James Patterson Shows Why Comfort Can Be a Trap

Summary

Afford Anything – Episode Summary
James Patterson Shows Why Comfort Can Be a Trap
Original Air Date: November 12, 2025
Host: Paula Pant | Guests: James Patterson and Dr. Patrick Ledden

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Episode Overview
This episode is a deep dive into the concept of disruption—what it means, how it’s different from change or adaptation, why so many people resist it, and how to harness it for personal and organizational growth. Host Paula Pant discusses these topics with two guests who embody the disruptive mindset: James Patterson, the world-famous, record-breaking author, and Dr. Patrick Ledden, Vanderbilt professor and co-author with Patterson of the new book “Disrupt Everything.” Both guests have made major pivots in their lives and careers, and the conversation focuses on how anyone can cultivate positive disruptive strengths, break through comfort and fear, and radically change the narrative of their own story.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Defining Disruption vs. Change and Adaptation

• Disruption: Fast, unexpected upheaval either in life, careers, or industries—more like a “tornado” than gradual change. (04:05–05:27)
  • James Patterson: “Disruption is everywhere. It really is an age of disruption. Every day we wake up and something new is happening. That’s pretty stunning.” (04:05)
  • Dr. Ledden: Distinguishes disruption (external, often sudden, forces) from slow, internal change. (05:05)
• Adaptation: The iterative, gradual evolution over time, in contrast to the immediate, often jarring nature of disruption. (19:09)
• Key Quote:
  • James Patterson: “Disruption is more of a tornado.” (05:27)

2. Disruption as Opportunity, Not Threat

• Many people see disruption as negative, but both guests argue it’s fertile ground for growth and opportunity if approached with the right mindset. (06:35)
  • Dr. Ledden: “A lot of people have a limiting mindset...we want to say, no, it’s fertile ground. There’s some opportunity within this.” (06:35)
• James Patterson’s entire career is described as positive disruption, breaking conventional industry norms—like submitting four portfolios to get hired, then challenging the publishing industry’s “one book a year.” (07:13–11:41)
  • Patterson: “Where’s the rule written that you can only do one book a year? ...That just doesn’t make sense to me, so I challenged it.” (11:23)
• Persistence and Gumption are keys to positive disruption:
  • “People either have that [gumption] or they don’t...but a lot of people need that starter.” – Patterson (07:13)

3. Process for Personal Disruption

• The Fire Inside: Positive disruption starts with identifying your passions and purpose, but not everyone knows what those are. (08:18–10:02)
  • Dr. Ledden: Ask, “What would you do even if you weren’t being paid for it?” (09:40)
• Overcoming Internal Barriers:
  • Many limitations are internal; people freeze, fight, or flee when faced with disruption. (13:14)
  • Dr. Ledden: “It’s getting in your own way that can be a real problem... You have agency; make a choice here.” (13:14–14:20)
• Positive Disruptors share certain behaviors—16 identified in the research—nobody has all, but everyone has some. Figure out your strengths and pull in others for support. (13:14–14:20)

4. Disruption in Organizations and Industries

• Academia and Other Sectors Are Ripe:
  • Dr. Ledden discusses how Covid forced universities to adapt and disrupt, reflecting broader patterns in every industry. (14:29–15:18)
• Universal Need for Disruption:
  • James Patterson: “It’s hard to imagine any business...that isn’t ripe for disruption... You better disrupt, even if you want to maintain the status quo.” (15:18)
• Missions Require Buy-In and Willingness to Disrupt:
  • Example of a publishing house needing every department—sales, editing, even the receptionist—to change in order to reach a new mission. (16:14)
  • Patterson: “Insofar as you get buy-in, your mission works... If people aren’t willing to disrupt—which means change pretty rapidly—your mission isn’t going to work.” (16:14)

5. Overcoming the Lure of Comfort

• Dr. Ledden: “The status quo is a deceptive little devil.” (17:02)
• Clinging to comfort is the antithesis of positive disruption and personal growth.
• Patterson: “People fight change...it can create problems for them.” (18:16)
• Dr. Ledden: “What holds you back from being a positive disruptor isn’t your yearning to be a negative disruptor...it’s a relentless pursuit of comfort.” (63:40)

6. Navigating Internal and External Friction

• Internal friction (fears, limiting beliefs) is usually stronger than external obstacles.
• Patterson: “Sometimes it’s a case of trying to help people get past their fears, their large fears, which is really important.” (69:33)
• Ledden: Sometimes, choosing not to change is the most disruptive—so long as it’s intentional and aligned with values. (33:58–34:45)
  • Key: Make conscious decisions rather than react on autopilot.

7. Framework: Anchoring Disruption to Mission, Values, and Relationships

• Mission vs. Purpose:
  • Mission = What you do and how; Purpose = Why you do it. (45:52–47:03)
• Values Anchor the Fire: (35:21)
  • Ensure actions in moments of disruption are aligned with deeply held values, both as an individual and as an organization.
• Relationships as Headwinds or Tailwinds:
  • Assess whether relationships support or hinder your purpose. Sometimes this requires boundary-setting or difficult decisions. (36:12–37:53)

8. Changing Your Story Changes Your Trajectory

• Sometimes you need to leave or shift environments to escape a limiting narrative about yourself—a major lever for career growth. (26:39, 70:41)
  • “Sometimes you go in at your first job and you’re still the kid there...six years later, you have to leave because you’re not the kid.” – Patterson (70:41)

9. Human Stories of Positive Disruption

• Jamie Andrew: After a life-altering tragedy (losing his hands and feet while mountaineering), he embraced incremental self-challenges as positive disruption. (23:45–25:28)
• Patterns of Positive Disruptors:
  • Don’t react immediately—first step is discernment. Lean into strengths, seek support, don’t self-limit, reflect on lessons (25:42–26:39).

10. Collaboration and Diverse Skill Sets in Disruption

• Collaborating with people with complementary skills fosters innovation. (38:57–41:43)
  • Patterson: “If we’re going to actually save our world, it probably means we’ll eventually learn how to collaborate.”
  • Cites writing partnerships with Clinton, Dolly Parton: each brought authenticity and storytelling skill.

11. AI and the Future of Disruption

• Approach AI as a tool—not a fear. Learn its impact, find where you can add value, and be prepared to educate others. (47:41–54:00)
  • Patterson: “Don’t spend time being fearful because it’s not useful.” (47:59)
  • Ledden: “He [company writer] chose to be a trailblazer... Then a torchbearer, leading the movement in the organization.” (50:09)
• The most indispensable employees are those who proactively embrace and educate around disruptions like AI. (51:04–51:16)

12. Humility, Growth, and Accepting Weaknesses

• Positive disruptors are learners, focus on their strengths, and accept their weaknesses (57:54–58:00).
  • Patterson: “Walking in your own shoes...I don’t do certain things well at all...That’s fine.”
• The partnership between the guests is cited as a case study in collaborative strengths and humility. (61:18)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• James Patterson:
  • “Disruption is everywhere. It really is an age of disruption.” (04:05)
  • “Hungry dogs run faster.” (11:44)
  • “Sometimes you go in at your first job...six years later, you’re still the kid and you can’t get past [that]...you have to leave.” (70:41)
  • “Where’s the rule written that you can only do one book a year?” (11:23, 68:19)
  • “Don’t spend time being fearful because it’s not useful.” (47:59)
  • “Collaborating...is probably a good thing. Not everyone should [do it], but I always thought it would be kind of useful.” (38:57)
• Dr. Patrick Ledden:
  • “A lot of people have a limiting mindset...We want to say, no, [disruption is] fertile ground.” (06:35)
  • “The status quo is a deceptive little devil.” (17:02)
  • “What holds you back from being a positive disruptor...is a relentless pursuit of comfort.” (63:40)
  • “You’re making a conscious decision. And I would argue...in the face of disruption, if you say no to change, you might be the most disruptive person in the room.” (33:58)
  • “Lean into [your] strengths, seek support, don’t self-limit.” (26:39)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Introduction and Guest Background – 00:00–03:57
• Defining Disruption & How it Differs from Change – 04:05–05:29
• Disruption as Opportunity, Not Threat – 05:29–06:53
• Cultivating Persistence & Gumption – 06:53–08:18
• Process for Positive Disruption / The Fire Inside – 08:18–10:02
• Disrupting Publishing Industry Norms – 10:02–11:41
• Navigating Internal vs. External Friction – 12:30–14:20
• Disruption in Academia & Industries – 14:20–16:14
• Status Quo, Buy-in, and Agency – 16:14–18:16
• Comparison of Disruption/Adaptation – 19:05
• Resilience in Sudden and Gradual Disruptions – 23:45–25:28
• Behaviors of Positive Disruptors – 25:42–26:39
• Changing the Narrative & Career Transitions – 26:39–30:17
• Making Conscious Choices, Not Just Change for Its Own Sake – 33:58–34:45
• Values and Relationships as Anchors – 35:21–37:53
• Collaborative Disruption and Co-Authoring Experience – 38:57–41:43
• Disruption and AI: Practical Approaches – 47:41–54:00
• Instinct, Decision Making, and Humility – 55:00–59:20
• Comfort as the Real Trap – 64:13
• Key Takeaways Recap – 67:43–70:50

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Three Key Takeaways (as summarized by Paula Pant):

1. “Your disruptive edge comes from doing things others won’t.”

