The Rich Roll Podcast - Jonathan Fields’ Buckets For Living A Good Life

Episode Date: October 10, 2016

Some people exude a calm, confident quietude. Others exuberantly burst with exciting ideas. But it's the rare individual that combines understated self-assurance with a spark so powerful, it incites lasting positive change in all who enter his orbit. Jonathan Fields is one such human. His mission? To humanize and empower the process of creation. To help people and organizations conceive and build better, more conscious businesses, art, and lives in less time, with more joy and less effort. On a personal level, Jonathan is guy I can deeply relate to – a dad and husband who (like me) decided to leave the gilded, protective hallways of mega-law firm life and risk everything in search of a life path of greater meaning for himself and others. Reinventing himself as a socially conscious, serial entrepreneur and mindful innovation strategist, today Jonathan is an A-list blogger, award-winning author, speaker, and founder of Good Life Project –empowering people to live more engaged and connected lives via a global education and multi-media venture that encompasses video projects, his wildly popular podcast and super cool events like Camp GLP, his annual 3 1/2- day retreat that blends friendship, adventure and deep-learning with strategies and tools for accelerated personal and business growth. Beneath it all, Jonathan is a teacher. Brimming with empowering wisdom, I love his focus on process over results. His emphasis on the journey over the destination. His deep understanding that authenticity is everything. And that mindfulness lays forth the path. This powerful ethos is reflected in everything Jonathan does, from his writing and advocacy to most importantly, how he conducts his life down to the smallest details. Jonathan has been featured in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, FastCompany, Inc., Entrepreneur, Forbes, USA Today, CNBC, CNN.com, PBS Nightly Report, Elle, Self, Fitness, Vogue, O, People and thousands of other websites that sound cool, but (in Jonathan's words) don't impress his daughter all that much. His first book, Career Renegade: How to Make a Great Living Doing What You Love*, was named a Top 10 Small Business Book by Small Business Trends and a Top 5 Summer Read by MSNBC. Fields’ second book, Uncertainty: Turning Fear and Doubt Into Fuel for Brilliance*, was lauded as the #1 Personal Development book of 2011 by 800-CEO-READ. This week marks the release of Jonathan's highly anticipated new book, How to Live a Good Life: Soulful Stories, Surprising Science, and Practical Wisdom*. I was lucky enough to get an advance copy (one of the perks of hosting a podcast) and ...

What I'm fundamentally looking for is I'm on a learning quest. I want to learn. You know, I'm beginner's mind always, student always. No matter how much I know, I always consider myself a student. So I'm constantly on the hunt for embodied teachers, people who don't just write about and talk about ideas, but people who live it. People where I can actually look at the way that they're living their lives

and say, oh, there's something about that that I want to learn what's underneath that. You know, I want to learn how that happened. I want to learn how this person is in the world this way. And I'm constantly trying to get as close to the source as humanly possible. That's Jonathan Fields, and this is The Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey everybody, how you guys doing? What's going on? My name is Rich Roll. I am your host. Welcome or welcome back to the podcast that bears my name. The show where I have the privilege of going deep and long form with some of the most interesting, some of the most provocative, paradigm-breaking, positive change-making minds all across the globe. And this week, I am very excited and proud to share a tremendous conversation, a very deep and insightful conversation with my good friend Jonathan Fields. But first, let's acknowledge the awesome organizations that make this show possible.

Jonathan is a former big corporate law firm guy like me, turned serial entrepreneur. Most of his ventures are very community driven. He's an award winning author. He is the founder of something called Good Life Project, which is a media and education venture, as well as a global movement, all oriented around empowering people to live more engaged and connected lives. I think if there's one way of kind of describing what Jonathan does, I mean, I would say that he's a teacher in certain ways. He is a guru in the truest definition of that word, guru meaning teacher. He's somebody who helps people amplify their creativity and helps them architect better businesses, art and lives in less time and with more joy. And that's a really beautiful thing. Jonathan's been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal,

Fast Company, Inc., Entrepreneur, Forbes, USA Today, CNBC, CNN, PBS, blah, blah, blah, all those cool places. Thousands of other websites that, in his words, sound cool but do not impress his daughter all that much, which I think is really cute. Jonathan's got a new book out this week. It's called How to Live a Good Life, Soulful Stories, Surprising Science, and Practical Wisdom. And the book really offers a gateway to a life of meaning, of connection, and vitality. It's a really great book. I had the privilege of getting an advanced copy, and we talk about it today in the podcast. And I think you're really going to enjoy where Jonathan is coming from. I started following him and his writings and his teaching way back,

back when I was still a very unhappy, overweight, practicing attorney. And I've always enjoyed Jonathan's very present, kind, patient, caring approach to the information and the wisdom that he imparts. This is Jonathan's second time on the podcast. The first time was way, way back in early 2014, I think, episode 74. You could tap that for more on his life story because this episode's a little bit more subject specific. We talk about cultivating community. We talk about how to let go and be present, how to bridge that gap between inspiration and action. We talk about Jonathan's three buckets to a good life. We talk about the fallacy of balance. We go through Jonathan's morning routines and the importance of embodied teachers.

In other words, people that you can be present with, not just books that you read or, you know, people who have imparted wisdom on the page who are no longer with us. In any event, I could sit and talk with Jonathan all day. I just love this conversation, and I think you're going to really get a lot out of it. I just love this conversation, and I think you're going to really get a lot out of it. So without further ado, please enjoy this exchange with the extraordinary Jonathan Fields. All right, we're rolling. Awesome. I know. For the listeners, we just geeked out for 20 minutes on podcast gear, and we're going

to spare the audience for that conversation. Anyway, but it's a pleasure to see you, my friend. It's on podcast gear, and we're going to spare the audience from that conversation. Anyway, but it's a pleasure to see you, my friend. It's awesome to be hanging out. I've been looking forward to this for a very long time. We're here in New York City in your apartment that you've opened up. Jerry Rigg does a podcast studio. I didn't have to bring my own gear. You have your own stuff, so I'm feeling very slid right in.

I'm here to please. Yeah, it's great. gear you have your own stuff so i'm feeling very i'm here slid right in i'm here to please yeah it's great um and as i was riding my bike over over uh over to your apartment to do this i was sort of thinking about like what is it about jonathan fields like you know what what is it what is it that makes this guy special what is it that attracts me to him and i was sort of contemplating like for lack of a better word your energy like you have really good welcoming energy like it's very easy to sit with you and feel at ease and not feel like you have to affect some sort of persona or try to impress you and I have this sense that your ability to kind of walk with that is magnetizing to your audience.

I think it's one of the things that's allowed you to build this incredible tribe that you have because people feel welcome and good about being part of this community that you've cultivated. Is that accurate? You know, it's like asking someone who's inside the jar to read the label. It's like, I don't know. Has he just clearly articulated what makes me special? Yeah, it's really interesting because I've probably occasionally just kind of sat here and thought, well, why are people actually showing up? Because I wasn't the kid who had a cult of personality.

I wasn't the person who always had, you know, like, I'm a regular middle-aged guy, you know, like married dad living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and just doing something that deeply interests me. And I wonder sometimes, I'm like, why do people show up? Why are people interested? And the only thing I've really come up with is that I tend to be, and I think my guess is, you know, we've known each other for a couple years now, that I'm genuinely interested in the people that I hang out with and that I have conversations with. It just makes it really easy to be natural rather than trying to sort of conjure up some sort of thing where, okay, this person has a big name or a big

following, so I should be interested in them, so let me get... It's like, no, I mean, we're just... We've hung out a couple times now and recorded conversations, and it's just... I love talking to you. I'm always learning from you. Well, you're just easy to talk to. I'm like, it'll be fine. I'm going to go over and talk to Jonathan. I'm not going to sweat the details because we're going to figure out how to make this great. You know what I mean? Because you're a very natural conversationalist. And I think it's because you are tapped in. Like, you have the ability to listen.

And, you know, you make eye contact and you're paying attention. And you're present. And I would imagine that it's also a reflection of the work that you've done and the kind of journey that you've been on, the meditation practice, all the mindfulness, and everything that you kind of speak to that you also practice in your own life. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting. I think my sense is it probably is an outgrowth of that.

But as you're speaking, something else popped into my mind that you and I share in common, which is a history in the law. And I remember really, really, really early, I started my career working for the SEC. So I was thrown into the federal government, you know, like in cinderblock rooms, taking investigative testimony under the cover of, you know, like secrecy, with literally almost no training. And I learned really, really quickly that if I went in with a scripted set of questions, and you know, all with a scripted set of questions, and all I would do is ask the questions, and I wouldn't pay any attention to what was being said.

I'm guessing you probably figured that out. Yeah, after my first couple depositions. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that has made me a better podcaster. Totally. Taking a million depositions, you have to really get to the bottom of who somebody is. And that's where I was going with it. I'm like, you know, I think that training, realizing that at some point you have to really get to the bottom right who somebody is and that's where that's where i was going with it i'm like you know i think that training realizing that at some point you have to

let go of the script and just be present um it makes because that's where the amazing things in any conversation i'm sure you've had the same thing with the podcast the best parts of the conversation happen on the tangents you never saw coming when when you actually notice them and then you follow them you know yeah if you're if you're too wed to your question, like you've done this a million times. I'm sure you've done a million podcasts and somebody has their 10 questions that they gotta get through and they're not listening

and you say your answer and they say, awesome, and they go to the next one. Yeah, you should never, and I think that's, it's fear on behalf of the interviewer because they're afraid of dead air or they're afraid they're not gonna know what what to say next but the truth is if you just let go of all that and you're just there and you're paying attention the next question is always built into whatever somebody is saying i so agree with that i i had one um it was funny a couple

years ago i was i was doing a segment on tv actually and they were so they were interviewing me but the the person it was a short tight segment you know like typical three four a segment on TV, actually, and they were, so they were interviewing me. But the person, it was a short type segment, you know, like typical three, four minute segment on TV. And the newscaster who was interviewing me was clearly just like, the next question was on the teleprompter, and she was waiting for me to stop, just finish talking, so she could just ask the next question and get through. But it was so obvious that she wasn't listening to me or looking at me that when they aired the segment, my community got really angry. And it's like I had to jump in and calm them down. I'm like, no, no, no, guys. It's like this is the job. It's a three-minute segment.

