book is that there's this certain city called Norwich here in the United States where they produce more skiers who go on to the Olympics than almost anyone else. Yeah. What did you find about Norwich that redefines these communities? Right.

It's a little town, Norwich, Vermont that resembles every other New England town, right? If you do a picture of your idyllic, there's a steeple and there's a town common. The only thing that's unusual is that they produced, I think, 11 Olympians over the last 30 or 40 years. And what is unique about it is our normal instincts for explaining that is, Well, they must have a set of incredible coaches or some incredible Olympic program or something in the water, as we like to say. There's something in the water. But what's in the water in Norwich is, and has been, is this incredible clarity about connection and our possibilities and obligations for helping one another out. In Norwich, there was a woman, Karen Krause, who wrote an excellent book about it.

And the way she described it was the Norwich Daisy Chain, which is everyone sees every other kid in Norway as almost an extension of their own kids. You treat them the same and you hope for them the same and you're not competing and you're trying to lift each other up. And when you scroll back history a little bit, why are they this way here and not somewhere else? Well, it turns out that in Norwich in the 60s, they got a vivid lesson on how not to parent. There was a tiger parent, the perfect tiger parent back in the 60s, raised two Olympic skiers and made both of them miserable in the process. He would put tire ankle weights around their ankles and send them on pre-dawn runs, and he controlled every aspect of their diet and their training. And he absolutely taught, and both girls, of course, ended up succeeding and yet spiraling

in their personal lives as well. And so the cost of that kind of pressure was immediately apparent to all of Norwich. And as partly as a result, they moved into this other space, and it redefined the norms with which they treat each other and they support each other. And there's a million tiny examples that I talk about in the book. But one of them is when there's a big meet, sometimes the whole town will go and watch the kids compete, say at Placid or somewhere else.

And all the other top athletes are looking at from other places. They're with their team and their coach and their masseuse or whatever. And the people from Norwich are with all the local folks. And it's just a sense of, again, community. We think of community as a noun, but I think what Norwich helps teach us is that it's actually a verb. It's a set of actions of noticing someone, of looking for where the need is, and of supporting them in some way. It makes me think of one more quick example. There was a young snowboarder who needed money to travel. And her parents, her name was Hannah Carney. Her parents, I think she was

about 14, said, well, we don't have any money. Why don't you go around town and see if you can get any businesses to sponsor you? And so Hannah wrote up a little resume for herself, started going door to businesses. And sure enough, somebody agreed to sponsor her. And the condition was just one condition. I'd love to see your grades every year. I don't care how you do in the meets. I don't care how you do in your sports life. But I want to see your grades. I want to make sure you keep up your grades. So that expect that kind of, you know, everyone is playing a role of an uncle, A caring uncle, as Karen Krauss, who wrote the book on Norwich put it, everywhere, it's normal to care about your kids. But in Norwich, you care about other people's kids more than you care, as much as you care about your own kids.

So it's just, it's simple. But I think what the story kind of illustrates is that it's those kinds of ecosystems, as with the seals. They're not fixed. They depend on this living participation and these sets of norms that people create together so that they can behave in this way. It's interesting, Dan. I have a really good friend I went to the Naval Academy with. Turned out he became the chief astronaut. Chris was originally a Navy SEAL, and he ended up taking the concepts that he learned

from going through buds and spending over a decade with the teams to the astronaut program. And this really paved the way for when he was up on the International Space Station, how the team behaved. Because when they were up there, they cultivated this community, that we've been talking about throughout the episode and really created this ecosystem of trust between the different astronauts. I thought this was a really good example

because he did this famous spacewalk with this Italian astronaut Lucia Paratimo where everything went horribly wrong. It was probably the most dangerous or one of the most dangerous spacewalks there's ever been. Lucius helmet started to collect water in it. And at first they thought it was just to sweat. But then it turns out it was a mechanical failure.