   • Persistence and challenging the status quo can transform your career.

2. “Fear is expensive.”

   • The biggest obstacles are often internal fears that prevent you from making changes.

3. “The story you tell yourself determines your salary ceiling.”

   • Changing your self-narrative or environment can be the key to unlocking higher income and better opportunities.

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Where to Find the Guests:

• James Patterson – jamespatterson.com
• Dr. Patrick Ledden – patrickledden.com

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Tone & Concluding Thoughts

The episode is dynamic, candid, and filled with tangible advice for listeners seeking not just financial well-being, but also deeper personal fulfillment through courageous, thoughtful disruption. Patterson’s lifelong approach of “chopping wood”—taking direct action—and Ledden’s research-backed behavioral frameworks combine to offer a toolkit for anyone considering a career pivot, leadership challenge, or personal reset. The message: Comfort is tempting, but real growth—and often, happiness—lies on the other side of disruption.

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Transcript

[Paula Pant]

Imagine that you're at the absolute peak of your career. You're the CEO of a prominent advertising company at the age of 36, but you feel like you're driving in the wrong lane. It's wrong. And so you make a hard career pivot, and it works out beautifully. My guests today know exactly what that's like. We're joined by James Patterson, the author who has sold more than 425 million copies of his books. To put that in perspective, James Patterson has sold more books than the entire population of the US And Canada combined. Forbes tracked his income and over a decade, his total income, not his net worth, by the way. His total income is estimated at 700 million in 2016 alone. According to Forbes, he made 95 million just in that one year. He is someone for whom that career pivot worked out well. He is one of the most prolific and successful authors in history. He has co authored books with President Clinton, Dolly Parton. And now his latest co author is Dr. Patrick Ledden, who also joins us in this interview. So this is a joint interview with two of them. Dr. Ledden is a professor at Vanderbilt University, where he teaches corporate strategy, negotiation, advanced marketing, and crisis leadership. He himself also made a big career pivot. He spent his 20s as an army rang, then he built and sold a successful business and then he moved into academia as a professor of Vanderbilt. Both of these guys had huge success early in life, and both of them utterly disrupted their lives in order to make huge career and life transitions. And they did so multiple times. James Patterson was actually a PhD candidate at Vanderbilt before he disrupted that to enter the advertising world, which led to him becoming the CEO of J. Walter Thompson at the age of 36. And then he disrupted that again to become the famous James Patterson that we all know today. So it's disruption after disruption. Together, these two have researched how people navigate change, how people create positive disruption in their lives. They've researched how to turn disruption into a force for good. And they've published their findings. And in a new book called Disrupt Everything. And in our conversation today, we dive into what disruption really means, how it's different from the concept of mere change or adaptation. We talk about why some people freeze while others thrive. And we talk about how you can develop your disruptive strengths. We also talk about creating disruption inside of industries or inside of organizations. That James talks about how he went from publishing one book per year to publishing as many as six books a year, which totally disrupted the norms of the publishing industry. So I should introduce this show, shouldn't I? I've just disrupted the format of our intro. Welcome to the Afford Anything podcast, the show that knows you can afford anything. Not everything. This show covers five pillars. Financial, psychology, increasing your income, investing, real estate, and entrepreneurship. It's double eye Fire. And today's conversation resonates with anyone who's looking to change careers, to retire early, to move abroad, to in some way totally disrupt your life, maybe to start a new business or a nonprofit to create some type of disruption. Or to anyone who's interested in shaking up the norms and practices inside of your own industry or inside of your own company or organization. Anyone who wants to be a positive disruptor. You're going to enjoy today's conversation with mega bestselling author James Patterson and Vanderbilt professor Dr. Patrick Ledden. Enjoy. Welcome, James. Welcome, Patrick.

[James Patterson]

Thank you.

[Dr. Patrick Ledden]

Thank you. Hey, glad to be here.

[James Patterson]

Terrific to be here. Absolutely.

[Paula Pant]

Thank you for joining me on the show. I'd like to open by asking, what is disruption? How do you define this?

[James Patterson]

Disruption is everywhere. It really is an age of disruption. Every day we wake up and something new is happening. That's pretty stunning. The government is into disruption right now. We've got wars, we have health scares, we have AI. We have things happening in the workplace that's never happened before, at least not as rapidly as it happens change. Television, network, sports, incredible disruption in the sports world, nil. All sorts of things that people didn't expect to happen.

[Dr. Patrick Ledden]

Yeah, I would agree. And in building on that, they scale all the way down to our dinner table at home and our own careers. And people are disrupted when they get a work opportunity or they lose a job and everything in between. So it's from the big to the small and everything in between.

[James Patterson]

And it creates incredible stress on us. And anybody you talk to, your doctor, they'll say stress is the killer. And one of the things we're trying to do is cut down people's stress a lot.

[Paula Pant]

What is the difference between disruption and change?

[James Patterson]

Change is much slower and gradual. That's one piece, Patrick.

[Dr. Patrick Ledden]

Yeah. And oftentimes in organizations or in certain entities, change is kind of a decision we make internally. Like we're going to implement a new system. We're going to do. Disruption oftentimes comes out of left field or from a customer call or whatever it might be, and it just turns things on the head. And oftentimes in times of disruption, you know, you think about in organizations, but same in your family and your life. People freeze, people fight, people flee. We want to help them. Flip the script.

[James Patterson]

Yeah. Disruption is more of a tornado.

[Paula Pant]

It sounds as though. I mean, I think for a lot of people, disruption has a negative connotation, but there are positive disruptions as well. And there are also intended disruptions.

[James Patterson]

Yeah, my entire career is just one disruption after another. Positive disruptions. I've had two very successful careers. I started. I was. I ran an ad agency. I was the CEO, youngest one. When I was 37, it was all disruption, starting with, I came out of grad school at Vanderbilt and needed a job, and I had no marketing experience, no advertising experience. J. Walter Thompson required you to put together a portfolio of sample ads. I did it in the Washington Jefferson Hotel, which is a horrifying place in New York City. So I brought them a portfolio, and that was supposed to be the way it works, but I have a disruptive nature, positive disruption. I brought them another portfolio the second week. I brought them another portfolio the third week. Then they hired me. They said, okay, their portfolios are pretty good, and this guy has something, whatever the heck it is, and we can get into publishing later. But that was nothing but positive disruption after positive disruptions.

[Dr. Patrick Ledden]

Yeah, absolutely. You mentioned on the front end of that question about disrupting having a negative connotation. And we would just say that, yeah, a lot of people have a limiting mindset. The idea that I just need to survive this thing or endure it or it's breaking something. We want to say, no, it's fertile ground. There's some opportunity within this.

[Paula Pant]

James, in the story that you just described as to how you got that job at J. Walter Thompson, when you were young, you brought them portfolios for four consecutive weeks. They hired you in that fourth week. What I hear in that story is gumption and persistence. To what extent are those qualities related to positive disruption?

[James Patterson]

Well, one way or the other, people either have that or don't. If you have a lot of gumption, you still need help in terms of you got a great idea to fix things at work and to fix your team, or you have a great idea for a product or a great idea for a novel or whatever, it will help you to move that thing forward in an orderly, constructive manner. And in some cases, people don't have that, and this really helps them to get started. Mel Givens has that book, Let them. But she had a book earlier. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. And that's just a starter. It's because she was having trouble in her life at that point. And she just said, this is five, four, three, two, one. Get out of bed. Five, four, three, two, 1. Make that call for that job interview. And a lot of people need that sort of starter. That first step that get me moving, and then the second step.

[Dr. Patrick Ledden]

Yeah, I would add to that, that tenacity is definitely a principle. But we don't just start off with, hey, have tenacity, have some grit, get out there and make it happen. We start off with a whole process around, think through things, understand your strengths. Then it gets to applying your strengths, which is really when tenacity starts to come into play.