You have to go really fierce and on pace. Don't be upset. It's just it's the nature of this type of setting. It's not a 90-minute podcast. You know, it's easier to do a 90-minute podcast than it is. I did do a TV thing in Washington, D.C. a couple weeks ago, and it's the same thing. It's like you better, like, be able to spit your message out really quickly

and concisely because it's over before it begins. And that's just the nature of that form of medium. It is. This is an antidote to that in many ways. And I think that the ascendancy and the popularity of podcasting is like a salve to everybody's, you know, kind of, you know, burned out feelings about watching, you know, canned nonsense on television. I think we're getting really tired of staying surface level. You know, I think there's so much

of it around these days that when you have the opportunity to actually have a real sustained deeper conversation with people or sit in on that conversation it's it's something I think we're we're missing that it's an intimacy that a lot of us you know are lacking in our own lives I think yeah and I'm sure you've had this experience when you meet people who listen to you know your, your show or just, you know, are part of your community, they feel very connected to you in a way that is sometimes surprising. You know, I think that that's a testament to the power of the medium when you are, you know, willing to, you know, take the time and be honest and be vulnerable and be open to, you know, what it is because because people feel like, oh, they're, they're listening in on, you know, like a private dinner party conversation, like there's an

intimacy to it and a specialness to it that makes people feel included. Yeah, I totally agree. And I've gotten so many comments saying literally almost exactly that, like, people saying almost, I feel a little bit guilty. It's almost like, I'm listening in to a private conversation. Yeah, like they're violating. Right. I'm like, no, no, it's all good. Rationally, like, that's our intention to share it the whole time. It's cool, man. Well, I've been following you. I mean, we've known each other for a couple years, but I started following you many years prior to that when I was still, you know, a practicing lawyer kind of looking for, you know, the exit door and very unsure about, you unsure about how to do that,

and struggling for many years trying to figure it out. Back in, I guess, the first iteration of you kind of stepping into this online world was really Career Renegade. Is that? Yeah. Like, that's when I first discovered you and started reading your stuff. Yeah, it was. So I stepped into the online space probably about a year before that book came out because but I did it because I had signed the book deal. And I knew I was going

to start to make a shift into becoming an author and doing a lot of stuff. So my first question was, well, where's the future of book marketing. And it was just really clear to me that the future was going to be all online. And I had been in business before that and built a reputation, had generated a nice amount of PR and stuff like that, but it was all traditional. And I had no relationships or no understanding of how the whole online world worked or digital media world. So I just started playing and dabbling as a blogger. And so that was the entree.

And it just, you know, over the years, it has grown and morphed and changed to something else. But yeah, originally, it was literally just to start to build a platform in anticipation of my first book. Right. And I'm interested in that growth and that trajectory because it has changed and morphed. I mean, you could have stayed like, I'm the self-publishing guy. You know, I'm going to kind of be in this lane and, you know, develop a certain level of expertise and speak to those people. But you've grown out of that. And so to tackle, you know, bigger, you know, subjects, you know, basically personal growth, which is, you know.

Makes me a little nervous. Yeah, it is. And that's one of the things that I really appreciated in the new book, in the forward, you know, where you kind of call out right at the beginning, like, who am I to talk about, you know, how to be a better version of yourself? And you had a really great answer to that. You know, I'm stepping into starting to put together a next book that traverses similar territory,

and I butt up against that. Like, I struggle with that. Like, you know, like, does anybody really need to read another one of these books? Like, what am I going to be able to say that's different or new? But I loved what you had to say about that.

Maybe you can kind of articulate. Yeah, and it's definitely, you know, it was a struggle on a couple of levels. One was actually only in the fact that, like, really at the heart of who I am is a deep exploration of human potential. And that while a lot of, do you want to wait for the siren? No, we're in New York, man. I know. It's part of the deal. It's, we're in New York, man. I know. It's part of the deal.

It's just flame. It's like I'm used to it, but I know. So for me, part of it is getting comfortable with the fact that that's actually the guy that I am deep down underneath. Even though I've been writing about business and entrepreneurship and creativity and innovation, that fundamentally deep down, what I really care about is how all of those things change the person within those experiences. And so to a certain extent, I do have a fascination with those processes, but I also kind of realize that it may be a little bit of me wanting to kind of hang my hat on these, you know, supposedly more legit, I'm making like air quotes with my fingers here, like legit pursuit rather than just like stepping squarely into the space of human potential and personal development, because

my association with that space has been not the best one. And so the last book I wrote before this, Uncertainty, was named the number one personal development book by 800 CEO, which is this really, you know, very well known and established business book thing. And it was an amazing award to receive. And when I got that award, I was like, really personal development? Like, that's not me. And then I kind of said that had conversation with people who knew me. And they're like, no, actually that's entirely you you just don't want to own it you were at the time thinking of yourself as more of someone who was speaking to entrepreneurship yeah and creativity and innovation and stuff like that and um but so with this book you know for me part of the process is has been how do i actually get comfortable with the fact that that is really who i am and i

need to i know like i need to redefine sort of you know like this space and and then and then how do i get comfortable with the fact that maybe i have something to say and and the truth is this is what i wrote in the introduction to the book it's like you're like fundamentally when it comes down to the actual theories and strategies none of us have a whole lot that's new to say i mean um you know that the problem with us like the human condition essentially remaining largely unchanged for you know like a zillion years it's not so much that we don't know what to do it's that the what to do is not delivered in a way that that is is lands in it's not told in a way where it's it's simple it's easily digestible it doesn't require people to buy into all sorts of

you know like big major disruptive shifts and changes or a lot of dogma or a lot of dogma yeah you know an ideology where you like you have to bury yourself in this stuff to be able to say, no, I just want to feel better when I wake up in the morning and when I go to bed at night. It doesn't require a costume. Yeah. So my goal was really to be like, you know what, I'm a middle-aged guy. And what can I write? How can I write this in a way where it's literally somebody who's in the middle of their lives, you know, can just immediately say, yeah, this really resonates with me.

I don't have to struggle or work to understand it. I don't have to buy into anything. And I can just, and I can sort of digest it in tiny little bite-sized pieces. And the other thing I say in the beginning of the book is don't trust me. Don't trust anybody. You know, like my only request, I'm not asking you to buy into anything. I'm just saying be open. You know, and most of the chapters in the book after the first one are these tiny little chapters.

There's like five to eight pages. So I'm not asking. I'm not even asking for much more than, you know, like 10 minutes of your time on a day. And then it's like just try it and let your own experience validate or invalidate whether this is legit for you yeah well you definitely accomplished that i mean i would say you know much like yourself i have a weird kind of like relationship with the whole self-help genre of books yeah which is odd because i've benefited tremendously right so many of them but anytime somebody hands me one or i buy one'm like come on really i know am

i really gonna read this and i i just i have to overcome that barrier to get to a state of open-mindedness yeah you know and i don't know what i mean i don't know what that is i mean do you think is that we were both sort of like long-time new yorker slash lawyers who have been trained to just you know just be skeptical right exactly it's like this can't yeah we're just looking constantly for what's but i don't even think that's it because i think um maybe it is actually i don't know what it is i don't either but i know because i'm not like i am an open-minded guy and you know i do all kinds of crazy out there stuff so it's not like i'm closed off to that maybe it's the you know like i said before the audacity of it or like who who does this person think that they are that they have the answer?

And now I'm supposed to listen to maybe that's a control. I don't know what it is, whatever. But my point being is that, you know, so here I am. I'm sitting that you've sent me an early copy of your book. And I so I go through the mental gymnastics of that. But I'm like, I know Jonathan. He's my friend. I've been reading his stuff forever.

I know where he's coming from. And he's got, you know, one of the biggest hearts of anyone that I know. And I crack the book open. And the thing about your book is I could tell, first of all, it's wonderful. Congratulations. Thank you. You wrote a great book. Thanks, man.

I appreciate that. It's going to be amazingly successful. Thank you. I have no doubt about that. I could tell immediately that it is a very fine distillation of a lifetime of experiences and study and teaching and advocacy and the million books that you've read and all the different things that you've tried and practiced are all kind of like coming together into this document that really is you conveying to, you know, the reader in very easily digestible terms, look, here's some simple things that you can do. I've

divided it up into these three buckets. Each bucket, there's 10 little chapters, and I tell little stories, and I make it very easy with some practical things that you can implement very easily without disrupting your whole life or adorning robes or going to some temple or whatever, having to go get on a plane and go to retreat to make your life, you know, a little bit better, and hopefully, perhaps a lot better. Is that fair? Yeah, that's, that's beautiful. Actually, that's, that is exactly. So it's like, there's nothing intimidating about it. I mean, like, you could crack it, it's super easy to read, you know, and you don't even have to read it from beginning to end, you can pop it open to the part that you're dealing with or struggling with.

Totally cherry pick the chapter. And it's like, Oh, yeah, of course, I can do this thing that you're dealing with or struggling with. Totally cherry pick the chat. And it's like, Oh yeah, of course I can do this thing, you know, and that will help. I, but the thing is I have to actually do it.

Yeah. And so it's that thing that you kind of, you were tiptoeing around earlier. Um, that gap that exists between the inspiration or the, the information and the implementation of that. It is that that's the big thing, you know, and what I found, so I'm, and the implementation of that. Yeah. It is. That's the big thing.

You know, and what I found, so I'm, whenever I take any kind of strengths test or anything like that, love of learning always comes up at the top for me. So I'm the oddball dork that actually loves to just sit there and learn and learn. I devour knowledge. And I'm also wired in a way

where I'm constantly running experiments to test and validate the knowledge. You know, if there's science, first I'll read. If there's science, I'll go and I'll find the science and I'll deconstruct the studies and try and actually talk to the researchers. And if there's not, I'll do an N of 1

and run it in my own life and see is this legit or not. You're kind of the same way from what I know. Yeah. And I don't want someone to have, I realize most people aren't like me. So I'd rather kind of really distill that and just say, like, here's something to try. Here's a really simple way to actually get into it and get out of it.

People are not like you in what way? In that I don't think most people want to go down that rabbit hole. So most people are just kind of like, just tell me what I need to know and tell me what to do. Like really simple, short, and sweet. I don't care about the background, the philosophy, the deep research. I mean, I had to, it's funny, I had to literally stop myself so many times when I was writing because I was starting to go really deep down, like, the science rabbit hole with this and share, like, this study says this,

and then this researcher had, like, this add-on. I'm like, no, no, no. This is fascinating to me. And there is a lot of research behind it. You could have footnoted every sentence. Right. It's overcomplicating. It's just massively overcomplicating. Most people want is, tell me a story so I can understand how this really engages me.

