Podcast Summary: We Can Do Hard Things – Jon Batiste + Suleika Jaouad: WHAT IS ENOUGH?

Date: December 4, 2025
Hosts: Glennon Doyle, Abby Wambach (Treat Media)
Guests: Jon Batiste, Suleika Jaouad
Duration: Key content spans through 1:13:42 (excluding ads/intros/outros)

Episode Overview

This heart-expanding and thought-provoking episode of We Can Do Hard Things features renowned musician Jon Batiste and bestselling author/artist Suleika Jaouad. Glennon, Abby, and Amanda invite listeners into an intimate double-date-style conversation that explores creativity, ambition, spirituality, and the challenge of defining “enough” in art, love, and life. The discussion glides between playful anecdotes, deep existential musings, and tangible advice on creative partnerships, all within the loving, wise, and often hilarious dynamic between the hosts and guests.

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Working and Creating Together as a Couple

[02:56-10:16]

• Life on the Road: Jon and Suleika share the joys and challenges of touring together, highlighting how blending professional and personal lives creates both deeper connection and unforeseen friction.

  • Jon: “I love it. I'm ready to retire, doing my thing and do our thing. It's so good.”
  • Suleika: “If you really not only love each other, but like each other, merging work worlds means that you get to be together more often.”

• Collaboration Tensions: Suleika, a meticulous planner, and Jon, a spontaneous improviser, reveal a vulnerable behind-the-scenes story—Suleika’s onstage panic when Jon wanted to rewrite the show structure just before curtain-up. This friction led to deepened trust and ultimately, a favorite performance.

  • Suleika [06:41]: “I had a panic attack. I started sobbing. All my makeup was dripping down... By the time I got on stage, I was such a frazzled mess... But it was probably my favorite onstage experience.”

2. Balancing Art and Money: The Question of “Enough”

[13:53-27:05]

• The Moving Goalpost: Both couples discuss the persistent tension between staying true to their art and navigating the pressures of “making it,” selling it, or promoting it. The temptation to equate success with external validation or financial reward is a recurring temptation.

  • Suleika [15:38]: “In some ways, [having little] makes things a lot easier: enough is quite literal... I think that's the double-edged sword of success and the goalposts constantly moving.”
  • Jon [17:10]: “You have to think about, well, what is the work that only I can do?... Then let me do that to the best of my ability.”
  • Jon [18:59]: “The systems of the world... are impossibly corrupt... there's something or someone or someplace that it hurts. Everything in every single vertical of society is rooted in some level of impurity.”

• The Beast (Ambition): Jon and Suleika speak about “the beast” within—the drive, ambition, or perfectionism—and the importance of facing and naming it, rather than letting it unconsciously steer their lives.

  • Jon [20:02]: “The beast is different for different people. Everybody has one, though. Don’t fool yourself and think you don’t have one.”

3. Perfectionism, Creative Injuries, and Performance

[21:13-45:53]

• Dangerous Perfectionism:

  • Suleika [21:32]: “That kind of perfectionistic tendency that... can feel like a kind of prison... so attached to the words that I miss the moment.”

• Defining True Ambition:

  • Glennon [24:13]: “Genius is the one who sounds most like himself.”
  • The group explores ambition as a positive force only when aligned with one’s truest self, but as “a monster” or “beast” when it is tethered to others’ perceptions or endless external striving.
  • Suleika [25:21]: “Where ambition can dip into dangerous territory is when it's an unconsidered yearning for more. But you're not defining what more is.”

• Creative Injury and Rejection:

  • Both guests (and hosts) recount stories of “creative injury”—childhood moments where an authority figure shamed or misunderstood them, shutting down creative joy until it is painstakingly rebuilt in adulthood.
  • Suleika [44:12]: “I felt like I had done a bad thing... It took me until the age of 22 to ever show my writing to anybody again.”

• Resilience and Authenticity:

  • Jon [51:40]: “The greatest souls have been the most rejected... if you’re not doing it for that [inner knowing], everything else is external.”

4. Creativity, Anxiety, and the Human Condition

[33:03-41:09]

• Tension as Creative Fuel:

  • Jon [33:49]: “Joy comes from pain... an expression... doesn’t come without some sort of journey...”
  • Suleika [35:31]: “A mosaic is a conversation between what’s broken.”

• Public Perception Anxiety:

  • The shift from childlike, intrinsic creativity to anxiety-driven, externally monitored creativity is parsed, with insights from both the power and the peril of visibility.

5. Cultural Critique: Art, Capitalism, and Human Potential

[40:00-57:45]

• Modern Commodification:

  • Jon [38:32]: “There’s not really been a precedent for the way that art is taking the place as a commodity in society... it’s much more than entertainment. It’s...our communal gathering and spiritual practice.”