[Paula Pant]

All right, let's talk through that process then. It begins with fire. And that fire is really anchored by your passions. A lot of people don't know what their passions are. A lot of people have never really heard an inner voice. It sounds a little bit esoteric. How do people start unearthing that?

[Dr. Patrick Ledden]

Some people, they'll look at it and they'll say, fire inside. We explain it and they go, check. I got it. Other people might say, I don't know those components. I don't understand how to uncover my passions. Hey, we got you, too. The idea behind this is that we all have a fire inside. We have some bigger purpose mission in life, and we want to see opportunities within disruption to actually throw some positive fuel on that fire, or in some.

[James Patterson]

Cases, even to start the fire. Some people, I mean, it's kind of ashes, but there's a potential there for passion. We, you know, not in every single person, but in most people, for the.

[Paula Pant]

People who are trying to unlock their passion, would you recommend following a curiosity and seeing if that deepens or are there other prescribed paths?

[James Patterson]

I think there are a whole lot of other different things. I mean, that's certainly one of them. And some people, they kind of know their passions. They just. I'm not sure how to make these things happen. Or they can be afraid of it, or they don't have enough confidence, or something's gotten in the way, or their family life has gotten in the way, or, you know, so a lot of things that get in the way of our passion.

[Dr. Patrick Ledden]

No, no, you're right. I mean, I think somebody might come to it and go, got it. Move on. Other people might say, I don't know what that fire inside is. And then the question might be, what would you do even if you weren't being paid for it? Start there and start to explore that a little bit and ask other people what seems to light your eyes up and start exploring that. But ultimately it's about, how do you live out that fire inside in the face of all the stuff that life Throws at you.

[Paula Pant]

James, I'd like to learn more about your story because before you started working with Patrick, you know, you were a lone wolf. When you first started writing, your first major disruption was rather than just publishing one book a year, you published two a year, then three a year, and then six a year, which was enormously disruptive to the publishing process in a.

[James Patterson]

Positive way, I must say. If you look at their bank accounts.

[Paula Pant]

Right. Can you talk about how you worked through that disruption?

[James Patterson]

So many things here are just looking at things and going, and we do this. We all do this. That's not working as well as it could or that's not working at all. When I started to move up at J. Walter Thompson New York office, when I started running, it was. Some of the offices were very, very good. New York wasn't very good, and people didn't want to go to work there. So I ran this ad on the back page of the Times once, and it was eight questions like, here are the ingredients on a can of beans, vinegar, water, whatever the heck make it sound delicious. All of them were things where you could immediately find out whether a person could write and whether. And more important, whether they could solve problems. So there was a positive disruption, figuring out a way to hire people when they didn't think they wanted to come to J. Walter Thompson.

[Paula Pant]

And.

[James Patterson]

And then in the book business, going from one book to two book to three, it started with three actually. Just looking and go, where's the rule written that you can only do one book a year? One book every two years? What is that rule? I'm sorry, it just doesn't make sense to me. So I challenged it.

[Paula Pant]

How did you find the time to do that?

[James Patterson]

You know, a lot of it just has to do with the way you're brought up. My grandmother, she was great. 8th grade education, but she was brilliant. She gave me all the advice in the world, and she really was my prime motivator. And her thing was, you can do this. She said, you're not going to play in the NBA, so forget about that one. You can't go to your left as well as you need to. I could dunk in high school. There's a little guy I could dunk. But she said, you're not going to, but you can do a lot of stuff. And she had a line, hungry dogs run faster. And she also had a thing, Go chop wood. Which is basically, stop talking about it and go do it. So a little bit of his tough love, too. Come on, you got to get up off your Butt you got to go do something. Patrick was an Army Ranger. Army Rangers. That's a tough way to learn how to move on with life when being.

[Paula Pant]

Disruptive in a field. And you've told two stories. One about how, as the CEO of J. Walter Thompson, you disrupted the way that hiring is done. Was done. And the second was as an author, you disrupted the pace of publishing. There are, of course, the internal sources of friction. Time management being one, just creative barriers being another. But then there are the external sources of frictions that you encounter as well. Pushback. Are there any overarching themes that you found as you have had to navigate those? And which of the two do you find to be stronger? The internal or external sources of friction?

[James Patterson]

It depends on the person. But Patrick, you're great in this area.

[Dr. Patrick Ledden]

Yeah, I think that probably one stronger than the other, and probably it's predominantly internal, to be honest with you. It's getting in your own way sometimes can be a real problem. And that's why it's important to surround yourself with different voices who can help you think through things. But one thing we tried to help people do is recognize that in moments of disruption, you have to step back and discern what role you're going to take on. Which hat do you kind of want to wear right now or need to wear? What's the context of the situation calling for? We encourage people to, hey, you have agency. Make a choice here. And we also help them realize that they have some strengths. And the research, the research is pretty strong behind this. We spent over three years at Vanderbilt University, I did, leading a team where we studied positive disruptors in the world. And we found these 16 behaviors that showed up in what they do. And we also found that Nobody had all 16 of them, but they had some, and everybody listening to this has some. So the ability to discern, like, what role should I take on and which of these disruptive strengths do I have that I can apply and. And maybe who I can bring with me on this journey is really powerful. So it goes from, gosh, there's all these reasons I can't do this to what's going to stop me from doing this. It's a choice, and there's a path in front of me and I've got everything I need to do it.

[Paula Pant]

You know, Patrick, it strikes me. So you are a professor at Vanderbilt. Do you see academia as at odds with the notion of disruption?

[James Patterson]

Not anymore.

[Dr. Patrick Ledden]

Yeah, I think the world's caught up in that milk tech, to be honest with you. You know, take Vanderbilt, for example, we never taught classes that were 100 people. In general, we never taught anything online. Then Covid hit, you better figure out how to do it. And we're seeing that across academia and just how things are shifting, whether it's questioning, should I go back and get an mba, Are they just living in ivory tower and can't connect? I mean, I think I'm a pretty non traditional professor at a Vanderbilt University, and I spent my 20s jumping out of planes and running around the woods and the next 15 years building a business before I sold it off and then jumping into the university. And I think the fact that they would even bring somebody like me into a classroom, even though I have on paper what you need, I think shows that we're open in many ways and need to be open and having some different voices in the conversation. But in general, I would put education right at the top of the list of ripe for disruption. And it's either you figure out how to do it or it's going to do it to you.

[James Patterson]

It's hard to imagine any business, any area, any industry that isn't right for disruption. You just look at anything right now and you go, you better disrupt. Even if you want to maintain the status quo you want to maintain, you want to be Harvard, you want to stay Harvard, you're going to need to disrupt.

[Dr. Patrick Ledden]

When you think of education or organizations in general, there's a lot of senior leaders who kind of can envision where they need to go to where they need to take the institution or where they need to take the business or whatever it might be. But then they look at the organization they have and they're not convinced they have the leaders or the culture to help them get there. And what we're trying to do is help within organizations, at least help people realize that every job needs to be disrupted in some way, every person needs to be a positive disruptor. So then all of a sudden it becomes, I'm a senior leader trying to take my organization in a new direction, and I don't know how I'm going to bring them to. I've got 80% of my people who are understanding what it means to be a positive disruptor and they're willing to do it.

[James Patterson]

And so much of success in life is about missions, having a mission. And one of the things we help people to do is to have personal missions. You know, we, we sold this book to Hachette, who's my publisher, and they had two new people coming in to run Hachette, and they had A mission. It was a different mission than what had existed before it. For that mission to work, they needed to have the editors disrupt the way they buy books and the way they edit it. They needed the. The sales department to disrupt the way they've been selling. They needed the receptionist to disrupt the way they greet people. And insofar as you get buy in, your mission works. And if you don't get buy in, if people aren't willing to disrupt, which means change pretty rapidly, your mission isn't going to work. Or you might have the wrong mission.

[Dr. Patrick Ledden]

Yeah, you know, you hit the status quo as it is, we call it. The status quo is a deceptive little devil. And it's one of four fundamental facts that we uncovered in the research. And it is true. I mean, think about back to Covid. People were like, why can't we get back to normal? Or what's the new normal? And one thing we realize is things are constantly changing. And we don't always recognize that or act that way. We try to kind of bury our head or hope it goes back. So one thing is that, yes, status quo is deceptive. You think it's going to stay that way. It's not going to. Which is good too. If you're going through some tough times, you know it's going to change. But that's okay, because the second fact is that you're wired to handle this. You have a big brain that can do cool things. You have experiences where you've gotten over challenging times. And you also have lots of resources. You have friends, you have family, you have co workers. You may have some money that you can, you know, loosen up to do certain things. You also have technology. As disruptive as it is, it's a great resource. And then the other two really quickly is that relationships in life really, really matter. As Jim and I were studying this, we're like, this is a really key thing that every relationship you have in life, if you think about it, is it a headwind or is it a tailwind? Is it pushing you closer to your purpose or holding you back and what are you doing to other people? And then that last one, I think is really critical is the idea. The fourth fundamental fact is that your time here is finite. Make it count in ways that matter.