Give me a little bit of science, enough for my rational brain to say, oh, I get how this could work and why it really matters. And then just tell me what to do. So I had to keep pulling myself back to just really focus on that and make it almost deceptively easy to move through. Knowing that a lot of these seemingly really simple little things or actions actually have a lot of science behind them and really move the needle in a lot of parts of life yeah it's an interesting kind of conundrum because when you put a book out like this there's almost the expectation that you're gonna tell the secret that has yet to be told right and sometimes it's just really it's that again right exactly it can't be that easy

like how can you take me beyond the velvet rope into the VIP room to tell me the top secret? Right, right. You know what I mean? It is, and the secret is there's no secret, man. The secret is just do it. The secret is getting out of your head and taking action. The secret is action.

Yeah, it really is. I mean, it's the simplest stuff on the planet. It's like so much of what you and your wife are about and your whole crew. It's actually not that hard. Eat more plants when it comes to the food side of things. There's a lot of nuance around it, and you've got great ways to. But the basic stuff is there for us. We just kind of need really specific instructions

to be able to do it. And that's why, I mean, so part of what we're looking to create around this is the book is sort of like a guide, but we're also, you know, looking to, and we've already built a substantial community, but there's tremendous research also around the fact that the only road to success is just sustained action

over a longer window of time. And if you don't have people to do the sustained action with, your chances of actually doing it over a long period of time plummet pretty quickly. So what we're trying to do is actually build community around the book also. And either within us, I mean, we've built a beautiful community with Good Life Project, so it's like join us, or mean, we've built a beautiful community with Good Life Project, so it's like, join us. Or, you know, really strongly recommending that people go out and just, like, find a couple of friends to do this with. And that's not because I want to sell more books to a couple of friends.

It's because your likelihood of succeeding at any form of sustained behavior change, it goes up exponentially when you do it with people. Yeah, exponentially. just it goes up exponentially when you do it with people. Yeah, exponentially. Just the accountability, the positive and negative accountability of being in a group setting, which gets to one of the buckets, and we're going to explore these buckets in a minute. But I love the phrase that you use in the book, which is it's ripples, not waves.

In other words, it's the boring little thing. It's like, you know what? I'm not going to check my iPhone for my email the minute I wake wake up i'm going to delay that you know 20 minutes half an hour it's like nobody's going to write a blog post about that it's that sexy you know but it's those things done consistently over very extended periods of time yeah that change your life and you know when i was struggling with how i was ever going to get out of being a practicing lawyer and reading your stuff, the idea that I would be sitting in your living room doing a podcast, it's just like it's insane. I just can't even – it doesn't make any sense at all. And it only happened because I was doing tiny little things every single day.

Can I ask you something, though? Yeah. Because I'm really curious about – I know we've talked about a lot of sort of like how you developed into like the massive super athlete that you are was when you were, cause you also came back from a really dark place where did you take sort of, um, a really kind of like bite size incremental approach over a longterm to go from where you were, which, which was like really struggling physically, emotionally to being like astonishingly fit and healthy i think it was a mix of lightning bolt moments and tiny actions taken consistently like i had a couple line in the sand moments where i made decisions about how i wanted to

live and didn't want to live anymore right and kind of removed the decision fatigue out of that by saying stepping over that line saying i'm doing this now. But the actual change in terms of manifesting it in any kind of tangible material way only occurred through that, you know, daily pressure. So the transformation from, you know, absolute disaster alcoholic to productive, sober member of society was, you know, a 10 year period and a transition from schlubby couch potato, 50 pound overweight guy to ultra man athlete. That was a number of years too. And, you know, the, if you read about it on the internet, it makes it look like it all happened overnight. And that's just not the truth. You know, it was very difficult and it was painful and it required sacrifice and

all that kind of stuff that isn't fun to talk about or write about. But, you know, that's how real change happens. But you can't, you know, when we talk about that, that bridging that gap between information and action or inspiration and action, you know, there's, you know, what what stands in between the success and the failure with that is willingness. And willingness is not something that you can, you. It's a self-generated thing. It is. There's something deeper that it has to come from. But it's interesting. So I think you brought up these lightning bolt moments, which I think a lot of people,

those tend to be the things that kickstart people and launch them into behavior change. But they rarely ever sustain people unless they're a series of them. Especially without that community accountability. Yeah, absolutely. So it's like this, it's this blend of community accountability. It's a blend of sort of a series of continued awakenings. And it's also what I found, and this is really interesting. I had a chance to sit down with K. Anders Erickson who is the guy who's done all like the leading research on greatness on the world-class performance that

you know um gladwell and so many others quoted and kind of correctly and somewhat incorrectly i have a 10 000 story that i want to tell you don't let me forget okay sorry i don't want to um yeah and i was saying to him i was like because he's like look you know if you want to become really good at anything it takes years and thousands of hours, you know, may not be 10,000, maybe 5,000 or 25,000. But it's not fun practice. It's grueling, you know. And the nature of the practice, and I said to him, I said, you know, I've had this question for years. I've known about his research for about a decade now since I first saw it published.

I was like, what keeps somebody doing that for so long if it's not fun? published, I was like, what keeps somebody doing that for so long if it's not fun? And this was the first time that he actually, we had a conversation about the role, the importance of a teacher or a mentor. And he said, you know, teacher and mentor isn't just to sort of like tell you what to do and what not to do and providing a regular source of accountability. It's that they can construct sort of like a learning process where it's hard enough so that you really feel like you're challenging yourself. But they kind of know that, you know, you'll have enough of these tiny little wins along the way. So that little moment of like, oh, hell yeah, like I just nailed that, you know, it's enough of a feedback mechanism to keep you in it and to keep you doing a little bit more. So rather than hitting that place and you're like, I'm just done.

I'm just not getting anything. I'm working so hard and I'm not seeing the growth that I want to see. A really good teacher or mentor will be able to tap into that psychology in you and adjust sort of like the learning and the practice process so that it's it's still really hard because it has to be but they'll they'll make sure that it's done in a way where you do continually experience these tiny little wins that serve as feedback mechanism to keep you in it and to keep it self-motivating um which goes back to like Teresa Amabile and the whole, the research around progress actually being the single biggest motivator for sustained action as well.

That's super interesting. Yeah. I'm just sort of thinking about how that's applied you know in my own life and in the lives of other people like i you know i'm thinking you know the olympics just completed so i'm thinking about michael phelps and like you know this guy's been participating in the olympics for 20 years and he's had his ups and downs and like 2012 was kind of his low moment he's so great he could still compete but. But how did he bounce back from that? And when you were talking, when you were sharing those ideas,

I'm also thinking about the importance of finding the love in it. It's like he'll tell you that now his teammates and their success and the community of showing up for practice with his friends is equally as important in keeping him invested in what he's doing than his own personal success. Yeah, it's a huge part of it. And this is something I talk about a bit in the book, but it's also just been a deep topic of curiosity for me is belonging, the role of belonging in our lives.

And what's kind of funny, it's the backstory to this book, book actually is this is not the book that I sold to my publisher. Oh yeah. Yeah. Um, what was the, what was the original book? The original book was a deep dive into belonging. Um, cause it's been this years long fascination for me. Um, because it turns out that, that we are, we're, we're physiologically and psychologically wired to have to belong. If we don't belong, we pretty quickly get unhappy, and that moves into dysfunction on all levels, and eventually we die. And, you know, it's very likely some sort of leftover from survival, because if you're outcast, if you're isolated from the tribe, you're busted.

You weren't going to last long, so we have it wired into us that somehow we have to belong. But there are a couple couple challenges with that. One is that most of the big institutions that provided this really big sort of like experience of belonging, either they're going away or they don't provide it anymore. And that's leaving us looking for it in places that aren't providing it anymore. And very often looking for it online, too, where we get this sort of surface level, diluted taste of it, but it's not totally taking care of that Jones. But we have to be in community if we're going to be okay. And it's not just about goal achievement.

It's about flourishing in life. And I'm deeply fascinated by how we are trying to solve for that need right now and how we're going to solve for it down the road as the world becomes increasingly digital. And addressing that need in business and entrepreneurship is very interesting. And you actually use the case study in your book about CrossFit. That's a big reason why CrossFit has become such a massive success is because it gives people that sense of belonging and community. It's not just going to the gym and anonymously, you know, running alongside somebody on a treadmill. Yeah. And as I kind of don't pull punches with the, so I had, you know, my first step out of the law. You come from this. Right. I spent a dozen years in the fitness industry. So I went from doing really nicely as a lawyer to making $12 an hour as a personal trainer, learning the industry, opening my own facility, growing it, selling it, opening another facility, and growing that.

And what I saw was just massive dysfunction. And what I saw was just massive dysfunction. But one of those big sources of dysfunction is that most of the culture in a large club these days is you walk in, most people don't know your name, you key swipe in, there's never any human contact except for a brief glance up to validate that your membership is active. And you don't have to get sent to somebody to handle things. And then you're kind of on your way. And then what's the first thing you do? You change into your clothes. You put on headphones, right?

And A, because it's music and you just want to get jazzed. But more importantly for most people these days, because the rows and rows and rows. You don't have to talk to anybody. Right, right. It keeps you isolated. And then all these rows of repetitive motion machines, which most people experience as just horribly monotonous and boring, to distract yourself from it, you plug into entertainment systems. So you're distracting yourself, and you're also even more now isolating yourself from

even the possibility of community. And so then along comes a place like CrossFit or SoulCycle or a whole bunch of other... Or even like Spartan races. Exactly. Spartan, Tough Mudder, all these things. One of the things that's happening on the surface is people are reconnecting with nature and they're reconnecting with intense activity. But really, deeper under the surface, these are places of intense community and belonging.

They finally have a place where they live. People will join CrossFit and pay four times more than they would pay at the local gym. They would join the local gym. They would go for two weeks and keep paying for six months and never go back. They'll join CrossFit, pay a ton more, and they'll go. Literally, every single day, they'll be there. If they don't go, everybody else is going to call them up and say, where are you?

