← Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
How to Flourish: The Art of Building Aliveness and Meaning | Daniel Coyle – EP 728
01:07:35
Loading summary
Transcript91 lines
- [00:00]
Sleep Number Salesperson
Why choose a Sleep Number Smart bed? Can I make my site softer?
- [00:04]
Daniel Coyle
Can I make my site firmer?
- [00:05]
John R. Miles
Can we sleep cooler?
- [00:07]
Sleep Number Salesperson
Sleep number does that cools up to eight times faster and lets you choose your ideal comfort on either side your Sleep number setting. Enjoy personalized comfort for better sleep night after night. And now during our President's day sale, take 50% off our limited edition bed plus free premium delivery with any bed and base ends Monday only at a Sleep number store or sleepnumber.com Coming up.
- [00:31]
Daniel Coyle
Next on Passion Struck Modern Experience I think to feel like you're just a cog in a machine, to feel like you're not mattering. I find it to be a little almost near dystopian extent. Normalize that kind of thing where we talk about people and treat people as if they're simply computational beings and simply machines. But what it looks like is isolation. What it looks like is loneliness. What it looks like is anxiety and depression. I think in the end, well, when you know we are social animals, we are animals made of meaning. Without meaningful connection, without mattering. To use the language without mattering, we're hollowed out. It is a core need of us to be in community and growing welcome to Passion Struck.
- [01:14]
Podcast Narrator/Host
I'm your host John Miles. This is the show where we explore the art of human flourishing and what it truly means to live like it matters. Each week I sit down with change.
- [01:24]
John R. Miles
Makers, creators, scientists, and everyday heroes to decode the human experience and uncover the tools that help us lead with meaning, heal what hurts, and pursue the fullest expression of who we're capable of becoming. Whether you're designing your future, developing as.
- [01:40]
Podcast Narrator/Host
A leader, or seeking deeper alignment in your life, this show is your invitation.
- [01:45]
John R. Miles
To grow with purpose and act with intention.
- [01:47]
Podcast Narrator/Host
Because the secret to a life of.
- [01:49]
John R. Miles
Deep purpose, connection and impact is choosing to live like you matter.
- [02:00]
Podcast Narrator/Host
Hey friends, and welcome Back to episode 728 of Passion Struck. In our last two conversations, we have been examining how choice, culture, the mattering instinct, and inherited identity scripts shape our sense of agency, dignity, and belonging to often determining who feels significant and who quietly disappears inside modern systems. Today, we turn to a deeper what does it actually look like when people feel that they matter together? This episode continues the youe Matter series by exploring flourishing as a collective condition, something that emerges when environments are designed to make human presence consequential. As we move toward the February 24th launch of my upcoming children's book, youk Matter Luma, I've been reflecting on how early we learn whether our attention counts whether our voice shapes outcomes and whether our presence changes the room. Those lessons don't stop in childhood. They follow us into teams, organizations, communities and institutions. That's why my guest today, Daniel Cole, is so important. Daniel is the best selling author of the Culture Code and the author of his newest book, the Art of Of Building Meaning, Joy and Fulfillment. Daniel spent years embedded inside groups that don't just perform well, they feel unmistakably alive. From a Chilean mind collapse to a Parisian long table, from elite sports teams to nursing homes, he studied environments where people showed up differently. More alert, more responsive, more human. What he discovered is that flourishing doesn't come from motivations, incentives or charisma. It comes from presence. It comes from trust and judgment. And it comes from environments that quietly signal you are needed. Here, in today's episode, we explore what he first noticed when high performance gave way to something more vital. Why presence is the foundation of flourishing, how group flow differs from efficiency or coordination, why people disengage when they feel interchangeable, and why mattering is the precondition for vitality in any system. This conversation shows how flourishing emerges from when people are treated as contributors, not components. Let's continue the youe Matter series with Daniel Coyle. Thank you for choosing Passion Struck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating a life that matters.
- [04:18]
John R. Miles
Now let that journey begin.
- [04:25]
Podcast Narrator/Host
You're trying to whip up dinner after a long day, but your pans are sticking like glue, the handles are burning hot and cleanup feels like a full workout. Sound familiar? Yeah, I've been right there. Frustrated, wasting time scrubbing and honestly kind of dreading cooking. Then I switched to caraway and wow. Everything changed. From the very first sizzle of garlic in their ceramic skillet, I was sold. Food slides right off. No oil pools, no scraping needed. It heats super evenly so my veggies come out perfectly roasted every time and the colors gorgeous on the counter. Like modern art instead of boring pots. Best part? It's completely non toxic. No weird chemicals leaching into my food so I actually feel good about what I'm feeding my family and cleanup Literally wipe and done in under a minute. I reach for these pieces every single night. Caraway's cookware set is a favorite for a reason. It can save you up to $190 versus buying the items individually. Plus if you visit carawayhome.com passionstruck you can take an additional 10% off your next purchase. This deal is exclusive for our listeners, so visit carawayhome.com passionstruck or use code Passionstruck at checkout. Non Toxic Kitchenware Made Modern.
- [05:57]
John R. Miles
I am absolutely thrilled today to welcome Daniel Coyle, one of my favorite authors. Daniel, how are you doing today?
- [06:06]
Daniel Coyle
I'm doing great, John. Thanks for having me. I'm excited for the conversation.
- [06:09]
John R. Miles
Last week I had the honor of interviewing Barry Schwartz, someone whose work I have studied since he put out the Paradox of Choice. And I understand, doing my research, that he has had a major impact on you and your life and the books that you have written. I was hoping we might start there.
- [06:29]
Daniel Coyle
Oh, I love that. I love that. It's incredible. It's funny how the world works, isn't it? Like, how serendipitous is that you would have just spoken with him when I have his words tattooed on the inside of my eyeballs for the last few years, because I bumped into them during kind of a low point. And I was getting. I guess I was in my mid-50s and looking at the career, looking at the family. Family got four daughters, kind of looking at the big picture. And I bumped into a quote of his that said, people mistakenly think life is a treasure hunt. And it is not a treasure hunt. It's more like treasure creation. And so that stopped me, right, because I. I think it's deeply true. It was definitely true to my experience, and it's true to how we're entrained to think about our lives. Like, we think, oh, if we hunt these things down, we get them, we chase them, we achieve them, we have them, we possess them. That if things will be great, and that's not true. There are so many success stories that have hollowness on the inside of them that we see. It's a treasure creation. It's not a game, it's a garden. Is what he was saying that I heard right. And it's not a game to win. It's a garden you grow. And that's what it really knocked me for a loop a bit and sent me on this. On this journey that has me standing in front of you now that resulted.
- [07:38]
John R. Miles
In this book, as you and I were speaking before we came on, you use that word grow. And I was telling you that I think I like the word cultivate better. I think they express similar things. We can't just expect things to happen to us. And in my first book, Passion Struck, I wrote about this analogy that I think people use the concept of autopilot too much. And so I tried to redefine it. I think the way so many of us are living, getting back to what Barry was saying is we act out our lives as if we're in the game of pinball. But instead of being the player, we end up being the ball bouncing off all the distractions of life instead of defining our path. And I really think that's what he means when he talks about this cultivation.
