The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 504: Jeff Shesol - Moonshot Goals, Driver vs. Passenger Mentality, & Creating Your Own Fate

Episode Date: December 19, 2022

Text Hawk to 66866 to become part of Mindful Monday. Join 10's of thousands of other learning leaders and receive a carefully curated email from me each Monday morning to help you start your week off right... Full show notes at www.LearningLeader.com Twitter/IG: @RyanHawk12    https://twitter.com/RyanHawk12 Jeff Shesol is a multi-hyphenate leader. He's a Rhodes Scholar, a historian, a presidential speech writer, and a 3-time best-selling author. He also had a comic strip called thatch that was nationally syndicated from 1994–1998 when it appeared daily in more than 150 newspapers. Notes: If you're going to set moonshot goals for your team, you must relentlessly communicate them to all involved. The what, why, how, and when… Relentlessly communicate with vivid clarity. Focus, Purpose, Urgency… This was what was lacking before President Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson helped take fragmented groups and bring them all together. Focus, Purpose, and Urgency. How can you do this for your organization? John Glenn – A leader of action. He didn't let fate determine the outcome of his life. He went after what he wanted. He had a bias for action. In a world of drivers and passengers, John Glenn was a driver and that's what led to him leaving his mark in the world. John Glenn – "Friendship 7—designed to fly itself—had begun drifting to the right, like a car with its front wheels out of alignment. Glenn took the control stick—not without satisfaction. He was a pilot, by training and temperament, and pilots take control." Press conference to introduce astronauts… John Glenn said, "I was brought up believing that you are placed on earth… with sort of a fifty-fifty proposition. We are placed here with certain talents and capabilities. It is up to each one of us to use those talents and capabilities as best as we can. A higher power will certainly see that I am taken care of if I do my part of the bargain." The space program may be the profession that requires the highest risk tolerance aside from the military. It is no surprise the original 7 astronauts were all test pilots. The Flight Director of the Apollo missions, Chris Kraft, is quoted as saying: "if we thought about odds, we wouldn't do it (launch man into space)." Bob Gilruth, head of NASA, also said: "we don't have enough chimpanzees" responding to criticism that not enough test launches were done. JFK, despite his outward speeches, was initially reluctant to go to the moon and was skeptical if it was a waste of time and money. Publishing your work can change your life... In 1997, President Bill Clinton read Mutual Contempt and invited Shesol to become one of his speechwriters. During his three years at the White House, Shesol became the deputy chief speechwriter and a member of the senior staff. Sustaining Excellence: Need to evolve, and be open to change. Musicians take risks with new albums. Be willing to take those risks as a leader. Continue to challenge yourself. Keynote speeches: Do not ever let them get stale... But have one fundamental core message. Dr. Martin Luther King had a core theme of every speech. Life and Career advice: "In your 20's, figure out where you can make your great contribution." Trial and error is good. What energizes you the most?

Welcome to The Learning Leaders Show, presented by Insight Global. I am your host, Ryan Hawk. Thank you so much for being here. Text, Hawk, 266-866 to become part of Mindful Monday. You, along with tens of thousands of other learning leaders from all over the world, will receive a carefully curated email from me each Monday morning to help you start your week off right. You'll also receive details about how my book, The Pursuit of Excellence, will help you become a more effective leader. Text, Hawk to 66866. Now, on to tonight's featured leader.

A great one, it's Jeff Scheschel, a Rhodes Scholar, a historian, a presidential speechwriter, and a three-time bestselling author. He also had a comic strip called FACCH that was nationally syndicated from 1994-1998 when it appeared daily. in more than 150 newspapers. This dude is incredible few of the topics we discuss. The difference between being a passenger and a driver and life. And which is better for you, nuanced topic. And then rivalries. Some of us have them.

Some of us don't. Jeff has studied the history of rivalries and if they are helpful and how they could be helpful for you. And then failing in public, why the United States Space Program benefited from the world seeing their

failures and how you could benefit from this as well. This one is jam-packed with so many useful stories. Please enjoy. Jeff Shessel. Jeff, it's so great to have you here on the Learning Leader Show. Welcome.

Thanks for having me. I want to start 1997, let's go there. And a very powerful person read your book, which was called Mutual Contempt. And this person was so moved by what you had written that he offered you a job. Can you take us back to that moment, share who that person was and what happened next? Well, that person at the time was president of the United States, a man named Bill Clinton. I know you you know them well, and we all do. And I certainly did in 1997 when I went down to my mailbox in the afternoon

and found a cardboard-backed envelope with a White House return address, which was pretty startling and thrilling. It was pretty clear to me just from looking at the envelope that it wasn't one of those fundraising letters that you get from one political party or other claiming to speak on behalf of the president. So I opened it up and there was a nice little handwritten note from President Clinton saying that he had read my book, which was news to me and pretty thrilling, of course, and saying some nice things about it. And I did what you expect. I framed it.