The problem is they go too much and get hurt. If anything, the problem is trying to sort of temper that. But it's in part because the modality is different. It's novel. It's constantly changing. But the bigger thing is that people find their people. Like, you actually – people quit products and services and solutions and experiences. They don't quit communities unless something goes wrong in the culture of the community that breaks with the fiber of who they are and what their values are and their belongings.

So how did your book morph out of this kind of singular idea? Because that's a very, you know, it's very specific. It is. It's sort of like, you know, Ryan Holiday writes, you know, ego is the enemy. It's a very, it's a one specific thing. And you've kind of expanded into this to make it a much more comprehensive, you know, look at life satisfaction. I did. So a couple things happened.

One was I realized I actually wanted to talk about something bigger. And I realized that there were a whole bunch of other things that kind of probably needed to work together but the other was there's actually a really substantial body of research around this idea around both belonging and isolation and exclusion and kicked off by Baumeister in 95

so there's a 20-year body of research of academic research which is good news, bad news good news is you can look at a lot of data. The bad news is it's still kind of all over the place. There's a lot of disharmony within the science. So the deeper I went down that rabbit hole, I'm thinking to myself, well, I'm the geek who loves learning. This is really fascinating to me.

But in terms of creating something that might be helpful, it's also likely going to be unsatisfying because i don't think we have enough to sort of create a really in-depth comprehensive exposition on belonging quite yet my sense is we we need another 10 years um so i actually went back to my publisher and i kind of said here's what's going on and um i'm essentially going to have to agree with one side or another also on the research and i have you know as much of a geek as i am i'm not the researcher so i don't have the valid basis to parse you know like and uh and i'll hang myself out to dry and i'm not particularly looking to do that and i just don't think it's going to be a satisfying read yeah i mean it sounds like it

would have been much more of an academic exercise yeah Yeah, yeah, which for me is fun. But for your average person, not so fun. So I'll very likely just keep exploring that. But I kind of pulled back and I said, you know, I said, I don't think it's going to be, this is the right book to write at this time. But there's another book that as I'm researching, this is starting to become clear as a book that I can and maybe should write right now and and I pitched up how to live a good life to them like oh my god yeah this is this is awesome this is just what we want it's funny because I would have thought well you know you're it's the good life project you know of course your book is going to be called so like they're so they're they're like saying to me they're like why didn't you sell us this

they literally asked me that question. And my answer to them, so there was about a year between when we sold the first book and I came back to them and I'm like, I just don't think this is the book that needs to be written. And during that year, I had been starting to come, like a lot of the ideas, sort of like the bigger framework really started to come together in my head and i started testing it with the different people in our different programs and people were lighting up saying this works it's like i hear it once i remember it it makes sense i'm applying it because it's super straightforward and it's really making a difference so so because my publisher asked the exact same question they're like this is the

perfect book for you and your brand right like what's wrong with you right and like why didn't you just give us this one? Because probably a year before, it wasn't ready. It wasn't fully picked. Yeah, yeah, but at that point, I was like, you know what? Now the time was just, it was ready. Well, let's break it down. I mean, you know, it's pretty simple how you've kind of allocated,

you know, the different aspects of, you know, how to live a good life in the book and doing it in this, you know, kind of three of, you know, how to live a good life in the book and doing it in this, you know, kind of three-bucket methodology, which is really kind of cool and brilliant. I'm trying to remember from the book, but I think this is something that you use with the people that you work with in your community, right? Yeah, absolutely.

Kind of developed out of that. Yeah, and the idea was really, how do I take all this stuff that I've been geeking out on, 50 years of my own experiments, and like years and years and years of sitting down with embodied teachers and actually learning from people who a lot of people don't have the opportunity to sit down with and and maybe even before sorry to interrupt you but like even before we get into the buckets like what is that is i mean can you articulate what the basic strain or tradition of philosophy or spiritual history or science, is there any one kind of tradition that predominantly informs us, or is it really a synthesis of all these things?

It's really, it is a strong synthesis of them, because my brain is wired. I'm probably skeptically open. So I'm open to phenomenon that I can't explain. I'm open to spiritual phenomenon. And at the same time, the first place I'm going to go after I experience a phenomenon or hear about it is science to see if I can actually find research that validates or invalidates or explains what's really happening under the surface. So for me, it's this really interesting blend of, you know, okay, so I hear about this thing happens to people when they're, so I taught yoga for seven years, right? I owned a large yoga center in New York. And there were all these claims about what happens to people

when you're doing full immersions, these postures where you take your body and put them upside down. And, you know, there are claims everything from it cures everything that could ever go wrong. It gives you you can never die. And it makes you psychic. And I'm like, OK. So some of them are clearly out there. But some of these, I'm really curious, is there a valid basis? So I started to actually research what happens physiologically in your body when you turn

your body upside down. You stay there for a little bit of time. And it turns out there are these things in your body called baroreceptors. And when you're invert, in a very short amount of time, your blood pressure goes up, but then immediately it triggers these receptors to reverse that and actually drops your blood pressure in your body. So that when you come back down, that actually sustains for a window of time. So if you're doing this regularly, there's an interesting argument that actually says that this actually may help to chronically lower blood pressure, which is one of the claims related to inversions would actually be a lot of the symptomological benefits of lower blood pressure. So I'm always sort of like, I'll start with something which is this, you know, comes out of classic Eastern philosophy and spiritual or even mysticism. And then I try and reverse engineer data or science around it. It's kind of like Dan Harris did that with Dementia and Happiness.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Especially because, you know, part of it for me is just a deep fascination. But part of it is also there's a teacher in me. Part of it for me is just a deep fascination, but part of it is also there's a teacher in me. And I also know that for me to have an idea that's shared that people will then, again, I care less about teaching theory. I care more about people acting on whatever it is and actually doing the work. So for somebody to actually take action, somebody who's completely open and spiritual will be like, okay, cool.

I'll buy into the spiritual side. Whereas somebody who's more rational brain is going to be like, that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard in my life. So I need to be able to actually translate it into that language too so I can have a broader spectrum of humanity. Be able to say, okay, I get how that actually might make a difference and I'm willing to try. So that's part of what's going on there. That said, going back to your original question, I am very drawn to Eastern philosophy, to various paths of Buddhism, and positive psychology, which is the branch of psychology that sort of grew out of Martin Seligman's work when he decided that actually there was value in exploring how to work with people to take them from baseline to flourishing, not just from sick to baseline.

The buckets. Yeah. Let's break it down. Yeah. So three buckets. When you look at life fundamentally, I look at it as having three buckets. One is contribution. One is connection. one is vitality.

So how did you arrive at these three? Like how did you decide three and not four? Yeah, and I kept bouncing around. And so at various points, there were probably between four and eight of these. But what I start to realize is a lot of them were really just the same thing using different names. So for example, at one point I was like,

well, let's make it four buckets, and there'll be a bucket for state of mind and state of body. But then it's so crystal clear that there is no separate state of mind or state of body. They're utterly integrated feedback mechanism, and you can't talk about one without talking about the other. Yeah, I was really glad that you put those into one grouping, because naturally we always separate those know, because we, naturally

we always separate those things and we just, we got to stop doing that. Yeah. Because it's, it's a, it's a fiction. It's a complete and utter fiction to talk about them separately. You know, it's so interesting, right? I remember when we were hanging out, so we were talking with you and Julie when your, when your book came out. I can't remember whether this actually aired on the conversation or whether we were just talking about this after the fact,

but Julie and I both had something. So we had this cyst. Thyro-glossal duct cyst. Right, in our throats. And it was so interesting to me. So I went to the top guy in New York, and he was like, there's only one thing you can do. You've got to have surgery and cut it out.

So that's what I did. She went completely alternatively. The Ayurvedic route. Right. And they're like, no, no, out. So that's what I did. She went, you know, completely alternative route. And they're like, no, no, no, no. Like you can,

you can take care of this. And she, so we both end up in like similar end states without this thing in our bodies anymore, but like profoundly different ways. Um, and why was I even bringing that up? Uh,

my body, you know, Oh yeah. Right. It's just, it's the fact that, you know, like, yeah, you can't it's the fact that you know like yeah you can't separate like the way that you explore the way you think about and the way that your your mindset you profoundly affects the state of your physiology and vice versa you know so

the idea of of separating those out it just the more i really thought about it it felt completely foreign to me. So like when we talk about the vitality bucket, you know, that's, it's fundamentally, you're focusing on optimizing your state of mind and body, you know, so there'll be, you know, one, one day would focus on a mindset practice, you know, but if you develop a, you know, if you sit and you have a really gentle mindset practice one day, it's not just going to be good for your state of mind. It's going to change all sorts of physiological markers and inflammation markers and stress markers

and disease risk markers and potentially the experience of pain in your body. So it didn't make sense to me to separate that stuff out. So vitality is one, right? Optimizing the state of your mind and your body. Connection is the other one, which? Optimizing the state of your mind and your body. Connection is the other one, which is fundamentally, it's about the relationships between you and yourself. And most of us are pretty dissociated with ourselves. So really understanding who you are, you and anyone who's

important in your life, you know, like partner, spouse, colleague, kids, family, close friends, you and a sense of source or something bigger than you that you belong to, however you may want to define that. And to me, also nature, the natural world. So these are things that are really important. And what about these extended communities that are so much a part of everything you do? Yeah, the bigger community also. And a community can be as small as a handful of people,

or it can be as large as a global group of people who are doing something really substantial. And so these are all really, really important. And then the third one is what I call contribution. And that's fundamentally about how you're bringing your gifts to the world. You know, are you investing your energy, the vast majority of your energy every day in a way that makes you feel lit up, that's leveraging the fundamental values and strengths and beliefs that let you feel fully expressed. Because if you're not, and most people aren't, that bucket runs dry really quickly. If you're not taking care of your body and your mindset, the vitality bucket runs dry really quickly. And so in the connection,

if you abandon your relationships, that runs dry. And so what we know, so the idea is really simple. Life is these three buckets, vitality, connection, contribution. A good life is filling those buckets, is keeping them as full as possible. And understanding that they leak. Yeah. And that's- You don't just fill them and move on. Right. You can't just top them off and be like, I'm good. You know, that's the truth is they all leak. So you have to constantly be filling every I'm good. You know, that's the, the truth is they all leak. So you have to constantly be filling every bucket a little bit every day, which some people might

be a little bummed about, but the truth is it's an amazing gift to be able to just keep doing things that are enjoyable and fulfilling and enriching to fill them. Um, one of the interesting, so there were three rules of the buckets. One, you know, is that they all leak. Two is that the height of any bucket is always capped by the least full one, which is counterintuitive to a lot of people. It's sort of the idea that you're only as strong as your weakest link, basically. Yeah, pretty much. And then the third one is that the buckets don't lie because we love to delude ourselves into believing that,

no, no, no, this relationship will be fine if I ignore it for five years. It's all good. I'm locked in there. It's a family. It'll be fine. My health will be fine. Three more years at this job, and even though I'm working 113.9 hours a day and I hate it,

it'll be okay. Three years, it'll be totally fine, not realizing that actually, no, actually, it's utterly delusional., it'll be okay. You know, like three years, it'll be totally fine. Not realizing that actually, no, actually it's utterly delusional. It won't be okay. You know, and the truth is the buckets never lie. You know, we can delude ourselves, but at some point they're going to tell us the truth and grind us to a halt and force us to either start filling them or die. It's that simple. There's no middle. The basic premise behind all of this really is balance, right? Balancing all of these systems, attending to these buckets. And if you can kind of make sure that you have enough self-awareness and objectivity about your own life to understand when one of these buckets is starting to leak or

drip and needs attention, that you can reach some kind of, you know, functional stasis that's going to allow you to then be more expressive and more actualized and more, you know, I hate the word happiness, but, you know, productive and what's the word I'm looking for? Satisfied, you know, in your daily existence. Fulfilled. Exactly. Yeah. And it's funny, I use the for? Satisfied, you know, in your daily existence. Fulfilled. Fulfilled, exactly. Yeah, and it's funny. You use the word balance.

