Podcast Archives | The Art Of Manliness podcast

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You’ve heard the advice that to build wealth, you need to earn more, spend less, and invest consistently. But what if there was a clearer way to understand exactly where you stand financially — and what steps you should take to reach the next level? My guest, Nick Maggiulli, offers just such a framework. Nick is the creator of the Of Dollars And Data blog, the Chief Operating Officer at Ritholtz Wealth Management, and the author of The Wealth Ladder . Today on the show, he unpacks the Wealth Ladder concept, taking the complex, often overwhelming concept of personal finance and distilling it into six easy-to-understand wealth levels, each tied to specific net-worth milestones and financial freedoms. Nick walks us through each rung of the Wealth Ladder, from getting out of financial instability to achieving restaurant and travel freedom, and eventually reaching upper levels of significant financial independence. We discuss the distinct strategies you should utilize on each rung to make the most of that level and move on to the next. And we get into why your spending decisions should be based on your net worth rather than your income, how wealth allocation changes dramatically as you climb the ladder, and why increasing your earning potential becomes more important than penny-pinching as you progress. Whether you’re just getting started or well on your financial journey, this episode provides actionable insights and practical wisdom for climbing the Wealth Ladder and securing a life of greater freedom and fulfillment. Resources Related to the Podcast Nick ‘s previous appearance on the AoM podcast: Episode #836 — Data-Backed Answers to Personal Finance Controversies Nick ‘s previous book: Just Keep Buying: Proven Ways to Save Money and Build Your Wealth Nick ‘s article: What is Coast FIRE? The Ultimate Guide to Semi-Retirement The Missing Billionaires: A Guide to Better Financial Decisions Connect With Nick Maggiulli Of Dollars and Data blog Nick on X Nick on LinkedIn Nick on IG Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!) Listen to the episode on a separate page. Download this episode. Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice. Transcript Coming Soon This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.…

Podcast Archives | The Art of Manliness

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Podcast #1,076: The Microbiome Master Key — How 100 Trillion Bacteria Influence Your Weight, Mood, and All-Around Health

13 days ago

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When you think of the microbiome, you probably think of your gut. But bacteria live all over your body. And they’re incredibly numerous; you play host to about as many microbes — a hundred trillion of them — as you do human cells. As my guest will explain, these microbial ecosystems are not only ubiquitous but hugely influential for your health — impacting everything from your weight and mood to your risk of developing many diseases. Dr. Brett Finlay is a microbiologist and the co-author of The Microbiome Master Key . Today on the show, Brett explains what the microbiome is, how modern life — including our overemphasis on hygiene — has damaged it, and how the quality of your microbiome is connected to nine of the top ten leading causes of death, as well as everything from depression to Parkinson’s. Brett also shares how we can boost the health of our microbiome, including whether probiotic supplements are effective, how something as simple as flossing your teeth can cut your risk of Alzheimer’s by 50%, and why you might want to let your dog lick you in the face. Resources Related to the Podcast Let Them Eat Dirt documentary AoM Article: How and Why to Eat More Fiber AoM Article: Don’t Be a Stick in the Mud — Why You Should Let Your Kids Get Dirty Probiotic gum Connect With Brett Finlay Brett’s faculty page Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!) Listen to the episode on a separate page. Download this episode. Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice. Transcript Coming Soon This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.…

Podcast Archives | The Art of Manliness

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Podcast #1,075: Tame the Dopamine Drive — How to Stop Chasing and Start Living

19 days ago

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All the neurochemicals in the brain have to do with life in the present. Except for one: dopamine . Dopamine is the one neurochemical that looks to the future. It anticipates what may be to come and drives you towards it. That can be a good thing — dopamine is one powerful motivator — but it also has its downsides. Here to help us understand how the most important chemical in the brain works and how to deal with its pitfalls is Michael Long. Michael is a trained physicist turned writer whose latest book is Taming the Molecule of More . Mike and I discuss how dopamine , for better and worse, makes you want what you don’t have. He shares what causes low dopamine activity, how to know if you’re experiencing it, and what increases dopamine . We then talk about how to deal with the consequences of dopamine in some of the scenarios in which it plays a role — like losing the spark in a relationship and getting stuck in a smartphone scroll habit — and why so much of taming dopamine comes down to living in the here and now. We end our conversation with why The Great Gatsby is really a novel about dopamine and the fundamental answer to not letting the dopamine chase lead you around. Resources Related to the Podcast Mike’s previous appearance on the AoM podcast AoM Article: How to Do a Dopamine Reset AoM Podcast #745: Do You Need to Take a Dopamine Fast? AoM Article: Your Life Explained Through Dopamine Connect With Michael Long Taming the Molecule website Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!) Listen to the episode on a separate page. Download this episode. Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice. Read the Transcript Brett McKay: Brett McKay here. And welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. You’re on an airplane that crash lands, smoke fills the cabin, and you’ve only got seconds to react. How would you respond? Would you immediately take action or freeze in place? While you might think you know how a scene like this would play out from watching movies, the reality of what occurs in the aftermath of a disaster is quite a bit different. And that knowledge gap could prove deadly. My guest, Amanda Ripley, spent years researching how humans actually respond in emergencies, interviewing survivors as well as leading researchers. In her book “The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes and Why,” she uncovers the myths and realities of survival psychology and explores the individual and structural factors that shape people’s outcomes in unexpected crises. Today, Amanda explains why the biggest threat during an emergency isn’t panic, but passivity, and how to overcome the tendency to be overly complacent and compliant. We discuss why you might actually want to read the airplane safety card, what we can learn from the surprising calm that prevailed in the World Trade Center Towers on 9/11, how to improve your risk assessment, what influences if you’ll act heroically in an emergency, and much more. This episode will give you plenty to think about. It could even make the difference in how you respond if you’re ever faced with the unthinkable. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/disaster. All right Amanda Ripley welcome to the show. Amanda Ripley: Thanks for having me, Brett. Good to be here. Brett McKay: So back in 2008, you put out a book called “The Unthinkable,” and it’s all about the psychology and sociology of disasters and survival, how humans behave in a disaster situation. What was the original spark behind the book, “The Unthinkable”? Amanda Ripley: Well, way back for the original version of the book, I had been covering disaster, after disaster, after disaster for Time magazine at the time. From 9/11 in Manhattan to hurricanes Katrina and Rita in New Orleans to the European heat wave that it’s easy to forget killed 50,000 people in Europe one summer. So it seemed like we were doing a lot of stories about loss and grief and blame. But there was one kind of story that we didn’t do as much, which was what can we learn from the survivors of these things? What did it actually feel like physically, mentally, even socially, to survive a disaster? And what I had noticed interviewing survivors is that every single one had things they wish they had known, things that they wanted the rest of us to know. So that’s what led me to write the book. Brett McKay: And then you recently came out with an updated version. Why update it nearly 20 years later? Amanda Ripley: Well, it’s funny, it wasn’t my idea. I wish I could say it was, but basically, during the pandemic, the publisher noticed an uptick in sales and they reached out to me to say, “Hey, this book could probably use an update.” I mean, it’s actually kind of astounding how much had changed since 2008. I mean, that was before smartphones, social media, before the level of political polarization we have, before so many things that have changed since then. And of course, the pandemic itself being a massive global disaster made it feel like, yeah, we gotta update this thing. Brett McKay: Before you began researching and writing this book way back, how did you think people typically responded in disasters and emergency situations? Amanda Ripley: It’s a good question. I mean, I think I thought it was like in the movies. I thought that people would panic and freak out and just behave terribly. And it was really the interviews with probably starting with the survivors of the World Trade Center after 9/11, who piqued my curiosity because they said, actually it was really quiet and calm in the stairwells and people were moving really slowly. So it wasn’t the kind of mayhem that I had expected. And that was kind of one of the first things where I was like, huh, there’s more here that I don’t understand. Brett McKay: And something you… The argument you make in the book is that our erroneous understanding of how humans behave in disasters. I think people have that typical idea that you had, oh, there’s a disaster, everyone just freaks out. But that erroneous understanding actually contributes to us not being prepared for them. Amanda Ripley: Yeah, it’s much more insidious than it seems. Probably one of the biggest threats to our civilization is the low expectations that the people in charge have for us and that we have for each other in disaster. So it sounds dramatic the way I’m saying it, but again and again in my reporting, I saw examples of people in positions of authority assuming that the public was going to panic and freak out and so then not sharing facts with them and not helping them make informed decisions because of that distrust for the public, which of course then runs both ways, right? The public distrusts authority figures. And that distrust is a major feature of the updated version of the book because it’s gotten so much worse since the book first came out. And it’s unto itself a significant threat. Brett McKay: Yeah, a point you make is that because people in authority mistrust the public that, oh, these are a bunch of crazy people who just… They’ve lost their minds, we can’t trust them. Instead of dealing