And he was tasting cooling fluid that was going into his mask. And what ends up happening when you're up there in space is that these molecules need to go someplace, but they don't move. And so they're accumulating around his face. and my point here is that Chris used the trust that he had built up with Lucia and that community to guide him because there was a point as he was doing this that Lucia was pretty much blind. He couldn't see. And so Chris had to guide him back to the safety lock. And then once they got in the safety lock, he had to calm him down enough for the 10, 15, 20 minutes while they're in there,

that he would stay calm. I expressed this because they were way above our gravity. And it shows you the magnitude of what successful communities can build. Where I'm going with this is we talked about mountaintops and alpine skiing, and we've talked about outer space now. I now want to switch to underneath the ground because that same bond that Chris Cassidy demonstrated was also found in the Chilean mine. rescue from a number of years ago. And if people haven't studied this, I encourage you to look at

this through the lens of Amy Edmondson, the Harvard professor who pioneered psychological safety. Not sure if you've read it, Dan, but her white paper on this is phenomenal. Yeah. Yeah. And she's focused, if I remember, right, largely on what's happening outside the mine as they come together to build this incredible, talk about a space shot, right? They're going 2,000 feet into the granite to rescue these people. Most of us remember the big outlines of the story. 33, 33 miners. There's a cave in San Jose mine. There's 100 million tons of rock on them. The hope for escape is pretty minimal at first because nobody's ever escaped from that far down before. And they're trapped in what's called a refugio, a little room, which had a cabinet with some

old cans of tuna and some cookies and some sour milk. And for 16 days, they were there in the dark. then when they're finally contacted, they're thinking what typically happens in these things is there's severe mental health risks, injuries get infected, there's all kinds of horror stories of what happened when you have a group of rough neck minors in a small space with no certainty of rescue at all, like probably not going to be rescued. And then they finally contact them and they drop a phone down the hole and say, how are you guys doing? And they say, we're doing great, but our first question is, what happened to the bus driver who was near us when the cave-in happened? First thing they do is ask about somebody else.

They didn't say, oh, my God, when are you going to come and get us? We're dying down here. They said, what about that other guy? And then they go on. The conversation was very normal. And then they sang a song together. They sang the Chilean anthem together. And what became clear is that they had created in atmosphere that were very close to hellish,

an extraordinary community. And then where it gets more interesting, and I think where it connects back to our other conversation, is at the moments in which that community was, created weren't moments of like action and decision and information it wasn't moments of a leader taking charge and saying here's what we need to do it was moments where they all stopped where they circled up and they said who are we they didn't have answers they explored questions who do we want to be and at one of those moments the boss this very stern man his name was louis urzua steps to the center of the circle takes off his white helmet and says there are no bosses

and there are no employees anymore. And whoa, that changes things, right? So they're switching out of this kind of fix it, solve it mentality that we're always in. It's an attentional style, really, is what it is. It's an intentional mode that we're in where we're paying attention, we're seeing the world as a problem that can be solved. And what they're doing in that moment is surrendering to the situation and saying they're widening their attention.

They're not trying to fix anything. and they're connecting to something bigger than themselves. And it's a pause. Like nothing seems to happen. And yet it's where everything important happens. It's probably a moment like that where your astronaut friend in the Italian created a bond, right? Those relational moments of responsive connectedness where you stop and you stop seeing the other person as something you can control or some situation you need to fix.

And you genuinely inhabit the mystery of what are we doing here? What value do I see? What value can we add to each other? Where do we want to go? What do we want this to look like? How do we want to be together? Those are really simple, powerful questions. And that's what you find at the core of all flourishing groups, because those are moments when relationships get born, when communities stops being a noun and starts being a verb. What happened in the mind was that after they circled up like that, they started self-organizing around big obvious problems. like where are we going to sleep let's get a sleeping area organized what should we do with this food how are we going to divide that up they started working on that they developed these rituals at each meal they developed these habits of being guardian angels for each other one would sleep the other one would keep an eye on they'd pair up basically safety buddy and they've developed little games they would play down there and so it's not to say it was easy at all it was an incredible amount of suffering but it was those bonds of community that allowed them,

those bonds formed in moments when they stopped. Not in moments when they did something. They formed in moments when they stopped, they let go of control, and they really inhabited this mystery of where do we want to go together. And that's the pattern I saw in all of these places. They weren't on autopilot. Like we think of the, when you said autopilot in the modern world,