[James Patterson]

And people fight change. It's a little bit in their nature. And if they fight change, it can create problems for them. Publishing, they fight change. They've been doing things the way they've been doing for the last 50 years. You talked earlier about colleges, colleges, universities, Fight change. People that run shows fight change. They want to do things the way CNN wants to. They still want to put a person up there. Talking heads like they did in the 50s. For the most part, that's not going to work. It's not going to work terribly well unless that talking head is magical. MSNBC has one talking head who's magical. But that's a hard thing. And they fight it. They fight it. Everybody. People fight change. And Patrick and I, for the most part, we kind of change. Pretty much everything I've done and writing with co writers, it's always been, okay, I'm kind of open. Let's give it a shot, let's see what happens with it.

[Paula Pant]

What's the difference then between disruption and adaptation?

[Dr. Patrick Ledden]

Oh, I think adaptation would be very evolving too. I mean, I think about it's almost iterative nature over the course of time, as opposed to disruption can very much be your next customer call, I mean, that quickly, or your results when you go to the doctor of a blood screening, something somebody says to you around the dinner table, a phone call from somebody who gives you an amazing opportunity to go to a new city and take a new job. And as positive as that might feel, it could be very disruptive to you.

[James Patterson]

And your family or so the next person you interview. Yeah, it could be a disruption. It could. All of a sudden the show goes a little differently than you thought it would go because somebody came on and that's just the nature of that. It changed everything. For better or worse.

[Paula Pant]

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[James Patterson]

That story there starts with a very negative disruption and then there are a series of positive disruptions yeah, There is.

[Dr. Patrick Ledden]

Referring to Jamie Andrews story about losing his hands and his feet and his friend on climbing a mountain in the Alps. Obviously there's risk associated with type of climbing, but there was a change in the weather and they ended up spending five days on the mountain. And that was very obviously, that's a. It could be framed as a negative disruption. Certainly not framed. It is. I mean, you wouldn't wish that on your worst enemy to wake up in a hospital and be told they're going to have to amputate your hands and your feet. But he decided to go very incrementally in the idea of somebody brushed my teeth today, I'm going to brush my own tomorrow. And started to take ownership. When I met Jamie Andrew, he actually traveled from Scotland, where he lives, to the United States and walked in to give a presentation. I mean, it's one little disruptive choice he made after another. When you talk about ones that are more gradual over time, I think that to the idea of. We had a chance to talk to happened to be another climber, but a young lady who was the youngest female North American to climb Mount Everest at 18 years old. And we talk about the evolution of a relationship with her father, where initially he was guiding her on small family hikes. And then she became his peer because she became as strong as he was. And then at the end, as she climbed Everest, he stayed at Base Camp and she went forward. You talk to her father, his name's Rodney Westlake. You talk to him and you feel that disruptive momentum that he felt over the course of time and. And he had to process his way through it too. I mean, and when you think about. She got to the top of the mountain. Yes. But he also stayed in Base Camp. The relationship was disrupted. So it happened over the course of time. What we found is that everybody we talked to, regardless of how it came out, suddenly over the course of time, we just started to realize there's a pattern that they follow and there's a way that they look at things and the way that they approach things. And that's what we. We found so intriguing in the research.

[Paula Pant]

Can you elaborate a bit more on the patterns that people follow who are successful at positive disruption and not just what are they doing, but what is it that they're not doing? What are the things that they're avoiding?

[Dr. Patrick Ledden]

I would say the first step is discernment. So the thing they're not doing is reacting immediately. They're not just shooting from the hip or somebody said something to me And I'm just going to lose it type of thing. What they did is they discerned. So that's what they didn't do on the behavior side. They didn't focus on all the stuff they couldn't do well. They didn't focus on I can't go left. So therefore my, you know, Jim was referring to earlier on the basketball court. They said, what can I do? And I'm going to lean into that. I'm going to find some people around me who could do some other things. They leaned into their strengths, not focused on trying to build up their weaknesses. One thing that they didn't do is they didn't limit themselves in the ability. They could have a big impact. There were people that may have just disrupted themselves, but others disrupted family, industry, society. And they didn't put those self imposed constraints on themselves because they started to see what was possible. And the other thing they didn't do is they didn't just move on to the next thing. They always stepped back and say, what did I learn? What can I do differently? How can I recommit to something new?

[James Patterson]

And storytelling is really important to both of us and important in terms of getting people to understand, getting them involved, getting to stay involved. Every company has a story and that story either moves you forward or moves you. Back when I was in advertising we had Ford and in those days Ford was having trouble and it was Ford found on road dead or fix or repair daily. That's a bad story. Bill Clinton had a bad story initially which was all pot smoking and he changed the story in terms of what he accomplished in Arkansas. Sometimes we have to leave our job and move to another job because we need to change the story. Sometimes you go in at your first job and you're always, you're still the kid there and six years later you're still the kid and you can't get past and you have to leave because you're not the kid. Maybe you never were the kid. But you have to change jobs with our families sometimes it's very difficult to change the story. Mom and dad always kind of, well, you know, you've always been well, but I'm not that way anymore. Mom and dad and changes the story. Changing the story is important.

[Paula Pant]

You were the CEO of J. Walter Thompson by the age of 36 and yet you had to dramatically change your story to become an author. How do you know when it's time to disrupt inside of your organization? Like if you had stayed at J. Walter Thompson vs. When you hear that whoosh of traffic on the highway and you think, you know what, I'm driving in the wrong lane. It's time for me to. Rather than disrupt within, I need to disrupt in a totally different lane.

[James Patterson]

Frequently it's harder than it should be. Sometimes it's just hard for us to step back and be kind of rational. I should have been able to step back at Thompson. There's some good things about this. I love the people that I work with. One of the things in terms of hiring there, I would only hire people who were talented and good to be around. So that was a pleasurable thing about the job. Interfacing with clients I didn't like as much in terms of just what you had to do or not do in terms of promoting their projects or products. At that point, I was writing novels and beginning to get successful. And I should have been able to logically figure that out, but I didn't. Couldn't. Patrick, I don't know his situation. At a certain point, he might have said, okay, it's time. It's time for something else.

[Dr. Patrick Ledden]

Yeah, I think of it a little bit like, when a disruption hits, you have to think a little bit about the emotions and process through them. So you have to think about. I liken it a little bit to a roller coaster. Some people love to hold onto the bar and scream, and other people like to raise their hand and smile. And that's how we hit disruption at times sometimes. But the ability to think, like how you feel about this and what do you do with it, you got to process through those things. Like when Jim was talking about things he liked about his work, and didn't he have to kind of process through that emotional piece before you make a good decision? And I think that when, for me, when James Patterson comes and asks my students, are you living a good life? And then starts to tell about how he created his own good life at that very moment. It was disruptive to me in that I was like, I want to study that. I want to know how people can take these disruptive moments. Whether it's, I'm driving in traffic and I don't want to go into the office today and I've kind of hit a limit, or I got caught on the top of a mountain or whatever it might be. How do they do that and say, okay, I'm going to make a move and I'm going to see something good really come from this. I'm going to innovate something new. And that was really interesting to me. Which then when you have A good question you're trying to discover. It becomes a great research piece.

[James Patterson]

You have a terrific idea for your company or your team or a product or something. You wanted a company you want to start yourself. You don't kind of know exactly how to take that next step.

[Paula Pant]

Right. Patrick, how did you know when you made the transition from being an Army Ranger to running a business, and then later from running a business to becoming a professor? How did you know when it was time to make those shifts?

[James Patterson]

He was tired of jumping out of airplanes.