with the people problem, dealing with the humans, what they typically resort to is, well, how can we use technology or how can we manipulate the environment to get people to do what we want? For them, disasters are a technology issue, not a human issue. Amanda Ripley: Exactly. And I think that’s… I mean, we see that a lot, right, in education and other fields where we think if we can just invest in enough gear, then we can save ourselves. And it really wildly underestimates… And I speak for myself, I wildly underestimated the human factor. As you say, we have a lot of incredible tools now to help us get out of harm’s way. The thing we are not doing is incorporating psychology into how to use those tools, because it doesn’t matter how good your forecasting is or how incredible your vaccines are if people don’t trust you and you don’t trust them. Brett McKay: Yes, and I know we’ll talk about special forces guys today because that’s some of the people you talk to in researching this book. But I know they have a maxim that it’s humans over hardware. So when they’re planning a mission, they don’t worry about the tool so much. Those can come in handy, but you got to think about the human element first. Amanda Ripley: Yeah, and that’s one of the interesting things is that a lot of the research and reporting in the book comes from two categories, which are military research, U.S. Military research, but also other places, and then also plane crash analyses. And the reason for that is that those are two areas in which researchers have really been investing in trying to understand human psychology under duress. In other places, there’s much less of that. So even though plane crashes are not likely to happen, we can learn a lot about human behavior under duress because psychologists and sociologists have looked really closely at these disasters. Brett McKay: So you organized the book along what you call the survival arc. It’s this process that we all go through whenever we encounter a disaster. The three parts of the arc are denial, deliberation, and decisive action. Let’s talk about denial first. You mentioned you talked to survivors of the World Trade Center attacks, and the thing that surprised you was how slow people were, and then survivors describing how people kind of acted like nothing was wrong initially. So tell us more about that. What was the typical response of someone? They felt the building rock and shake. They heard a loud explosion. What did people do? Because I would think, oh, man, get out of there as soon as possible. That didn’t happen. Amanda Ripley: Right. No. So there is a kind of immediate return to normalcy. So your brain tries to fit what’s happening into everything that’s happened before, which makes total sense and works 99% of the time. And if you haven’t been in a disaster like that or trained for it in a realistic way, then your brain will try to just put it away and carry on. So in this case, I talk about Elia Zedeno, who was a survivor from the World Trade Center, and she said the building just rocked. I mean, in a way it had never before when that first plane hit. And she remembers grabbing onto her desk at her cubicle at the Port Authority and lifting her feet up off the ground and yelling, “What is going on?” because it really felt like it was going to fall over. So it was not a normal or subtle experience. But yet she said later, everything in her body wanted someone to yell back, “Nothing, it’s fine,” and kind of return to normalcy. And so she felt herself not wanting to evacuate. But luckily, in her case, somebody yelled back, “Get out of the building,” which is a great example of how assertive commands can break through that initial denial. But even then, she found herself sort of walking in circles, looking for things to take with her, which is very normal. We see this on plane crashes as well. People want to… They’re delaying. They’re delaying the evacuation for different reasons, including, let me just note, that in the World Trade Center, in certain parts of that complex, people heard official commands to stay in place, which was the protocol for skyscraper disasters. So literally, they’re being told not to evacuate in some cases. In other cases, we just procrastinate leaving, even when there’s smoke filling the ceiling. And there are good reasons for this, but it can be really dangerous. So it’s something to kind of expect and notice. Yeah, I can notice it in myself now. I’ll notice that I’m kind of not reacting and that I’m hoping it goes away, and I’ll try to push through that phase. Brett McKay: Yeah, that was one of the biggest takeaways from the book, and I think about it all the time, that normalcy bias. We all have it. I had to remind myself, if something crazy happens in my day-to-day life, like a disaster, an emergency, I had to remind myself, my initial reaction is going to be like, oh, yeah, I’ll try to figure out a way how everything is normal. I’ll try to convince myself that everything’s okay when it’s not. And I think about this a lot, my wife and I think about this a lot, when we get on an airplane. Because you talk about one of the things they found in airplane crashes, whenever there’s an accident and people are able to get out. Well, that’s another myth that people have about airplane crashes. Most of them are actually pretty survivable, except for we always see the really catastrophic ones. But a lot of ones you have a chance to get out before the plane goes up in flames. But one thing that happens is people just kind of sit there, even though the plane’s on fire and they’re just acting like nothing’s going on. Amanda Ripley: Yeah, it was a real mystery for a while when there were more plane crashes happening in the ’70s. Researchers and forensics teams would find people just sitting in their seats. They just died from the smoke, but they were on the ground. They just had to get out of the plane, and they hadn’t gotten out fast enough. But before we talk about that, let me go back to your other point, which is that actually most serious plane accidents are survivable, which is fairly shocking, right? But the statistics are very clear that of all passengers involved in serious accidents between 1983 and 2017, I think it is, 59% survived. 59% survived. And serious is defined there by the National Transportation Safety Board as accidents involving fire, severe injury, and substantial aircraft damage. So that is serious, and yet 59% of people survive. But survival depends often on the behavior of the passengers. And so that’s what these researchers have learned from these different plane crashes, is that people will, especially if they’ve been trained to become passive victims, which I think we probably have, by the time you get on an airplane, right, if you make it through TSA and everything else, you’re kind of beaten down, and you’re not in charge, and you know that, right? And so that influences our behavior. And so when something goes wrong, it’s very easy to kind of fall into this strange sort of lethargy, which researchers call negative panic, interestingly. So it’s not that we start punching each other out. I mean, that can happen, but it’s very rare. Much more likely is we just don’t move. Brett McKay: Okay, what else is going on psychologically? So there’s the normalcy bias, there’s this negative panic, anything else going on that causes that sort of just we’re not doing anything, taking action whenever we see a disaster happen? Amanda Ripley: Yeah, this is an interesting one because the research on this is that pretty much every mammal that’s ever been tested freezes if it faces what it perceives to be a serious threat and doesn’t know how to get out, right? So they feel trapped and they’re frightened. So the animal research on this kind of coincides with the human research, which is that we do kind of shut down under an extreme threat, especially when we feel trapped. And there could be good evolutionary reasons for that, right? You always hear that old playing dead. If you’re being attacked by a predator and the predator thinks you’re dead, then you’re less appealing. It’s hard to sort out what is causing what here and what is adaptive and what is not, except that we know in many modern catastrophes where you need to evacuate out of a city or a plane or whatever it is, that response doesn’t serve you well typically. Brett McKay: So how do you overcome those biases of inaction whenever you encounter a disaster? Amanda Ripley: There are at least two good answers to that and probably many more. But the first is assertive commands really help. So if you are in a situation where you know something is not right and you are very clear, sometimes yelling to other people that they need to get out, they will often snap out of it and move. People often become really compliant in disasters because evolutionarily, it’s in our interest to stick with the group. And so leadership can be really effective in piercing that lethargy. The other thing… And of course, you know, you’re counting on the leader to know what they’re doing right, because you could be led poorly in the wrong direction. But this is how they now train flight attendants if there is an emergency evacuation, they really do scream at you. And I did go through some training with them. They scream at you to not take your bags, to unbuckle your seatbelt, to get off the plane. And it does focus the mind. So that is the good news. The other thing that really helps is any kind of training or even just situational awareness. So if you’ve counted the number of rows between you and the closest emergency exit in advance, which I just do I’m waiting for the plane to take off because there’s nothing else to do then that’s in your brain. And it might help you when you can’t see, which is how… So most plane crashes, you end up on the ground, but you have to get off really quickly. And smoke fills the plane really fast, so you can’t really see your hand in front of your face. So knowing how many rows and whether you should go forward or back is really helpful. And even better is having some muscle memory for evacuating. Let’s say you work in a skyscraper. If you haven’t taken the stairs, you should do that. At least try to take five or ten sets of stairs so you have the muscle memory for doing that. Brett McKay: Okay. Some things you can do – assertive commands. So if you see something happening, you see people just milling about, start yelling at them. It’s for their good. And you’re good because if they don’t get out of the way, you can’t get out either. And then also practice. But if you can’t practice, just have a plan when you sit down. I do that on the plane too. When I get on, it’s kind of morbid, but I always look at the card and then I always look for the exits. And then I go through a situation like, what am I going to do if there’s an accident? And I don’t know how much it does, but it helps me at least think about it so that if that does happen, I’ll have something to do. Like, I have an action plan. Amanda Ripley: Right, right. So you don’t just become a passive recipient of the disaster. I think that’s right. And I think even looking at the card is interesting. My husband does that too. And I think it always makes people around him wonder what’s going on because no one looks at the card, the safety briefing card. But they are interesting, and it is funny how different they are one from the next depending on the airline. And some of them are really clear and effective, and some of them are hilarious, and some