And I told my family and friends about it. And I certainly never thought anything else was going to come of this. But indeed, a week or two later, I got a phone call from a guy named Michael Waldman, who was then the chiefs. speechwriter to the president. And he said, look, as you know, the president read your book. And what you don't know is that we have an opening for a speechwriter. And would you like to come have lunch at the White House mess and talk to me about it? So I said, of course, and went in. And Waldman and I spent about three hours together between lunch and just sitting around his office talking. And all of a sudden, this crazy thing that just fell out of the sky, this was a real

possibility. And I wound up getting the job. It is a great example of you never know. You never know what can happen if you're willing to have the guts to publish your work for all to judge. I'm a big proponent, Jeff, of pushing leaders to write and to publish their writing, certainly for the people they lead, but for all, because I think it can be a serendipity vehicle. And in this case, this is even before the internet was what it was, what it is today, because now there's even more opportunity for people to find you if you publish online. In this case, though, you wrote a book.

How do you view that, given the amazing impact it's had on your life, that publishing your work can literally change your life? Well, it certainly has been the case for me. And I still feel incredibly lucky when I think back. And it's, you know, it's been 25 years now since this happened, the story that I've just shared with you. But I will say that I certainly didn't write the book as part of any kind of plan. I wrote the book because I was consumed with this story. I was obsessed with this story, which you really have to be to write a book.

I mean, you can write a book that you're not as interested in, but that's a painful process. You want to love the story that you're trying to tell. You want to feel compelled to tell it. And I remember sitting down in 1994 to work on a book proposal to write this book. And I just, my hope was that someone would just give me the chance to do this. Self-publishing at the age of 25 didn't seem like an option to me. It certainly wasn't an option to me. And so an editor somewhere in New York was going to make the decision whether I got to spend some years writing this book.

And I just wanted to get this story out there. I wanted to immerse myself in it. I wanted to interview some of the participants. I wanted to see what I thought about this set of questions that I had written for myself. And so, you know, did I think anything more was going to come from that someday? I had no idea. You can't be consumed with that question in a moment like that. because you can't foresee it.

You hope that if you do a good job at this thing and you get it out in the world, that it will begin to speak for itself and that others will read it and perhaps other opportunities will emerge. But it has to be enough in itself. At least it did for me in that moment. And I had another day job at the time, which was as a syndicated cartoonist. And I was sort of playing in a way, running the same play with both of these things. I didn't know whether either of them was going to lead to anything more than what they themselves were.

But that was okay with me in the moment. And when you're in your 20s, if you're in a, you know, not everybody is as fortunate as this. I recognize that I sort of recognized my privilege in being able to tell a story like this. I knew that if neither of these things worked out and I failed at both, that I could go find something else to do. And that's not a risk that everybody is in the position to take. So I felt fortunate just for that. Yeah. I interviewed Brian Coppelman once, Jeff, and he has written a bunch of movies and TV shows.

And Brian told me, as he gave me advice, was to follow my obsessions and curiosity with great. rigor. And that is not a guarantee of anything, but if you consistently do that, I like your odds, is what you said to me. And I remember that, and I try really hard to do that. And it feels like that's what you've built your career on. But were you a Rhodes Scholar before this book? Or what's the timeline there? How does this work? Yeah, I was. I graduated college in 91. I had gone to Brown and I got a road scholarship and I was at Oxford for the next two years studying British political history. And in 93, when I finished that degree, I moved to Washington. And I moved to Washington with a kind of vague plan that I was going to try to do both of these things.

I wanted to launch the comic strip. I actually had a syndication deal that I'd gotten in college that I was able to put on ice for a couple of years while I was in grad school because I had done a comic strip for my college newspaper and for a college syndicate. So that was part of plan A. And then there was the idea of trying to write this book about LBJ and RFK. But I wasn't sure I was going to do either of those things. I wasn't sure whether I was going to be able to do either of those things. So I got to Washington and began to look around and consider other options.

And there was another part of me that wanted to put those two things aside and just get into politics, just get into the new administration, the Clinton administration that had just gotten started when I moved here. And it was all very exciting. And I had a lot of friends from college and grad school who had gone into the government. Maybe they've worked on the campaign. And I thought, maybe that's what I should do. That's kind of the most exciting thing happening in the United States right now. But I decided that if I didn't pursue the strip and the book, at that point in my life, that I was never going to do it. all day. I love the arc and what you've built. But I want to get into some of the meat of the things

that you've written about because I think there's so many takeaways. And the books are just beautifully written. Man, like talk about writers, Mb. I've published a few books. I'm continually working on more. And Jeff, I read and just kind of get mad at myself. So as you probably do with some writers, uh, I forget from all. It's, it's, it's, they're so, so good, man. I was rereading him this morning. But I want to jump into a passage actually from John Glenn for me. most recent book. And John Glenn, fellow Ohio, and got some pride there. And I've been writing about and thinking of this concept of being a driver versus a passenger in life. And the differences between a driver and a passenger and using this metaphor for how you kind of approach your career, your family,

your job, everything, your friendships. And, and in it, when he was, you were, you know, when he was, was flying up in Friendship 7, this was a craft that was designed to fly itself. And as he was launched in the sky, it was it was drifting to the right. As you write like a car with its front wheels out of alignment. And John Glenn took the control stick, not without satisfaction, as you said, because he was a pilot by training and temperament and pilots take control. Can you unpack that a bit and humor me on this analogy about being a driver versus a passenger and the fact that John Glenn was just a straight-up pilot and those types of people like to take control?