[Dr. Patrick Ledden]

Takes a toll for me on the military side. I was just kind of good at the military. You know, they tell you to turn right, I turn right. Tell you to turn left, I turn left. Told me to shut up, I shut up. I was pretty good at. And then you just progressed. I went to infantry school and airborne school and Ranger school and did all those things. And my last job in the army was a company commander in the 82nd Airborne Division. And I'd heard so many people tell me, enjoy the time as a platoon leader, enjoy the time as a company commander. Because after that, it all changes. And that was kind of just all changes in that you get away from the soldiers, you're doing a lot more staff type of things. And I was like, I love this part of being with the soldiers. I don't know if I'll love that stuff. And I just decided at that moment, I heard that enough to me, I was like, I'm going to move in a new direction. And it was tough in many ways, because you're on a pretty good track. The path I was on was a good path, probably to high rank. But on the other hand, once you start to lose that passion around something, are you serving the soldiers? In my case, well. And that's when I decided, I'm going to make a move. It wasn't that I lost the passion to make a positive impact in people's lives. I hope I do that across my whole career. But it was the passion of, I don't want to keep putting on the uniform and sit in a cubicle. For me, that just wasn't the right fit. So when I pivoted to coming out of the military, I still wanted to build something and do something cool. And that's eventually started on a business, and I ran it for 12 years, and I was out of the country doing some work. And I came back after three months out of the country, and somebody said, my boss would like to talk to you at their company. And I said, why? He said, because you've been gone for three months, and your clients haven't quit and your employees haven't quit. We're looking to acquire someone. So that was an acquisition situation. And in that type of situation, when you exit, it's tough, too. Cause it's like the business was our. We had two children, and then we had our business. It was like our third child. At every meal, my wife and I worked together on the business, but we decided it was the right thing to do and move on to the next step. So sometimes, you know, other voices will help you figure it out. Sometimes situations arise, and those disruptions, like, my boss wants to talk to you, maybe hire a business was a moment for me to say, I could hold onto what I have, which could be a perfectly good choice, or I can move and go in a new direction. Actually, this new company can take our employees to a whole nother place that I probably won't get them either.

[James Patterson]

And sometimes it's a case of trying to help people get past their fears, their large fears, which is really important. And pretty much all of us have those fears. Okay, I'm not sure if this will work. I'm not sure if I really want to change. I'm not sure if I can do this. I'm not sure. So helping people to get comfortable, don't be afraid of it. You don't have to make the move necessarily, but let's figure it out, and then let's see if you're still afraid or as afraid. It's hard for a lot of people to open their minds up. It just is. They just. They have difficulty at helping people to open their minds up. You know, with our son Jack, with. With sue and I, my wife, it was always, let's just open doors for him. Not that you should do this, but, you know, what would be like to do this? What's it like to play soccer? What's it like to take an extra math course? What's that like? And you don't have to do it, but let's just open door and take a peek in there. There's a lot of times people, oh, I never would want to do that. Well, you don't know until you try it a little bit. I mean, constantly. People are always saying, I wouldn't want to do that. I don't want to go to that kind of. I wouldn't eat that kind of food. Well, let's try it. And very often people go, I live in Palm Beach. Before I moved here, I would have said, there's no way that I will want to be in Palm beach or deal with Palm beach people, or deal with Palm Beach. And I was wrong. It's delightful here. Sorry.

[Dr. Patrick Ledden]

And if I could make one additional point, I think this is a really critical thing. As we studied this, you might think, well, you're going to be a positive disruptor, which means you're going to change and you're going to change and you're going to change, and you're going to change. That's not the game we're setting up here. We're not saying that at all. We're saying you need to be open to change. And there may be times you take that job or take on that project at work or have a conversation with someone. There's also times where you might go, you know what? That disruption's out there. I was open to thinking about it, but I'm actually going to double down on stability right now. We already have a good product in the market, the way we go on family vacations. Great, whatever it might be. But the point is, you're making a conscious decision. And I would argue, Jim and I would argue that in the face of disruption, if you say no to change, you might be the most disruptive person in the room sometimes because you say, that's not who we are. We're not going to do that right now.

[James Patterson]

That's huge. Huge. With companies. We have to expand. We gotta do this, we gotta do that. I mean, that's destroyed so many companies. They expand and then. Oh, what happened to them? Well, they just expanded too many times. They made too many bad decisions, and now that great company is no more, or they're half of what they were.

[Dr. Patrick Ledden]

They lost the fire inside themselves. They lost the connection to that.

[Paula Pant]

Yeah, right. They strayed too far from the core. And so that's why, in the framework that you've created, the fire is anchored by passion, talent, and your inner voice. Voice. But then the foundation. Underneath that are values. Can you talk about that?

[Dr. Patrick Ledden]

A lot of times in organizations, they'll say something like, these are the things we value. Integrity, collaboration, communication, trust, loyalty. Have fun doing all these things that will be sitting on the wall. But the question is, what do you really live out? What does integrity even mean? So when we talk about values, we're saying you need to have values individually, you need to have values teams. You need to have values as an organization. Values ultimately. Tell you what, what will I stand for and what will I not put up with? What will I not stand for? And you need to be clear on those things, because in moments of disruption, you're actually hitting a moment of choice, and you can choose to move closer in alignment with those values, or you can choose not to. And if it's in my family and I'm the parent, my kids see it. If I'm living out my values or not, my team at work sees it. My colleagues and friends see it. So the ability to make sure we move out in ways that align with our values are really critical, because that's the anchor.

[Paula Pant]

You mentioned earlier, that relationships can be a source of both headwinds and tailwinds. Sometimes those relationships push you to act in a way that is not in accordance with your values. When that happens, it can be difficult to say, these are my values, because it comes off sounding like unwarranted stubbornness. You know, how would you deal with a situation like that?

[Dr. Patrick Ledden]

Well, I would be a little bit different in the way I would phrase it in that I wouldn't say that the relationship pushed me to do it. I would say I chose to do it. I made that choice to do that. And that is a choice. And I don't necessarily think I need to challenge somebody like, my values are xyz, because doing that, that becomes confrontational. I think you just need to realize that relationships do hold you back, and relationships do lift you up and you do the same thing to others. So keep that in mind as well. But there's also the reality that there's some relationships where you might be like, this person is a terrible headwind, and I've tried to address it, and you know what? I just need to kind of terminate this relationship. That's a doable thing if they're on the way kind of to the periphery or on the outside of really. But what if it's a family member? That's a very different thing. In that case, you know, you make your own choices in life. But you may just say, okay, I got to put some boundaries in place around this and figure out how to make this work a little bit better, because I still want to maintain a relationship with that person. All we're trying to help people think about is we realize that it's like going for a jog is the wind behind your back, and you all of a sudden feel like you're the next Olympic athlete or is the wind in your face? And we know it when we walk into a meeting somewhere and you're like, oh, my gosh, I didn't know this person was going to be in here. And that's a headwind. And we need to address it as opposed to just let it sit. Because not addressing it, it doesn't get better. We have to choose to disrupt it.

[James Patterson]

And with the relationship, that can make the relationship stronger, make it work, addressing them. Or in some cases, you just. You may have to say that this is not workable. But if you're rational about. I mean, you see a lot of people and you go, oh, my God, why are they doing this to each other? You know, once again, it comes down to that fear or not being open. And it's hard for people. And we try to make it a little easier to examine these things in a rational manner and then, you know, hopefully make things better. Or in some cases, you just have to make a difficult decision.

[Paula Pant]

You know, I want to go back to James when we were talking about some of the ways that you have been disruptive throughout your career. We covered the decision to break the mold of publishing only one book a year and to go all the way up to six books a year. But then you did something that was also disruptive and quite different, which is you started co authoring books with a wide variety of different people. And that was really, no pun intended. That was very novel. Can you talk through that?

[James Patterson]

Once again? It just seemed like a very logical thing to consider. There's no reason. But if you look around the world, if we're going to actually save our world, it probably means we'll eventually learn how to collaborate. Here's a good thing that works somewhere, let's try it somewhere else, because it works. Sistine Chapel. Some amazing painters up there built, you know, painting the same and collaborating and making it great. Advertising tends to be collaborative. Writer, art director, maybe a producer. Getting together and figuring out how to make a relatively short film. And how do you make the best film? And I knew all this, so I always thought it would be kind of a useful thing to do, not scary and probably a good thing. And obviously not everyone should collaborate on things. And I started doing it with a couple of friends. There was one friend in particular, and we said, let's just write this little novel. Both of us were writers, and we tried it, and it was fun, and we were used to it because we both worked in advertising. We were comfortable with that for a while now, collaborating with famous people like President Clinton. And we've done three novels together. And President Clinton, first of all, he reads everything. He's a massive reader. He reads, reads, reads. He doesn't sleep. He's a vampire now. He doesn't sleep. And among other things, he likes mystery novels, just doesn't escape every once in a while. So the notion of writing a mystery with him was sort of interesting. And also especially the books that we wrote. He brings authenticity, which is really useful and important and it doesn't appear necessarily in most mysteries. With Dolly Parton, same thing. She brought authenticity and she's a storyteller. Country music more than most rap is this way too weirdly, but country music and rap in particular are storytelling forms of music. All of her songs are her famous songs are stories. She was fascinating to work with. She was a hungry dog for sure. I met with Dolly down in Nashville and we talked for about three hours about we started out maybe we'd do some kids books and then we started talking about an adult book and I had a little idea and a quick little outline for the possibility of one. She said, well, leave the outline with me and I'll think about it. Two days later she called up. She had some thoughts on the outline and she had already written seven songs to go along with this novel, which was about a country singer in Nashville. That's just her nature to be a hungry dog, to go out and chop wood. And she's still that way.