- [08:33]
Daniel Coyle
I couldn't agree more. I think it's deeply true. We're really taught that. That life is this sort of giant machine. And with machines are great for certain things. They're good at being predictable, and they create measurable outcomes and they give you a result. But in the final analysis, that's an illusion. Life is. Parts of life are a machine. There's definitely parts of life. If I want to get my meals prepped for the week, that's a machine like activity in some ways, right? I need to get from A to B to C to D. But there's a whole nother world that opens up when you start seeing it as a garden, when you start seeing it as moments. Because gardens don't work like games do. Gardens don't work like machines do. Gardens depend on. You have to clear a space and you have to cultivate things. Which means these small moments of nurture that you're not like doing, following some script. It's where you're noticing some need and then responding to that need in real time in ways that create something bigger. Like a relationship. Right? And relationships aren't games, and relationships aren't machines. It's funny. I was another walk of my life. I worked with Major League Baseball teams, and we were interviewing a new candidates for a new manager. And one of the questions that came up during the conversation was, what do you do when you're isolated alone? It's lonely at the top. What do you do? And what this candidate said was, I just. I go inside out. I look for somebody I can help. And it just takes 10 seconds to make that little reversal where he goes and picks up towels on the clubhouse floor. Whatever he does, looks for somebody to help. And I think that speaks to the way that we're built. We're not trying to always fix, optimize, maximize everything. We're not looking to automate things and be the best pinball ball. What we're looking to do many times is to animate them with a sense of aliveness and connection and relationship and meaning. And that was a question that set me out. Writing this book is what places are really good at doing that we know what happens on the mountaintops of career, mountaintops of performance But. But what's happening in the valleys where there are these moments of cultivation, these meaningful connections, and where there is. The thing that really defines flourishing is joyful, meaningful growth that is shared. That is shared. Nobody can do it alone. You can't do it alone, but you can do it. We need other people to bring out the best versions of ourselves. And so that's what I've found over and over again in those little moments that aren't scripted and they're not games and you can't write an instruction manual for them. But there are rules. Like there are ways to cultivate gardens, and if you. And they're habits of. And practices of attention and practices of action. And that's what I just got. Totally fell in love with the story of that. With the story. What are those rules? That's a mystery that really captivated me for the last five years.
- [11:13]
John R. Miles
So Dan already named it. The book we're talking about today is his brand new book titled Flourish, the Art of Building Meaning, Joy and Fulfillment. It's a masterpiece, just like his previous books. But I want to go into this garden theme just a little bit more. I learned servant leadership when I was in the military, and I'm going to talk to you about that here in a second. And I used that servant leadership really well during my career as a Fortune 50 executive up until a point. Marshall Goldsmith has this great book. What got you here isn't going to get you where you need to go and to tie this into the world we are living in today. I really contend that service leadership has served its cause. But what I really think leaders need to be in the future is something I call Gardner leaders. I got this from talking to General Stan McChrystal and Keith Crotch, the former CEO of DocuSign. And we were talking about eyes on, hands off leadership. And to me, that whole concept, eyes on, hands off, is what really defines someone who is gardening their people. That the way they work with eyes on is that they give them instructions enough so that they can flourish, but then they're hands off because someone who's micromanaged isn't going to flourish. But if you give them the right ingredients, they are. Does that analogy relate to you?
- [12:52]
Daniel Coyle
Absolutely. I think the thing that I'm feeling most powerfully is how aligned that is with the way ecosystems actually grow. So many of our models in the business world came out of the military, came out of kind of machine thinking. We want to execute, have a plan, have checkpoints, and when you use that language, you end up in Training yourself on these mental, mental models that it is about machines and control and prediction. And yet the world we live in is not super predictable as we know. And the idea of having a rigid machine, our mental model of business as some rigid machine whose job it is to do like any machine, the same thing over and over again, that is controlled by an outside person, a leader who can flip the switches and get the outcome they want. I agree with you. It feels outdated. It still works for simple stuff. If my mail shows up every day, that's great. Love that machine, that's fabulous. Let's keep it going that way. But in a world where so many of us work in domains and live in domains where it ain't the same every day, where there are forces and everything's speeding up on us all the time, and there's innovation and creativity that's required, the idea of a machine is outdated. What you really want is a greenhouse of kind of fast growing stuff and a deep understanding of we need to grow people, first of all, like we need our people to be continually learning and to be what I've heard described, I think accurately as an arlo, an adaptive, resilient learning organization where you are continually at real time adapting to the shifting ground in which you live. And so a leader's job in that place is very. It couldn't be more different than the machine leader.
- [14:27]
John R. Miles
Right?
- [14:28]
Daniel Coyle
You need to continually be creating conditions where you can generate awareness, agency new ideas, give people opportunities to develop, embrace messiness. I think that's one thing about ecosystems and gardens. If you're a gardener, like you get dirty, everything around you gets a little dirty. And that's not a bad thing. Actually, I don't think you would trust or appreciate a gardener who was. Looked like he was from a laboratory somewhere having that embrace of imperfection which actually just helps create cohesion and trust and understanding. All the research would absolutely support that. It's these moments of embracing the mess that create the cohesion that great groups embody. But I'm drawn to your term and I've heard it. It might interest you that I heard it at one of the baseball teams I was visiting just the other day. They said we need to think like gardeners. We need our coaches to think like gardeners, we need our managers to think like gardeners. Because the fact is we're an a living thing. We're a living ecosystem. And living ecosystems need that kind of nurturing, attentive actions and a deep sense of connection. What makes a garden grow is the connection to that same Earth. And for us human beings, that means meaning. That means community. And so all the stories that we have, I think, in business and sports, in technology, when you really scratch the surface of a lot of success stories, what you find is a thriving community. They're growing new people all the time. They're trying new stuff. They're adapting. They're making a little mess. Sometimes they're not perfect, and their leadership is not serving, as you say. Their leadership is creating conditions, and sometimes that condition is complete hands off. But they're creating conditions where things can grow in the right direction. So providing a clear horizon, providing guardrails. You don't want your garden to just grow anywhere. You want it to be here and not over there. So creating guardrails, creating agency, and creating really a clear horizon to go toward ends up being. I love that. Eyes on, hands off.
- [16:29]
Podcast Narrator/Host
Yes.
- [16:30]
John R. Miles
Dan, I've heard that several professional sports teams have started reading my book, and in chapter 12, I wrote this whole chapter on Gardner leadership.
- [16:40]
Daniel Coyle
Oh, that's so cool.
- [16:42]
John R. Miles
Hopefully there's some connection there between the two. I know Jim Murphy, who wrote Inner Excellence, was taking my book to some of the teams that he works with. And also golf coach Sean Foley uses it with golfers he coaches. So maybe the ideas are expanding.