Absolutely. In fact, during the NASA years, there was a senior official in NASA, wonderful man who I've gotten the chance to get to know here in the D.C. area named Robert Vos. He actually helped to select the first astronauts and helped to train the astronauts, a remarkable, remarkable guy. And he told me about a study that conducted that measuring the heart rate and the breathing and all sorts of other markers of stress in pilots. And pilots like John Glenn are remarkably calm in the most stressful, life-threatening situations. but when they start to sweat, when the heart rate starts to go up, is when you make them the co-pilot and they're not in control. And they are more stressed out as a co-pilot than as a pilot because they have that sense of

confidence in their own ability to get out of any situation. And indeed, John Glenn had showed that throughout his career as a pilot long before he ever wound up as an astronaut. But actually, I take it even a little farther back. Glenn was very active on his own behalf. And it seems funny to point that out. But there is another culture within the military, which is to simply do what you're told and to follow orders and to hope that if you do that effectively, that you will rise and be effective and so forth. But Glenn was very clear in his own mind, even as a teenager, that he was not just going to sit back and let decisions be,

made for him. He was going to do what he could, sometimes a little beyond the threshold of appropriateness and trying to control his own fate and try to, for example, after Pearl Harbor, he enlisted.

He enlisted in the Army Air Force and never heard back and waited and waited. And at a certain point he thought, well, to heck with that, I'm going to, the Marines seem like they're going to, you know, lead the fight. So let me go and enlist with them. And that's how he became a marine pilot. He just

went to a different registration office. Again, not sitting back and letting fate happen to him, but taking it into his own hands. And then, you know, once he'd had the pilot training, he was assigned to one of these big multi-engine planes, which he and other pilots referred to pejoratively as a bus. It was a sort of, you know, cargo plane. And there was no sex appeal in that for John Glenn. He wanted to get out there and fight as a combat pilot. And so he spent a lot of time lobbying his superiors for that assignment and annoyed some of them,

but ultimately got the nod. And through his career, he pushed rather than to sit back and let fate. happened to him. And he never felt like he should be a passenger in the journey of his own life. The people who make a debt in the world have a bias for action. They just do. I mean, Donald Miller talked about on this podcast multiple times. It's the, I don't know if it's the victim versus hero mentality, if that's the right one. But it simply is about the fact that I'm not, I like how you put it, not going to just let fate say, oh, well, whatever happens, happens. I'm going to make it happen.

I'm going to take action. When I was reading those parts about how annoyed he would get and just kept bugging him and writing letters and letters and letters and they finally, like, dude, stop writing us letters. Right. He just so badly wanted to get into the fight to say, no, I'm going to take control this and make it happen. I think that's how you become John Glenn. And I think we can draw from that in our own lives.

in our own careers. Absolutely. And I think that it was characteristic of the astronauts generally. And to come back to the story that you told about Glenn taking the controls when the automatic control system began to fail in orbit, this was a group of the best pilots that America had to offer. That's why they were selected as astronauts. And none of them liked the idea that they were going to.

to be put into a capsule that essentially could fly itself, that had been designed to fly itself. There were a lot of reasons that it was designed that way. There was not a tremendous amount of confidence that a human being could survive the flight or could remain conscious through the flight, that all sorts of terrible things might happen to the pilot physiologically while in a zero gravity environment in this little titanium bottle that they had cast him up there. And so it was meant to fly automatically and none of them liked it at all. They resented the hell out of it, frankly, and they consistently lobbied their superiors at NASA, the NASA managers, for more control over the flight itself. And this was a continual tension between the astronauts and the NASA

and managers and it played out not just in advance of Glenn's historic orbital flight, but during the flight itself. By the way, when you talked about the fact that the co-pilot, when they became the co-pilot and were not in control, that's when their heart rate and everything went skyrocketed. It makes me think of the difference between when I was on the field playing versus in the stands watching my children play. I try to remain calm, but man, I'm not on the inside at all. But when I played, I felt like I could get to that place where I was as a quarterback

as what I played. I had to be calm for my teammates and got to that place through repetition and work and experience. As a dad, it's like it never goes away. You never get to the place where I'm calm. I'm always like, oh, I'm not in control. And I hate that. But I just got, let it go. And it is interesting how that works.