Oddly, I have this weird reaction to the word balance, maybe because most people use it in the context of work-life balance. Yeah, because I want to talk about this. Yeah, and I actually don't buy that whole thing. But as soon as you said balance, the thing that popped into my head was like, for me, the word isn't balance. It's like fullness.

I feel like I'm full as I move through the day. When I think about my relationships, yeah, I feel full. I feel they're good. I feel that there's a richness to them. When I think about the way I contribute to the world, I'm full. The way I contribute to the world fills me up. And the way I take care of my body and my health and my mind fills me. It leaves me feeling full. I like that. I like that a lot better. You know, balance is tricky.

It's something I've been thinking a lot about lately. What are you thinking? Like what's going on in your head? Well, I mean, the thing is I'm fundamentally somebody who's prone to be out of balance. You know, I'm in recovery for addiction issues. You know, it's like, I like to go to extremes and it's very easy for me to believe, and I don't know if this is real or, or fabricated, but you know, a lot of the things that I've achieved in my life are the result of being quote unquote out of balance. Like you're not, are you in balance if you're training your

body 25, 30 hours a week for a race? You race? Are you in balance if you kind of go into that hole to write a book or do these certain things? And it's like, for me, I sort of feel like maybe this is the thing that I need to overcome to be more full, which is to understand that I don't have to suffer to write a book. Wait a minute. If you figure that out, I need to know that one.

But I was like, no, I gotta isolate myself and just go deep. And there is a kernel of truth in that. You know how it is, if you're starting to hit a groove and you get interrupted because a family obligation comes up, it takes you two hours to get back into it. So I need a very extended period of quiet time

where I can't have anything intruding on that. And that's how I kind of move the ball forward. a very extended period of quiet time where I can't have anything intruding on that. And that's how I kind of move the ball forward. Over an extended period of time, that's perhaps not a very balanced way to live. But that's how I have achieved certain goals in my life. So I have kind of a countervailing opinion about balance. Like in the macro sense, my life is imbalanced. Like I can't get so out of balance that my marriage or my relationship with my children, all these things start to disintegrate or become imperiled. But I think it's okay to allow yourself to go out of balance for a certain period of time as long as you kind of know what you're doing and understand when you have to snap back. Yeah, and I pretty much agree with that, which know, which is why to me, the notion, it's like you said, you don't love the word happiness. I don't either. And the research

pretty clearly shows these days that if you sort of make, you know, like attaining happiness, a goal, you end up pretty miserable. And I think balance is the same thing, you know, because what you're assuming is that your life is fundamentally a pendulum that's not swinging. It's just static in the middle. It's just the goal is to make the pendulum static. It's a complete and utter fabrication. Nobody can live that way.

Right. And then you feel bad about yourself if you're not. Right, so you start beating yourself up because it's this unattainable goal rather than saying, look, what I do believe is possible and can leave you feeling really full is i'm going to be intentional about the

decisions that i make about the actions that i take and make agreements about why i'm doing them how i'm doing them and how it affects me and the people around me and sometimes you get agreements back about how long we're all willing to to like do this together you know and have people sort of like pull me and have circuit breakers and triggers when I'm breaking those agreements, you know, so I can understand and I can constantly be like reconnect with being intentional, you know, so that I can, I'm not just falling into an autopilot behavior.

But the idea of, you know, like life is a pendulum that just stays static in the middle, it's such a complete fiction that to try and make that an aspiration, I can't imagine it being anything other than brutal futility, rather than just owning the fact that life is dynamic. And understand, if you're investing yourself fiercely in something, why does it matter to you? What's it going to take? If things go south, how will you respond to that? What are the agreements that you have in place around it? And then keep checking in and be intentional about the way you're making decisions around that.

When somebody says everything in moderation, does that bring up the same sensibility in you? Yeah, probably. It's kind of a similar thing. Probably. That said, I think it was the last book, I was interviewing Randy Commissar. And he had this, it was really funny because I remember this because I interviewed him. It was a telephone interview.

And I was interviewing him. I was staying in a suite in a casino in Vegas. I was staying in a suite in a casino in Vegas. And I met a guy about his Buddhist practice in Silicon Valley. And he said something to me, and it was something like, equanimity is a powerful muscle to flex when you step out into the ambiguous void. And I think for me... Hold on, I'm trying to like... Wait, say that again.

Equanimity is a powerful muscle to flex when you step into the ambiguous void. I gotcha, okay. You know, it's about... Balance and equanimity are different, and I think we confuse the two, is what I'm trying to say here. How are they different?

Because I think balance assumes a level of just like staticness, whereas equanimity assumes openness and adaptability to change. Equanimity assumes a state of constant movement and change and the ability to adapt and respond to that dynamically, whereas balance assumes that everything will come to a point of stillness. And then your job is to lock that down. Or stasis, not stillness. Yeah, no, stillness is good, actually.

Stasis, yeah, a much better word, yeah. So my aspiration, if anything, is much more towards the ability to be in a rapidly changing environment and still be able to touch stone. And I would imagine that's a reflection of your meditation practice. Yeah. It's a huge part of it for sure. That's the, that's the superpower of like a well-honed. Yeah. Do you still, do you practice still?

I do. Yeah, I do. Yeah. And I, and I love it. And you know, it gets interrupted and you know, I have to get back to it and it's kind of like you're talking before about um we were talking about crossfit and we were talking about you know the gym and how you pay and then you don't go and the power of community to reinforce you know sort of the level of engagement of whatever the activity is and i think behind that momentum is a very important kind of of invisible force that takes place that we all experience. And we know what it's like to, whether it's going to yoga or going

running or going to the gym or going to CrossFit, when you're in your routine and there's a self perpetuating kind of energy that makes it easy to go the next day and the next day and the next day. But once you leave for Thanksgiving vacation to visit the relatives and you come back and then you just can't get yourself back to that place.'re starting from zero it's like there's no logic behind that you know what i mean and yet it's very very powerful i know you're like shouldn't i be better than this man it's like i've been working for years i've written a self-help book right it's like come on man when do i get a pass here yeah what is that about i i don't know we're so much like as as advanced as developed as we get we're fundamentally just like pavlov's dogs when

it comes down to it in the end humans are insane yeah so in speaking about like all these people that you've affected and impacted through you know your your tribe and your community that you've built the good life project and the camps and all of that. I want to talk about the camps in a minute. What do you think is the number one thing that holds people back? Or what is the strain or the thing that you identify in people that is perhaps the biggest limiter? Yeah, you actually used the word earlier, awareness.

I don't think we're actually aware of how we move throughout the world. I don't think we're aware of, on a deeper level, I don't think we're aware of who we are, what matters to us, what we believe is important to us, and what we value. On the next level, my sense is that we move through each day very unaware of how we're actually making decisions. In fact, most of us aren't making decisions. We're maniacally busy from the time we open our eyes in the morning to the time our pillow hits the bed at night, which is not actually in and of itself a bad thing. If your day is filled with things that move the needle, that really matter to you, that are an outgrowth of who you are and your need to express yourself and step into your potential, that's not a bad thing. The challenge is that we're reactively busy.

Rather than being intentional about the way that we're filling our days, we're being massively reactive and sort of like there's an autopilot sense to existence these days where the vast majority of the way that we move through our days isn't being aware and intentional and then choosing and acting. the blended agendas of multiple people kind of drop into our laps, and all of their agendas and all the stuff that they want done that's important to them becomes all the things that fill our days and our to-do lists. And then we blink, and the day is gone.

And we blink, and the week is gone. And we blink, and the year is gone. And we blink again, and life is gone. And yet we think we're being productive. Yeah. And now we're confused that we're unhappy. I mean, you have this great, I don't know, three or four page section very early in the book where you're like, tell me if you relate to this, is this your life? And you kind of go through from waking up in the

morning to going to sleep at night. And it's just an onslaught, like a series of just reactive behaviors. Oh, I check my email and then I check in and then I go to Twitter and then I go to Facebook and then I go to Snapchat and then I answer the phone and then I call that guy back and I cross this thing off my to-do list and I commute and I come home, whatever. And your head hits the pillow at night and you're like, I did all this stuff. And then it's like, wait, you actually didn't, what did you really do? Oh, I don't even know. Yeah. Because every action was a reaction to something that you didn't choose to engage in.

So there's no, there's a complete lack of intentionality about how you're living your day. Yeah. And boundaries. Yeah. of intentionality about how you're living your day and boundaries. Yeah. I mean, and it all comes from like a fundamental lack of awareness. You know, so I think awareness, you know, mindfulness, you can probably like pretty close words, you know, mindfulness has become a huge buzzword these days.

And I think there's a reason for it, you know, beyond the fact that, you know, it's a performance enhancer and all these other things where people are associating spectacular outcomes. Spectacular? I just made up a word. I like that word, actually. Yeah, like, let's use that. Right. Spectacular outcomes. And, you know, but fundamentally, it's just about being able to actually pause it at a given moment, zoom the lens out, and notice what you're doing, and be able to ask yourself, why am I actually doing this?