of them are confusing. But I do recommend that. And there is actually research that shows that people who have done that and/or paid attention during the safety briefing do have a better chance of survival because it’s just like you have something to work with. Brett McKay: Yeah, I like to look at the card, not only for preparation, but the illustrations are often funny. Amanda Ripley: Yeah, they are. Brett McKay: There’s this one. They had this baby that looked like Bobby Hill from King of the Hill with the inflatable thing. Amanda Ripley: Yes. Yeah, some of them are really classic. So that’s good fun. Brett McKay: Okay, so besides this normalcy bias that causes us to not take action when a disaster strikes, another thing that contributes to us not taking action is we miscalculate the risk involved in the situation. And you talk about how that played out during Hurricane Katrina. So what went on there? Amanda Ripley: Yeah, I mean, in general, we don’t look at risk as a sort of rational assessment. That’s not how humans are wired, right? So we actually use an emotion that is called dread, which I think is well-named. And we sense how much dread we feel for any given risk. And that dread equation is based on a bunch of different factors, if you break it down in the research. And some of those factors are how unfair the threat feels. If it feels like particularly unfair for some terrible thing to happen, like a plane to drop out of the sky, like just nothing you can do, that’s very scary. That’s a lot of dread there. Or if it feels like at scale, right? A bus crash is scarier to us than an individual car crash, right? Even if you had 20 of them. So scale matters, the familiarity matters, our experiences in the past matter, how much pain and suffering we think would be involved matter. That’s why cancer seems to feel like more dreadful than maybe a heart attack. So it’s worth just noticing the different variables that go into that. I don’t think we should expect that we would be totally rational, but it’s worth noticing that and noticing if you want to dial down the dread factor for a given risk that you just want to get more comfortable with, breaking it into those pieces can be helpful and seeing if you can lower any one of those variables as opposed to just gutting it out. Brett McKay: Yeah, I think that was interesting because that dread idea explains why we don’t find driving in a car scary. That’s a good risk to take. But airplanes, oh man. Even though the research shows, it shows that you’re more likely to die driving in a car than flying in an airplane. Amanda Ripley: Right, and we see this happen after major disasters like after 9/11 and during the pandemic, a lot of people choose to drive instead of flying places because it feels so much less dreadful. Brett McKay: Yeah, because when you’re driving, you have control. I’m driving my car. When you’re in a plane, it’s like, I’m in this tin can and I can’t do anything. Amanda Ripley: Right, yeah, exactly. So control is another important piece of it, right? How much control do I have? Brett McKay: And then the scale of destruction in an airplane crash just seems bigger than a car crash because you see what a plane crash looks like on TV. It’s oh my gosh, it leaves a big giant hole in the ground and there’s fire everywhere. A car crash, your car just looks smashed up. That’s it. Amanda Ripley: Right, right. And so we can make a lot of mistakes that way, right? I mean, I always try to remind myself and my family that driving to the airport is the scariest part of the trip, from a risk perspective. And just trying to remind ourselves of that so that we’re a little more awake and vigilant. But it’s hard to do. I mean, and we do make a ton of mistakes around… I mean, we know from the research that after 9/11, because driving felt safer and many people made that exchange, about 2,302 additional Americans were likely killed because they drove instead of flying somewhere. And that’s a study by three Cornell University professors. So again, understandable, but that’s a good example of how our risk perception doesn’t always lead us to safety. Brett McKay: Well, going back to Hurricane Katrina, you highlight that there’s a lot of people who, even though they got the warnings to evacuate and there was actually, yeah, you got to get out. It was an order. You got to get out of here. They decided to stay put. Why did those individuals decide to stay put? And how did a miscalculation of risk contribute to that? Amanda Ripley: Yeah, so it’s interesting. I mean, one of the frustrating things about disasters is that the really good research doesn’t come out until years later when the news cycle has totally moved on. But we now know that age was the most important risk factor for Katrina in particular. People, older people, I mean, obviously other things mattered. Poverty mattered, race mattered, but age mattered most. Older people did not evacuate. And there were lots of reasons for that, or they were less likely to evacuate, I should say. Lots of reasons for that, but one reason is that they’d experienced a lot of really bad hurricanes before, so they assumed that this wouldn’t be worse, and they were right, which is important. They were not wrong. Hurricane Katrina was not the strongest storm that the Gulf Coast had experienced. It’s just we had changed the shape of the Gulf Coast. We had dense vertical cities. We’d removed a lot of the buffer that used to protect us from those storms from the coastline. So the storm was not more dangerous, but we were more vulnerable because of the way we’ve developed these cities. So yeah, in that case, their risk analysis made sense. And in many cases, maybe they didn’t have a way out in some cases. In other cases, they just didn’t want to sit in a car with six other people and a dog for 12 hours. They’d had bad evacuation experiences, which also is very salient, right, in the mind, in the memory. So they had different reasons, but age was a real clear risk factor there. Brett McKay: So what do we do about our poor ability to calculate risk? How do we overcome that? Amanda Ripley: Well, this is where I think we need to do a better job helping each other. At this point, we have a lot of data that could help us really rank the risk based on where we live and how we live and what’s important to us. So it’s a little frustrating to me that still I don’t see, certainly the federal government has not done a great job of helping us with this. There are some siloed examples of some flood maps and different things that can help you, but there’s not one place you can go and plug in your information and know, okay, here’s what I should be most worried about. Here’s what’s most dangerous, but least likely. Here’s what’s most likely. And just kind of help you sort out that risk if you want that help. And there are lots of reasons for that, but one of the reasons is that typically the work in this area is very siloed. So it’s there’s people who study floods and then there’s people who study earthquakes and they’re in separate worlds. And so even though really they should all be talking to each other, and again, the public should be part of that conversation, it’s sometimes hard to find. But there are some resources out there and I include some in the book, but it’s not as easy to find as I think it should be. Because you can’t just rely on your intuition, particularly when we live in such a densely populated interdependent world. You just can’t go with your gut. Brett McKay: Whenever I think about risk and thinking how to calculate better, I often wonder if I should start studying probability. Be like Nassim Taleb, we’ve had him on the podcast and you interviewed him for your book. Should I study statistics? Would that make me better? Did you go down that rabbit hole? I’m going to learn probability so I can be better at risk analysis. Amanda Ripley: It sort of depends on your personality. My dad is a computer scientist, a mathematician. People like that, for certain things, they can do that and just really go with the data. But even they have huge blind spots, things that they’re more frightened of or less frightened of. I think it’s tricky. I will say interviewing people who study risk analysis did help me a little with that because you just start to notice… I would just ask every single one of them, given what you know, what do you worry most about? And the answers were often aligned with their actual risk. So what is most dangerous for most people? Well, it’s pretty clear. It’s car accident, stroke, heart attack, cancer, or suicide. Those are the things. And then what about “natural hazards”? Floods are a huge problem. Extreme weather, extreme storms. So those are the things. And they’re not always the same things that haunt us, the same things that occupy our imagination. But those are the things that they tend to worry about most. And I will say those interviews left me much more anxious about driving, regular driving in a car, than I was before, which I’m not sure is great, but I’m more aware of that threat. Whether that’s translated into better behavior, I don’t know. Because if you’re more nervous about something, that can lead to worse performance. Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. So that’s the denial part of this survival arc. So we have a tendency whenever we see a disaster or part of a disaster to resort to a normalcy bias. We’re just, ah, everything’s fine. I want everything to be fine. And we act like everything’s fine. We’re bad at miscalculating risk. So that can also lead to inaction. Let’s move to the deliberation phase of the survival arc. And you started this section talking about the fear response. We kind of talked about it a little bit earlier, how all mammals have this fear response. What’s going on physiologically in our body, in our brain when we experience the fear response? Amanda Ripley: Yeah, so for that part of the book, I kind of tried to do a slow motion analysis of a shooting hostage taking event at an embassy because I was able to talk to people on both sides of it, the hostage takers and the hostages, because it happened a while ago and kind of help piece together what they experienced because it turns out the experience is very similar, even though you’re on opposite sides of that fight. I mean, the human fear response is very primal. So the first thing that happened in this case is that one of the diplomats who was taken hostage, he’s at this party and it’s a fancy event, and all of a sudden he hears gunshots. And so when he detects that sound, even before he realizes what’s happening, a signal travels to his brain and the signal reaches his brainstem and passes on this information to his amygdala, which we’ve probably all heard about at this point, which is sort of central to managing threats. And the amygdala then sets off a bunch of changes throughout your body. You kind of transform into survival mode without any conscious decision-making. And there are pros and cons to everything that happens next. So you get certain superpowers and you lose certain powers. So you probably don’t feel fear at this point. He doesn’t remember feeling afraid yet, but your body is subconsciously responding to this threat. And that means the chemistry of your blood literally changes so that it’s able to coagulate more easily if need be. Your blood vessels constrict, so you’ll bleed less if you get hurt. Your blood pressure, your heart rate shoot up. You get a bunch of hormones, a cocktail of hormones, particularly cortisol