I remember that feeling. I was never a quarterback and I was never a baseball player, but my son was a baseball player through middle school and high school and boys sitting in those stands and being able, unable to do a single thing is a tough feeling for a parent. Okay, I want to get into rivalry. This is a big thing for me because this is a nuanced topic. I think in the books you've written, rivalry is a central thing. theme. And one of the kind of core motivators in my life is not necessarily thinking about the

doubters or the haters, as some would say, but thinking about the people who support me in my work and trying like crazy to prove those people right for supporting me. And I think there again, there's nuance here, but what do you think about having rivals in your life, whether it's the space program, the U.S. and Soviet space programs, or RFK and LBJ, the fact that it seems like rivals can make you better. What's your overall thoughts on this? Well, I think about it in two maybe contradictory ways, because I think both things can be true. I think rivals can bring out the best in each other, but they can also bring out the worst in each other. And I think the latter case was kind of an animating idea in my book about

LBJ and RFK. I think in that case, you had two incredible leaders, incredible in different ways, and to some extent in similar ways, who really could have been even greater if they had been able to join their strengths. But they were so consistently at odds that you saw on both of their behalf some of their really worst behavior brought out by that, by that rivalry. And I think I like writing about rivalries for a number of reasons, but I think most importantly, I think a rivalry can be clarifying. I think that as I wrote in that book, it is really impossible to understand Lyndon Johnson without understanding his relationship with Robert Kennedy and vice versa. That to see the two of them in contrast is really to understand something

fundamental about how they kind of made their way through the 1960s, but also how they came to understand themselves during that period. They existed in dialogue and in competition with one another. I think when we look at the rivalry, between the United States and the Soviet Union and in the space race. I think my answer would be quite different. I think that it is absolutely the case that the achievements of the Soviet space program

and the relentless accomplishments during those early years of the Soviet space program absolutely drove the United States to think bolder and to do better. And there were mistakes that were made and absolutely. And yet I think the United States was felt forced to compete and to find within itself. This is true of the space program. This was true of the Kennedy administration and true of all of the private companies that were involved in the space program to find something greater within themselves. and together to respond to not only to Soviet achievements, but to the Soviet threat, as it was

understood. I think that's something that I really want to work to bring across in my book about John Glenn, Mercury Rising, is that this wasn't just a race. This wasn't the Olympics. This isn't a good-natured competition. The stakes were understood to be existential. And if the Soviets were left to do whatever they were capable of doing in space and the United States was unable to rise to the challenge. Well, as JFK put it in 1960 when he was running for president, the nation that controls space can control life here on Earth. So he saw no alternative but to compete and to win. And a part of the differences between the United States and the Soviet space program, is I think this idea of failing in public versus failing in private.

And it felt to me, correct me if I'm wrong here, the United States failed in public. When something went bad, everybody knew it, it was all out there, the whole world saw it. But the Soviet program seemed to be more secretive, and we didn't necessarily know what was going on. We thought they were more advanced than they were. They led us all to believe that. And it seems like us failing in public, I say us, I'm an American, failing in public was advantageous to us while them failing in private hurt them. What do you think about that dichotomy of the differences between us and them? I think it's a really important dichotomy.

It's a really important way of looking at and understanding the space race. And I think you're you're exactly right. I mean, the Soviet Union really looked like a juggernaut during those first several years, and was, in fact, a juggernaut during those first several years of the space race. Because there were two elements to it. One was that when they failed, they failed secretly. In fact, the location of the Soviet launch platform was not even announced publicly. United States had some sense based on its intelligence of where it was. But even the location

of the launches or the timing of the launches, all of this thing was, all of these things were kept secret so that when there was a horrific accident, and there were horrific accidents in which astronauts lost their lives and others lost their lives on the launch pad or near it, that the Soviets were able to suppress that and suppress any sign of weakness. But it was also the case that they were succeeding in public. It wasn't just, we know, as we think back, we know about Sputnik, the first satellite in 1957. We know that in 1961, it was the Soviets who sent the first human being into space, Yuri Gagarin, who orbited the Earth once before returning safely. But it wasn't just those two huge achievements, which would have been huge enough

in themselves. There was a whole series of firsts in between. They were, they were, there was a whole series of firsts in between. They were the first to send a living being into space. They sent the dog, Laika into space. They sent heavier and heavier objects into space. They sent a probe to the moon that went around the far side of the moon and took pictures. No one had ever seen what the far side of the moon looked like at that time in the late 1950s. It was one spectacular achievement after another with no sense of any setbacks. And so the world was in awe of what the Soviets were achieving. Whereas in the United States,

anytime a rocket exploded on the launch pad, which is something that happened a lot during those early years, everybody saw it happen in real time. And so at that time, when the space program was defined mostly by its failures, I'm not sure that most Americans, including John Kennedy, thought it was so great to be failing public.

In fact, when the United States was finally ready to send the first American into space, Alan Shepard in May 1961, Kennedy's thought seriously about trying to close the launch to the press so that if something horrific happened, it would not, in fact, be broadcast to the world. He quickly recognized that in a democracy that that was just not, you know, with a free press and and with the world's press coming to witness the launch, that that was not something that he was even capable of doing, even if he decided to do it. And so he decided to embrace it.