Like, is the way that I'm, is what I'm thinking about now, is the story that I'm telling in my head, are the actions that I'm taking in this moment, are they legit? Do they matter to me? Are they in some way allowing me to live well in the world and contribute to society? So you can't correct course and you can't be intentional until you're aware of the fact that you're not on the course that's deliberate. But I feel like there's a relative level of awareness. Like this is the great plague of our era, right? Beyond like physical disease, like this is something that we're all dealing with.

Any professional person is combating this reactive tendency to be just, you know, wed to our phones and all this sort of thing. And I think we all know like, this is crazy. Why are we doing this? And yet there's a certain powerlessness to, to shift that or course correct. Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, I had an amazing chance to sit down with Sherry Turkle,

who's an MIT researcher who's been studying like how human behavior reacts to technology. And you know, her, her whole thing, she's she's like look i'm not a Luddite and and neither am i neither are you we're hanging out using technology to make this happen right now you know we all have smart devices um and they're not going anywhere you know our apps and our devices are here to stay this is the thing so it becomes more incumbent upon us to develop a more responsible relationship to them yeah and and i I think that the superstructure for that, like the foundation for that is the oldest stuff in the world.

It's like meditation. It's these really basic awareness practices that allow us to be like, oh, wait a minute. I've just checked my phone. And for the 396th time in the bathroom while I'm like you know like at a restaurant with people and there's really no reason for me to be doing this right now is there other than the fact that I'm literally just addicted to the dopamine hit it's going to give me by seeing if there's something new like that I can heart or respond to or something like that.

And there's so many places we can go with that. There's a lack of empathy and there's the disconnection. But fundamentally, the focus is the impact on your inability to be intentional, and actually choose your thoughts and your actions in a way that constructively builds a life that you really want to inhabit, that is not possible unless you start to cultivate a genuine sense of awareness. And so what is the first step to cultivating that awareness? Yeah. I mean, in my mind, I love practices. My practice is a mindfulness practice first thing in the morning. And it doesn't

have to be, you know, so my practice, I wake up, I roll out of bed first thing in the morning, and I sit for 25 to 30 minutes every day. And that's my anchor. That's the thing that allows me to move throughout the day and hopefully make more choices rather than just receive whatever comes and respond from the time I open my eyes. And what is that mindfulness practice specifically? Yeah. So for me, it's a really simple breath-oriented practice. So I literally sit and I use a little timer on my phone, which is actually a really interesting moment for me first thing in the morning because I use an app that's a meditation timer and it chimes every three minutes just to kind of give me a sense of, you know, right, exactly. And, um, and at the same time, right next to, you know, like where I touch to open the meditation timer app is my email icon. So, and it's funny because, you know, I've often thought, well, just put your email on the back

page, you know, so you're not tempted by that first thing in the morning. And, and I haven't done it because in an odd way, I actually feel like that's part of my practice is to see those two side by side and start my day by intentionally not choosing the email app by like the first, like the first, literally like tiny little bit of, of willpower that I'll exercise is literally choosing a mindfulness practice over checking my email. And the juxtaposition of those two things literally millimeters apart from each other. Yeah, right.

Mentally and in the physical space. Yeah. So that alone allows me to start my day having an intentional practice and also doing the seated meditation practice where it's a really simple breath-oriented practice. I literally just, I start out with about five minutes of some yogic breathing and then I just, I'm sort of looking or observing the sensation of my breath as it's moving in and out of my chest. And

it's really much easier actually for people to start this for a much shorter window of time and also guided with audio. It's one of the reasons some of the things that we're creating around the book are these like guided audio. But you have some of these guided programs, right, that are like listed like hyperlinked in the book. Yeah, exactly. So there's just one page where, you know,

we're creating all these awesome resources and we'll be adding to that too. Because I know, especially when I was starting, it's just much easier if you have somebody's voice in your ears and it's three minutes or five minutes instead of doing it yourself for 25 minutes. That's taken me years to build up to. But really, a tiny little thing makes a really big difference. So having a really basic morning practice like that where you have an intentional act, you're starting to cultivate a little bit of stillness that just starts to move into

your day. And that's the beginning for me. And then you can build with all sorts of fun other stuff from there. Yeah, I like it. I think that morning routines are having kind of a zeitgeist moment, which is great because it really is all about mindfulness and being intentional about how you're going to start your day. But I also think it has the tendency to create like a lot of vertigo in people because

much like researching nutrition on the internet, you're going to find like, well, first you do this and then you have to write your gratitude list and then you're writing your, and then you have to journal and then you're doing the artist way and you go on your artist date and like all this stuff. And it's like, this is a four hour thing, you know, like forget it. And they just throw the baby out with the bathwater. And I think it's about like just choose one thing and start with that. It's about keeping it really simple. And some people love big complex routines. I mean, most of – I write generally for, you know, like we're in the middle of our lives.

And for people who are grownups and who have big complex lives and a lot of stuff to do, we've actually created and are printing ourselves a companion practice journal to sort of take the kickstart that you get from the book and actually turn it into a deliberate practice over a period of months. And the idea is that there's a really simple seven-minute practice in the morning and a really simple five-minute practice in the evening. So you don't have to think about it. We actually repeat prompts. They're really simple exercises. Most of them just repeat and they're super simple. And there are a couple of prompts that kind of rotate through a 28 day cycle. But so for some people, that's great, you know, and for other people, you kind of have to just find your way into whatever the morning practice is that feels good to you.

Mm hmm. What is some bad advice that you hear getting thrown about uh in the in the kind of you know world in which you yeah you know operate man um i so hesitate to answer that because um it condemns anybody whose mouth it came out at the same time and that's sort of not my bent um general maybe bad is the wrong word. Maybe confusing or less helpful or disconcerting. Yeah, yeah. So here's one thing that I've heard a lot of, which is that if you make a choice to walk a path so that you can step into and create life that you really love to inhabit, and that requires some change and requires you to experiment and to grow,

that anybody who's not along for that journey with you, you need to just jettison out of your life. Just like they're no longer your friends. Like, sorry, mom. Sorry, dad. Sorry, uncle. Sorry, like partner in life and in business. Sorry, kids. Sorry, best friends. You're like, if you don't buy into this journey that I'm going down, that's on you.

Don't hold me back. And, you know, so let's sort of talk reality here. Yeah, it's a pretty narcissistic thing, first of all. Yeah, okay, so there's that. Yeah. Right? But then beyond it, just like from a practical standpoint, if you're telling people that, you know,

then you're setting them up to eviscerate a potential support system, to like completely like short-circuit the potential to actually have a series of intelligent, articulate conversations with people that may end up having them become real supporters and maybe even go on the journey with you. And there are for sure probably some people who are just completely, probably shouldn't be around as you continue to grow and they have no interest in growing or really they actually want to take you down. They're for sure, they're probably some people where not a bad idea to just sort of grow out of those relationships. But there are other people where, you know, like they're my close family, you know, your close family, your closest

friend since you were six, you know, so what if they see the world differently? There are people in your life where, A, they may not buy into it because they really care about you and they think you're going through some stuff that may be massively destructive or they may be threatened. It makes sense to have a conversation with those people and to really create a dialogue so you can understand what's going on and if there's any way to actually you know like have a conversation that sort of like allows for their forbearance and then eventually support and then eventually potentially joining along with you why would you not have that conversation well it requires a level of emotional maturity

yeah first of all and i think it speaks to um self-soignty. Like if you have a good sense of your path and your direction and you have surrounded yourself with some form of community that supports you in that, yeah, and perhaps you have other people in your life that don't see the world that way. If you have a good sense of boundaries and self-sovereignty, you can coexist with those people without it, you know, detracting you from your past. So it's about how much control and power are you giving to somebody else? If they don't have that emotional or electrical charge with you, you can be in the same room and have a conversation with them. But if you don't, it's more about the work that you need to do to be able to do that,

right? I mean, if you think about your, um, think about your life almost like, you know, so sometimes I default to entrepreneurship because it's a world I know so well. And it's also, to me, it's just a stunning canvas for the development of the human being.

Right. So if you think about building a company, starting a company from nothing, and, and one of the questions you have to ask yourself is who's the team, who's, who's my team is going to build this with me. I,

the thought of building a team where everybody just like has the identical Who's the team? Who's my team who's going to build this with me? The thought of building a team where everybody just has the identical worldview and the identical opinions for me, that is a disaster in waiting and jettisoning everyone who doesn't see the world exactly the same way and doesn't agree with me. I want a diversity of opinions. I want a diversity of world. I want people who are open to the vision, who understand what we're all working to create together. But I want difference. We all benefit from difference in our lives.

And if that means having intense, fierce, deep conversations that maybe move us off of plans because we shouldn't have been doing those things to start with and there's a better, more intelligent way to grow and to get there, I want people who are going to actually be in my life where I can have those conversations rather than just saying, oh, no, you need to go. I mean, it's lunacy. In the world of business and entrepreneurship, there's a disaster awaiting. So it's no different when you're trying to construct something awesome with the way that you live. I think there's a nice allegory for that happening

in, you know, culture right now, and particularly politics, as we sort of head into this election, and we see ourselves quite divided and kind of decamping to our, you know, to our people that see the world the way that we see it. And that's disconcerting to me that we're in this place where we can't we can't have that kind of conversation yeah it is it's uh yeah it's a weird time in the united states um i'm sure you have a lot of international listeners too and i sometimes wonder what they think of what what's going on here also but i mean fundamentally there's there's um the work of robert cialdini who's sort of legendary in the world of influence and understanding how people make decisions. And 30 years ago, he came out with this book, and he talked about something called the consistency principle. We are wired to feel a compulsion to say and act in a way that is consistent with anything we've said or done before.

And that's one of the reasons why when we get into a supercharged sort of political environment like this, if somebody makes a statement that's completely outrageous, or they're just like sticking a stake in the ground early on, they're wired from that moment on to want to continue to say things that support that and take actions that will support that original thing. And the more you do that, the more deeply ingrained this pattern becomes. So even if at some point it becomes really crystal clear

that the facts just aren't supporting a particular scenario. It's not even that we ignore it. Our brains won't see that at all. Well, it's a threat to your very identity when you start to become one and the same with that notion. That's something that I think about that kind of stuff a lot because I'm like the vegan athlete guy. It's like, well, what if I woke up one day and just really felt terrible

and felt like I needed to eat differently? What would that mean? Would that be a threat to how the world sees me, how I see myself? And it's important, and it goes back to self-awareness, right? Yeah. So super interesting stuff. It is. We are weird beasts. You know, so super interesting stuff. It is. We are weird beasts.