and adrenaline, that surge through your system and give your gross motor muscles a sort of boost. So that’s important. But again, for every gift your brain gives you in danger, it takes one away. You have limited resources. So yes, your muscles become taut and ready and your body is creating its own natural painkillers, but you lose the ability to reason and perceive your surroundings. So you just cannot think. Cortisol interferes with the part of the brain that handles complex thinking. And by complex, I mean basically any thinking. So we suddenly have trouble solving problems, how to put on a life jacket or unbuckle a seatbelt. Often survivors would tell me about losing certain… They lose peripheral vision, that’s almost guaranteed, but sometimes they lose all vision, they go temporarily blind or they lose their sense of hearing. So it’s a really mixed bag, but all these things are happening without your control, but it’s a way to keep you alive. Brett McKay: Yeah, the tunnel vision, that’s one thing that happens. Everything, your focus narrows. Sometimes people, they don’t hear things. They can’t even hear loud bangs, like guns that are fired right by the ear. They don’t hear it. Amanda Ripley: Which is wild, because we don’t think of hearing as something you can turn off. I mean, you can’t close your ears, right? But it turns out your brain can if it’s motivated. Brett McKay: Yeah, and then complex motor skills go out the window. So I know this is a problem with soldiers or law enforcement officers. Once they get into that sort of freeze mode, they have a hard time manipulating their gun and things like that, and that can cause problems. Amanda Ripley: Yeah, I talk in the book about a police officer who was running from someone with a gun and he actually dropped his weapon. He has no memory of it. It’s just, you lose eye-hand coordination. So there was a study of 115 police officers involved in a serious shooting, and 90% reported having some kind of dissociative symptom, like numbing or loss of awareness or memory problems. Sometimes it feels like you’re having an out-of-body experience. And again, there’s understandable reasons for that, but it’s sort of your brain’s last line of defense, and it’s trying to help you survive, but sometimes it can be a liability. Brett McKay: Is there any variability in demographics and how people respond to highly stressful situations? Are some people more prone to have the freeze response than others? Amanda Ripley: Yeah, I mean, there’s some research on this and not a ton, but from what we can tell, there are some people who are just weirdly immune. It’s not that they don’t get afraid. It’s not that their heart rate doesn’t go up. They still get those things, but they’re able to recover more quickly and they don’t go as far down that path. So a little bit of stress we know is good for you, wakes you up, gets you going, but too much and then you start to get those negative side effects, right, where you can’t think, you can’t operate. So there’s this green zone you want to be in that’s somewhere in the middle. And the military has found that there are certain people, especially people who end up in special operator roles, who seem to be able to get into that zone, even under really extreme situations. And there’s a lot of speculation about why and how. But at the end of the day, for most of us, what we need to know is that relevant experience and training can really help you get into that green zone. You don’t need to be a Navy SEAL, but if you have a little bit of experience or training, that helps a lot so that you can stay in that zone. The other thing that really helps, and this is something the military uses, law enforcement, is practicing when you’re not under stress, practicing box breathing or different techniques. The only way that we know of to control your automatic fear response is through intentional breathing. And so that’s something that is worth keeping in mind, that if you want to find a way in the moment to control that fear response, it’s good to have practiced some form of rhythmic breathing, box breathing, which you may know. It’s just you breathe in for four counts, you hold for four counts, you exhale for four counts, hold for four counts, and then you just keep repeating it. Brett McKay: Yeah, we’ve talked about box breathing on the podcast before. I think it’s a really useful tactic to keep yourself calm whenever you have that initial fear response. But how do you practice for disasters? Because you had the opportunity to go to Oklahoma City where they have the FAA plane crash school where they study plane crashes, and you got to do a simulated plane crash. How do you do that if you’re just a regular person? Amanda Ripley: Well, I used to have this dream that there would be a national disaster museum where everyone could try those things, play with the stuff, because there’s really amazing simulations out there. Brett McKay: Oh, you mentioned this in the book. There was someone who had the idea before you get on the plane, have a little area in the airport where you could practice going down the yellow slide and putting on the vest. Amanda Ripley: For kids. Brett McKay: For kids. But they were like, no, we don’t want to do it because that’ll just freak people out. Amanda Ripley: Right, which is such a shame, because people are already scared. A lot of people are really scared of flying, and they don’t always talk about it because there’s shame around it, but it’s a real fear. So not talking about it doesn’t help, but I think there could be a lot more creativity in helping people train for this stuff so it’s less daunting. Going down those escape slides from planes are quite steep. So if you’ve never done it before, it can really give you pause at the top. But I think if you’ve done it even once in your life, I really think even once gives you that muscle memory. And so you just jump. But look, to answer your question, in the meantime, until we get the cool museums and the playgrounds at the airports, I think it’s first thinking about two things. What do you feel the most dread about? What are you most afraid of? And then second thing, can you figure out what your biggest risk is given how you live your life, where you live? Because it’s different, right, depending on different places. And then trying to find ways to, if you can’t train, then at least really learn more about those threats so that they’re less terrifying. A lot of this is exposure therapy, right? The more you can, in a contained, safe way, expose yourself in small doses to these things by learning about them, the less terrifying they might be. I mean, that doesn’t mean you go watch a horror movie about a virus destroying everyone and think that’s going to help you with a pandemic. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying immerse yourself in sober, reliable, trustworthy research that’s different than the Hollywood approach to this. So I think that’s something to think about is what is the thing you’re most afraid of? And what is the thing that is most likely to threaten you and what you hold dear? And trying to learn more about what those things have looked like in the past, how you can prepare for them and what to do and what are the mistakes you make? I mean, the good news is the behavior is the same. It’s the same mistakes no matter what the threat is. It’s the delay and the denial. Those are the things that are going to trip most of us up. So just knowing that, even if you don’t know what the threat’s going to be, can be helpful. Brett McKay: So yeah, if your office does fire drills, take them seriously. If they don’t do fire drills, take the stairs instead of taking the elevator to your office to get out of the office. Amanda Ripley: Thank you, Brett, for giving us a practical answer to that question. I’m going on and on, and there’s the answer. Do the things that you can do. Take the drills seriously, because your body needs some muscle memory for this stuff. And if you’ve never been in the stairwell, even when I’m in a crowded theater or a crowded event, I’m noticing where the exits are. And that’s helpful. So I think taking those opportunities is really important. And in the longer term, taking every opportunity to build relationship and trust with the people around you, because those are going to be the people that you’re with. Those are the people who will save you or you’ll need to save. It’s the people you work with, the people you live with in your neighborhood, strangers on the bus, the people in your community. It’s not going to be first responders because they just can’t get there in time. So knowing that, I think, has helped me also invest a little more in the place where I live and in those community gatherings, because I see them as short and long-term investment. Brett McKay: Let’s start with this one. I always think about this incident that you talked about in the book, the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire. Now, for those who aren’t familiar with supper clubs, this is a thing in the Midwest where it’s basically a private dinner club for middle-class people, is what I’ve gathered. There’s this one that was a little fancier called the Beverly Hills Supper Club. Big fire there. I’m going to use this to explore the sociology of disaster. How do we behave in groups whenever there’s disaster? So what can the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire tell us about groupthink and disasters? Amanda Ripley: Yeah, so this is a good example of how people behave when they’re in a crowded place and not expecting anything bad to happen. So you’re just not, again, your brain is going to try to fit everything that’s happening into what’s happened before. And it was studied pretty carefully by some sociologists, so it’s a really useful example. But on the night of May 28, 1977, this Beverly Hills Supper Club, which was just south of Cincinnati, a very regal place filled with ballrooms and fountains and gardens, and it was hosting many different events. There was a wedding, there was a big dinner happening, all different things happening in this place, all of which were sort of the opposite of a disaster. And that’s important because, again, your brain doesn’t see it coming. But this fire, it was an electrical fire, had started in one room, and it really tore through the whole complex very quickly. And at the time, there were almost 3,000 people packed into the club, because I think it was Memorial Day weekend, so it was really crowded. There was a dog owner’s club in one room having a banquet in the crystal room, and then doctors, a group were together in the Viennese room, all these different groups. There was 400 people for an awards banquet. And then most of the remainder of the guests, most of the guests were in the cabaret room, which was a ballroom. And most of the people who died would die in that room. In all, the fire killed 167 people. And so it became this mystery, what had happened here? What could have gone differently so this wouldn’t happen again? And became very closely studied by safety engineers to try to understand how did this happen? And there were some really hopeful lessons. One that really stands out to me is that the waiters and waitresses went to incredible lengths to get people out on average. I talk about a busboy who really put himself at risk over and over again, going back into the smoke to pull people out. Cooks, busboys, all these people, men and women. And that’s partly because when your role is to