So when this begins to benefit the United States in terms of world opinion, is when we are mostly done failing in public and we begin to succeed in public. Then the world starts to appreciate. that the United States has taken these risks for all the world to see. And the successes mean that much more because the world has recognized the risks that were undertaken and the setbacks that were overcome. You're a deep learner of history and how great historical events have been achieved. And so when you live in that world of

studying it and understanding how it happened and the people and the characters involved, I'd have to imagine that there's key takeaways for you as you're building your own career with a family and all that goes into that. When it comes to risk, how do you approach your own career and making decisions and saying, oh, that's risky, I don't know. How do you go about managing risk in your own life? Well, it's tough to distill that to a formula. I think like a lot of people, you sort of do this intuitively as you go along and thoughtfully, you hope.

I mean, I think that I've tried to be thoughtful in weighing risks and opportunities, but not paralyzed by that set of questions. And so, you know, I feel like I've taken some, I mean, I have to call them small risks ultimately. I guess the decision to become a syndicated cartoonist and not to take what my parents at the time would have called a paying job was a small risk. But again, you know, look, I don't want to overstate that. I had a good education. I knew that if that failed, I would find something else to do. I wasn't going to be destitute. I don't want to magnify the kind of risks that I took there.

or in the case of coming out of the Clinton administration and deciding to start a business with a couple of my colleagues and friends, rather than to join a business or some other kind of organization. There was a risk in that, but again, I don't want to overstate the case because the costs of failure for me were not existential. That was part of the weighing process, was that you do have to ask yourself, well, what if this fails? And again, if it had failed, I would have lost some time, I would have lost some money, I would have then gone on to find a job somewhere else. The costs of failure in the case of the space program, it was life and death. And Glenn understood that, and everyone in the program understood that. And it was actually even bigger than any individual's life or death.

it was America's standing in the world and also the, the effectiveness of the U.S. nuclear deterrent and other key components of our national security. If the United States continued to fail on this new frontier, then it was already weakening America's standing in the eyes of our allies and our adversaries. and it was only going to get much worse. So again, I can talk about risk in my professional career, but I don't want to make a big thing out of it. When you think about the people that you've studied and written about in your career, a lot of them have sustained excellence for an extended period of time. What have you found to be some of the common traits, behaviors, virtues of the people

who have sustained excellence over time? I think to come back to the question of risk, I think that it is difficult to sustain excellence if your formula for doing that is to just keep doing the same thing as long as you possibly can. I think about this when it comes to political leaders who evolve and question and change

as necessary to continue to be effective. I think about it in terms of artists, musicians, authors. I think one of the things that, I mean, on one level, I'm just a fan of the Beatles, of Bob Dylan, of you two. But I think when you look at some of the greatest contributions that any of them made, the greatest albums they ever recorded, They took risks. They defied their fan base.

They risked alienating all the people that had followed them up to that point by insisting that they would continue to challenge themselves and do something different. And sometimes all of them, who I mentioned, had failed. But their greatest accomplishments came because of that restlessness, because of that willingness to, in a sense, risk at all. to risk their careers, to risk their reputation, to risk embarrassment. And so I think that, again, looking at anybody in just about any field who has sustained excellence, that requires a kind of nimbleness and alertness to the ways in which change is required and risk is

necessary. Do you give a lot of keynote speeches? I have over the years. Yeah, I've had some opportunities to go out and talk. either about speech writing or about the books that I've written or other things. I bring this up because early on in my keynote speaking career, I was given the advice of, hey,

like create your stock speech and then go out and kill it a hundred times a year to just different audiences every time. And I understand that advice. It's good advice so that you make sure you know your stuff. You understand the timing. You know the bits. You know the transitions. You know the jokes.

You got it, you know, your opener and your clothes or all that stuff, right? But I found that if I don't like try new bits or try something new throughout, so I was on a long stretch leading up to this moment, I don't feel nervous or challenged enough. And in a way, I have to push and try something new each time that, certainly needs to apply the audience and give them exactly what they want and still play the hits as my dad tells me right you gotta play the hits man but still do that you know what I mean and I feel like that's that I'm not trying to like be the equivalent of these people who sustain actions but I really aspire for that and I think part of what helps me is this ah I'll have a phone call with my wife the night before a speech and I'm like I gotta try a few new things here because I want to be nervous I want to wonder if I I can pull this off. And in a weird sick way, it like keeps, it fuels me up.

I don't know if that, if you, if you sense that or you feel that. Absolutely. I think, and look, audiences know when you're going through the motions. Yes. Even if you're doing it very convincingly, when a speech has become stock, they, they get that. They can feel it. And it's because you yourself become bored by it. It's wonderful if you enjoy this sort of thing and it sounds like you and I both do to stand in front of an audience and to talk and to engage with an audience.

But you lose that sense of excitement yourself when you know exactly what you're going to say every time and it doesn't particularly vary. On the one hand, if you're in the business of a public persuasion, if you're in politics or some other field where you're trying to change people's mind, and you're trying to lead them to a destination of one kind or another. It's important to have a core message and for that core message to be consistent. Martin Luther King, to paraphrase Martin Luther King, he said, as I travel around the country, I don't have but one speech. And of course, that wasn't literally the case. We all have heard, you know, many times, many speeches by Martin Luther King.