[Paula Pant]

This is Kevin Harlan. This Friday, the NBA on prime crew and I are back with another exciting Emirates NBA cup doubleheader.

[James Patterson]

It all tips off with Bam Adebayo.

[Paula Pant]

And the Miami Heat taking on Jalen.

[Dr. Patrick Ledden]

Brunson in the New York Knicks in.

[Paula Pant]

An east coast rivalry. Then Steph Curry and the Golden State.

[Dr. Patrick Ledden]

Warriors go toe to toe with Victor.

[Paula Pant]

Wembanyama and the San Antonio Spurs. It all comes your way this Friday on Prime. And if you're not a Prime member, that's not a problem. Sign up for a free 30 day trial to get started today.

[Dr. Patrick Ledden]

The Heaton Knicks, the Warriors and Spurs.

[Paula Pant]

Coverage starts Friday at 6:30pm Eastern only on Prime. Restrictions apply.

[Dr. Patrick Ledden]

See Amazon.com amazonprime for details.

[Paula Pant]

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[James Patterson]

It depends on the person. You can make some small gains. I wrote a book, the number one dad book, how to be a Better dad in One Hour. And it's another one like this where my objective is to make things easier for people. There are a lot of men out there, especially younger men, who are kind of lost and overwhelmed and you know, you're not going to be the breadwinner anymore. You have to change the way you're thinking about life. You may not find somebody to love. There are a whole lot of things. And the notion about that book was I knew a lot of men will not sit down and read the 400 page book. So I tried to figure out a way to condense as much as I could. And I did a lot of research. I kind of read everything I could find on that subject and then talked to hundreds of dads about, well, how do you do it? What are your tricks? What have you figured out? And tried to put as much as I could into this book. And my guarantee was, I guarantee you if you read these hundred pages, this one hour, you will pick up at least a couple of things that will make you a better bother. And that's a pretty good use of an hour. But once again, the spirit of it was, and it's just the way we were brought up, which was to work in the soup kitchen. We do a lot of charities. I've given away $240 million right now. And I don't take credit for it. It's my mother and my grandmother. That's the way we were brought up. You give. That's the deal. Don't take any credit for it. Just that's what you're supposed to do. So similarly with the dad book and to some extent with this book, yeah, we have some thoughts that can help people.

[Paula Pant]

There's a section in which you talk about the distinction between mission and purpose. Can you elaborate on that idea?

[Dr. Patrick Ledden]

Each of these have distinct meanings. You hear, like, vision, mission, purpose, all these type of things. There is a distinction between them. Like, a vision is like, where are we going to go over time? And a mission is what are we going to do and how are we going to get there? And a purpose is why we're doing these type of things. We didn't want to belabor the point as we were talking about it, because as we were going through the research, most people just talked about, hey, what are they trying to do? And why does it matter to them? We just kind of kept the conversation at a fairly simple level. And Jim even talks about his own mission and give some examples of missions. And we just want people to think that through about why am I here, where am I going? Type of thing. But we weren't really getting too much into. Corporations deal with all these different terms because that's just not where people live.

[Paula Pant]

Well, it strikes me that there's disruption at the corporate level or at the organizational level, I should say, and then there's disruption at the individual level. And I think at. At the individual level, a lot of people are looking for. Looking for a sense of purpose in their life. But many people don't necessarily think about, kind of have a mission statement for their own life.

[Dr. Patrick Ledden]

Yeah, I would say that we purposely made a choice early on to talk a bit about purpose and the importance of it. Understand the fire inside yourself. But quite frankly, we didn't belabor the point on that. We leaned more into the idea, okay, once you know what this is, how are you going to handle disruptions? And the reason we did that is there's a lot already written and said about sitting back and thinking about your purpose. And in many ways it's a introspective component that takes a fair amount of time. We show up and say, in this project, all right, get clear on your purpose. But now let's talk about how you live that purpose out once you walk out that door and life hits you with the good and the bad.

[Paula Pant]

Right. So AI is The new frontier of the ultimate disruption. How should people be thinking about the way that AI is going to disrupt every facet of our lives? And how do we incorporate this into this conversation?

[James Patterson]

The first step, I think, is don't spend time being fearful because it's not useful. President Clinton and I talk all the time about if something happens today, as it so often does, it's disturbing. If we can't do something about it, we're not going to let it or try not to let it ruin our day. And if we can do something, we do it. So with respect to artificial intelligence, let's not spend a lot of time worrying about it because it's not useful. It's not helping anything to sit there and worry about it. And if there are things that you can do, you know, like in your work, if it's already like, Patrick, you were talking to somebody who had an experience.

[Dr. Patrick Ledden]

Yeah, absolutely. So there was a gentleman I was talking to who was talking about AI. He was concerned about AI. So it wasn't just an abstract concept or something you saw in the news. It was, like, really happening in his life where he said, I'm a writer at work. I get paid to write. And my CEO just read a presentation or gave a speech that was completely written by AI and he's like, I'm concerned. Am I going to lose my job? Talk about a disruption, right? Not the abstract disruption of AI, but the real one in his life. And I just started asking him some questions to think through. And then one of them was, do you see a world where, with the existence of AI, you could actually be more valuable, not less valuable, to your company? And he thought about it. He said, yeah, I think I can. And I said, okay, well, in our research in this project, we identified five roles that people take on in the moment of disruption. Which of these makes sense? And he picked one. And I said, great, let's talk about what your strengths are, your behaviors. And he labeled some. And all of a sudden he walked out. He'd go like, oh, I kind of have a vision of what can happen, and I can see how I can change my behavior in a way that'll add so much more value. So in that type of situation, it took the AI is changing the world, and it's disruptive to. What's it mean to you and what can you do about it? We talk often about technology. There's an expression out there that says, we overestimate the impact it's going to have in the short term and underestimate it. In the long term. So right now, AI to many people is the savior, and other people it's the devil. And the question becomes, all right, what's it mean to you specifically? Let's really get our hands wrapped around it because that's where we live.

[Paula Pant]

Which one of those roles did he choose?

[Dr. Patrick Ledden]

He chose to be a trailblazer, which folks listening, that means he's going to go toward change and move out independently, which meant he's going to learn as much as he can about AI and he's going to take that over and take on the role of then of torchbearer, which means he's going to lead a movement in the organization to help educate and help people understand how to use AI, the positives and the negatives. Because we know there's a lot of investment going on in organizations around AI and there's also a lot of chatter going on right now saying we're not getting the return on investment we thought we'd get from it, or AI is doing things we didn't expect it to do. It hallucinates constantly. So him understanding that as well as how to use tools all of a sudden made him a person who's possibly on the line to get crossed off at some point if there's cuts to suddenly being the guy that people are going to. So he didn't just choose one role, he chose one and then he moved over to another one at the right time. Which is what we find is that because it's not a fixed personality thing, we find that people move from one role to the other as the situation evolves.

[Paula Pant]

So essentially he made himself indispensable by being the go to guy. When you've got a question about AI.

[Dr. Patrick Ledden]

It'S the difference between saying disruption's going to destroy everything to disruption's fertile ground to do something cool.

[Paula Pant]

Right. Are there any other things that people should be thinking about as we approach the AI future? Not just in terms of work, but in terms of how it'll affect family, how it'll affect relationships, how it will affect every element of life?

[James Patterson]

I think part of it is just get real about is it going to affect you and get perspective from your. Rather than this worldly and especially fear, just being afraid of things, it's not useful. It's just not. I mean, is it going to have any effect on you in terms of what you do insofar as you can see? And if not, I mean, it's not that you can't talk about it and have interesting talk about it, but the amount of time that's being wasted in terms of people talking about AI, that doesn't go anywhere. It's just not helpful. If it's going to affect you or if you can see it affecting you in the near future, whatever, then it probably behoves you to spend some time with it, talking about it, but don't waste a lot of time. The same thing happened early on with the Internet and we had some of the same fears, but this is, I think, a more intense than the Internet change was, but it will be. And just an incredible amount of time wasted at Thompson. What I said is nobody knows where it's going. We're going to sell tours on the Internet for people, for our clients. We will take them on tours. In terms of what exists right now, here's the Internet, here's what's happening, and we will get you to pay for it. So that was the positive use of the Internet for right now? Yes. You're going to know more than you knew about it. We'll bring you up to date as much as we can, and we will get paid for it.