be helpful and be the host in a situation, and then a disaster happens, you tend to still obey according to that role. So if your role, though, is to be a guest at a banquet, you’re in a more passive position and you also continue to play that role in the disaster. So it’s interesting to see how that continues. Now there was also denial. There were people who were just not reacting, but many of those employees just behaved magnificently above and beyond what you would expect. The problems included the fact there were just not enough exits in the club and they were really hard to find. And that was true of the World Trade Center. That’s true of a lot of places. These places aren’t really designed for humans often. They’re just mazes. And so it created, in addition to denial, it created dangerous delay. So these sociologists Norris Johnson and William Feinberg, who were professors at the University of Cincinnati nearby, they got really curious about what happened here and they just dug into the research and found that an estimated 60% of the employees had tried to help in some way, but only 17% of the guests had helped. So again, your role at the time really matters. Brett McKay: Yeah, and you talked about when guests did help, they had a social role as a helper. They’re either a doctor or a nurse or an EMT. If they were that in their daily life, then they were more prone to be a helper. But if they weren’t, they weren’t going to do anything. Amanda Ripley: Yeah. Remember I said, there were those doctors dining at the club. They started administering CPR and dressing wounds and nurses did the same thing. There was even a hospital administrator there who began organizing doctors and nurses. So the overarching lesson from the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire is how well most people performed. They thought they were going to find pushing and chaos and selfish behavior, but actually it was really orderly almost to a fault. People were staying in line, not pushing, queuing up to get out and helping each other, particularly when they were in that role going into the event. So it was not what they expected. And it was one of the big eye-opening moments where we started questioning the Hollywood stereotype about how people behave. In fact, if anything, the problems with the World Trade Center evacuation included the fact that people went too slowly. We tend to get very polite to strangers in these situations because we’re scared and we need each other. Brett McKay: Yeah. So I mean, maybe the lesson there is if you are in a disaster scenario, you have to remind yourself, I will probably default to my social role in this situation and that might not be the best thing to do. Amanda Ripley: Right. Brett McKay: Yeah. If you’re in an official role or in a helper type job for your day job, you may default to stepping up and taking action. But if you’re a guest somewhere, a customer, know that you are apt to be passive and compliant and you may need to make an extra effort to snap yourself out of just being passive. Another way your social role in a situation can affect your behavior, and I think about this all the time, let’s say you’re in a restaurant or in a grocery store and there’s an active shooter situation. The closest exit might be through the kitchen or through the back of the grocery store. But because you’re in customer mode, you’re thinking, I can only go through the front door. I can’t go through the employee exit. But then you have to remember that in an emergency, social roles are off the table. I mean, you can break social norms. You got to get to the nearest exit, whether you’re an employee or not. Amanda Ripley: Right. The sort of rule bound folks in the room are going to have to overcome that. And it’s even true in very small ways. Just a few months ago, I was walking around Washington, D.C., where I live in DuPont Circle, which is a pretty safe, affluent neighborhood. And it was on a Tuesday afternoon and just sunny day, nothing big going on. And I was just walking down the street and I heard a gunshot at pretty close range. And I looked around. I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. But what was weird is everyone around me just kept walking. And people were sipping their coffee and people were chatting and people were on their phones. And it was like it hadn’t happened. And then I remember I’m like, okay, just because no one else is reacting doesn’t mean they’re right. It’s just they don’t expect it here. In this neighborhood, it’s not your brain is just moved right past it. So, again, I couldn’t figure out where it come from, but I knew I’d been around enough guns that I knew that was a gunshot. And so I just knew it wasn’t coming from the subway. So I just went down into the subway to leave the area. And it was, in fact, one driver had shot another. Anyway, what I did not do was start screaming for everyone to run and clear the area. I didn’t take it that far. Maybe I should have. Maybe I shouldn’t have. I didn’t hear additional shots. But it’s like you’re in the moment trying to balance am I right or am I overreacting here? And you just usually don’t know until it’s too late is the thing. You don’t know. Brett McKay: Yeah, that’s another reason people don’t take action is they don’t want to be the weirdo. Amanda Ripley: Right. Overreacting. You don’t want to cause people to think you’re just hypersensitive or, and I think the reality is if you’re going to be that guy or that woman who does say we got to evacuate for this fire drill, even though you all think it’s a joke, people are going to think you’re the weirdo. And that’s probably worth it. But there is a little bit of social pressure that you will face in that situation. So you don’t want to make permanent mistakes there that put people in more jeopardy. But it is worth taking on a little bit of that peer pressure and pushing through. Brett McKay: We’ve been talking about how most people in a disaster, they’re actually very polite, they’re docile, but occasionally panic does happen. And you look at the Muslim Hajj, what that can teach us about panic and why it happens in groups. So tell us about that. I thought this was really fascinating. Amanda Ripley: Yeah, so it’s not that panic never happens. And sometimes it’s annoying because researchers on this will constantly downplay. And I think that’s a mistake because I know that what they’re trying to do, they’re trying to make us less prone to assume there will be panic. But that doesn’t mean that it never happened. So it’s important to talk about when it does happen and why. The research on this is basically yeah, panic rarely happens. But I think people feel panicky in disasters. That’s true. When you’re afraid, your heart races, your palms sweat, your breath is short. That feels panicky. That’s not the same thing as mobs of people freaking out. So it’s almost like the word is inadequate to the task. But when we’re actually looking at, okay, when do groups of people behave in an antisocial way? It’s usually when they feel trapped and they might get out, but they might not. And they also are in a system that they think is corrupt. So there’s certain conditions that have to be met. They don’t trust the setting and they think they may not get out. So there’s a zero-sum situation. But in the Hajj, so the Hajj that you mentioned, there’s been a series of really tragic crowd crushes that have happened in the pilgrimages that happened to the Hajj. And for a long time, some of the people in charge would blame the victims and say that they had misbehaved. And this is something you hear a lot after crowd crushes. And the research on this is pretty clear that that’s not what happened. That basically, usually in crowd crushes and stampedes like that, first of all, it’s just too dense. There are too many people in too small a space. So the design and management of the crowd is a problem. And then what happens is you lose control over your bodily movements because it’s so tight. And then someone falls down up ahead of you. And then that causes other people to sort of surge forward, right? Because they don’t know that someone’s fallen down. So it’s a lack of communication on top of everything else. The way most people die in crowd crushes is asphyxiation. It’s not that people are trampling you, although that happens, but it’s that you don’t get enough air. And the compounding force of many rows of people behind you in big crowds, it’s like a Mack truck. I mean, the pressure on the people in front. And if they don’t know that people have fallen, they just keep moving forward in the direction they were already moving. And then that compounds that pressure. So this might look like panic. And then, of course, people are struggling to breathe and to get to the top of the pile. It might look like panic, but it’s not like people are punching each other out and misbehaving. It’s people are getting really pressed to death. And so that’s a design and crowd management problem. It’s not really that the people themselves misbehaved. Brett McKay: And it sounds like they’ve taken measures to reduce or prevent those type of things happening during the Hajj, right? Amanda Ripley: Yeah, because they’ve learned it’s a physics problem. That is a physics problem. You need to design and manage the crowd differently. And a lot of big crowd events, if you look at Times Square in New York City on New Year’s Eve, they are managed really well. You want a square meter around you of space. And if you have less than that, you can get in trouble. So the advice to individuals is, look, if you’re in a really crowded situation, try to slowly, gradually move to the edge of the crowd where you have a little less, a little lower odds of getting crushed. But the best advice is to the organizers of these events, right? You really have to be able to communicate with the crowd and keep people from getting into too dense of a scenario. And that’s what they’ve gotten much better at at the Hajj, although there are still problems. Brett McKay: Okay, so we’ve talked about the first two parts of the survival arc. There’s denial. People often don’t immediately recognize the danger or downplay its seriousness. They may freeze, delay action, just carry on like nothing’s wrong. Then there’s deliberation. And that’s when people begin to assess what’s happening and consider their options. And sometimes if people are overwhelmed by stress or if they’re unprepared, they get stuck in deliberation. But hopefully, maybe if you’ve rehearsed the scenario before, you can stay calm and then you can enter into the third part of the survival arc. And that’s decisive action. And one thing you talk about in this part of the book is that some people don’t just take action to save themselves, but they try to save others. And we talked about this a little before, that people sometimes help others in an emergency. But let’s talk more about when people are out-and-out heroes. They may not even be directly involved in the situation that’s going on, but they may jump in and risk their lives to save someone else. What did you learn about that? Why would someone who doesn’t even know the person who’s in the freezing cold water drowning, why would they jump in and try to save that person? Amanda Ripley: Yeah, I mean, the research on this is really frustrating. It’s very hard because one person’s hero who jumped in and saved someone else can be another disaster’s victim or fool. If you jump into a really threatening situation and die or make things worse, then