- [16:58]
Daniel Coyle
That's nice. Well, and sports ends up being a beautiful place to test this stuff out because I think because performance is so transparent, because camaraderie is so transparent, because growth is so transparent, where in some business domains, it's harder to see. So the fact that sports tries stuff out first, I think is promising and great.
- [17:18]
John R. Miles
Dan, I want to take this whole concept that we've been having and now take it to one of the groups that you've worked with closely, which is Navy Special Warfare or SEAL teams, as many people know them. I myself didn't go to buds. I had hoped I could have gone to buds, but I got injured my senior year at the Naval Academy playing rugby. My father is actually UDT class of 16, so he preceded me, which made me want to do it. But I end up serving the National Security Agency. And I got really lucky because at the Academy, we have sponsor families, and my sponsor dad ended up getting promoted at nsa. In fact, he was the top civilian leader at the National Security Agency. He asked me to take this concept of inserting integrated teams into the seals. So I went from the unit that I was stationed at and got reassigned to Naval Special Warfare Unit 10. What I observed when I did that switch is that in the SEAL teams, there's this concept of the brotherhood that you hear them often talk about. And I found that in their groups, it wasn't that they just perform well, but they felt unusually alive, which is something that you really capture in flourish. And this is fundamentally different from high performance. And I was hoping you might be able to explain it.
- [18:43]
Daniel Coyle
The depth, it's so interesting because I think what the seals are really, they're obviously good at breaking down doors. They're obviously good at collaborating to do these incredibly intricate, very difficult operations together. But one of the skills that I think is underrated is their ability to create meaning. Create meaning together. Have these moments where they stop and really connect and where they also express what being a SEAL means. You notice we know there's obviously other groups that do special warfare, right? There's Delta, there's Rangers, there's all these different other groups that are basically the same thing. These small teams that do stuff. But, but the seals seem to have a unique ability to express what that connection means. They're really good. For example, they have a lot of Mantras, even the SEALs, like we, we do three things. We shoot, move and communicate. And we're the quiet professionals.
- [19:33]
John R. Miles
Yeah, right.
- [19:34]
Daniel Coyle
And the only easy day was yesterday. All these, like, little things and they're cheesy. And yet having that kind of shared language creates these moments of deeper connection and deeper meaning. They're very strict about keeping the team small. And there's something about that number. Having a very small number of people on a team creates places where every voice can be heard, where you can have these conversations. And one thing they're especially good at, I think even better than some of the other groups is having these hard meetings called an ar, where as you're familiar, like it's an after action review. And it's right after you finish an operation or a practice run and you circle up and you ask three really hard questions together, right? And it's usually led not by the commanding officer, it's usually led by an enlisted person. And they would, it would be like, what went wrong? What do we do wrong? What do we do right? And what are we gonna do differently next time? And that's hard to do. Like that shared vulnerability that they have is they're really good at it. And I guess the other thing that I've noticed with them that's unique is just the sheer amount of hanging out time, downtime, empty time, where maybe you're working out, maybe you're practicing, maybe you're just shooting the breeze, but you're waiting around. So all of these moments of stillness where they're creating meaning, where they're creating connection, where they're creating relationships. As we were talking before, relationships aren't a machine. You don't just exchange information. And now we're close. We don't just exchange faxes. And now we're deeply connected into some shared meaning. It requires these moments of expression, of risk, of vulnerability, of connecting to things bigger than yourself. And I think they, they really deeply embody the DNA of what that looks like. Because if we were to do a kind of a comparison of, okay, they have these super deep relationships. What does that, what is, how does that compare to the typical set of office friendships or something like that? It would be just the differential of the. And yet in the seals there, there's like doing a lot of stuff that doesn't look important and they're hanging out and they have these cheesy mantras and they're joking around and all that stuff ends up adding up to create what really is the meat of real relationships.
- [21:42]
Podcast Narrator/Host
Before we continue, I want to pause for a moment. Conversations like this often surface a quiet realization. Flourishing depends on whether people experience their presence as meaningful inside the ignited life. Each episode in the you Matter series is paired with guided reflection prompts designed to help you examine where your environment's support presence and where they quietly drain it. This week's prompts focus on noticing where people feel psychologically necessary, identifying where systems reward contribution versus compliance, clarifying what helps presence stay alive in your work, relationships and communities. You can explore them@theunitedlife.net and as we move toward February 24, I want to share something very close to my heart. My new children's book, you, Matter Luma launches that day, a story created to help children learn early that their presence counts before the world teaches them to measure worth through performance or comparison. You can pre order Umatter Luma at Barnes Noble or go to umatterluma.com now a quick word from our sponsors. Thank you for supporting those who support the show.
- [22:47]
John R. Miles
Foreign.
- [22:52]
Podcast Narrator/Host
You're listening to Passion Struck on the Passion Struck Network. Now back to my conversation with Daniel Coyle.
- [22:59]
John R. Miles
When I think of that, another high precision team that uses a similar concept is the Blue Angels. After every single flight, they spend hours going through it. Same thing. Each one of the aviators is asked to evaluate the same three questions. What did they do well? What did they do poorly? And what could they improve on next time? So this stuff really works. The other thing that both of them do from my Experience with deploying with them is that before we ever went on an operation, we would imagine ourselves performing in that operation, and we would do a dry rehearsal before we ever went out in the real world multiple times, so we could live through and imagine what we were going to walk into, what we were going to enter when we went into the operational domain.
- [23:53]
Daniel Coyle
So smart. So smart. Yeah. In all these cases, you're not informationing your way to success. Right. You're relationshiping your way there. You're constantly creating spaces. And if you were to look at all these teams from above, you'd see the same thing, like this pattern where they circle up as a little group and talk, and then they go do something. Together. Together, and then they circle up and talk, then they go do something. It's almost like a heartbeat of high performance teams where talk, reflect, action, reflection. Action, reflection. And it grows. It's something you don't have teams that walk in and all of a sudden they're great. It takes time to get that way because that you're gardening something in that heartbeat where you're going, let's circle up and have a hard conversation about what really happened. Now let's go do something else. Now let's come back and talk about that. And if any of us do that, we get closer, more cohesive, and more high performance.
- [24:38]
John R. Miles
For me, as I was listening to your conversation with Adam Grant, which is a great conversation for those of you who want to tune into another podcast with Dan on it, you talked about something that I learned in the SEAL teams. I often get this question, what did you learn from your time being in the Navy? And I talk about this concept of transition points. We end up thinking about our lives and how we flourish at our peaks. We often tend to think when we're in the military or doing an operation, when it comes to a SEAL team, that that's the peak experience. But what I really learned from experiencing them is that it's the valleys, or what I now call the transition points, where it matters the most. Because it's in those transition points that you're accumulating your microchoices that eventually determine the flourishing in that moment. In that interview with Adam Grant, I heard you talking about this, and I thought maybe you can comment on it.