[Dr. Patrick Ledden]

Yeah. When we think about Internet, obviously a big disruption and it's here to stay. Y2K bug was going to crash. Everything didn't quite happen. You think about these Internet of things was something we all talked about for a while. It went away. AI, I think, is different. It's going to be here forever. It's already. It's going to be here for the rest of my life. It's going to continue to be more generative. You can't get away from it. Teaching in a classroom, think about how you deal with AI in the classroom. What do you give writing assignments that students can just hand over to an AI device or something? AI that's going to generate the homework for them and you can't really tell who did it because you can't. So what do you do there? You have to disrupt the way you teach. All of a sudden you're doing more things in the classroom. You've seen the blue books come out and people are writing the actual essays in the classroom. Or you use it as a tool and say, all right, I'm actually going to use this thing to create the prompts that we talk about in class and students will throw ideas and then we'll go from there. So I think it's a tool, right? So like any tool, you can use it for its intended purpose. Even as that evolves, you can use it as a crutch. These are all the reasons I can't do things because of this thing. You can use it as a weapon and hit people over the head with it. And I just think it's a tool. And you just have to say, okay, what can we do with it? And one of the best things you can do is just get smarter about how it's impacting your world.

[James Patterson]

And that's pretty much all you can do. And in Patrick's case, or in anybody teaching in college or even high school or, you know, anywhere right now, it's a real issue and it's an everyday issue.

[Paula Pant]

Right. You know, you mentioned Thompson in your last answer. And another thing struck me, which is you became the CEO at the age of 36. There were, I would assume, people who had been there longer, people who were older and who had been there longer.

[James Patterson]

Yes, there were older people, by golly.

[Paula Pant]

No more, though, who did not ascend to that position. You did something very special when you were in your 20s and 30s. There was something about you that was different in your performance that led you to become the CEO by the age of 36. And then you repeated that performance, made a whole career switch, but also did something very special that made you stand out amongst authors. What is it that's so different?

[James Patterson]

Well, I think part of it, I just recognized a real skill that I had, that one, I enjoyed it, which is the skill to communicate. And in terms of advertising, it is that skill. And in terms of books, obviously, it is that same skill, that ability to collaborate in a lot of different ways. And in the book world, I've written mysteries, I've written nonfiction, most recently the Idaho Murders. I wrote the first big book on Jeffrey EPSTEIN Back in 2016, children's books. Because Jack, our Jack, was a kid. He's a very smart kid. He wasn't a big reader. I started writing a lot of kids books, but I just recognized one, I love to do it, you know, communicate, tell stories. And I had a skill set there. But, you know, once again, just in terms of solving problems, when I took over the New York offices, I said, people don't know how to work there. And what I did, I just looked around, I said, well, here are the people that I think can really help me right, right now and make this company a whole lot better, this office a whole lot better. And I chose two women. One was 28, one was 29, and a 74 year old guy. And those, they become the three big people in the company, in that office. Why? Because they really know what they're doing. The end. I Don't care that Linda Kaplan has only been in the business for four years. She's great at it. I don't care that this other guy is 74 years old. I don't care. It's irrelevant. No dumb rules.

[Paula Pant]

What I'm hearing is decision making that was formed in large part by trusting your instincts.

[James Patterson]

Yeah, yeah.

[Dr. Patrick Ledden]

There's actually. In the research on this project, we found 16 behaviors. These are disruptive behaviors. We didn't find anybody who maxed all of these things. And when I'm listening to Jim talk right now, I'm like, okay. One of the behaviors is trust your instincts. And some people have that nailed. Other people, not so much. I was actually talking to an audience about a year and a half ago or two years ago during the research, we'd go out and talk to audiences, and I was talking to this big group. Is it a hotel that had a casino? And I said to them, how many of you believe that, you know, everybody has instincts worth trusting? And a lot of hands went up. I'm like, seriously, you all think that? And they're like, well, I don't know. I said, go to that casino at 2am and tell me if people have good instincts. Jim has good instincts, which is one.

[James Patterson]

Of the, you know, my instinct about gambling. I don't.

[Dr. Patrick Ledden]

Yeah. Guaranteed not to lose. I. So trust your instincts. Is one that people have. Some people who are positive disruptors don't have great instincts. Maybe they don't have an experience or whatever it might be. Then they surround themselves with somebody who does have a good gut. Jim also has the ability to say smart things, and that's one of the 16 behaviors. So as I'm listening to him talk right now, I'm ticking off the ones in my mind that, like, these are the ones that he has nailed and does. Sorry, Jim. You don't have all of them nailed, but nobody did. There's all these really cool combinations of people who do amazing things, though. The point being, as we learned in the. In the project and in the research, is like, you got some strengths. Lean into them.

[James Patterson]

But another piece of it is also to recognize some of the things you don't do as well and accept it.

[Dr. Patrick Ledden]

Yeah.

[James Patterson]

Walking in your own shoes. And I don't do certain things well at all. I can't fix my. There's a lot of things I can't do very well. That's okay. That's fine. I think a lot of guys are not great at accepting things that they don't do as well or they let it overwhelm them. They let it defeat them. I'll meet people and go. They apologize because they don't read a lot. You don't have to apologize. It's okay. What do you do? Oh, you think a lot or you don't. Are you raising your family well or whatever the heck it is. Let's talk about the stuff that you. It doesn't matter. You don't read my book. So what? Good for you. And some people are really good at. And I've been with all types, either actors or directors or whatever. And some people, really. Ron Howard is wonderful at accepting that and realizing how lucky he is. And when people. We've been out to eat a few times, and always people will come up, and very frequently they say, we loved you on the Andy Griffith show when he was Opie. And he's such a gentleman. He's like, oh, thank you so much. That's really wonderful. I have won a couple of Academy Awards, but don't worry about that. And part of it, I mean, people come up in restaurants or whatever, and I always try to be, you know. Yeah. Well, this is great, and thank you so much for, you know, sharing after all these years.

[Paula Pant]

Does it feel real?

[James Patterson]

Yeah, why not? It is real. You know, one of the things about raising Jack, our son, is the notion of, my dad writes a lot of books. So what?

[Dr. Patrick Ledden]

All right.

[James Patterson]

Dad writes too many books. So what? Hopefully he's okay with it, but that's the end of it. That's not a big deal. And, you know, he's gone to good schools and run into some people who have famous parents and whatever, and most of his friends are pretty cool about it. I didn't do it. Yeah, I'm a Kennedy, but I'm not the Kennedy. So what? And that's a good attitude about. Insofar as you can do it. And same thing here. I write a lot of books, and it's not a big thing. It's fine. It's okay. I'm lucky.

[Paula Pant]

And Patrick, from your side, how is that experience for you? Like the two of you partnering on this project that you both clearly, very deeply believe in, but coming from such vastly different backgrounds. Can you describe that?

[Dr. Patrick Ledden]

Yeah. Jim mentioned different partnerships. Right. Sistine Chapel. Sometimes I'll mention Lennon and McCarthy. Whenever you're partnering with somebody, there's a bit of a dance and you have to figure out how it's going to work out. And I just felt that once we started down this road, not only was whatever, I would have produced on my own been substandard to this, but also, I'm going to learn a lot in the process. I mean, we spent nine months on the outline of the project that we were working on when it became a book. We spent a few years working on this over the course of time. And actually, the entire time, we never even talked about what's this deal going to look like if we ever strike it somewhere, until we got to the very end and we just said, jim asked me what you think is reasonable, and I told him what I thought. He said, that sounds good. Let's go forward. So it really was a partnership. And if you look at the book we wrote, you wouldn't know who wrote what. Yeah, I mean, other than some lines jump out at me sometimes I'm like, oh, yeah, I wrote that line. There's other times where I'm like, that was really good. I wish. I wish I could write more like him. But I don't think if somebody would read a project they'd even know and that that's part of a partnership.