They're not all the same speech. fundamentally, his core message did not vary much. And so I think that that's an important distinction to understand is that there may be a central story, a core message that you want to deliver to just about every audience. But you've got to vary the way that you do it, just to keep yourself excited, engaged, challenged, and for audiences to feel that as you're describing. Speaking of talks, you did one at Google. And the phrase that you used at the start was focus, purpose, and urgency. It seems that these are the keys you allude to.

Can you talk about focus, purpose, and urgency as it relates to the program and why this was a big deal? This was what was lacking in the late 1950s. during the Eisenhower administration, there was certainly, obviously, in the United States in that time, enormous scientific and technological expertise. There were vast resources, human and otherwise, that could be applied to the challenge of getting objects and then ultimately human beings into space. But what was lacking in the program, and this started really at the top in the Oval Office, was a sense of focus, a sense of purpose.

a sense of urgency. Eisenhower ultimately didn't believe that space exploration was important, was worth the cost, was worth the struggle. He was interested in one element of the program, which was reconnaissance satellites. He thought that could help to prevent a surprised nuclear attack on the United States. So that engaged Eisenhower. The rest of it, he thought was non-essential at best, silly at worst. The idea of putting people in the United States. The idea of putting people in spacesuits and sending them up there to do what? It was really unclear. And actually, many of the advocates of human space travel were unclear why they were advocating it.

And so what you had in the United States, until the creation of NASA in 1958, which Eisenhower did essentially under duress after Sputnik, was multiple space programs. All the military branches, other than the Marines, they had their own space program. The Army had its own space program, believe it or not. The Air Force, that's a little bit more believable. The Navy had its own space program. They were competing with one another. They were fragmenting resources. They were feuding.

And Eisenhower just thought the whole exercise was wasteful. And one of the things other than Sputnik that convinced Eisenhower to create NASA was this feeling that more resources were being wasted through this fragmentation than by bringing it all together in a more focused effort. But it really was not until Kennedy becomes president and really not until then the Soviets sent Yuri Gagarin into space in April 1961, that there is a sense of urgency in the United States, that this has to be a top priority, and that that was going to require a lot on the part of the Congress, on the part of taxpayers, on the part of the administration that they had not yet invested to that point.

The going to the moon speech from JFK, obviously iconic, one of the most memorable speeches of all time. But privately, you write about that, he was a little reluctant and wasn't sure if it was a good use of resources of time and money. Can you talk more about the, how he portrayed this, publicly, but would he said to close advisors and to those that he worked with about his thoughts on going to the moon? He got frankly sort of backed into it.

He ran in 1960, partly to close the missile gap, as he also, as he often talked about, a missile gap that turned out not to exist, or if it did exist, it was to the favor of the United States, but also to close the space gap. He insisted repeatedly that the United States could not afford to be second in space. But he had not at that point given a lot of thought as to how to become first in space. And so when he became president, he had a lot of other things to worry about. There was a lot going on in the world, a lot of imminent crises and there are problems here in the United States as well. And so he lost his focus on space or he never really had it to that point.

But again, it was the success of the Soviet. again that forced the Americans hand. And after Gagarin went into space, Kennedy recognized the United States really had to find, as we were just discussing, that focus, that sense of purpose, that sense of urgency. It was clear, for a number of reasons, maybe too detailed to go into here, that the United States was not going to be able to catch up to the Soviets quickly. The Soviet advantage in booster rockets, the powerful thrust of their rockets, was just too great for the United States to overcome overnight. And so he began to search and he really asked Linda Johnson to lead the search for some sort of goal that was far enough in the future and involved enough

of an investment in technology that we might be able to leapfrog the Soviets in getting there. And for Johnson, that answer was obvious. We had to go to the moon. And he begins in the White house to steer the conversation immediately toward the moon as an organizing principle for the entire program. And as a goal, there was no guarantee that we were going to get there. There was no guarantee that if we did, that we were going to beat the Soviets, but it was conceivable. And so Kennedy makes this big announcement and asks for this huge investment of resources, not just in one budget, but over the course of a decade. And he wishes throughout that he didn't have to do it. And he made this clear, as you said, to the advisors around him. He really would have rather

spent that money on other things. But he felt that for the sake of America's national security and for the sake of America's standing in the world and America's credibility, that he had no choice. It So thinking of this from a leadership perspective again, not going to the moon, but just leading a company or leading a team I think Elon had this a lot initially with SpaceX where he just talked about Mars so much and being a multi-planetary species. He had 100% approval rating at that time and now it's obviously not and I think it was because of this creating this big audacious vision that seems like he's going to make it a possible. And the moon seemed almost impossible when JFK said it,

but we believed, we wanted to believe, and then we went and did it. So for leaders, what can we take from this big, audacious goal set years in the future for our companies to go and accomplish? What do you think about that? And how could this put into play for someone right now

who's getting ready to go into a Monday meeting, and they're thinking about their next quarterly town hall to say, how can I be a visionary like JFK? How can I create this excitement in my team to go after a big goal that seems like it might not be possible, but I want us to stretch for it? Well, we hear a lot about moonshots, and we're very enamored of moonshots,

