Something You Should Know - SYSK TRENDING - A Different View of Success

Episode Date: July 14, 2026

What does it really mean to be successful? Most people would probably say it's about making more money, climbing the career ladder, earning recognition, or becoming well known. But what if we've been measuring success all wrong? After spending years traveling the country as host of Dirty Jobs, Mike Rowe met thousands of people whose work is essential but rarely celebrated. Welders, plumbers, linemen, mechanics, farmers, and countless others showed him that fulfillment, purpose, and success often have very little to do with prestige—and a lot to do with attitude, craftsmanship, and showing up when it matters. In this fascinating conversation, Mike challenges many of the assumptions we've come to accept about work, education, persistence, efficiency, and what it really takes to build a satisfying life. Even if you don't agree with all of his conclusions, his perspective is thoughtful, refreshing, and guaranteed to make you reconsider some deeply held beliefs. Mike Rowe is creator and longtime host of Dirty Jobs, founder of the mikeroweWORKS Foundation (www.mikeroweworks.com), host of the podcast The Way I Heard It (https://mikerowe.com/podcast/), and author of the bestselling book The Way I Heard It (https://amzn.to/34Dikog). PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS WAYFAIR: Ready to upgrade your home for way less? Head to ⁠⁠https://Wayfair.com⁠⁠ right now to shop all things home and get your space ready for less.  RULA: Thousands of people are already using Rula to get affordable, high-quality therapy that’s actually covered by insurance. Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Rula.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to get started. QUINCE: Elevate your summer wardrobe. Go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Quince.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada, too! SHOPIFY: It's time to turn those "what ifs" into CHA CHING with Shopify Today! Sign up for your $1 per month trail and start selling today at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Shopify.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ INDEED: Get a $75 Sponsored Job credit to help get your job the premium status it deserves at ⁠https://Indeed.com/PODCAST⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Hulu original series Furious is coming to Disney Plus, starring Emmy Rossum. Furious follows FBI agent Alice Black on the hunt for a mysterious and calculating serial killer. Both walk their own paths toward justice, and as their lives start to intertwine, the line between right and wrong begins to blur. Don't miss the three-episode premiere of the Hulu original series Furious on July 27th, only on Hulu on Disney Plus. What does it actually mean to be successful? If you ask 10 people, you'll probably get 10 different answers.

For some it's money, for others it's status, prestige, or recognition. But what if we've been looking at success a little too narrowly? What if some of the happiest, most fulfilled people define success in ways that rarely make the headlines? That's why today's SYSK trending topic is a different view of success. Today, we're talking about alternate ways to think about success with someone who spent years meeting people from every walk of life. Mike Rowe has traveled the country highlighting jobs most people never think about.

And through those experiences, he's come away with some interesting and sometimes surprising ideas about work, fulfillment, and what really makes a successful life. It's a fascinating conversation coming up right after this. This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business.

The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. Did you ever watch the Discovery Channel TV show Dirty Jobs? It was fascinating to watch people do jobs that are dirty, gross, disgusting. And they even had people doing jobs. You never even knew were jobs. It's just that somebody's got to do them.

One of the things that show did was make its host, Mike Rowe, a pretty popular guy. In addition to Dirty Jobs, Mike also hosted the show, somebody's got to do it on CNN, and he has been a commercial spokesperson for Ford and other companies, because he has a great set of pipes. He also has the Mike Rowe Works Foundation, which he started. That foundation champions blue-collar jobs and the people who perform them. Mike is also the host of a podcast and author of a book, both titled The Way I Heard It. And he has some very sound insight and advice from the trenches. For anybody who wants to work, and get ahead in life.

And that advice is a lot different than what you've probably heard before. Hi, Mike. Welcome to something you should know. Mike, thanks for having me. So despite the image I think a lot of people have of you, you didn't really grow up as a blue-collar guy working in these blue-collar jobs. That's not who you are. You kind of made your way into that world through your television show, but that's not how you got into the business.