[James Patterson]

In terms of the partnership, I don't love to research. I should do more with. Even with the novels. And Patrick is much more skilled also because. And I think this relates sometimes to professional athletes, why some of them don't become very good coaches for other people. Because some of this stuff just comes to them rather naturally and they can't explain it. They can't. They just. Well, you just do this. And, you know, and Patrick is much better at explaining some of these things so that people who necessarily don't have the instincts, okay, I can follow this. And a lot of the toolkits and things like that, that I would never be able to do those in a million years. It's not me. And it's recognizing what I can't do and what I can do and Patrick recognizing what he can do and he can't do as well.

[Paula Pant]

Yeah. And so what I hear is that a lot of, you know, finding. You talk about strengths, so there's that element of finding people with complementary skill sets. But what's interesting to me about this is that there's the recognition of playing to your strengths is not in conflict with also having a growth mindset. Because I think, Patrick, you alluded to that earlier when you said, hey, it's not a fixed mindset thing.

[Dr. Patrick Ledden]

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it is definitely not limiting yourself. It's definitely the world is exciting. You mentioned AI. What can I learn about it? I mean, there's that constant yearning to learn something new. And one of the behaviors we found is this idea that things can get better. One person we interviewed, she started a company back in the 70s, fashion line called Natori. She still runs it today. She's about 80 years old. Every month she travels to the Philippines where she owns a plant, visits with the people who are producing the garments, and then sits down with her 100 year old mother and talks about the bookkeeping. I mean, that's somebody who's constantly learning, producing a new line of clothing every fall, every spring. And the idea of realizing things can get better is really an important mindset. And I think one thing we found is that what holds you back from being a positive disruptor isn't your yearning to be a negative disruptor, to be difficult or curmudgeon. What holds you back from being a positive disruptor is a relentless pursuit of comfort to try to go back and maintain these things. And positive disruptors by definition are learners. They're constantly moving forward.

[James Patterson]

And your roles may change. I mean your role in the company, your role at home or whatever, it may change over time. You may, this year it may be, you have to be this in the team. And next year it's something else. Eventually you may run the team which run the company, but that's part of it. There are different things where you, as time goes by, your role can change radically. Sometimes learning to do one of the lower roles or lower roles, one of the different roles is useful in terms of moving forward, moving up. If you want to move up right.

[Paula Pant]

It rounds out your skill set and makes you appreciate that area better. But you mentioned, Patrick, you mentioned comfort. And it seems as though the big antithesis of what we're talking about, the antithesis of the positive disruption that we've been discussing, it's comfort. It's a false sense of security. It's stubbornly clinging to what is, to the illusion of what is.

[James Patterson]

And comfort might not even be the best word because there's nothing wrong per se with comfort. You can be, you know, on a successful team and be very comfortable with the success. But there is something about the negative, the laziness. Sometimes there's some really bad things about just burying your head in the sand. You know, this used to be a great, we used to make a lot of batteries here and da da da da. And it went away and there's nothing we can do anymore. And just to be angry and it's human nature, but it's not useful. Not the best way to move forward in life.

[Paula Pant]

James, your hat says unreliable narrator. What does that mean to you a.

[James Patterson]

Nice way of saying you're a liar? No. There are certain kinds of novels, and I've written a couple where the narrator is totally unreliable. You're listening to them, it's first person. So you just assume that they're telling you the truth. And you find out as it moves on that they're not telling you the truth. So a friend of mine gave it to me, Mike Lupica, one of my best friends. He's a co writer and so, yeah, I think it's humorous. I like humor. Humor's great. Humor gets you through stuff.

[Paula Pant]

Do you prefer co writing project? You seem to be doing mostly co writing projects these days.

[James Patterson]

No, I do one or two of my own every year. But what I love is at the end of the project and it doesn't always happen. You hope it will, that you go, I'm really happy that I did that. That really worked out well. And it doesn't always happen. Sometimes you get to the end of the novel, it's like, I don't know why it didn't click the way I hoped it would, but it didn't. Or you make a movie which are complicated because you have so many people involved and so many egos. And a lot of times, the way Hollywood is structured now, it's not just the person in the movie, it's all of their people, which really gets it out of hand. And it's not useful for the project. Usually there's a piece of language, it's not mine. I don't know where it came from, but I think about it. It's guided me for the last couple of years. Like doing the novel with Viola Davis. What it is, is my time here is short. What can I do most beautifully?

[Paula Pant]

What strikes me is that what often is good advice for an organization is also good advice for an individual.

[Dr. Patrick Ledden]

Exactly. We have one life and one thing. If we try to compartmentalize things too much, I think we cause problems for ourselves. So the idea of recognizing, boy, if I can get good at this with the relationships at work, yeah, that'll probably help me around the dinner table, if I even have one anymore. So the ability to say, like this is applicable everywhere because it's based on some really good thinking and some really good practices that other people are using. If it was just one person's narrative story about how they lived a great life, it might be useful to you. You might be able to apply it. But this is the voices of many. And when you get to a certain number of many, you Start to realize there's some real wisdom here.

[Paula Pant]

Right, right. Well, thank you for spending this time with us.

[James Patterson]

Oh, thank you. Thank you.

[Dr. Patrick Ledden]

Thank you so much.

[Paula Pant]

Where can people find you if they would like to learn more?

[Dr. Patrick Ledden]

We're pretty easy. He's James patterson.com and I'm patrickledden.com beautiful.

[Paula Pant]

Thank you to James Patterson and Dr. Patrick Ledden. What are three key takeaways that we got from this conversation? Key takeaway number one. Your disruptive edge comes from doing the things that others won't. James Patterson didn't just submit one portfolio in order to land his first job. He submitted four consecutive portfolios over four weeks. And that completely disrupted the normal hiring process. And that kind of relentless approach became his signature throughout his career. Constantly questioning the status quo and saying, you know what? Why can't I go above and beyond that?

[James Patterson]

I just look at and go, where's the rule written that you can only do one book a year? One book every two years? What is that rule? I'm sorry, this doesn't make sense to me. So I challenged it.

[Paula Pant]

That's the first key takeaway. Key takeaway number two, Fear is expensive. If you're stuck in a job or a situation that's just not working, fear keeps you from making the move. And that could ultimately transform your income. And maybe there would be short term pain, but there would be long term growth. James Patterson was a PhD candidate. That's a lot of sunk cost. At the time that he left Vanderbilt. He then became a successful CEO. That's a job that most people would want to keep, especially at 36. But he knew that he was in the wrong lane. And so he took a huge gamble becoming an author. You know, a lot of people identify with this idea that authors and artists, that necessarily equates to being broke, especially fiction authors. Right. But he became a fiction author and then decided that he was going to publish at a wildly prolific volume and over time amassed 425 million book sales.

[James Patterson]

And sometimes it's a case of trying to help people get past their fears, their large fears, which is really important. And pretty much all of us have those fears. Okay, I'm not sure if this will work. I'm not sure if I really want to change. I'm not sure if I can do this. I'm not sure. So helping people to get comfortable, don't be afraid of it. You don't have to make the move necessarily. But let's figure it out.

[Paula Pant]

Fear is expensive, particularly when it comes to opportunity cost. That is the Second Key takeaway. Finally, key takeaway number three the story that you tell yourself determines your salary ceiling. Sometimes you need to leave a job because you're still seen as the kid even after six years of proving yourself. If you're in an organization or in an environment, maybe you're in a social environment where your environment around you is telling you a limiting story about yourself. Or if you, inside of your own head are telling yourself a limiting story about yourself, well, changing that narrative is your key to getting a higher income and better opportunities.

[James Patterson]

Sometimes you go in at your first job and you're already still the kid there and six years later you're still the kid and you can't get past it and you have to leave because you're not the kid.

[Paula Pant]

Those are three key takeaways from this conversation with James Patterson and Dr. Patrick Ledden. Thank you so much for being part of the Afford Anything community. If you enjoyed today's episode, please do three things. First, subscribe to our newsletter affordanything.com newsletter where today in fact, we are sending out a newsletter all about the 50 year mortgage about things that are happening right now. So we talk in our newsletter about stuff that we don't cover here on the podcast. So please subscribe to our newsletter. It's absolutely free. Afford anything.com Newsletter Second, please share this episode with the people in your life. Share it with anyone you know who's a fan of James Patterson's books or a fan of reading mysteries. Share it with fans of Dolly Parton or fans of the fiction writing of President Clinton. They co authored three books together. Share it with all of those people and more because that is the single most important way that you spread the message of FI r e. Finally, please open up your favorite podcast playing app and leave us up to a five star review and write a few words about what you enjoy about the show. Those reviews are incredibly meaningful and they allow us to go out and book incredible guests. So thank you in advance for doing that and thank you for being part of the Afford Anything community. I'm Paula Pant. This is the Afford Anything podcast and I'll meet you in the next episode.