I really think that's deeply true. And our world teaches us to build a lot of habits and to stay in this narrow mode of attention all the time and to automate our lives. But what these places show, what the flourishing groups and people show is that it's not about automation. It's about animation. It's about creating moments where you stop and really see what is happening in life around you and connects to it. And there's some fascinating. It all sounds very woo-woo in a way, but there's some, what I found in the course of writing the book is there's a ton of super fascinating studies and research and point of view about how our attention operates that really

shows the mechanism beneath these moments. They're not just magical moments of groovy connection that we know each other now. It's like in our brains, we're actually switching from one narrow attention system to a relational attention system. And those two attention systems are between our ears all the time and our challenge is to balance them and turn them on when they're appropriate and create moments of meaningful connection through activating our relationship. attention. And the argument that I make in the book is that it's not magic. It can be done if you learn how to use like awakening cues, if you learn how to manage the balance of how your attention functions and sense when you're in one mode and sense when you're another mode and create

spaces that activate this broader, warmer, healthier relational attention. I love it. And I'm sitting here smiling the whole time you're saying this because whether you knew her or not, you're just describing mattering to a precise tea. And I loved how you brought up the awakened sense because it reminds me of Lisa Miller's work on the awakened brain, which is someone, if the audience hasn't heard of her, you can go back to an interview I did, search for it in the archives where we discussed that. But what you were really describing in that cave was each man's attention, their voice and action were seen and heard and valued. And it was materially consequential to the group's survival. So given that, I want to look at the opposite side of this,

which is in systems or communities where people feel interchangeable, managed, or unseen. What does that erosion look like? It looks incredibly common, A, right? It's very easy. It's a modern experience, I think, to feel like you're just a cognitive machine, to feel like you're not mattering. And we've got to a, I don't know, I find it to be a little almost near dystopian extent, normalize that kind of thing, where we talk about people and treat people as if they're simply computational beings and simply machines. But what it looks like is isolation, what it looks like is loneliness, what it looks like is anxiety and depression, I think, in the end. When, you know, we are social animals, we are animals,

made of meaning, without meaningful connection, without mattering, to use the language, without mattering, we're hollowed out. It's, it is a core need of us to be in community, in and growing. And the litmus test that I use informally is like two questions. Who do you feel most alive with? Like, where do you feel most alive? And what are you growing with someone? What project are you working on that's creating something new in the world that maybe wasn't there before. And if you can answer those questions and say, I feel alive here and here, and these are the projects I'm working on, then that's beautiful. That's very human thing to be feeling that. But if you have, if there isn't a part or a relationship in which you feel alive or if there isn't a project in which you feel like

you're growing something meaningful that matters, I think that's what our world sometimes can create. I think it creates a profound hollowness that I think we all, to one extent, or another feel. And the deeper challenge of it is that there's a trillion dollar economy of really smart people that are trying to pull us into that world that really only make money if people are isolated and a little ticked off. Community, neighborhood, meaningful connection is not what pays the bills for those guys. They would much rather have people typing angry things to each other. And I think we're learning that. It feels maybe your podcast is part of it, but it feels like, And it might be me because I'm writing about this topic.

So it's like when you buy a Toyota Corolla, you just see a lot of corollas on the road. So I may be totally biased here. But it feels like there's a bit of a humanist revival that people now are understanding what's happening in the algorithmic world. Right. You can live in the algorithmic world where the algorithm will drive your choices and tell you what to do. And you can be treated as a set of machine-like preferences. And there's a humanist world. There's a bit of a humanist revival.

community world. So it feels like the community is having a bit of a comeback. I hope that it is. I love that. And I was recently interviewing Rebecca Newberg of Goldstein, whose episode was two days ago, in fact, who wrote another great book that has recently come out called The Mattering Instinct. The things that you were describing, she refers to as mattering projects. And she was saying when people don't have that mattering project, that's when they typically tune out. And I also liked your definition that you gave for these communities where this stuff is absent because that's where this whole concept of anti-mattering that Gordon Flett came up with really takes hold. when people in these communities experience anti-mattering or what's happening to presence at the

neurological and social level, they do self-reliance. They perform competence and they psychologically withdraw. And that's what's happening to so many communities around us. It's the self-silencing. I mean, the psychological withdrawal that we're seeing, which then leads to other things that you we were talking about, loneliness, people feeling burned out, the disengagement that we're seeing across companies, helplessness, and all the other things that we think are just symptoms. We're treating them as independent epidemics. However, I believe they're all interrelated. What you and I are both talking about here. I like that, but I think the thing that I'm taking away, too, just to connect those two worlds a bit, is how close they actually are. Like, experiment after

experiment shows, and I think part of it is rooted in these attentional mode switches, that we have both systems inside ourselves, this kind of rugged individual, selfish controlling, focused system, and this broad, warm, relational system. Because over and over in the book, I end up encountering the same story, which is, well, everybody was feeling, disconnected, and then we did these two, three events, and that really flipped it. It wasn't like they had to start from zero and come up. This we are pre-wired for community. The place that captured most vividly for me was this neighborhood in Paris called Petit Mont Rouge.