it’s a different storyline. So it’s really tricky. But I did try to find research that is out there. And first of all, I interviewed a lot of people that other people have called heroes. And if you ask them why they did what they did, they invariably say the same thing. They say they had no choice, which is interesting. They’re universally uncomfortable with the label hero. They attribute their actions to the situation rather than their own profile. So they say, how could I watch a man drown or starve or burn to death? So for them, the fear of not acting is worse than the fear of acting. And both are scary. So it’s not like they’re not scared. It’s just, given their training, given their background, given their identity, who they think they are in this world, they can’t live with themselves if they don’t try. So that’s some of what we know is that on average, again, this research is really thin, but from what we can tell, a lot of people who are celebrated in the media as heroes from events like this are much more likely to be young, single men. That could be partly because they don’t have families. So maybe they have less at risk. It could be because men are more likely to work outside and in situations where these types of things happen that get a lot of media coverage. They might be they have an identity that they’re someone who’s not supposed to just sit quietly by and watch someone else die. So there’s a lot of possible reasons there, including there’s some evolutionary reasons about why young men would do that, because it raises their status in the group. And that would make sense. But it’s a lot of speculation right now. Brett McKay: Yeah. And it sounds like to the people who have this idea that they couldn’t not act, they had to do something. It sounds like from what you talk about in the book, when they were growing up, they really had a good relationship with their parents and their parents always impressed upon them. You’re a helper, you’re always going to do what you can for others. And then they carry that over into heroic situations. Amanda Ripley: Yeah, it could be like the doctors and nurses, right, from the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire. If you’ve got the mindset that you’re a helper, then you’re going to carry that with you. Brett McKay: So you end the book talking about this guy named Rick Rescorla. He worked at the World Trade Center. And you use him as this is the guy that we should look at to see how to really prepare ourselves and others for the unthinkable. So what can Rick tell us or teach us about that? Amanda Ripley: Yeah, Rick Rescorla is a really interesting person who was the head of security for Morgan Stanley, which had a massive presence at the World Trade Center. He was a former soldier who worked on security and spent many years at Morgan Stanley. He had fought in Vietnam, earned a bunch of medals, and eventually settled into this role. But he still brought with him that mindset that he had learned in the military. He knew that Morgan Stanley was vulnerable, it occupied 22 floors of Tower 2. That’s like a small city, basically. And after the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, he got really focused on the threat of a terrorist attack at the Trade Center. And so he brought up one of his buddies to New York City who did counterterrorism work in 1990 and asked him, where are the vulnerabilities that you see here? And his friend saw the Trade Center’s garage and he said, oh, well, this is a no brainer. I would just drive a truck full of explosives into the garage and walk out. So Rick and his friend wrote this report to the Port Authority explaining their concerns and trying to get more security in the parking garage. Not a lot of things happened, according to Rick. Nothing happened, really. The Port Authority did not respond to my requests for comment. But in any event, three years later, Ramzi Yousef drove a truck full of explosives into the underground parking garage of the World Trade Center. And that was the first terrorist attack at the Trade Center that led to a really disastrous evacuation. So while it wasn’t very deadly, it was truly traumatic for a lot of people because it took many hours for people to evacuate. The stairwells were not well lit and ventilated. So now Rick had real conviction that things needed to change. And he didn’t trust the Port Authority, which ran the Trade Center. So he did something that almost no one else did, which was he trusted the people in the company to save themselves. Morgan Stanley was the largest tenant in the World Trade Center. And so he decided they were going to have to take care of each other. And so from then on, no visitors were allowed in the office without an escort. And he made sure they knew where the stairwell was on their first day. So they knew how to get out of there. He told his employees not to listen to instructions from the Port Authority in a real emergency because it had lost all legitimacy for him. And most importantly, he started running the entire company through frequent surprise fire drills, which remains extremely unusual. And he actually had people go down the stairs two by two, go down several sets of stairways. And he insisted that the highest floors evacuate first and not let the lower floors in in front of them, which is actually a big problem, a lot of evacuations because it takes forever. So this is someone who had advanced understanding of human behavior and also incredible faith in his colleagues, in the public basically. He knew that if people had the training, they can become really expert in getting out of places and helping each other. And he was right. So, on the morning of 9/11, he knew that another plane had hit the other tower and he grabbed his walkie-talkie and he started to order an evacuation and it had already started. The Morgan Stanley employees knew not to wait for someone to tell them to go to safety and it already started. They knew where the stairwells were, which was pretty unusual in the Trade Center. It was confusing for different reasons. And then when people started getting scared in the stairwell because another plane hit, he started singing songs through his bullhorn, which is something he had done to calm his soldiers in Vietnam. And he sung songs in the stairwell and there’s a picture of him doing that in the book and people remember that. And when the tower collapsed, only 13 Morgan Stanley employees were inside. The other 2,687 were safe, which was quite extraordinary. And unfortunately, Rick and a handful of his security colleagues had gone back in to get some stragglers. So, they were killed that day. But it’s an incredible story of what can happen when you trust regular people to train for bad things to happen and to help each other. Brett McKay: Well, Amanda, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work? Amanda Ripley: You can check out more about the book and my work at amandaripley.com. Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Amanda Ripley, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure. Amanda Ripley: Thanks for having me. Brett McKay: My guest here is Amanda Ripley. She’s the author of the book, “The Unthinkable”. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about her work at our website, amandaripley.com. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/disaster, where you find links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com, where you find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you can think of. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you take one minute to use your new podcast or Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think will get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you to only listen to the AOM Podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action. This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.…

Podcast Archives | The Art of Manliness

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Podcast #1,003: Books, Routines, and Habits — The Founders’ Guide to Self-Improvement

27 days ago

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Note: This is a rebroadcast. A lot of self-improvement advice and content feels empty. And there’s a reason for that. It often offers routines and habits to practice, but doesn’t offer a strong, overarching reason to practice them. That’s why the self-improvement advice of the Founding Fathers is particularly compelling. Though they were imperfect men, they had a clear why for trying to become better than they were. For the Founders, life was about the pursuit of happiness, and they equated happiness with excellence and virtue — a state that wasn’t about feeling good, but being good. The Founders pursued happiness not only for the personal benefit in satisfaction and tranquility it conferred, but for the way the attainment of virtue would benefit society as a whole; they believed that political self-government required personal self-government. Today on the show, Jeffrey Rosen, a professor of law, the president of the National Constitution Center, and the author of The Pursuit of Happiness , shares the book the Founders read that particularly influenced their idea of happiness as virtue and self-mastery. We talk about the schedules and routines the Founders kept, the self-examination practices they did to improve their character, and how they worked on their flaws, believing that, while moral perfection was ultimately an impossible goal to obtain, it was still something worth striving for. Resources Related to the Podcast AoM’s series on Benjamin Franklin’s 13 Virtues Ben Franklin Virtues Journal available in the AoM Store AoM Article: Young Benjamin Franklin’s Plan of Conduct AoM Article: Thomas Jefferson’s 10 Rules for Life AoM Article: The Libraries of Famous Men — Thomas Jefferson’s Recommended Reading AoM Article: The Best John Adams Quotes AoM Article: George Washington’s Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation AoM Podcast #366: Teach Yourself Like George Washington AoM Article: The Spiritual Disciplines — Study and Self-Examination Tusculan Disputations by Marcus Tullius Cicero The Golden Verses of Pythagoras Connect With Jeffrey Rosen The National Constitution Center website We the People podcast Jeffrey’s faculty page Jeffrey on X Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!) Listen to the episode on a separate page. Download this episode. Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice. Read the Transcript Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness Podcast. A lot of self-improvement advice and content feels empty, and there’s a reason for that. It often offers routines and habits to practice, but doesn’t offer a strong, overarching reason to practice them. That’s why the self-improvement advice of the Founding Fathers is particularly compelling. Though they were imperfect men, they had a clear why for trying to become better than they were. For the Founders, life was about the pursuit of happiness, and they equated happiness with excellence and virtue. A state that wasn’t about feeling good, but being good. The founders pursued happiness not only for the personal benefit and satisfaction and tranquility it conferred, but for the way the attainment of virtue would benefit society as a whole. They believed that political self-government required personal self-government. Today on the show, Jeffrey Rosen, professor of law, president of the National Constitution Center, and the author of The Pursuit of Happiness, shares the book the founders read that particularly influenced their idea of happiness, of virtue, and self-mastery. We talk about the schedules and routines the founders kept, the self-examination practices they did to improve their character, and how they worked on their flaws. Believing that, while moral perfection is ultimately an impossible goal to obtain, was still something worth striving for. After the show is over, check out our show notes at aom.is/pursuitofhappiness. All right, Jeffrey Rosen, welcome to the show. Jeffrey Rosen: Great to be here. Brett McKay: So you got a new book out called The Pursuit of Happiness, How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America. And this is a really fantastic book. I really loved reading it. It was great getting into the minds of the founding fathers. And what you do is you take readers on a journey through the books that the founding fathers read that shaped their thinking as they were trying to figure out what is this new government gonna be in the United States. And specifically, you wanted to figure out what Thomas Jefferson meant by the pursuit of happiness in the Declaration of Independence. What led you to take this exploration? Jeffrey Rosen: It was a series of synchronicities during COVID that led to this project. First, I was rereading Ben Franklin’s attempt to achieve moral perfection in his 20s. He made a list of 13 virtues that he tried to live up to and practice every day. Classical virtues, industry, temperance, prudence. He saves the ones he finds hardest for last, which is humility, and puts X marks next to the virtues where he fell short. He tried it for a while. He found it was depressing ’cause there were so many X marks, but he was a better person for having tried. I noticed during COVID that he chose as his motto, a book by Cicero that I’d never heard of called The Tusculan Disputations. And he said, without virtue, happiness cannot be. A few weeks later, I was at the Boar’s Head Inn in Charlottesville, Virginia, which is on the UVA campus. And on the wall, I noticed this list of 12 virtues that Thomas Jefferson had made for his daughters. They looked a lot like Franklin’s silence, resolution, industry, and so forth. Jefferson leaves off one that’s on Franklin’s list, which is chastity. But Jefferson chooses as his motto also this Cicero book, The Tusculan Disputations. So basically during COVID, I thought I’ve got to read Cicero ’cause it’s so important to Hamilton, or rather to Franklin and to Jefferson, but what else to read? And then I found this amazing reading list that Jefferson would send to anyone who asked him when he was old how to be educated. And it’s very comprehensive. It has literature and political philosophy and science and history and a very rigorous schedule about when you read which books at what time. It’s kind of 12 hours of reading starting before sunrise and going until evening. But what caught my eye was the section called moral philosophy or natural religion or ethics. And there was Cicero, The Tusculan Disputations, along with Marcus Aurelius and Seneca and Epictetus, other stoic and classical philosophers, as well as Enlightenment philosophers like Francis Hutcheson, and Bolingbroke, and David Hume. So basically, I thought, I’ve got to read these books. I’ve had this wonderful liberal arts education. I’ve studied history, and politics, and English literature, and American literature, and law with great teachers in wonderful universities. I missed these books ’cause they’d just fallen out of the curriculum by the time I was in college. During COVID, I resolved to read the books. I followed Jefferson’s schedule, got up before sunrise, read for an hour or two, watched the sunrise. And what I learned transformed my understanding of the pursuit of happiness, how to be a good person and how to be a good citizen. And all of these books confirmed what Cicero said that for the classical philosophers, happiness meant not feeling good, but being good, not the pursuit of immediate pleasure, but the pursuit of long-term virtue. And they defined virtue as self-mastery, self-improvement, character improvement, being your best self, and mastering your unreasonable passions or emotions so you could achieve the calm tranquility that for them defined happiness. So that was a wonderful experience in rediscovering Jefferson’s understanding of the pursuit of happiness. Brett McKay: Okay. So, I hope we can dig into some of these books and their schedules. It was really fascinating to get a peek at how these guys thought about self-improvement, how they scheduled their days in order to fulfill those goals. But let’s talk about the intellectual environment these guys were growing up in that caused them to turn to classical writers in order to figure out what it means to live a good life. So they were products of the Enlightenment. How did the Enlightenment shape the founders’ reading habits? Jeffrey Rosen: It shaped it completely. All of their reading habits, their whole worldview, their political and their moral philosophy is based in this shining faith in the power of reason and the ability of individuals thinking for themselves to discover the truth and align their lives with divine reason, which they thought was a synonym for the divine. And there’s just such a inspiring faith in the power of reason, the ability of reason to be reconciled with faith, and the ability of reason to achieve self-mastery. This antithesis that you find constantly in the Enlightenment literature between reason and passion comes from Pythagoras, of all people, in addition to reading the triangle and inventing the harmonic system of triads and fifths. It was Pythagoras who drew this antithesis between reason in the head and passion in the heart and desire in the stomach. And he said the goal of life is to use our powers of reason to moderate or temper our unreasonable passions and desires so that we can achieve calm tranquility, self-mastery, and live according to reason, which is not only a right but a divine duty. And the Enlightenment philosophers like Locke and Hutcheson and The Whig critics of the English tyranny all pick up this antithesis between reason and passion. Sometimes they disagree about whether or not reason is strong enough to overcome passion in particular circumstances. But it’s all in the service of moderation, the Aristotelian mean. They’re not saying that we should avoid passion or emotion, but just that we should moderate our unproductive passions or emotions, in particular, anger and jealousy and fear, so that we can achieve productive emotions like tranquility, prudence, justice, and fortitude. Those are the classical virtues that were so important to all the founders. So just this wonderful consonance between the classical and the Enlightenment faith in reason, and a tremendous belief that the individual applying his or her powers of reason is able to achieve calm self-mastery. Brett McKay: And another theme you see in the Enlightenment, they pick this up from the ancient writers from Rome and ancient Greece, was that you had to… I don’t wanna say, maybe, yeah, you had a duty to improve yourself because you wanted to live a flourishing life yourself. But the idea is that as individuals pursued this idea of excellence or Arete, eudaimonia, of flourishing, that will allow for a flourishing society. Jeffrey Rosen: Exactly. You’re so right to phrase it as a duty to improve yourself. And arete, as you say, is the core of Aristotle’s famous definition of happiness. In the Nicomachean Ethics, he defines happiness as an activity of the soul in conformity with excellence or virtue. And because the phrase excellence arete is not self-defining and nor is virtue, it can be confusing to us. But it really means an excellence of the soul, a moderation of the soul, a self-control, so that, as you say, we can achieve our potential. And we have not only a right to achieve our potential, but a duty to use our gifts and talents as best we can so that we can be our best selves to use the modern formulation of it, and to serve others. And in so doing, we’re living a life according to reason, aligning ourselves with the divine harmonies of the universe and fulfilling our highest purpose. Brett McKay: And going back to the social element of this, I think the founders were thinking, we’re gonna try this Republican form of government where there’s more direct participation by individuals in their government. In order for that to work, we need everyone to be like, I think Jefferson called this, like you had to be kind of an aristocrat of virtue and an aristocracy of virtue and talent. You couldn’t just be this sort of dolt who just like passively lived life. If you’re going to participate in government, you yourself had to have sort of this aristocracy of the soul. Jeffrey Rosen: Absolutely. Very well put. And it’s this deep connection between personal self-government and political self-government. I really hadn’t understood this before reading the moral philosophy. But the founders think that unless we can achieve a harmony of soul in the constitution of our own minds, we won’t be able to achieve similar harmony in the constitution of the state. And more specifically, unless we can restrain ourselves from being our angriest selves and tweeting and attacking and retreating into our tribal factions, we won’t be able to deliberate in common and pursue the common good. The founders are not at all sure that the experiment will work. Never before in human history have, as a nation, tried to test the experiment of whether we can be governed by reason and conviction, not force or violence, as Hamilton says. But that’s the whole purpose of the experiment. And it’s all based on Republican virtue. Brett McKay: Okay. So the founders believed this idea that you could develop yourself, you can improve yourself through reason, and they called it faculty psychology, where you try to use reason to temper your passions. You don’t kill your passions. You use reason to direct your passions to the good. Let’s talk about some of these books that influenced their thinking. Let’s talk about that first one you mentioned, Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations. All the founders read this book. A lot of them quoted from it in their commonplace books or in letters. Tell us about this book. Who was Cicero and why did he write Tusculan Disputations? Jeffrey Rosen: Cicero, the great orator and political philosopher and moral philosopher of the Roman era, writes the Tusculan Disputations to console himself after the death of his daughter, Tullia. He’s also out of political favor and he retreats to his villa in Tusculan and sets out to write a manual. Amazingly, it’s on grief and on the management of grief. And it’s really striking that the central source for the founder’s understanding of The Pursuit of Happiness was a book about grief management. And it is divided into chapters about how to focus on controlling the only thing we can control, which is our own thoughts and emotions and not the activities or fate that befalls others. This is the famous Stoic dichotomy of control. And Cicero is applying it to try to console himself after the death of his daughter. In its most rigorous form, the Stoic advice about death was even grief over the loss of a loved one is not reasonable because if you look at things reasonably, you want to accept whatever is as it ought to be and be grateful for the happy times you had with your daughter and recognize that