- [25:42]
Daniel Coyle
I think it's deep. I think there are these. When you look back in the history of so many great groups, so many flourishing groups, you go back a few years and what you find is a crisis. Often it's true. In the history of the seals, it's True in Pixar. It's certainly true in the baseball team that I work with here in Cleveland, the Cleveland Guardians, where there's this sor of reckoning, where you are seriously encountering real existential adversity. Existential adversity. Are we even going to be together? Are we going to be around a valley, a deep valley? And that valley is really hard to go through. But what it creates is this clarity, this clarity. And so teams that can develop the habit, you might say, of turning toward each other and toward the adversity at the same time. Like turning. There's a temptation when you hit that to isolate. There's a temptation to feel sorry for yourself. There's a temptation to look elsewhere, to get out of that situation. But these teams, I saw it really vividly. I think I tell the story in my book, the Culture Code. But there was the San Antonio spurs lost probably the most heartbreaking game in the history of the NBA in, in the finals a few years ago. I think it's 2013 finals. Miami hit a few last second shots. They were all set to celebrate the series, win the championship. They were, I think, 23 seconds from winning. The odds of winning were above 99%, but ball bounces the wrong direction three times in a row and they end up losing the game. They're devastated. They are absolutely broken. They had champagne in the locker ready to go. But what their coach said is, we're still going to the restaurant where we were going to celebrate. Get on the bus, we're going to the restaurant together. And they went and he gathered the players at a center table. And as the bus pulled up, the observer said the coach was Greg Popovich. He looked as broken as a person could be. He was absolutely spent. He'd given everything this game and they had lost. The bus pulled up, he stood up, straightened himself up, took a deep breath, and then started warmly greeting everybody as they came in the restaurant, greeting their families, pouring wine for people. People said watching him was like seeing a dad at a wedding. Like he just was absolutely locked into making sure everybody had a great time. And by the end of the night, like, they had reconnected, they had processed together, they had turned toward each other in their worst moment. And that became the foundation for the next few years at San Antonio. They actually kept the unopened champagne bottles and they popped them the next year when they won. It's really cliched. It's so much of this stuff. It sounds like a cliche at first. Oh, adversity. You should stay Tough and everything. And it's a cliche partly for a reason, that there is, like, a deep truth to there, that those moments do both reveal character, but also give you the opportunity to grow that character together. And the story I see over and over in the places that I visit for the new book is that same instinct, like experiencing adversity and then turning toward that adversity with other people and creating community. That's what's happening in each of these places. And that's what Pop was doing that night. He was creating community. And that's what we see. That's. That is the deep pattern that we see in flourishing places, people, groups, and businesses is this. This turning toward and this community that is ready to be unlocked and gets awakened.
- [29:02]
John R. Miles
So, given we're in the middle of the Winter Olympics, I want to go into winter sports next, and I want to tie back Barry Schwartz into this. Barry told you about how you need to cultivate your life. I have been doing a tremendous amount of study now on mattering and connectedness, which are actually two different things. Connectedness is what a lot of people think of when they think of mattering, and it is a relational aspect. But to me, mattering is the solo human operating system on which connectivity sits. So when you think of the communities that we reside in, oftentimes we think we just have to find a community, whether it's a church or a special operations team or perhaps Toastmasters. We think all of a sudden the community just happens to you, but you actually have to cultivate yourself into it. And where I wanted to go with winter sports is in the Olympics and Alpine skiing, which is probably one of my favorite events. And what you found in the book is that there's this certain city called Norwich here in the United States, where they produce more skiers who go on to the Olympics than almost anyone else.
- [30:21]
Daniel Coyle
Yeah.
- [30:21]
John R. Miles
What did you find about Norwich that redefines these communities?
- [30:26]
Daniel Coyle
Right. This little town, Norwich, Vermont, that resembles every other New England town. Right. If you do a picture of your idyllic doing, there's a steeple and there's a town common. And the only thing that's unusual is that they produced, I think, 11 Olympians over the last 30 or 40 years. And what is unique about it is our normal instincts for explaining that is, well, they must have a set of incredible coaches or some incredible Olympic program or something in the water. As we like to say, there's something in the water. But what's in the water in Norwich is and has been, is this incredible clarity about connection and our possibilities and obligations for helping one another out. In Norwich there was a woman, Karen Krause, who wrote an excellent book about it. And the way she described it was the Norwich Daisy chain, which is everyone sees every other kid in Norway as almost an extension of their own kids. You treat them the same and you hope for them the same and you're not competing and you're trying to lift each other up. And when you scroll back history a little bit, why are they this way here and not somewhere else? Well, it turns out that in Norwich in the 60s, they got a vivid lesson on how not to parent. There was a tiger parent, the perfect tiger parent back in the 60s, raised two Olympic skiers and made both of them miserable in the process. He would put tire ankle weights around their ankles and send them on pre dawn runs. And he controlled every aspect of their diet and their training and he absolutely taught. And both girls of course ended up succeeding and yet spiraling in their personal lives as well. And so the cost of that kind of pressure was, was immediately apparent to the, to all of Norwich. And as a, as partly as a result, they moved into this other space and it redefined the norms with which they treat each other and they support each other. And there's a million tiny examples that I talk about in the book, but one of them is when there's a big meet, sometimes the whole town will go and watch the kids compete, say at Placid or somewhere else. And all the other top athletes are looking, they're with, from other places. They've, they're with their team and their coach and their masseuse or whatever. And the people from Norwich are with all the local folks. And it's just a sense of again, community. We think of community as a noun, but I think what Norwich helps teach us is that it's actually a verb. It's a set of actions of noticing someone, of looking for where the need is and of supporting them in some way. What it makes me think of one more quick example. There was a young snowboarder who needed money to travel. And her parents name was Hannah Carney. Her parents, I think she was about 14, said, well, we don't have any money. Why don't you go around town and see if you can get any businesses to sponsor you. And so Hannah wrote up a little resume for herself, started going door to businesses and sure enough somebody agreed to sponsor her. And the condition was just one condition. I'd love to see your grades every year. I don't care how you do in the meets. I don't care how you do in your sports life, but I want to see your grades. I want to make sure you keep up your grades so that expect that kind of, you know, everyone is playing a role of an uncle, a caring uncle. As Karen Krause, who wrote the book on Norwich, put it everywhere, it's normal to care about your kids, but in Norwich, you care about other people's kids more than you care as much as you care about your own kids. So it's just. It's simple. But I think what the story kind of illustrates is that it's those kinds of ecosystems, as with the seals, they're not fixed. They depend on this living participation and these sets of norms that people create together so that they can behave in this way.