• Purpose, Passion, and Monetization:

  • Suleika [57:35]: “This sort of toxic messaging... that you have to find your singular purpose, master it, then monetize it, and become the best in the world at it. And it’s so much pressure.”

• True Fulfillment:

  • Jon [54:20]: “We’ve stretched things beyond the natural limitation in almost every category, and it’s created this epidemic of loneliness and isolation... the purity of what we could be and who we are as souls on this Earth... has been stretched beyond its natural limitation in pursuit of what?”
  • Suleika [57:45]: “We do a great disservice not just to children, but to our ongoing possibilities of changing our minds about what we're curious about... without necessarily having to figure out how to translate that into something that pays your bills.”

6. Love, Conflict, and Spiritual Anchors

[62:53-73:10]

• Relationship Tools:

  • The couples vulnerably discuss how they navigate conflict, recognizing how old wounds and relationship dynamics play out.
  • Glennon and Abby share how they’re learning to name and own the “energy” behind their words, not just the words themselves.
  • Suleika [71:10]: “We have a code word. Our code word is lunch meat... The cue that what we need to do is to double down on expressing our love to each other.”

• Spiritual Foundation:

  • Jon [64:28]: “I’m Christian. I believe that we are in a broken world. So that is helping to understand and also have empathy for the brokenness... This whole aspect of our time on earth is to figure out how do we shine our light and point to the source of all things.”
  • For Jon, anchoring in faith is a daily, living practice and spiritual protection against the corrosive effects of public life and capitalism.

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On creative partnership:
  Jon [04:10]: "You just get to be together, and, you know, you get paid."
• On improvisation and trust:
  Suleika [08:16]: “It was probably my favorite on stage experience... but I was grateful to you for pushing me there.”
• On confronting ambition:
  Jon [17:10]: "You have to stare [the beast] in the eye and to let it know its place... you have to be very sober minded and you have to continuously push forward in a way where you understand exactly where you’re standing at every moment."
• On childhood creative wounds:
  Suleika [44:49]: “I think, you know, we all have these creative injuries at some point in childhood or adolescence or adulthood where you lose that pure connection to your creativity...”
• On public perception:
  Glennon [41:09]: “I think what I mean is I don’t know if I’m being perceived as giving enough, being good enough, being whatever, which is gross to admit, but I think that’s what I mean.”
• On artistic courage:
  Jon [51:28]: “The greatest souls have been the most rejected... and ultimately that inner knowing, you just gotta know.”
• On cultural pressure:
  Suleika [57:45]: “So many people suffer from feeling like they haven't found a purpose or a passion. And... haven’t earned a living by monetizing that sense of purpose or passion.”
• On spiritual anchoring:
  Jon [67:06]: “…It’s how you live. You can profess something and not live it.”

Timestamps for Important Segments

| Topic | Timestamps | |-------------------------------------------------|-----------------| | Introduction & Guest Bios | 00:00 – 02:06 | | Couples working & touring together | 02:56 – 10:16 | | Art versus Money: What is ‘enough’? | 13:53 – 27:05 | | The Beast: Ambition and Perfectionism | 17:10 – 25:47 | | Creative injuries; stories and impact | 44:12 – 45:53 | | Art, anxiety, and catharsis | 33:03 – 41:09 | | Capitalism, artistic purpose, human potential | 40:00 – 57:45 | | Relationship conflict & communication | 62:53 – 73:10 | | Spiritual beliefs and daily practice | 63:10 – 67:20 | | Closing gratitude and couch double-date wish | 73:12 – 73:42 |

Tone and Experience

The conversation is intimate but profound, balancing soulful vulnerability (“I had a panic attack...but it was my favorite on stage experience”) with wry humor (e.g., “Lunch meat” as a safe word for arguments). The hosts and guests are candid about their struggles—with art, partnership, ambition, and the world—but consistently return to hope, creative joy, and the spiritual practices that steady them.

Final Takeaways

• Collaboration is messy: True creative partnership involves loving friction and the courage to grow and improvise together.
• Defining “enough” is ongoing: Contentment in creative life arrives not from external successes but by returning, again and again, to inner purpose and values.
• Face your beast: Ambition, perfectionism, and anxiety are inevitable; awareness and honesty are tools for growth rather than sources of shame.
• Creative wounds can heal: Awareness of past rejection empowers artists to reclaim creativity for themselves—and, in doing so, to inspire others.
• Spiritual anchoring matters: Daily spiritual practice offers resilience against a world preoccupied with metrics and money, pointing us back to what’s essential.
• Kind, intentional communication in relationships transforms conflict into deeper love.

For anyone navigating art, purpose, anxiety, or love—this episode is a warm, wise, and deeply human invitation to do the hard and beautiful work of being yourself, with others, no matter how messy it gets.