And it was disconnected. It was people in their phones, pretty typical middle class neighborhood. And there was a retired journalist named Patrick Bernard. And he decided to do this experiment, which is, I'm going to put a, I'm going to rent a ton of tables. It's like cables you get at Costco right, right down a hundred of them and have a dinner for 800 people lunch the whole neighborhood come to the neighborhood longest table in Paris and then he set up a bunch of interest groups let people to self-organize in interest groups and the only rule he had was no politics don't talk about politics you must gather around a joy device of food or wine but other than

that no politics be around a joy device and it's completely revitalized the neighborhood it didn't take years it didn't take bottom up thinking it took experiences and when people experience community and experience the power of that, of knowing their neighbor and feeling connected. There was a woman there, older woman, who broke her wrist. Because this neighborhood now feels like a village. This older woman broke her wrist. She had 15 offers from people who wanted to help her get her groceries. It's what we're built for.

We're built for community. And although the fact that our economy we live in is very individualized, the people on the other end here aren't probably gathered around a speaker listening to the podcast as a group, they're probably listening through headphones or pods. They're listening alone. Our economy is built around individuals, and it sells to individuals, and it caters to individuals, and it isolates everybody as individuals, it measures us as individuals, but we're built for community. And so these places over and over again show us how quick it can be. And there's another one that I'm just

glabbing here, but there's one that just came to mind because the Patriots, of course, are going to the Super Bowl. And they did a little exercise that they're all talking about now. They're saying, us together as a team. Well, how are we so trusting? And there's obviously a million factors you could point to. But one of the things they did at the beginning of this preseason was called the four H's. They circled up, got in small groups, and said, all right, talk about your hero. Talk about your heartbreak. Talk about your history, where you're from, and talk about your hopes for the year. Open up. Let's really have a minute and figure out meaningful connection. Let's have a meaningful connection here. And they really grounded their whole season in that moment of meaning. And now they've

obviously a million other things have happened and they've obviously had a lot of other factors working in their way. But now that they're on the threshold of this great accomplishment, they're all talking and thinking about that little exercise. They took half an hour. So these moments of, so they were able to, because they understood how community actually works, like they could have used that half hour to practice harder, right? It seemed inefficient. We sit around and talk. Come on, let's go practice. Because this is how communities actually work.

You have to circle up, create that moment of genuine, risky, vulnerable, meaningful connection to create community. And we're pre-wired to do it. If we do it, it clicks on. Speaking of the Patriots, I just have to digress here just for a second. I was completely blown away that Bill Belichick didn't get into the Hall of Fame on the first ballot. That to me was, wow, crazy, right? Crazy. Right. Crazy. Maybe he wasn't that good. My theory would be he's not that good at forming community with

Hall of Fame voters. He should have had a 4-H exercise with him before the ballot. That stuff absolutely does matter, doesn't it? I live here in Tampa Bay, Florida. And in St. Petersburg, if anyone's ever been there, there's this great older hotel called the Venoid that sits right on the water basin. And I don't know, five or six years ago, they started to do the longest table here. It probably goes close to a football field. It's really long. And what I have felt experiencing it is that the table doesn't work only because people feel welcome. I think it works because it makes each person's presence relevant to the experience. It's like mutual contribution that they're all having. Did you find that to be the case when you looked at the Parisian example?