- [34:00]
John R. Miles
It's interesting, Dan. I have a really good friend I went to the Naval Academy with. Turned out he became the chief astronaut. Chris was originally a Navy seal, and he ended up taking the concepts that he learned from going through BUDS and spending over a decade with the teams to the astronaut program. And this really paved the way for when he was up on the International Space Station, how the team behaved, because when they were up there, they cultivated this community that we've been talking about throughout the episode and really created this ecosystem of trust between the different astronauts. I thought this was a really good example because he did this famous spacewalk with this Italian astronaut, Lucia Paratimo, where everything went horribly wrong. It was probably the most dangerous or one of the most dangerous spacewalks there's ever been. Lucius Helmet started to collect water in it, and at first they thought it was just a sweat, but then it turns out it was a mechanical failure, and he was tasting cooling fluid that was going into his mask. And what ends up happening when you're up there in space is that these molecules need to go someplace, but they don't move. And so they're accumulating around his face. And my point here is that Chris used the trust that he had built up with Lucia and that community to guide him, because there was a point as he was doing this that Lucia was pretty much blind. He couldn't see. And so Chris had to guide him back to the safety lock. And then once they got in the safety lock, he had to calm him down enough for the 10, 15, 20 minutes while they're in there that he would stay calm. I express this because they were way above our gravity, and it shows you the magnitude of what successful communities can build. Where I'm going with this is. We talked about mountaintops and alpine skiing, and we've talked about outer space. Now I now want to switch to underneath the ground. Because that same bond that Chris Cassidy demonstrated was also found in the Chilean mine rescue from a number of years ago. If people haven't studied this, I encourage you to look at this through the lens of Amy Edmondson, the Harvard professor who pioneered psychological safety. Not sure if you've read it, Dan, but her white paper on this is phenomenal.
- [36:38]
Daniel Coyle
Yeah, yeah. And she's focused, if I remember right, largely on what's happening outside the mine as they come together to build this incredible. Talk about a space shot. Right. They're going 2,000ft into the granite to rescue these people. Most of us remember the big outlines of the story. 33, 33 miners. There's a cave in San Jose mine. There's 100 million tons of rock on them. The hope for escape is pretty minimal at first because nobody's ever escaped from that far down before. And they're trapped in what's called a refugio, a little room which had a cabinet with some old cans of tuna and some cookies and some sour milk. And for 16 days, they were there in the dark. Then when they're finally contacted, they're thinking, what typically happens in these things is there's, you know, severe mental health risks. Injuries get infected. There's all kinds of horror stories of what happened when you have a group of roughneck miners in a small space with no certainty of rescue at all, like, probably not going to be rescued. And then they finally contact him, and they drop a phone down the hole and say, how are you guys doing? And they say, we're doing great. But our first question is, what happened to the bus driver who was near us when the cave in happened? First thing they do is ask about somebody else. They didn't say, oh, my God, when are you going to come and get us? We're dying down here. They said, what about that other guy? And then they go on. The conversation was very normal. And then they sang a song together. They sang the Chilean anthem together. And what became clear is that they had created in atmosphere that were very close to hellish, an extraordinary community. And then where it gets more interesting, and I think where it connects back to our other conversation, is that the moments in which that community was created weren't moments of, like, action and decision and information. It wasn't moments of a leader taking charge and saying, here's what we need to do. It was moments where they all stopped, where they circled up and they said, who are we? They didn't have answers. They explored questions. Who do we want to be? And at one of those moments, the boss, this very stern man, his name was Luis Urzua, steps to the center of the circle, takes off his white helmet and says, there are no bosses and there are no employees anymore. And, whoa, that changes things, right? So they're switching out of this kind of fix it, solve it mentality that we're always in. Just. It's an attentional style, really, is what it is. It's an attentional mode that we're in where we're paying attention. We're seeing the world as a problem that can be solved. And that what they're doing in that moment is surrendering to the situation and saying, they're widening their attention. They're not trying to fix anything. And they're connecting to something bigger than themselves. And it's a pause like nothing seems to happen, and yet it's where everything important happens. It's probably a moment like that where your astronaut friend in the Italian created a bond, right? Those relational moments of responsive connectedness where you stop and you stop seeing the other person as something you can control or some situation you need to fix, and you genuinely inhabit the mystery of what are we doing here? What value do I see? What value can we add to each other? Where do we want to go? What do we want this to look like? How do we want to be together? Those are really simple, powerful questions. And that's what you find at the core of all flourishing groups. Because those are moments when relationships get born, when communities stops being a noun and starts being a verb. What happened in the mind was that after they circled up like that, they started self organizing around big, obvious problems like, where are we going to sleep? Let's get a sleeping area organized. What should we do with this food? How are we going to divide that up? They started working on that. They developed these rituals at each meal. They developed these habits of being guardian angels for each other. One would sleep, the other one would keep an eye on. They'd pair up, basically safety buddy. And they developed little games they would play down there. And so it's not to say it was easy at all. It was incredible amount of suffering. But it was those bonds of community that allowed them. Those bonds formed in moments when they stopped, not in moments when they did something. They formed in moments when they stopped. They let go of control, and they really inhabited this mystery of where do we want to go together? And that's the pattern I saw in all of these places, they weren't on autopilot like we think of the. When you said autopilot in the modern world, I really think that's deeply true. And our world teaches us to build a lot of habits and to stay in this narrow mode of attention all the time and to automate our lives. But what these places show, what the flourishing groups and people show, is that it's not about automation, it's about animation. It's about creating moments where you stop and really see what is happening in life around you and connects to it. And there's some fascinating. It all sounds very woo woo in a way, but there's some. What I found in the course of writing the book is there's a ton of super fascinating studies and research and point of view about how our attention operates that really shows the mechanism beneath these moments. They're not just magical moments of groovy connection that we know each other now. It's like in our brains we're actually switching from one narrow attention system to a relational attention system. And those two attention systems are between our ears all the time. And our challenge is to balance them and turn them on when they're appropriate and create moments of meaningful connection with through activating our relational attention. And the argument that I make in the book is that it's not magic. It can be done if you learn how to use like awakening cues, if you learn how to manage the balance of how your attention functions and sense when you're in one mode and sense when you're another mode and create spaces that activate this broader, warmer, healthier relational attention.
- [42:26]
John R. Miles
I love it. And I'm sitting here smiling the whole time you're saying this because whether you knew it or not, you're just describing mattering to a precise T. And I loved how you brought up the awakened sense because it reminds me of Lisa Miller's work on the awakened brain, which is someone. If the audience hasn't heard of her, you can go back to an interview I did, search for it in the archives where we discuss that. But what you were really describing in that cave was each man's attention. Their voice and action were seen and heard and valued and it was materially consequential to the group's survival. So given that, I want to look at the opposite side of this, which is in systems or communities where people feel interchangeable, managed or unseen, what does that erosion look like?
- [43:19]
Daniel Coyle
It looks incredibly common. A right. It's very easy. It's a modern experience. I think to feel like you're just a cog in a machine, to feel like you're not mattering. And we've to a. I don't know, I find it to be a little almost near dystopian extent, normalize, that kind of thing where we talk about people and treat people as if they're simply computational beings and simply machines. But what it looks like is isolation. What it looks like is loneliness. What it looks like is anxiety and depression. I think in the end, when, you know, we are social animals, we are animals made of meaning without meaningful connection, without mattering, to use the language without mattering, we're hollowed out.
- [44:01]
John R. Miles
We're.