So explain your story. Well, the micro version of the micro story goes like this. I was born in Baltimore, surrounded by tradesmen growing up, persuaded and convinced I would follow in their footsteps, but realizing later in my teenage years, the handy gene was recessive, got into entertainment, made a living for a few decades in my early 40s. I decided that I'd like to try something different. So I hosted an episode of Evening Magazine from, a sewer with a sewer inspector, was essentially baptized in a most unfortunate fluid that was prevented from doing my typical hosting job by roaches and rats and everything else you would expect to find down there. Dirty Jobs was born out of that segment. Ever since, I've been impersonating, not a host, but a guest. That's where my career, such as it is, changed and took off. So for the last 15 years or so, I've been tapping the country on the shoulder and saying, hey, you should get a load of this guy or you should meet her, four or five different shows,

all with different titles, all basically do the same thing. So in your travels and all of the people that you've met and who have done all these different kinds of jobs that you've portrayed on your TV show, what's the big takeaway that you get that you think people could really appreciate. Well, the single biggest thing that happens when you stop impersonating an expert is you become humble in ways that you didn't even know you weren't. And I guess maybe the big lesson to come out of dirty jobs was a continual debunking of platitudes and bromides. So much of what passes for good advice these days winds up on photographs and. pictures that get framed and hung on the walls in conference rooms where we get to read about

the importance of things like persistence and teamwork and passion and all of those things. On dirty jobs, I learned there was a corollary or a dirty truth, if you will, to just about every existing bromide that was out there. And the big one was, follow your passion. And we spend a lot of time today telling kids in particular the key to job satisfaction is to identify the thing they're passionate about and then do whatever it takes to get that job. On Dirty Jobs, it was a very different philosophy. I met people who were passionate about their work but weren't led by their passion. People who looked around identified an opportunity, maybe a septic tank cleaner, for instance, and then worked hard to become good.

at what they did and then expanded and then found a way to be passionate about it. So just one example, there are thousands of others, but in a very general way, dirty jobs gave me a chance to question and maybe reconsider a lot of what passes these days for conventional wisdom. Well, I think that's so true because the advice of follow your passion implies that, A, you have one, and B, it could be turned into a career, which chances are not true, and that people who are very successful, septic tank cleaners or break shop owners or dry cleaners, probably don't lie in bed at night talking and dreaming about dry cleaning and septic cleaning.

And yet they're successful at it. They're not passionate about it. They don't live it and breathe it and sleep it, but they're good at it. Right. Oftentimes what happens when I suggest you shouldn't follow your passion, but rather bring it, with you is all people really hear is, well, you just want me to embrace some version of drudgery or you don't want me to follow my dreams. And it's not really, it's not really that binary. You know, it's, uh, the, the funny thing about dirty jobs was if, if you look at the people

we featured over 10 years of shooting as a group, you would find a very passionate collection of people. You'd also find 40 or 50 millionaires, unlikely looking millionaires. but nevertheless, you know, there's a lot of cognitive dissonance in the show. And the big reason for it, I think, is because they valued passion so much that they didn't allow passion to lead them. They simply put it in their pocket and said, look, I can be passionate about anything. But if I want to make a living, the first thing I have to do is figure out where the opportunities are and then become competent and then become highly skilled.

and then figure out a way to love it. So it's not a question of living one way or the other. It's really just a question of, are you going to take the well-worn path, the road less traveled, or the reverse commute? Let's talk about efficiency, because we do seem to be in a love affair with efficiency, that we not only get things done,

we want to get more things done, and then we want to get those things done faster so we can do even more things. And we want to be more and more, efficient. What's your take? We look at technology as a kind of panacea, and I certainly think the technology is going to shape the future. There's no doubt about it. But the question becomes, is technology a symptom of an efficient society or an effective one? And I'm not an expert on this, but I do believe there's a real difference between the ideas of effectiveness and deficiency.

Huxley said, for instance, that the greatest threat to total freedom was total anarchy, but the second greatest threat was total deficiency. And if you look at the conversation happening today around artificial intelligence, you know, and then the robots are coming. You know, it's easy to understand why efficiency can overreach. And if we're completely focused on being as efficient as possible, we sometimes get over our skis. I think on dirty jobs, you met people who understood that there's really no extra credit. You're either effective or you're not.