Absolutely. And there's a welcoming and an imperfection. They're so, many parts of our life that sort of perfection is expected, I think, in some ways, in the way we keep our lawns and the way we dress when we leave the house. And this is just hospitality. And everybody's shown up, I don't know how it was in St. Pete, but here it was a potlock. So what'd you bring? Right? Everybody's literally bringing a gift. And so I'm sharing mine with you and you're sharing my with me. When you actually look into the word origin of community, it means sharing services and gifts. Like that is what it is. And so this idea. And so this idea. that everyone, it's one of those sort of simple things, but this idea of orienting around gifts,

because in every group there are hidden gifts and creating conditions where those gifts can show themselves, whether that's in a conversation at work where we're trying to explore something new. And you've got some hidden expertise that's connected to that or some experience in the Navy that's connected to that. I think flourishing groups are continually, and that's why they're often built around questions rather than answers, but they're continually creating questions, continue creating space where gifts can come forward. Because a gift is a double whammy. You get not just the experience, if mattering is about being valued and adding value.

And I think that's one way to understand it. I am valued and I'm adding value. It is a mattering is a relationship. Community is a relationship. Focus on gifts is just such a beautiful shortcut to finding that. And also permitting the imperfections. It's not perfect. It's messy.

Your table at St. Pete was messy. And it wasn't like there was a perfect waiter for just the right amount of cool water in your glass. People are self-organizing. And they've turned from this stance of being a consumer to being a participant and being a citizen. And that's what I saw in these places. It's a change in energy, which sounds woo,

but it's where we go from being, receiving something, to actually saying, no, I'm not outside. that ecosystem. I'm not outside that relationship. I'm in relationship with it and it lights us up. So one core difference between the Paris example and the St. Pete example, I think I like the Paris example better, is in the St. Pete example, it costs a lot of money. They bring in five or six of the higher-end restaurants in town to cater it. I think the cheapest one you can do is like $75, but it goes all the way up to $200 a person, depending, on what experience you want to get. I like the idea better that if you bring community meals

that each one partakes in because it brings more of that contribution to bear. It's true, right? We like to be needed. We need to be wanted. We've all got gifts, right? Share them. You mentioned Cleveland, Dan, and I grew up for part of my life as a child in Bay Village, which is not too far from Cleveland. My family are dying. hard Michigan fans. My parents, grandparents, everyone went to the University of Michigan. So if you're a Michigan fan, you ultimately have gone to Zingermans because it's a legend in Ann Arbor. And you chose to talk about Zingermans as well in the book. Why would you focus on a deli as an example of this community that you saw so rich that they had created? The short answer is that they are, I think, measurably, one of the

most remarkable business stories in America. I think there should be MBA classes led and taught out there. What they've done is quite remarkable. The short answer is I'd been there a few times and I'd felt the energy and I'd read a bit about them and I knew just enough to have them be a mystery to me. Started as a one building deli, 1982. Started by people who had very little experience. One was a dishwasher. One was I think a manager of a restaurant maybe. Their goal was to build a great Jewish deli in an Harbor, one that was so good that you bit into the Rubin and the juice ran down your arm. That was the vision. I'm picturing it right here in my mind.

Yeah, right, exactly, good vision. And they did. Ten years go by and pretty soon, as in every business, people start copying them. Right? People start copying the typeface. People start copying the menu. It's easy. That's business, right?

Then, so the two partners sit down and they say, what do we want to be? That same conversation that Chilean miners had, that same conversation the New England Patriots had, that same awkward, vulnerable, difficult, whoa, we got to let go of control here and see what this is all about. And so they had that conversation and they developed this vision that of a community of businesses that were all rooted in Ann Arbor, connected by the Zingerman's ethos, not outside Ann Arbor at all, all in Ann Arbor. And sure enough, that's what they built, working with partners developing this very communal

structure. But now there's a coffee shop, there's a bakery, there's a roadhouse restaurant. There's a wedding planning outfit. There's a travel business. It's a huge catalog business. It's now a $90 million, completely organic, soulful community of businesses that is, by some measures,

some of the people that I met with who worked there, they had Harvard MBAs. They had worked at the Ritz Carlton in Paris, and they decided to come back to Ann Arbor because it is such a fulfilling, meaningful community, Zingerman says. And when you dig into that, and ask, how are they doing this?

How exactly are they doing this? The answer is that they're really skilled at creating what I call in the book, awakening cues, which is little moments that connect us to meaning in the average, everyday course of things. And I got to sit in on an orientation class, which was led by Ari Weinsweig,

who's the co-CEO co-founder of Zingermans. And there's new employees, the scene is simple, classroom setting. There's about nine or 10 new employees. They're there. The CEO walks in and they're all sitting expectantly. They got their pencils in their hand. They're ready to take notes. It's orientation. I'm going to learn. They're going to orient me. I'm going to be given information and I'm going to be given the secrets of how to succeed here. So I'm ready to learn. And Ari walks in, he flips it. What's your story? How'd you get here? Oh, wow. Cool. What's your story? How did you get here? And they walk around and share their stories.