I know. What are you, uh, what are you reading right now? Are you reading anything interesting? Um, what am I reading right now? I'm like looking over at my books. Um, Oh, the places you'll go. I see. I have to tell you, I probably reread that every year. Dr. Seuss. I have to tell you, I probably reread that every year. It's funny. We would do these super high-end, like 10-month training programs for conscious entrepreneurs,

and we'd give them a book list in the beginning. We actually would deliver a box of books, which were part of the curriculum, and the places you would go is actually mandatory reading. That's great. Because, I mean, when you read it, you're like, this is an amazing guide. Like, it just describes all of life and all of entrepreneurship and it's it's so good so yeah it's like sitting on my bookshelf right there right over like steve jobs biography um actually

a book that's sitting next to it the coaching habit is do you know michael bungay stanier i should totally talk to him um he's an old friend of mine and he was you know years know, years ago, he was known as like the leading coach in Canada or wherever it was. And he started a company called Box of Crayons. And he's a phenomenally funny, super smart and intuitive guy who was coach for a long time. And now he's built a consulting company. Like a business coach. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But he basically, he realized that a lot of coaching is really very straightforward. And that there are essentially, according to him, there are seven questions that if you understand these seven questions to ask, why to ask them, and sort of the order to ask them in, not just for coaches, but for partners in a relationship, for parents, for whoever it is, these seven questions are so stunningly effective at guiding really,

really constructive and powerful conversations that lead to outcomes, like legitimate outcomes where people feel genuinely heard and felt and changed and empowered. And so he put those seven questions in this book. Right. And so what's an example of one of the questions you know off the top of your head? So I don't remember if this is the exact language, but one of them is, and what else? You know, so we tend to ask somebody, so I think maybe the first one is something like, tell me what's on your mind, right? Which it's so simple, but it's actually, there's so much nuance under there. You know, like we're not,

you know, we're just creating this open canvas for somebody to actually really say what's going on. Yeah, and one of the other ones was, and what else? So normally we ask a question, somebody gives us an answer,

we're like, okay, cool, let's get to this, let's solve the problem now. Right? And he's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Like that first thing, that's the surface stuff that you kind of need to clear out first you know and you keep asking so like and and what else getting

the layers right and what else and what else and what else until you're like oh that's what's really going on here and that we never asked that that reminds me of uh ira glass always says one of his favorite questions in an interview ira glass being of this american life you know amazing interviewer he'll say uh what do you make of that yeah when he's interviewing somebody you know it's just so open-ended but it's an open template i'm gonna have to start using it oh what do you make of that right yeah well i one of the things that i've actually gotten to the habit of saying um tell me more about. Because I'm just kind of like, I just want to know more, but I don't want to define the parameters. I want to see what is somebody going to feel is important enough to tell me more about. I want them to decide that. meant to you like you've been doing it we you know it started out as a video series and then you know you've gone to gone to basically just audio but you've been doing it for a while and

you've had the good fortune of interviewing like incredible people i mean it's been amazing you're very gifted at it you know i love the show and i always get so much out of it but i'm interested in what it means to you thank you um and and by the way the same thing back your way um you know the the it's been amazing just being able to listen to some of the conversations that you've been able to create. For me, probably two things. One is, I think I used the phrase embodied teachers earlier. Maybe not. But what I'm fundamentally looking for is I'm on a learning quest.

I want to learn. I'm beginner's mind always, student always. No matter how much I know, I always consider myself a student. So I'm constantly on the hunt for embodied teachers, people who don't just write about and talk about ideas with people who live it. People where I can actually look at the way that they're living their lives and say, oh, like there's something about that, that I want to learn what's underneath that. You know, I want to learn how that happened. I want to learn how this person is in the world this way. And I'm constantly trying to get as close to the source as humanly possible.

So it was interesting when I was in the yoga world. And there are a bazillion workshops that you could take. And one of my criteria was always, how close was the person who's teaching this, how close were they to the originator of the idea or the style or the approach or whatever it is? Because I want to get as close to the source as possible. So part of it is, for me, it's this amazing learning quest to just find embodied teachers and sit down with them and ask them questions, you know,

and just say, like, ah, that's where this is coming from. And then part of it is, so there are three things, maybe. So that's one. Part of it is, as I get to turn around, like I said, I love to teach or at least be in some sort of, you know, create something that has some sort of teaching value to it. So we record it. We started video, and now we do audio.

And we release this into the world. And I don't know about you. I'm curious whether you've got this. But, you know, I've been in business a long time. I've created companies. I've done all sorts of different things. I've taught a lot of different things. I've written a lot.

I have not done anything that's gotten the level of response that this has given me. Without a doubt. It's crazy. Right? I mean, I started it with very low expectations of it being anything. has given me have you have you without a doubt yeah it's crazy right it is in i mean i started it with very low expectations of it being anything uh and of course i'm very proud of the books that i've written and all of that but this is a very different thing and it connects with people and resonates with people in a way i would have never imagined yeah you know it's amazing just like

being in new york like i walk down the street and people are like oh rich roll pot i'm like what you know it's like it's audio they don't you know like why do you even know who i am it's and i think the thing for me is is that um the most gratifying thing i mean beyond the fact that like it's you know the greatest scam in the world to be able to convince amazing people to sit down right right and talk it you. It's like, I have a podcast. Yeah, exactly. And getting to share that with people. But then interacting with people who have been really not just positively impacted, but profoundly impacted.

I'm sure you get incredible emails from people. And they tell you very intimate details about their life and how their life has changed. details about their life and how their life has changed. And that is, you know, that is, you know, I can't think of anything, you know, more gratifying for me, you know, to do in my life. And in terms of like, you know, the contribution bucket, like mine is very full as a result of doing this show. And it feeds me. And to know that it is, you know, providing that kind of value, you know, to people I've never met is just an extraordinary thing.

And I'm sure you've experienced that daily. Yeah, same thing. And it's just amazing. So that was the second thing. The third thing is it's just fun. Yeah. It's just straight up fun. I mean, you and I, we're hanging out right now.

So we're in my living room. We're working. Right. We've got like, I had an excuse to go and buy some really awesome audio equipment so gear hashtag yay right and we're hanging out in my living room and this is yeah this is our jobs and just having a really enjoyable time i mean and the thing is like if we'd gone out to lunch like it would have been good but like like we're i i know that i'm gonna walk away from this conversation and i'm not gonna forget it i'm like we just had this really cool experience yeah

you know so on a very personal level there's that as well yeah so um yeah it's it's uh it's given me a lot and then the interesting thing is like then we go from here and it's like you said you'll walk down the street and and people will will like see you and say oh rich um you know we hold these events and stuff like that. And it's like when I step into one of those experiences, it's like there's a level of knowing and relationship where you kind of like everyone just runs up and hugs. They know you already.

There's no introductory period. Right, yeah. But there's also a projection onto you. Yeah, true. An expectation, like, okay okay this is the guy right like so and you're meeting these people for the first time so how do you like whether navigate that yeah i'm an introvert um too which is always interesting um i i know myself well enough now to sort of understand how to set my own boundaries when to lean in and when to step out socially.

And also probably I'm constantly sensing for assumptions about who I am and a level of connection that I might feel in any way is off. It's very rare that stuff like that happens. We've been so blessed. I mean, we have an astonishing community. You know, like camp, we have 375,

probably more than that actually, people coming in literally from all over the world to live communally in kids' bumps. 375? Wow, I didn't realize it was that big. So where is the summer camp? We rent a kid's sleepaway camp 90 minutes north of New York City. And it's 130 acres, 160 acres, something like that. It's like you see in the movies.

It's this beautiful, super awesome thing. And people are living in bunks. And so it's intense. Three days? Yeah, three and a half days. So what's the program? So it's everything. It's all the fun activities of a kid's sleepaway camp.

So it's like bonfire and talent show and color games and arts and crafts and all the stuff. Except grown-ups are different. Except grown-ups are different. Right, and then we work in all sorts of really cool workshops and programs around entrepreneurship and making and things like that. And just sort of like living a good life, whether it's positive psychology to bookbinding to branding to all sorts of different stuff. And like a full range of health and fitness and morning activities and yoga and all this other stuff. But one of the big parts of it too, is just doing nothing. You know, it's being transported out into a natural environment, like withdraw yourself from your everyday environment, drop yourself into this sort of like beautiful place in the middle of the woods,

surround yourself with a decent number of people. And what blows us away is that we figured most of the people would be from the Northeast or New York. Very few people are. We have people getting on planes, trains, and automobiles from the other side of the world, all over Europe, Australia, Asia, South America, Central America, Africa. It's unbelievable. So it's a really international community that all comes together and plays. And it's this amazing sort of like cultural exchange. But it's like we create the container. We create the ethos.

There's a sense of shared value. So very often, even though there's a ton to learn about business and contribution, we kind of like focus on the three buckets. There's programming for each of the three. It is entirely possible to spend the entire time there having amazingly deep conversations with a small group of people the whole time and never having any clue what they do for a living. Because often it just doesn't go there. And because I'm an introvert and I'm also sensitive to people's sensitivities, we also, we create all sorts of ways for people to move into it gently. But at the same time, make sure that you know that because a lot of people come alone, that you're welcome

from the moment that you show up. So we like crazy things like the first night we've done, we call people bingo. So we'll have a bingo card, but instead of having numbers and dots, it'll be like 25 boxes. It's like, find somebody who speaks Italian. Find somebody who's read two books in the last two months. So we're giving you an excuse to just walk up to random people and say hello. And there's something about just the shared ethos of our community where it's the most BS, facade-free, just cool community of people.

It's just amazing. Well, that's the vibration that you're putting out. So you're going to attract people that are attracted to the kind of message that you're putting out. I'm not surprised that that's the caliber and the quality of the person that's going to show up for your camp. They're amazing people. How many years have you been doing it?