And if you're effective, if the thing you're doing is accomplishing your goals, you don't get the extra credit really for. for going much beyond that. So it's a bit controversial. A lot of people have written a lot of books that take a different approach, but I'm still fascinated by history, the Luddite Rebellion, which showed us, I think, in just about every way, shape, and form

that every time we panic over an existential threat like robots coming or like some new technology coming. We're always wrong. We're always wrong, and as long as we can focus more on the upside of remaining effective than efficient, then I think it's likely we'll be less anxious about a whole list of things we're not going to be able to control anyway. And that is so right that we're always wrong. And we're always wrong in the wrong way.

It's always, everything's going to be worse than it turns out to be. It's never like people never say it's going to be great and then it turns out to be worse. People always say it's going to be worse and it turns out to be not so bad. That's right. You know, the bad news is we're almost always wrong. The good news is that's how you advance. You know, on a personal level, the reason dirty jobs worked so well for me was because it was the first thing I ever did professionally where I wasn't evaluated on my ability to be correct.

I was evaluated on my willingness to try. So as a lab rat or a human guinea pig, I was able to manage expectations on television in a way that's very different than, say, David Attenborough, or Jane Goodall, or Jacques Cousteau, or any of the other myriad of experts who hang their entire reputations on the business of being correct,

I hung mine on the business of failing, good-naturedly, and then learning in the wake of whatever humiliation I was asked to endure, learning about how to do it better. And when you show the viewer that process, when they see you try and fail, it's not nearly as bad as we're brought up to imagine. In fact, what is trying and failing, but for Don Quixote and Sisyphus and a long list of literary figures who remind us that it's the journey, not the destination. Well, that's very reassuring to know that failure isn't fatal.

Mike Roe is my guest. He was the host of the TV show Dirty Jobs, and he now has a book and a podcast, both called The Way I, heard it. My name is Peter Parker, but I'm also Spider-Man. This July, we're faced with a threat. That could be anyone. The world may have forgotten Peter Parker. I'm just a neighbor, friendly neighbor. But he hasn't forgotten them. Sometimes Spider-Man has to do the hard thing. That's my responsibility. Talk to Banner? I didn't know you could get that big.

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Visit L'Oreal.com to learn more. So, Mike, as we're discussing, failure may not be fatal, but a lot of times people think it is, you know, and if you screw up on your job, you could lose your job or you could get demoted and that people go to great lengths to avoid failure when sometimes failure could be the best thing to ever happen to you. If you're in the business of telling stories, especially, I mean, life, of course, I agree with everything you just said, but in the business of telling stories, if you eliminate failure from the narrative, then you don't have a tale. Right. You don't even have a fable. You have nothing. It's just another story of how I did it. And the shelves are littered with people who are anxious to tell you how they did it. But if you dig into their stories, even their success stories are defined by their failures. So I'm certainly not the first guy to come along and say, don't be afraid of failing. What I'm trying to say is you have no hope of succeeding without it. I know some of what you talk about, a lot of what you talk about, runs contrary to what we've been led to believe.

A lot of the platitudes, as you say, on office walls about teamwork and passion and perseverance and all this, that there is a different view, and you take that different view. And so let's talk about that. Well, if you think about all of what passes for good advice, you can really just give me a topic, and I can give you the dirty jobs corollary to it. teamwork, for instance. I mean, we're, we spent a lot of time talking about the importance of working as a team. And obviously, there are tons of examples where that makes perfect sense to understand and embrace.

But it's so easy to go too far. And that's typically what we do. When we take a gem or a kernel of good advice, we become slavish to it. And our current obsession with teamwork, I think is another good example. If you take a close look at everybody on the team, you won't find any two people getting paid the same salary. You won't find any two people with the same basic talents. You'll find individuals. And those individuals to a man will have come from other teams.

And most of them will wind up on still other teams. and there's something about the mercenary that I love. There's something about the freelancer and the jobber that I think is so uniquely American and something we were able to really plumb on dirty jobs. And I hate to lose that. I hate to see people become so assimilated with the squad or the platoon or the regiment or the team that they lose that sense of eating what they kill and understanding. For instance, that the mastery of a skill or a trade,

something I talk about a lot, has benefits that go way beyond the paycheck. It's basic competency, you know. So to sum up, teamwork is great, but not at the expense of individuality. Efficiency is fine, but not at the expensive effectiveness. and passion is worth embracing, but not if you're going to follow it around and let it take you down a rabbit hole to the point where you wind up being one of those contestants on the early

episodes of American Idol who learned at 22 years of age, not just that they couldn't sing, but learned that lesson on national television. And that always fascinated me that they would get so angry as if they really didn't know that they couldn't sing, that they really believed that they could, that now given this chance they were going to become stars, when objectively, as a viewer, you could tell the person couldn't sing. As a viewer, yes, but as the individual, no.