and we're also a little bit self-castigating about moonshots and that we think that we were never capable of coming up with one that is as impressive or ultimately as successful as the real moonshot. But I think there's another aspect of this that we miss. So we focus, therefore, on setting these big audacious goals, as you describe them. And so you hear a lot of that from CEOs. You hear a lot of that from presidents. But I think there's another aspect of Kennedy's experience in that moment, which we tend to miss. We tend to lose this piece of that history. And that is that when Kennedy announced in May 1961 to the Congress that he wanted to send a man to the moon and bring him safely back to Earth by

the end of the decade, the public and the Congress did not just sort of fall in line or fall over with approval and excitement. There was a lot of skepticism, both in the Congress and in the country as a whole. There was a poll taken right around that time that the majority of the American people was unwilling to invest the amount of money that it was going to take to get an American to the moon. Did they think it was an appealing idea? Sure, most of them did. But when you then asked them in the next question, is it worth the money? The answer generally was no. Where would you rank this in terms of other priorities?

people put it pretty low on the list. And Kennedy recognized this. And so what Kennedy then understood was that if we were ever going to get there, if we were going to sustain the effort and the spending over the course of a decade to conceivably get to the moon, he was going to need to consistently communicate about it. And so that other famous speech that he gave, in fact, ultimately the more famous speech when he went to Rice University in Houston in September 1962, why do we go to the moon? That speech, which many of us know by heart.

We do these things not because they're easy, but because they're hard. Part of the reason that he went to Houston and gave that speech was because he had the sense that in the Congress and in the country, that the sense of excitement to the extent that it existed was flagging. He went down there to kind of re-energize the public campaigns to get to the moon and to re-energize the sense of support in the Congress. He knew, and he was frustrated by this, he was going to have to keep working at it consistently. That was going to be his job to keep the energy up, to keep the sense of urgency and the sense of possibility up. And so I think that That's the other aspect of the moonshot that too often we forget.

Because we know, we know the ending of the story, right? We know we get to the moon in July of 1969. But Kennedy didn't know in September of 1962 that that was going to happen and didn't think it was going to happen unless he and his successors kept working to keep the public, not just to keep the public behind them, but to actually increase the support for it. country which was not yet sufficient. I think relentlessly and consistently communicating that vision if you're a leader of a team that this is a part of all of those town halls. You maybe kick off every one of them with whether you call it a

moon shot or wherever the big goal is so that everyone is vividly clear on where we're going, why we're going, how we're going to do it. And you almost need to get to the point where people start making fun of you as the senior leader or the CEO because you say it so much. That's when you probably know, I mean, Daniel Coyle writes about this in the culture code. Like, that's when you know that it's actually starting to hit is when you get to that point. Because as the person who says it, you say it a few times, you just assume everybody, oh, they already know, they know, they know. No, they don't. You have to relentlessly and consistently keep on message to make sure that everybody is aware. And on, and on

board with the big goal. Absolutely. And I worked for a long time, one of our clients here at West Wing, CEO of a Fortune 50 company, and it was a mantra of his, relentlessly communicate. He was trying to drive a massive change in his global company, and he knew that he needed to align everyone behind this set of bold goals, their own version of moonshots. And so his job was to relentlessly, communicate, not just to market analysts and people outside the company, but to the tens of thousands of people inside the company who needed to understand the goals and be all and always be working toward them if they had any chance of possibly reaching them. So relentlessly communicate. That was his mantra. When you were a speechwriter, I know part of, from talking to Cody Keenan and other

speechwriters, part of the job is you're studying speeches of past president. and looking for the way they structured and what really hit and all of that. When you see we do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard. What a line, man. What a line. Who wrote that? Did he? You had to be constantly thinking like, can I get a line like that?

Let me get a line like that one. Well, Kennedy had one of the great speechwriters, really, of all time. Ted Sorensen. And they had a great partnership. because a great speechwriter is not just someone who sits in his or her office and writes wonderful things that somebody then dutifully goes out and says. It's the product of a great speech writing is the product of a collaboration, a partnership, of a kind of mind meld that if you're lucky you get to achieve once in a while. It doesn't happen in every speech writing relationship. It's actually quite rare.

But Kennedy and Ted Sorensen had had one of the strongest, most productive mind melds of any president and any speechwriter. It is a strange business speech writing because you are trying to sort of occupy someone's headspace. And not just to write words that sound like them, but really over time to begin to think like them, anticipate how they would frame an issue, a new issue, maybe that they haven't talked about before, haven't been confronted with before, but to do it in a way that is consistent with who they are, how they see the world, and how they think and talk. So much there. It might be a, I might need to do like a round two with you and Cody.