- [44:01]
Daniel Coyle
It's. It is a core need of us to be in community, in and growing. And the litmus test that I use informally is like two questions. Who do you feel most alive with? Like, where do you feel most alive? And what are you growing with someone? What project are you working on that's creating something new in the world that maybe wasn't there before? And if you can answer those questions and say, I feel alive here and here and these are the projects I'm working on, then that's beautiful. That's very human thing to be feeling that. But if you have. If there isn't a part or a relationship in which you feel alive, or if there isn't a project in which you feel like you're growing something meaningful, that matters. I think that's what our world sometimes can create. I think it creates a profound hollowness that, that I think we all, to one extent or another, feel. And the deeper challenge of it is that there's a trillion dollar economy of really smart people that are trying to pull us into that world that really only make money if people are isolated and a little ticked off. Community, neighborhood, meaningful connection is not what pays the bills for those guys. They would much rather have people typing angry things to each other. And I think we're learning that. It feels. Maybe your podcast is part of it, but it feels like, and it might be me because I'm writing about this topic. So it's like when you buy a Toyota Corolla, you just see a lot of Corollas on the road. So I may be totally biased here, but it feels like there's a bit of a humanist revival that people now are understanding what's happening in the algorithmic world.
- [45:34]
John R. Miles
Right?
- [45:34]
Daniel Coyle
You can live in the algorithmic world where the algorithm will drive your choices and tell you what to do, and you can be treated as a set of Machine like preferences. And there's a humanist world, there's a bit of a humanist revival or community world. So it feels like the community is having a bit of a comeback. I hope that it is.
- [45:53]
John R. Miles
I love that. And I was recently interviewing Rebecca Newberg or Goldstein, whose episode was two days ago in fact, who wrote another great book that has recently come out called the Mattering Instinct. The things that you were describing she refers to as mattering projects. And she was saying when people don't have that mattering project, that's when they typically tune out. And I also liked your definition that you gave for these communities where this stuff is absent because that's where this whole concept of anti mattering that Gordon Flett came up with really takes hold. When people in these communities experience anti mattering or what's happening to presence at the neurological and social level, they do self reliance, they perform competence and they psychologically withdraw. And that's what's happening to so many communities around us. It's the self silencing, I mean the psychological withdrawal that we're seeing which then leads to other things that you were talking about. Loneliness, people feeling burned out, the disengagement that we're seeing across companies, helplessness and all the other things that we think are just symptoms. We're treating them as independent epidemics. However, I believe they're all interrelated. What you and I are both talking about here.
- [47:21]
Daniel Coyle
I like that. But I think the thing that I'm taking away too, just to connect those two worlds a bit, is how close they actually are. Like experiment after experiment shows. And I think part of it is rooted in these attentional mode switches that we have both systems inside ourselves. This kind of rugged, individual, selfish, controlling, focused system and this broad, warm relational system. Because over and over in the book I end up encountering the same story, which is, well, everybody was feeling disconnected. And then we did these two, three events and that really flipped it. It wasn't like they had to start from zero and come up this. We are pre wired for community. The place that captured it most vividly for me was this neighborhood in Paris called Petit Mont Rouge. And it was disconnected, it was people in their phones, pretty typical middle class neighborhood. And there was a retired journalist named Patrick Bernard and he decided to do this experiment which is, I'm going to put a. I'm going to rent a ton of tables, these like tables you get at Costco, right, right down the hundred of them and have a dinner for 800 people, lunch. The whole neighborhood come to the Neighborhood longest table in Paris. And then he set up a bunch of interest groups, led people to self organize into interest groups. And the only rule he had was no politics. Don't talk about politics. You must gather around a joy device of food or wine. But other than that, no politics. Be around a joy device. And it's completely revitalized the neighborhood. It didn't take years. It didn't take bottom up thinking. It took experiences. And when people experience community and experience the power of that, of knowing their neighbor and feeling connected. There was a woman there, older woman, who broke her wrist. Because this neighborhood now feels like a village. This older woman broke her wrist and she had 15 offers from people who wanted to help her get her groceries. It's what we're built for. We're built for community. And although the fact that our economy we live in is very individualized, the people on the other end here aren't probably gathered around a speaker listening to the podcast as a group. They're probably listening through headphones or pods or listening alone. Our economy is built around individuals, but. And it sells to individuals and it caters to individuals, and it isolates everybody as an individuals and measures us as individuals. But we're built for community. And so these places over and over again show us how quick it can be. And there's another one that I'm just blabbing here, but there's one that just came to mind because the Patriots, of course, are going to the super bowl. And they did a little exercise that they're all talking about now. They're saying, what brought us together as a team? Well, how are we so trusting? And there's obviously a million factors you could point to. But one of the things they did at the beginning of this preseason was called the four H's. They circled up, got in small groups and said, all right, talk about your hero, talk about your heartbreak, talk about your history, where you're from, and talk about your hopes for the year. Open up. You know, let's really have a minute and figure out meaningful connection. Let's have a meaningful connection here. And they really grounded their whole season in that moment of meaning. And now they've obviously. A million other things have happened, and they've obviously had a lot of other factors working in their way. But now that they're on the threshold of this great accomplishment, they're all talking and thinking about that little exercise that took half an hour. So these moments of. So that they were able to. Because they understood how community actually works. Like, they could have Used that half hour to practice harder.
- [50:47]
John R. Miles
Right.
- [50:47]
Daniel Coyle
They. It seemed inefficient. Why would we sit around and talk? Come on, let's go practice. Because this is how communities actually work. You have to circle up, create that moment of genuine, risky, vulnerable, meaningful connection to. To create community. And we're pre wired to do it if we do it. Clicks on.
- [51:07]
John R. Miles
Speaking of the Patriots, I just have to digress here. Just for a second. I was completely blown away that Bill Belichick didn't get into the hall of Fame on the first ballot. That, to me, was, wow. Crazy, right?
- [51:19]
Daniel Coyle
Crazy, right?
- [51:21]
John R. Miles
Crazy.
- [51:22]
Daniel Coyle
Maybe he wasn't that good. My theory would be he's not that good at forming community with hall of Fame voters. He should have had a 4H exercise with him before the ballot.
- [51:32]
John R. Miles
That stuff absolutely does matter, doesn't it? I live here in Tampa Bay, Florida, and in St. Petersburg, if anyone's ever been there. There's this great older hotel called the Vinoy that sits right on the water basin. And I don't know, five or six years ago, they started to do the longest table here. It probably goes close to a football field. It's really long. And what I have felt experiencing it is that the table doesn't work only because people feel welcome. I think it works because it makes each person's presence relevant to the experience. It's like mutual contribution that they're all having. Did you find that to be the case when you looked at the Parisian example?