And then Ari shares some stories about Zingerman's evolution, how they came from, what their philosophy is. There was a, I don't know if he told that story that time or not, but there was a time where Walt Disney came in and offered him $50 million to partner because they wanted the best deli in America in their park. And Zingermans took about 15 minutes to think about it and said, no thanks. And Walt Disney is, you don't understand. You don't get it. And ultimately, Zingerman said, well, I don't think you guys get it. we're not about that. We're about this place. We have this deep, rich, thriving set of relationships. And if we go all over the place, we're going to lose that. This is what is valuable to us.

If you ever, they said, if you ever open Walt Disney World in Ann Arbor, we'll be partner with you, right? But so they keep walking through this orientation. It's a set of stories and connections. And they have got all of these. In addition to all of that, at the end of the orientation, he says, get into small groups and talk about what you want to build. in your lives. What are your dreams? Talk about those and then share those out. It was like a reverse orientation, right? It wasn't a typical transmit of here's all the information you need. It was, let's create a meaningful moment together so that we can get to know each other. And then we'll learn the information. That stuff's not hard. What's hard is like creating relationships.

And that's what Zingermans is incredible at. And one of the thing out that comes to mind, I was asking Ari, like, why did you say no to Walt Disney? This is an example of a good awakening cue that he gave me. I said, why did you say no to Walt Disney? And he answered not with logic or information. He pointed to my wedding ring and he said, do you take every opportunity that comes along? Oh, yeah, that kind of puts it in a clear light. Like commitment is where the good stuff is. And Zingermans understands that in a very deep level. And it's helped them continue to thrive because they're built on the values of community of sharing those gifts. Something I'm going to have to look into is my brother is an executive at Chick-fil-A.

And what people don't understand, if they don't understand the mechanism of Chick-fil-A, is that they don't call their individual owners franchisees. They call them operators. But their whole ecosystem is built on that operator community. And that is exactly the community that they want to cultivate inside each of their restaurants and then more importantly, the community that they want to build outside in the community around it. They take that very seriously and how they design everything they do in their stores. It would be such an interesting project to take what Zingermans has done and what Chick-fil-A has done and see how much they overlap.

Great call. All right, all you business students, get busy. Dan, if there was one thing that a person listening here today or watching, you hoped would take away from our conversation, what would it be? I think it would be yellow doors, yellow doors. This is actually an idea that you mentioned Lisa Miller earlier. This is from her work. But it has been, I saw it all the time at the flourishing places I visited. And it ended up impacted my own life a lot. And the idea is we mostly go through life looking for clear, signals to go or stop. Green doors that are go, open, do this, red doors that are stopped, don't do this. And life gets immeasurably richer and more interesting. If you slow down a little bit, widen your aperture, like turn off your controlling attention that goes through the world looking like through a tube of paper towels and widen out your attention and start attuning to the

yellow doors, which are opportunities that appear out of the corner of your eye that you aren't immediately drawn to, or the coffee with a neighbor who didn't seem nice at first, or the meeting with a colleague who invites you as an observer that you're not really connected with a project or a chance conversation on the bus when you could be on your phone. Opening up to that, it's ended up having a big impact, I guess the way it impacted my life the most, it's been a daily practice, right? One yellow door a day is a nice way to think about it. And not so long ago, I had a friend who wanted to get together to do a regular Wednesday thing with some guys and he wanted to go indoor climbing and I don't like indoor climbing. I've done it a couple of times. The shoes are

really stupid and tiny and it hurt your feet and I wasn't interested. But I thought, Yellow Door, I gave it a try and as I write in the book, those guys have turned into some of my best friends now. A few years later, we go climbing, we go skiing, we take trips together. Our families are friends. We play music together. We go to concerts. It's been like this incredible source of fellowship and fun that I was craving in my life. And if I hadn't been alert to Yellow Doors, I don't think I would have them in my life right now. Not to say that every yellow door leads to something like that.