I think it would be a cool conversation. We could, we could go deep on that. One more question for you, Jeff. For someone who's a bit earlier in their career, and let's say they didn't have quite the educational exploit. that you have had, but they went to a pretty good school and they graduated in their, and they're mid-20s-ish. And they want to leave a debt in the world like we've talked about. They want to do good. They want to serve. What are some general pieces of life slash career

advice you'd give to that person? Well, I think, I think for many people, your 20s are a period of figuring out where you can make your greatest contribution. It took me some time to figure it out. Maybe I'm still figuring it out. I've sort of settled on something. Was it the right answer? In most ways, I think it has been for me. But that process, it's not automatic. There's trial and error in it. And not everybody, again, is in a position where they can afford error. And so, you know, I think we do have to recognize that there are many people who need to find the safest, most secure path. And that's going to take priority over other ambitions. But I think that, you know, to the extent possible to test yourself in your 20s before you settle in, before you lock in, to figure out, again,

where you can make your greatest contribution and where you feel most vital, what you find most energizing. Not everybody's going to get to do that for a living, but I think that it is absolutely worth a shot to figure out what that is and if there's a way of making it work. again, I don't want to I don't want to romanticize what it is that I do or what it is that I've done but I wasn't sure I was going to be able to make a living

writing. It's not something that's possible in every case. It's not like locking into a law firm track where you have a sense of job security and you know what you're going to get paid year in and year out. There are a lot of start writers out there.

But I wanted to see whether I could make that work, particularly once I had done a number of other things and had gone through that process that we were talking about a minute ago of sorting out what was most exciting and what was most important to me and what I was best at doing or wanted to be best at doing. Well, the books are beautifully written. Mutual contempt, supreme power, Mercury Rising. I highly recommend that. By the way, they all have two word titles.

Is that intentional? You know, this was not an intentional thing. Like when, you know, people name their kids, give their kids all the same first letter of their names. No, it just sort of happened that way. I would certainly depart from it. I never want to be formulaic, even in naming my books. Are you going to keep writing more?

I absolutely intend to. It's what I love doing most. And there's just nothing like being able to invest yourself in a story, immerse yourself in a story and sort out how best to tell it and why you think it's worth telling. I love that work. I love all the elements of it, the research, the writing, and then going out and talking about it. It's all, um, it's, it's all, um, you. incredibly gratifying to me. And it's been especially gratifying to find that other people respond to these stories, that what excited you about this story when you first began to explore it, excites others who are maybe encountering it for the first time. What would be the next topic, or is there already one selected? There isn't. I've got to spend some more time thinking about it.

As I said at the beginning of your conversation. Before we recorded, I apologize for cutting you off, would you do one on the Beatles? You know, if there weren't already a brilliant series being written about the Beatles right now, I would feel sorely tempted to do it. But there's an author, maybe you know Mark Lewison, who is in the process of, he's writing the second volume now of a massive trilogy on the Beatles. He is giving a Robert Caro treatment to the Beatles.

That is the level of research. search that he's done. And it's extraordinary. It's an extraordinary achievement. Even if you're not a fan, just simply, and I am, it's certainly a fan. It's an incredible work of history. And I'm getting very impatient waiting for volume two. Gotcha. Well, I'm excited to see what you choose to dive into next and how you follow your curiosity and obsessions with great rigor. I'm one of the benefactors among millions of others. So thank you so much. Again, the books, mutual contempt, Supreme Power, Mercury Rising. So good, man. Thank you so much, Jeff, for being here. And I would love to continue our dialogue as we both progress, ma'am. Thank you, Ryan.

It's great, great talking with you. And I'd be delighted to continue the conversation anytime. Awesome. Thanks so much, ma'am. Thank you. I want to start by saying thank you to my good friend Liam Murray for one, the idea to have Jeff on the podcast, as well as all of the preparation, you did to help me make this such a cool conversation. So thank you very much, Liam, for that. I loved this talk with Jeff. In fact, we stayed on for about 30 minutes afterwards talking more about all of this interest, the Beatles, history, the space program, his career, writing for President Clinton, all of that was really neat. It's just another reminder of how cool it is to get to do this

for a living. I'm so grateful. A few takeaways from my notes. If you're going to set moonshot goals for your team, you must relentlessly communicate them to all involve. The what, why, how, and when. Reletlessly communicate with vivid clarity. And then focus, purpose, urgency. That was what was lacking before President Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson helped take fragmented groups and bring them all together. And I think this also happens within companies. So when you analyze what your setup is, think about focus, purpose, and urgency and how you can do this for your organization. Then John Glenn, a person of action. He didn't let fate determine the outcome of his life. He went after what he wanted. People had to tell him to stop sending us all those

letters asking to go to war. We'll call you up when wanted. And there's so much that Jeff has written about how John led his life that I think is inspiring. But he had a bias for action. And in a world of drivers and passengers, John Glenn was absolutely a driver. He was literally a pilot. And I think that's what led him to leaving his mark in the world. And I think when I study the commonalities of people who sustain excellence over time, the overwhelming majority of them are drivers. They are not in the passenger seat. They are the ones deciding to make it happen instead of just hoping for the best.

Again, I want to say thank you so much for continuing to spread the message and telling a friend or two. Hey, you should listen to this episode of The Learning Leader Show with Jeff Scheschel. I think he'll help you become a more effective leader. And because you continue to do that and you continue to write reviews and rate the show, hopefully five stars and Apple Podcast, you are giving me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis. And for that, I will forever be grateful. Thank you so, so much. Talk to you soon.

Can we?