- [52:15]
Daniel Coyle
Absolutely. And there's a welcoming and an imperfection. There's so many parts of our life that sort of perfection is expected, I think, in some ways, in the way we keep our lawns and the way we dress when we leave the house. And this is just hospitality, and everybody's showing up. I don't know how it was in St. Pete, but here it was a potluck. So what'd you bring? Right. Everybody's literally bringing a gift. And so I'm sharing mine with you, and you're sharing with me. When you actually look into the word origin of community, it means sharing services and gifts like that is what it is. And so this idea that everyone, it's. It's one of those sort of simple things, but this idea of orienting around gifts, because in every group there are hidden gifts and creating conditions where those gifts can show themselves, whether that's in a conversation at work where we're trying to explore something new and you've got some hidden expertise that's connected to that or some experience in the Navy that's connected to that. I think flourishing groups are continually and that's why they're often built around questions rather than answers. But they're continually creating questions. Continue creating space where gifts can come forward. Because that's a gift is a double whammy you get, not just the experience. If mattering is about being valued and adding value and I think that's one way to understand it, it's I am valued and I'm adding value. It is a mattering is a relationship. Community is a relationship. Focus on gifts is just such a beautiful shortcut to finding that right and also permitting the imperfections. It's not perfect, it's messy. Your table in St. Pete was messy and it wasn't like there was a perfect waiter pouring just amount the right amount of cool water in your glass. People are self organizing and they've turned from this stance of being a consumer to being a participant and being a citizen. And that's what I saw in these places. It's a change in energy, which sounds woo, but it's where we go from being receiving something to actually saying, no, I'm not outside that ecosystem, I'm not outside that relationship. I'm in relationship with it. And it lights us up.
- [54:23]
John R. Miles
So one core difference between the Paris example and the St. Pete example, I think I like the Paris example better is in the St. Pete example, it costs a lot of money. They bring in five or six of the higher end restaurants in town to cater it. I think the cheapest one you can do is like $75, but it goes all the way up to $200 a person depending on what experience you want to get. I like the idea better that if you bring community meals that each one partakes in because it brings more of that contribution to bear.
- [54:59]
Daniel Coyle
It's true, right? We want it, we like to be needed, we need to be wanted. We've all got gifts, right?
- [55:04]
John R. Miles
Sherrom, you mentioned Cleveland. Dan and I grew up for part of my life as a child in Bay Village, which is not too far from Cleveland. My family are die hard Michigan fans. My parents, grandparents, everyone went to the University of Michigan. So if you're a Michigan fan, you ultimately have gone to Zingerman's because it's a legend in Ann Arbor. And you chose to talk about Zingerman's.
- [55:29]
Podcast Narrator/Host
As well in the book.
- [55:31]
John R. Miles
Why would you focus on Adeli as an example of this community that you saw so rich that they had created?
- [55:40]
Daniel Coyle
The short answer is that they are, I think, measurably one of the Most remarkable business stories in America. I think there should be MBA classes led and taught out there. What they've done is quite remarkable. The short answer is I'd been there a few times and I felt the energy and I'd read a bit about them and I knew just enough to. To have them be a mystery to me. Started as a 1:1 building deli 1982. Started by people who had very little experience. One was a dishwasher, one was a, I think, a manager of a restaurant. Maybe their goal was to build a great Jewish deli in Ann Arbor. One that was so good that you bit into the Reuben and the juice ran down your arm. That was the vision right here in my mind. Yeah, right. Exactly. Good vision. And they did. Ten years go by, and pretty soon, as in every business, people start copying them. Them, right? People start copying the typeface, people start copying the menu. It's easy. That's business, right then. So the two partners sit down and they say, what do we want to be? That same conversation that Chilean miners had, that same conversation. The New England Patriots had that same awkward, vulnerable, difficult.
- [56:44]
John R. Miles
Whoa.
- [56:45]
Daniel Coyle
We got to let go of control here and see what this is all about. And so they had that conversation and they developed this vision that of a community of businesses of that were all rooted in Ann Arbor, connected by the Zingerman's ethos, not outside Ann Arbor at all, all in Ann Arbor. And sure enough, that's what they built. Working with partners developing this very communal structure. But now there's a coffee shop, there's a bakery, there's a roadhouse restaurant, there's a wedding planning outfit, there's a travel business, there's a huge catalog business. It's now a 90 million, completely organic, soulful community of businesses that is, by some measures, some of the people that I met with who worked there, they had Harvard MBAs, they had worked at the Ritz Carlton in Paris, and they decided to come back to Ann Arbor because it is such a fulfilling, meaningful community. Zingerman says. And when you. When you dig into that and ask, how are they doing this? How exactly are they doing this? The answer is that they're really skilled at creating what I call in the book Awakening Cues, which is little moments that connect us to meaning in the average everyday course of things. And I got to sit in on an orientation class which was led by Ari Weinsweig, who's the co. CEO, co founder of Zingerman's. And there's new employees. The scene is simple classroom setting. There's about nine or 10 new employees are there. The CEO walks in and they're all sitting expectantly. They got their pencils in their hand, they're ready to take notes. It's orientation. I'm going to learn, they're going to orient me, I'm going to be given information, and I'm going to be given the secrets of how to succeed here. So I'm ready to learn. And Ari walks in, he flips it, he's, what's your story? How'd you get here? Oh, wow, cool. What's your story? How did you get here? And they walk around and share their stories. And then Ari shares some stories about Zingerman's evolution, how they came from, what their philosophy is. There was a. I don't know if he told that story that time or not, but there was a time where Walt Disney came in and offered him $50 million to partner because they wanted the best deli in America in their park. And zingerman's took about 15 minutes to think about it and said, no, thanks. And Walt Disney is, you don't understand.
- [59:02]
John R. Miles
You.
- [59:03]
Daniel Coyle
You don't get it. And ultimately Zingerman said, well, I don't think you guys get it. We're not about that. We're about this place. We have this deep, rich, thriving set of relationships, and if we go all over the place, we're going to lose that. We. This is what is valuable to us. If you ever. They said, if you ever open Walt Disney World in Ann Arbor, we'll be part. We'll partner with you. Right? But so they, they keep walking through this orientation. It's a set of stories and connections, and they have got all of these in addition to all of that, at the end of the orientation, he says, get into small groups and talk about what you want to build in your lives, what are your dreams? Talk about those and then share those out. It was like a reverse orientation, right? It wasn't a typical transmit of, here's all the information you need. It was, let's create a meaningful moment together so that we can get to know each other, and then we'll learn the information. That stuff's not hard. What's hard is like, creating relationships, and that's what Zingerman's is incredible at. And one other thing that comes to mind, I was. I was asking Ari, like, why did you say no to Walt Disney? This is an example of a good awakening cue that he gave me. I said, why did you say no to Walt Disney? And he answered, not with logic or Information. He pointed to my wedding ring and he said, do you take every opportunity that comes along? Like, oh, yeah. That kind of puts it in a clear light. Like commitment is where the good stuff is. And Zingerman's understands that at a very deep level. And it's helped them continue to thrive because they're built on the values of community, of sharing those gifts.
- [60:37]
John R. Miles
Something I'm going to have to look into is my brother is an executive at Chick Fil A. And what people don't understand is if they don't understand the mechanism of Chick Fil A is that they don't call their individual owners franchisees, they call them operators. But their whole ecosystem is built on that operator community. And that is exactly the community that they want to cultivate inside each of their restaurants. And then more importantly, the community that they want to build outside in the community around it. They take that very seriously in how they design everything they do in their stores. It would be such an interesting project to take what Zingerman's has done and what Chick Fil A has done and see how much they overlap.
