Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - An Antidote to Autopilot | John R. Miles

Episode Date: February 16, 2024

Three tools for living a “passion-struck” life.John R Miles is a former naval officer and corporate titan who has made it his business to study what it means to find passion and purpose in your life. He is the host of the Passion Struck Podcast and the author of the new book Passion Struck: Twelve Powerful Principles to Unlock Your Purpose and Ignite Your Most Intentional Life.In this episode we talk about:A visualization technique for setting your prioritiesWhy “autopilot” is the wrong metaphor for an unlived lifeThe five “transition points” on “the journey to becoming passion struck” Sign up for Dan’s weekly newsletter hereFollow Dan on social: Instagram, TikTokTen Percent Happier online bookstoreSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelOur favorite playlists on: Anxiety, Sleep, Relationships, Most Popular EpisodesFull Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/podcast-episode/john-r-milesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Maybe you've stayed in an Airbnb before and thought to yourself, this actually seems pretty doable. Maybe my place could be an Airbnb. Could be as simple as starting with a spare room or your whole place when you're away. You could be sitting on an Airbnb and not even know it. I personally love Airbnbs. My friend Glenn and I just rented an Airbnb in Fort Lauderdale. We're going to bring our families down to see Inter Miami play some soccer.

Glenn and I both have boys. Our boys really wanna see messy play. So anyway, I'm really looking forward to all staying in the same place instead of being in hotels where we maybe run into each other once in a while. I love the intimacy of all being in the same house. It's really cool. Maybe you're planning a ski getaway this winter

or you've decided to go someplace warm while you're away. You could Airbnb your home and make some extra money toward the trip. It's a smart and simple way to use what you already have. Whether you could use extra money to cover some bills or for something a little more fun, your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello everybody. How are we doing? We've got a brief and experimental episode for you today with an interesting chap named John R. Miles.

He's a former naval officer and corporate titan who's made it his business to study what it means to find passion and purpose in your life. He's the host of the Passionstruck podcast where he interviews folks with whom our listeners may well be quite familiar. For example, Arthur Brooks, Katie Milkman, Ethan Cross, Dr. Mark Hyman, all former guests on this show. John Miles is also the author of a new book out this month called Passionstruck,

12 Powerful Principles to Unlock Your Purpose and Ignite Your Most Intentional Life. Okay, so here's how this thing is gonna work. We've got three bite-sized clips for you to chew on today from John R. Miles. In the first clip, John has just finished telling me about a moment in his life when he thought he had reached the pinnacle of success,

high-paying job, nice house, nice cars, a marriage, kids, and so on, only to lose the job, the wife, and much more, and then spiral into a deep depression. In this clip, he talks about a visualization technique that he learned that helped him to start digging himself out, and he explains how you might be able to apply it in your own life. When I had reached that point of burnout and depression, When I had reached that point of burnout and depression, I sought professional help. And I went to go see a career coach who also was a psychologist. And I remember sitting down with Jay.

And at that point, I had a number of fears about the future, but I also wasn't self perceiving myself enough to understand how I was living my life. And so he sat me down and said, John, I want you to close your eyes and I want you to do some visualization. And I want you to picture yourself sitting on a kitchen stool. And I started to picture myself there. And then he said, I want you to think underneath that stool, instead of having multiple supports, it's just one. And for you, it's the constant grind. And as that grind wears and tears on you more and more, what do you think it's doing to your stability on the stool? And then after going through that,

he said, now I want you to think about that same stool and now picture it with different supports that are underneath it, that are the things that you want to become the main things in your life. And these could be whatever a listener chooses that they want them to become. It could be philanthropic endeavors. It could be exercise, whatever you want it to be. I chose to make them pillars that composed relationship health, physical health, emotional health,

mental health, spiritual health, etc. Because I figured if I started setting the life that I wanted, according to those pillars, then any career I was going to do would be so much better because I had this solid foundation underneath me. And I think that's a great starting point for people to use that metaphor for their own life. But once you start creating those different pillars that you want to achieve, and this is where I went wrong, I tried to create change in all of them all at once. And I think that just leads to disappointment. I would highly encourage you to pick one and start making small incremental choices in that one pillar.