Look, Mike, remember, we're the clouds from which the snowflakes fell. And if you tell somebody for the entirety of their youth that the key to getting what you want is to simply want it real bad and that if you're serious about becoming an American idol and you never quit but put your head down and just follow that passion, well then, yeah, that's going to lead to a young man or woman standing there in front of three judges and an audience of millions. demonstrating for everyone that they simply don't have the necessary talent, and they're never going to get it. Can they get better? Sure. Are they going to be an American Idol? No.

They'd be better off focusing, probably, on being an American icon. Well, that one thing you said about teamwork that I want to comment on and get you to comment back is this idea of teamwork that really seems to be everywhere now. that everybody's part of a team, to me, has always been kind of counter human nature, that there is something in us that we have the need to accomplish something that's ours, not be part of something, but to be something. I think that that's exactly it. The trick is the balance.

You know, if you go too far toward the individualistic side, of it, then you'll never assimilate and you'll never be a part of anything larger than yourself and you'll be viewed by and large as a loner or an eccentric or just a selfish dude. And so it's bad to go too far that way. If you go too far in the other direction, then I think you're going to wind up like a lot of people today because what's the logical extension of a team that becomes too much of a team. I think we call them tribes. Right, right, exactly. And once you're in a tribe, well, you know, you've got your own colors and you've got your own theme song, you got your own

customs, and so you're either, are you a friendly tribe or not? And what do you do with somebody who's not in your tribe? Do you welcome other, others? You know, it gets, if you go too far in either direction, then it starts to break down. So I think companies and businesses and families and relationships and sports franchises, I think we all in some way, shape, or form have to come to terms with where we are in that whole team individual thing. And I think it changes. And I think that change is okay. It's fungible. Cal Ripkin played for the same team for 20 years, and it served him well.

And he became a Baltimore icon. And a lot of other successful players did the exact opposite thing. So as much as we love the idea that there's a playbook for all of this stuff, I think part of what we have to do to stay sane is remind ourselves, that there isn't. There is no playbook, but for this giant compendium of evolving advice that applies in different degrees to different people. So you said something earlier that struck me, you used the expression, cookie cutter. That really and truly is the enemy, I think, of everything you try and do on your podcast. And it's also the enemy of so much of what's happening today.

When it comes to education, for instance, telling an entire generation that the best path for the most people is a four-year degree. That's a cookie-cutter approach to education. And that approach has left us with about $1.5 trillion of student loans on one side, and on the other side, over 7 million jobs that don't require a four-year degree that employers are struggling to fill. So much of what happens comes from this idea that good advice is good for everybody in the same way. That's why the shelves are full of advice books,

and that's why those platitudes and bromides, wind up hanging on office walls and conference room walls. And that's why we're so enamored of them. I just saw one the other day that said persistence, exclamation point. And it was a picture of a bunch of people in a rowing shell, you know, working hard as a team, being persistent. And I'm like, what, what is inherently good about staying the course or being persistent? It only makes sense if you're going in the right direction. So be wary of advice. Be wary of taking it, be wary of giving it, and understand who might be listening.

Well, you certainly have a different and unique perspective that, well, it literally comes from being in the trenches with all those people. doing all those dirty jobs all those years, and I appreciate you sharing it. Mike Rose been my guest. Mike was the host of the TV show Dirty Jobs on the Discovery Channel, and somebody's got to do it on CNN. He is the founder of the Mike Rowe Works Foundation, and he has a book and podcast out, and both of them are titled The Way I Heard it. There's a link to both of them in the show notes. Thanks for being on something you should know, Mike. Sure think. And that wraps up this SYSK trending episode. I'm Mike Herruthers.

thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.