- [61:29]
Daniel Coyle
Great call. All right, all you business students, get busy.
- [61:35]
John R. Miles
Dan, if there was one thing that a person listening here today or watching you hoped would take away from our conversation, what would it be?
- [61:44]
Daniel Coyle
I think it would be yellow doors. Yellow doors. This is actually an idea that you mentioned, Lisa Miller earlier. This is from her work, but it has been. I saw it all the time at the flourishing places I visited and it ended up impacting my own life a lot. And her. The idea is we mostly go through life looking for clear signals to go or stop. Green doors that are go open do this. Red doors that are stop, don't do this. And life gets immeasurably richer and more interesting. If you slow down a little bit, widen your aperture, like, turn off your controlling attention that goes through the world looking like through a tube of paper towels, and widen out your attention and start attuning to the yellow doors, which are opportunities that appear out of the corner of your eye that you aren't immediately drawn to. Or the coffee with the neighbor who didn't seem nice at first, or the meeting with a colleague who invites you as an observer that you're not really connected with a project or a chance conversation on the bus when you could be on your phone opening up to that. It's ended up having a big impact, I guess, the way it impacted my life the most. It's been a daily practice. Right? One yellow door a day is a nice Way to think about it. And not so long ago, I had a friend who wanted to get together to do a regular Wednesday thing with some guys, and he wanted to go indoor climbing. And I don't like indoor climbing. I've done it a couple times. The shoes are really stupid and tiny and it hurt your feet. And I wasn't interested. But I thought, yellow door. I gave it a try. And as I write in the book, those guys have turned into some of my best friends. Now, a few years later, we go climbing, we go skiing, we take trips together, our families are friends, we play music together, we go to concerts. It's been like this incredible source of fellowship and fun that I was craving in my. My life. And if I had been. If I hadn't been alert to yellow doors, I don't think I would have them in my life right now. Not to say that every yellow door leads to something like that. Tons of them don't. But that's the point. Like, life is not to go back to where we started. Life ain't a game. It's literally not a game. If anybody listening takes a piece of paper and a pen and starts sketching out the shape of their life, what direction did you go? Where did it take you? They're not drawing straight lines. They're drawing these squiggles with a ton of dead ends. And then a turn and then a movement, and then a breakthrough and then another failure. And they're these squiggly paths. And yellow doors are the kind of inflection points on that path where we can say, hey, that's interesting. I don't know if it's good or bad. Let me try it out. Let me live into it. Live into the question. And we can't think our way through them. We can't predict our way through them or logic our way through them. And you have to live your way through them to really, really inhabit them and explore them. And that feels good. When you develop the athletic move, to say, I'm going to push through that and all. The fact that it's a little painful, a little uncertain, is just the price of good things. It's not a downside that it's a little painful. It should be a little painful, like a lot of stuff is, and that's okay. You're not going to grow without some form of stressing who you are now to lead toward that growth. That's how growth works. That's how the garden has grown. I guess you, you might say, great.
- [64:59]
John R. Miles
Closure for the episode right there. What I love about what you just said about the yellow doors mimics what you were saying about the cues earlier. And it kind of mimics what I was saying about the transition points. They're all the analogy or metaphor of the same thing. But these are the moments that we need to pay more attention to because that's where true connection happens and that's where our life gets shaped, I think, for the better or if you don't pay attention to them, for the worst.
- [65:29]
Daniel Coyle
I couldn't agree more.
- [65:31]
John R. Miles
Final question for you, Dan, is this. I always ask this for the guests. For you, what does it mean to live a passion struck life?
- [65:43]
Daniel Coyle
Wow. I think it means that you're always tapping into some core, some depth. For me, it's like you're always tapping into some depth. You're doing things because they resonate like a guitar string inside you. And it's not logical entirely, though. You can use logic to serve those feelings. You can use logic to help you cultivate that passion. And I almost think of it as part passion and part like fascination too, where it's like stuff you find endlessly interesting, where that flame gets reignited all the time and you get that energy is renewed. For me, it's like you're in touch with these sources and maybe their activities, maybe their relationships, maybe their projects that kind of pluck that guitar string inside you. That's, oh, I like that. And you can't help but pursue it. Like it doesn't feel like work, it feels like fascination.
- [66:39]
John R. Miles
I love it because that's what it means to me as well. You're in a mattering moment, mattering project that your passion struck about. Dan, it was such an honor to have you on the show. For listeners who want to learn more about you, where is the best place for them to go?
- [66:56]
Daniel Coyle
Yeah, danielcoyle.com is a link to contact me or whatever people want to do.
- [67:01]
John R. Miles
Awesome. Thank you so much for joining us here on Passion Struct.
- [67:05]
Daniel Coyle
Thanks, John. It was a delight. Thanks for having me.
- [67:07]
Podcast Narrator/Host
That brings us to the close of.
- [67:09]
John R. Miles
Today'S conversation with Daniel Coyle.
- [67:11]
Podcast Narrator/Host
If this episode stayed with you, it's likely because it illuminated something you felt before. The difference between being included and being needed. Here are three reflections you might carry forward. First, flourishing begins with presence. Second, group flow emerges from trust. And lastly, mattering is structural. It shows up in how roles are designed, how voices shape action, and whether individuals experience themselves as necessary to the whole. Daniel's work reminds us that flourishing doesn't require perfection or constant happiness. It grows where human significance is continually reinforced through participation and shared responsibility. If this conversation resonated, consider sharing it with someone who's building a team, leading a community, or quietly wondering why energy keeps draining from spaces that look successful on paper. To continue the work, visit theignitedlife.net our substack for episode reflections, watch the full conversation on YouTube at John R. Miles or Passion Struck clips. Explore Intention Driven apparel@start mattering.com Next, we continue the youe Matter series with Harry Reiss and Sonja Lieboomirsky, exploring how happiness, connection, and relational significance intersect and where they meaningfully diverge.
- [68:27]
Guest Expert
People will pursue the goals of being famous, of making a lot of money, of being the most beautiful person on the planet, that sort of thing. When you pursue those extrinsic goals and other people admire you for that, it isn't experienced as the real self. You can never have enough money because there's always somebody who makes more money. There's a wonderful study that showed that something like two thirds of the millionaires in America feel like they don't make enough money because there's always someone more beautiful. There's always someone more powerful.
- [68:58]
Daniel Coyle
Powerful.
- [68:58]
Guest Expert
There's always someone with higher status. There's always someone who's won more awards than you. And so when you're pursuing those more and more, it's not the real self that's coming through.
- [69:09]
Podcast Narrator/Host
Until then, remember, you matter because your presence shapes what unfolds around you. You matter because participation changes outcomes and flourishing grows wherever people are treated as indispensable. I'm John Miles, and you've been patient, passion struck.