And I promise you once you start doing that and momentum grows and your intrinsic motivation grows, other pillars start getting impacted just through that one effort. Before you know it, multiple areas of your life will start changing and that's exactly what happened to me. Moving on now to the second clip. In this one, John takes issue with a common metaphor for living the unexamined life and he proposes an alternative that he thinks can help wake us up. I hear so many self-improvement people talk all the time about, we're living our life

on autopilot and it's okay at analogy. But when I start thinking about that, even if you're in the cockpit of a plane, you've got the plane on autopilot, it's still going in a direction you want that plane to go. Typically it's in the direction towards the final destination. But I think that's how the majority of us are living our lives. I think the majority of people right now live their lives day in, day out as if they are the pinball in the game of pinball, instead of playing the game of pinball and controlling the ball. There's a big difference because we allow ourselves just to bounce off of

all these external influences that are hitting us because we're not consciously engaging with the world around us. And we're letting all those external noises come into our mind, fill us with all this crap, and then we're not doing any of the inner work to release any of it, to get ourselves back on the correct path that we want, to lead the life that we want. And so for me, one of the most fundamental things, if you want to have a passion struck life, you have to learn how to consciously engage.

You have to learn how to create unwavering focus in your life. And it's time to wake up now. Okay. In this last clip, John lays out five strategies, five transition points, and what he calls the journey to becoming passion struck. You might find it interesting to try on this framework and think about where you are right now in relation to these five stages. One of the common things that people kept coming to me with was, how do I even know

where I'm at on this journey to becoming passionstruck? And so I start out this third section of the book by outlining what I call the five plateaus on your journey to becoming passionstruck. And they consist of the subsister, the imitator, the vanquisher, the orchestrator, and lastly the creative amplifier. And I will just go into each one of them a little bit. So the subsister is someone who is indifferent, self-centered, gripped with an overwhelming fear of change. They settle for comfort in the status quo. The imitator

is someone who is self-absorbed and conforming, driven by ego and a need to fit in, adhering most of the time to societal norms. The vanquisher is someone who is ambitious and relentless, consistently striving for personal success, and they're determined to conquer obstacles on the path to the greatness they so long for. The orchestrator is someone who's balanced and visionary, possessing a managed ego and a genuine concern for the world. They're actively seeking out systemic change and progress. And then lastly, the creative amplifier is conscious and humble, fully engaged with a world-centric perspective, resilient in the face of challenges, and empowered to realize their self-authentic journey.

And what I would tell people is I put these out there and I made them pretty extreme so that there would be extreme plateaus that you would find yourself in. But in this methodology, I found that people can achieve becoming an orchestrator or a vanquisher, and then something may happen in their life that takes them back to one of their lower levels. The importance is I tried to give a structure, and then I put a quiz on the Passionstruck site where you can fill out 20 questions and it'll give you a starting point. But through this starting point, you can then use that to figure out what principles you need to apply from the book to get you from where you are and where you want to be, depending

on your starting point. All righty, thanks to John R. Miles. Really appreciate him coming on. Don't forget his podcast, the Passion Struck podcast. I was a guest there myself recently. And also don't forget he's got a new book, Passionstruck, 12 Powerful Principles to Unlock Your Purpose and Ignite Your Most Intentional Life.

Thank you for listening and thank you also to everybody who worked so hard to make this show. 10% happier is produced by Gabriel Zuckerman, Justine Davie Lauren Smith and Tara Anderson. DJ Cashmere is our senior producer. Barissa Schneiderman is our senior editor. Kevin O'Connell is our director of audio and post-production. And Kimmy Regler is our executive producer.

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We'll talk to the people who were there. And most of all, we'll bring you some amazing stories. You know what my biggest memory from that tour is? It was your birthday. Yes, and you brought me to Shoday. Life-sized artwork cut out. This is Class of 88, the story of a year that changed hip hop. Follow Class of 88 on the Wondry app

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