Tons of them don't. But that's the point. Like life is not, to go back to where we started, life ain't a game. It's literally not a game. If anybody listening takes a piece of paper and the pen and starts sketching out the shape of their life, what direction did you go?

Where did it take you? They're not drawing straight, lines. They're drawing these squiggles with a ton of dead ends and then a turn and then a movement and then a breakthrough and then another failure. And there are these squiggly paths and yellow doors are the kind of inflection points on that path where we can say, hey, that's interesting. I don't know if it's good or bad. Let me try it out. Let me live into it. Live into the question. And we can't think our way through them, we can't predict our way through them or logic our way through them. You have to live your way through them to really, really inhabit them and explore them. And that feels good when you

develop the athletic move to say, I'm going to push through that. And all the fact that it's a little painful, a little uncertain is just the price of good things. It's not a downside that it's a little painful. It should be a little painful. Like a lot of stuff is. And that's okay. You're not going to grow without some form of stressing who you are now to lead toward that growth. That's how growth works. That's how the garden is grown, I guess you might say. Great closure for the episode right there. What I love about what you just said about the yellow doors mimics what you were saying about the cues earlier. And it kind of mimics what I was saying about the transition points. They're all the analogy or metaphor of the same thing. But these are the moments that we need to pay

more attention to because that's where true connection happens. And that's where our life gets shaped, I think, for the better, or if you don't pay attention to them, for the worst. I couldn't agree more. Final question for you, Dan, is this. I always ask this for the guess. For you, what does it mean to live a passion-struck life? Wow. I think it means that you're always tapping into some core, some depth. For me, it's like you're always tapping into some depth. You're doing things because they resonate like a guitar string inside you. And it's not logical entirely, though you can use logic to serve those feelings.

You can use logic to help you cultivate that passion. And I almost think of it as part passion and part like fascination, too, where it's like stuff you find endlessly interesting, where that flame gets reignited all the time, and you get that energy is renewed. For me, it's like they're in touch with these sources and maybe their activities, maybe their relationships, maybe their projects that kind of pluck that guitar string inside you that's, ooh, I like that. And you can't help but pursue it.

Like it doesn't feel like work. It feels like fascination. I love it because that's what it means to me as well. You're in a mattering moment, mattering project. that your passion struck about. Dan, it was such an honor to have you on the show. For listeners who want to learn more about you, where is the best place for them to go?

Yeah, Danielcoil.com. There's a link to contact me or whatever people want to do. Awesome. Thank you so much for joining us here on Passion Struck. Thanks, John. It was a delight. Thanks for having me. That brings us to the close of today's conversation with Daniel Coyle.

If this episode stayed with you, it's likely because it illuminated something you felt before. The difference between being included and being needed. Here are three reflections you might carry forward. First, flourishing begins with presence. Second, group flow emerges from trust. And lastly, mattering is structural. It shows up in how roles are designed, a voice is shape, action, and whether individuals experience themselves as necessary to the whole. Daniel's work reminds us that flourishing doesn't require perfection or constant happiness. It grows where human significance is continually reinforced through participation and shared responsibility.

If this conversation resonated, consider sharing it with someone who's building a team, leading a community, or quietly wondering why energy keeps draining from spaces that look successful on paper. To continue the work, visit theagnetidlif.netedlife.net, our substack for episode reflections. Watch the full conversation on YouTube at John R. Miles or Passion Struck Clips. Explore intention-driven apparel at start mattering.com. Next, we continue the You Matter series with Harry Reese and Sonia Liebermirsky, exploring how happiness, connection, and relational significance intersect and where they meaningfully diverge.

People will pursue the goals of being famous, of making a lot of money, of being the most beautiful person on the planet, that sort of thing. When you pursue those extrinsic goals and other people admire you for that, it isn't experienced as the real self. You can never have enough money because there's always somebody who makes more money. There's a wonderful study that showed that something like two-thirds of the millionaires in America feel like they don't make enough money because there's always someone more beautiful. There's always someone more powerful.

There's always someone with higher status. There's always someone who's won more awards than you. And so when you're pursuing those more and more, it's not the real self that's coming through. Until then, remember, you matter because. your presence shapes what unfolds around you. You matter because participation changes outcomes and flourishing grows wherever people are treated as indispensable. I'm John Miles and you've been passion struck.