This will be the third year. Third year, yeah. And do you have other people that are experts in different fields come in, or do you just have a team? You do. No, we have a big faculty that comes in and does all sorts of stuff. So, yeah, just as people fly in to be campers, people flying from all over the place to teach and to be a part of stuff. So yeah, just as people flying to be campers, people flying from all over the place to teach

and to be a part of it. And we draw everything from, I have people, we have people on our team that I trained as yoga teachers, like back in the day when I actually owned a studio and was teaching yoga to, one of my buddies from high school ended up being the,

running his own sort of like DJ company and being like the sort of big local radio DJ in Woodstock, New York, which is like 20 minutes from where we do this. And so like whole come over and, you know, spin record, you know, like one night and just hang out. It's like, you know, we're playing Frisbee in the middle of the field. And it's like, wait a minute. You know, like we're both 50 and, but it's like you know we're playing frisbee um in the middle of the field and it's like wait a minute yeah like we're both 50 and but it's literally it's like we're 17 years old did you go to summer camp when you were a kid i didn't or so this is all about like you recapturing this thing

now i'm getting a very clear exactly yeah that's beautiful man it's amazing i love it it's amazing and and i i mean i mean i can't i can talk about it without also talking about my wife, Stephanie, because she really runs camp. And she's my partner in business, my partner in life, and so much of Good Life Project, everything having to do with it, flows from who she is as a human being, just radiating kindness. And she's full-time, works with you now, right? Yeah, yeah.

And that's a relatively new development. It is. It's or two years yeah and so how is that i mean because i work with my wife too like how how do you how do you you know what are the pros and cons of that and how do you deal with stuff that comes up around that yeah so i mean we're really fortunate in that um we love to be around each other. We have pretty different skill sets. And they're two different skill sets, and they're all really needed. So we started working out together, at least in this business, where we were doing a lot of events and retreats and programs. And she's amazing at actually coordinating on-the-ground experiences and delivering just astonishing levels of detail and delight

and creating these levels of touch that are incredible. And so we just started doing it more and more very organically. It wasn't a plan like, okay, now is the time we will start working together. So we just started doing that more and more because I'm more wired to create content and media and experiences and do the front and forward facing stuff and the branding and speak and things like that. And even though we work, we have very different modes of work. They still complement each other.

And the things that we do are very different and they complement each other. So it just happens to work really well with us. The challenge is probably that we both really enjoy working with each other. We're both somewhat maniacal about if we're going to do something, we're going to do it at the highest possible level, and we want to set the bar for whatever it is that we're doing. And so that can lead to scenarios where we're working a lot. Yeah, you don't know.

There's no off switch. Yeah. That's the biggest thing. Do you find that also, Julie? Well, it's very similar in that Julie and I have very different skill sets like and and i'm very similar to you like the speaking and the writing and the content creation is like kind of where i excel and she's she knows how to produce you know a big event or a thing like she can get a macro vision and she can multitask and i tend to like you know be able to just do one thing yeah so all of that works really well but it is like

when we go out you know if we're going out to dinner, it's like, okay, is this a date or a business meeting? Like, what are we doing? And like trying to have some, you know, intention, you know, behind what that is becomes, you know, something that you have to be paying attention to. Yeah. And that I think is the one big thing is that it's just because you really

enjoy what you're doing and who you're doing it with, you know, doesn't mean you can't actually have too much of that too you know so sort of sometimes we just have to kind of say like okay let's step away from this a bit well on the uh maniacal attention to detail you know i'm gonna blow some smoke up your ass i will say this you know you're everything from how you laid out your websites to, you know, the content that you create is always, you know, is and always has been of like a super high caliber. And I've always appreciated that. And I think, you know, we're in this world where there's a lot of, you know, sort of charlatans is the wrong word, but there's a lot of, you know, people in this kind of

self-help space. And, you know, the internet has allowed, you know, people in this kind of self-help space and, you know, the internet has allowed, you know, created an amazing mechanism and vehicle for people to be helpful and to create communities and all of that is an amazing thing. But it's sometimes it's difficult to figure out, you know, separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, especially when there's kind of a culture of sales funnels and email lists and webinar. It's very easy to get lost in all of that. And I feel like you're somebody, I've always been attracted to you because I feel like you figured out how to really maintain a level of honesty and integrity in what you do. And it's not lost on me. I'm very

aware of those conscious decisions that you've made around that thank you i appreciate that and um and same thing back your way also i look at everything that you do and i'm like wow this is beautifully executed and it's really compelling and but at the same time it just feels real it feels like uh there's actually like i can feel the human beings behind it um yeah and And to us, you know, it's interesting. Something happened, actually, the genesis, one of the genesis of Good Life Project was that at the end of 2011, I started writing a blog post. And it was supposed to be my year in review, which I would do every year as a blogger, turned into this 40 page, like Warren Buffett style designed annual report. And, and in there, I teased at the end this thing called Good Life Project,

and I didn't really know what it was going to be or if it was going to be at the end. But I sort of shared these ideals, and I spent a lot of time and energy designing this and really writing something. And the response to that was tremendous. It got shared all over the place, and then these Ten Commandments of Business, Conscious Business It got shared all over the place. And then these 10 commandments of business, conscious business got shared. It kind of woke me up to the fact that the number of years before that, I hadn't been operating on the level that I was capable of operating.

You know, creating something beautiful, really going deep and investing my time and not just kind of like making it good enough, but actually saying, I want to create something that's really good. It reminded me of what I'm capable of doing. It reminded me of the joy of not just shipping, but actually, like, you know, it's important to get your stuff out into the world, but really trying to do something exceptional. You know, like, if you're going to do it, just like do the hell out of it. And it brought me back. And when I saw the response, and I remembered that I had that in me, I was kind of like, you know what, I don't want to do anything again that doesn't rise to this

level. You know, I want to serve on this level, I want to delight on this level, I want to solve on this level, and I want to create on this level. And so I, and granted, I drift away from that sometimes, you know, sometimes I get distracted. I'm kind of like, oh, it's good enough. And then I try, but I try and catch myself and be like, no, that's not what I'm here to do. Like good enough is not what I'm here to deliver. I think that's a beautiful place to wrap it up. But I can't let, I can't let you go without maybe imparting a last word of wisdom to somebody who's out there who perhaps is feeling stuck in their life. Maybe they're looking for the eject button out of their cubicle or whatever it is and just can't figure out that first step. What would you suggest is an initial action that somebody could take that's simple, that's digestible, that could perhaps shift

their energy and start them reconfiguring their trajectory? That is a really good question. A lot of directions I could go with that. I want to keep it simple. So to me, there's a precursor to action, especially when it comes to career and on the contribution side of that, and that's always self-knowledge, self-discovery. So thinking of a single question, you could ask yourself to start to get to know yourself better. And it's really, it's a question,

it's asking yourself, what's important to me? And take out a piece of paper and just free write. There's no right or wrong answer. Define important however you want to define it. But just on the top of the piece of paper, write down what's important to me. And just start to, like whatever pours through your mind, don't do it for anyone else to see. Assume nobody will ever see this actually. And just start to free write and see what comes up. And you may surprise yourself.

You may laugh. You may cry. You may get back in touch with something that you thought you had lost in a long time. That's the seed. That's the seed, you know, because that guides what the next action will be. I think that's beautiful advice. And that's advice that I've taken in my own life. And I think I would just add to that that you might have to write for a little bit before you can crack your core and get into whatever is really going on. And if you can't think of anything to write, then write, I can't believe I'm writing this and I hate writing this journal

until an honest thought comes up that might you know spark some insight uh that could then shift your energy yeah sometimes it takes a little time yeah or a couple days or a couple weeks or whatever but start with that first sentence indeed thanks so much man thank you i'm uh i'm i'm so psyched and happy for all your success it's well deserved you're a beautiful guy with a great message and you're impacting lives in a really tangible and profound way. And I wish you only the best and wind in your sails, my friend. Thank you. So the book is How to Live a Good Life.

It comes out October 18th, right? Yeah. When do you want me to post this? It's August now. I know. Actually. I post every Monday, so we can figure it out whenever you want. Yeah, like the Monday before would be awesome because we have some super cool pre-order stuff.

We partner with a tree planting foundation, actually. We're planting a tree for every book pre-order. That is the best pre-order incentive I've ever heard. That's phenomenal. Because I'm like, you know what? Let's do something that's not just good for us. Let's do something that actually makes a difference on a bigger scale. That's really cool.

I'm psyched. Well, best of success. Have a great time at camp. Thank you. All right. Peace. Plants. What a delightful gem that Jonathan Fields is. I really appreciated his openness,

his candor, his vulnerability, and his contemplative nature throughout the course of this conversation. It was really great. I hope you guys got a lot out of it. Please make a point of picking up his new book, How to Live a Good Life. You can do that by clicking through the Amazon banner ad at richroll.com. I would also suggest checking out his podcast, Good Life Project. You can find that on iTunes. And also, it began as a video series, so you should check out the Good Life Project YouTube page. Some of those videos are really cool. I actually was fortunate enough to do an interview with Jonathan on video back in the day, and you can find that there as well. As always, please make a point of checking out the show notes on the episode page at

richroll.com. We've got tons of links and resources and tools where you can do a deep dive on Jonathan and Good Life Project and learn a lot more about him and who he is and what makes him tick. So check that out. And thank you so much for sharing the show with your friends and with your colleagues around the water cooler and on social media. I appreciate it. Thank you for leaving a review on iTunes and also for subscribing on iTunes. If you have not subscribed to this show on iTunes, what are you waiting for? It's one click away.

It really does help us out a lot. And, again, I appreciate everybody who has made a habit and a practice of using the Amazon banner ad on my site at richroll.com. It really does help us out a lot. And again, I appreciate everybody who has made a habit and a practice of using the Amazon banner ad on my site at richroll.com. It really does help us out a lot. It doesn't cost you guys any cent extra. It's just Amazon kicks us some affiliate change and that really allows us to do what we do here. And it does not go unnoticed. If you want to contribute even further, we now have a Patreon page. You can find a banner for that right next to the Amazon banner ad on my site. Also, have you subscribed to my weekly newsletter? It's called Roll Call. It's a free, short, weekly rundown of just a few tips and tools and resources, things I've enjoyed over the course of the week, five or six quick things. It's really

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And theme music, as always, by Anna Lemma. Thanks for the love, you guys. Thanks for the support. Keep sharing the show with your friends. I love you, and I will see you soon. Peace. Plants. Thank you. Thank you.