things cannot be in any other way. This is unrealistic for most people. Abigail Adams thought that the Stoic advice of completely overcoming grief was too rigorous. But Jefferson finds it very consoling when his dad dies. And he’s about 14 years old, and his beloved father, Peter Jefferson, has just died. And Jefferson copies out in his commonplace book passages from Cicero to console himself. And it’s just remarkable to watch his mind work as he copies out these passages, including the famous passage about how happiness is virtue, which is tranquility of soul, which is an old man in his 70s. He would send out to young kids who wrote to him asking about the secret of happiness. Brett McKay: How did you think this book influenced Thomas Jefferson when he was developing the declaration of independence? Jeffrey Rosen: Well, when Jefferson was developing the Declaration, he said he wasn’t doing anything original, but was just channeling the philosophy of the American mind by distilling ideas that were commonplace from public writers such as, and he cited in particular, Cicero, Aristotle, John Locke, and Algernon Sidney. What I did is set out to read all the sources that Jefferson relied on by looking first with the moral philosophy on his reading list and doing word searches for the pursuit of happiness. And what just really was striking is that almost all of those sources, the Stoic and the Enlightenment sources, actually contained the phrase, the pursuit of happiness. And defined it as virtue rather than pleasure-seeking. And then I set out to read the other documents that Jefferson had in front of him when he wrote the Declaration that talked about happiness, including George Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights and James Wilson’s Reflections on the Extent of Legislative Authority in Britain. And they also contain the phrase pursuing happiness or pursuit of happiness and defined it in this sense of virtuous self-mastery. So what’s so striking is Cicero is just one example, and really the most frequently-cited example, ’cause so many of the Enlightenment sources themselves cite Cicero. But one example of overwhelming consensus about the understanding of happiness as virtue, shared by the classical sources, the Christian Enlightenment sources, Whig revolutionary sources, and civic Republican sources, and Blackstone, the legal commentator. In other words, this is everywhere. It’s completely a ubiquitous, universally-shared understanding of happiness, but Jefferson roots it in Cicero. Brett McKay: Okay, so Cicero had a very stoic idea of virtue. And I think it’s interesting that he used in these other classical philosophers as well as Enlightenment philosophers and later Thomas Jefferson, they said the pursuit. It wasn’t achieving happiness. It’s the pursuit. There’s a virtue in just trying to be virtuous. And if you think of virtue or having a flourishing life as a practice instead of an acquisition, that’s what we’re going for. Jeffrey Rosen: Exactly. And Cicero himself says that the goal, the quest is in the pursuit, not in the obtaining. ‘Cause by definition, perfect virtue is unattainable. Jesus enjoins us to attempt to be perfect, but only Jesus can be perfect. Or Socrates, or Pythagoras, a handful of sages throughout history can approach perfection. But for ordinary humans, it’s just the quest. And every day you’re gonna fall short and fail, but you can attempt to be more perfect as Franklin so memorably said when he imagined life like a series of printer’s errors that he hoped could be corrected in a future edition by the author. It’s a very humane, but also demanding philosophy. We have a duty, as you said, to try to become more perfect, not only every day, but every hour of the day to try to use your talents, your time to stay focused, live in the present so you can achieve your potential all the time, recognizing that we’re gonna fall short and that the quest itself is the pursuit of happiness. Brett McKay: So one of the things that most of the founding fathers did in this pursuit of happiness, in this pursuit of using reason to temper their passions, is they did self-examinations, daily self-examinations. You mentioned Ben Franklin’s, we can get into this a little bit more, but the guy that inspired these daily self-examinations was Pythagoras. Tell us about the Pythagorean self-examination and what the founding fathers took from that. Jeffrey Rosen: Pythagoras is so inspiring. And I hope listeners will check out his 76 golden verses, ’cause they were really well-read in the founding era. They’re really accessible and just good practical advice about how you can try to be more perfect. And the core of the Pythagoras system is daily self-examination. Every night before bed, Pythagoras says, make a list of how well you’ve done and how well you’ve fallen short of trying to achieve the virtues of temperance, prudence, courage, and justice, and try to do better the next time. Pythagoras I thought of him as the triangle guy, but he lives on the Isle of Croton as a guru, as a divine figure. He’s surrounded by disciples who emulate his rigorous asceticism in drink and eating. He’s a very committed vegetarian, as Ovid describes in his great account of Pythagoras in the Metamorphosis. He has this weird exception for beans. You’re not allowed to touch beans, and his disciples rather die than touch beans, which he thinks resemble fetuses and have the spirit of life in them. But it’s all about trying to achieve perfection as a human being. Pythagoras tells his disciples to first be good and then live like gods. And the way that you live like gods is by reverencing yourself. That’s Pythagoras’s motto. And you do that through extraordinary mindfulness and self-discipline and moderation. And that was his contribution and his central distinction between reason and passion, as I said, ends up being the core of classical moral philosophy. Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Well, tell us about some of the founding fathers, Pythagorean self-examinations they did. So Ben Franklin famously had his 13 virtues and even developed this chart to track how he was doing. We did a whole series. When I first started AOM back in 2008, we did a whole series about Ben Franklin’s 13 virtues. I even made a Ben Franklin’s virtue journal that people could buy. But tell us more about this for those who aren’t familiar. Jeffrey Rosen: That’s so great that you did that. I first encountered the virtues a few years ago in the Hebrew version. It turns out there was a Hasidic rabbi in 1808 who really admired Franklin and translated the virtues into Hebrew and offered them up for Jewish Seekers of Character Improvement, or Mussar, which is the Hebrew word. And a local rabbi in Washington, DC recommended it to a friend and I, and we tried it for a bit making a list every night of how we’ve fallen short with the various virtues of temperance and prudence and so forth. Like Franklin, we found it really depressing ’cause you’re always losing your temper and falling short every day. But it was helpful in creating mindfulness about how to live. And Franklin got it not only from Pythagoras, but also from John Locke, whose book on education recommends a kind of self-examination and virtue. This led Franklin to form his famous club or junto to join of men who were devoted to self-improvement in the hope of creating a united party of virtue of fellow self-improvement seekers around the world. And the basis of it is they’re kind of support groups. You’re supposed to do it with friends and look closely at yourself and share what you find with others and try together to engage in self-improvement. Franklin, although he gave up the Virtues Project in his 20s ’cause he found it so rigorous, never abandoned his hope of writing a book called The Art of Virtue. And to the end of his days, he hoped that he would bring all of his wisdom into one place. He never quite did, but the Virtues Project is the most enduring legacy that he could give us ’cause it tells us in a practical way how to practice the art of virtue. Brett McKay: Yeah. So he had these 13 virtues that he focused on and he developed a chart for himself where he would put a black dot if he didn’t live up to that virtue. And the idea was to have the chart as blank as possible. The more dots on it, the more bespeckled his character was. And so, yeah, the 13 virtues, for those who aren’t familiar, we had temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity. Then he added humility at the end. And as you said, Thomas Jefferson had a similar set of virtues he tried to live in his own life. And the other thing that Franklin did in addition to developing this virtue chart and kind of being very rational about his moral development, he had a schedule that he set for himself and as part of his daily examination in the morning, he would ask himself, what good shall I do this day? And then at the end of the day, he would ask the question to himself, what good have I done today? And he was just, he’s trying to do that Pythagorean thing. It’s like, how have I gotten better throughout this day? And again, Thomas Jefferson did a similar thing as well. Jeffrey Rosen: So true. And it’s all about the schedule. That’s the most striking practical takeaway from the way all of these founders lived. They were very mindful of time and would make lists of their schedule and would stick to the schedule. They develop habits starting in youth about waking up early. Franklin famously, early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise. He kind of condenses that from a more lugubrious version in an English virtue source. And Jefferson’s reading list has a really demanding schedule associated with it. And all of the founders keep up this mindful schedule of rigorous reading and writing until the end of their days. And there’s something so moving about seeing Jefferson and Adams as old men still getting up early, doing their reading, trading ideas about the latest books that they’ve read, keeping up their correspondence. They fell short on so many levels in the pursuit of virtue as we all did. But the one virtue that many of them practiced until the end was industry just ’cause they developed the habits ever since they were kids. Brett McKay: Yeah. I found that the most inspiring thing from this book is how these guys really believe they can improve themselves and they set their time, their schedule to make that happen. A lot of times we have these sort of vague ideas like, oh, I wanna become better. And it doesn’t go anywhere ’cause we don’t make it concrete. All these guys set a very strict schedule for themselves. Yeah, Ben Franklin, he had a schedule. He was up at 5:00. He says, rise, wash, and address powerful goodness. Contrive business and take the resolution of the day. That’s when he asked himself, what good shall I do this day? That was from 5:00 until 7:00. 8:00 till 11:00, he worked. From 12:00 to 1:00, he read and overlooked his accounts, did some lunch, had a working lunch. 2:00 to 5:00, did some more work. And then 6:00 to 9:00, he was kind of putting things in their place, supper, music or diversion or conversation, and then do his examination of the day. And then from 10:00 to 5:00, he slept. And then Thomas Jefferson, like you said, he had this schedule that he started when he was a kid. He was up early. And not only was he doing the reading that he set for himself, he also scheduled physical exercise. Jeffrey Rosen: Absolutely. That’s the most inspiring thing for me too. It’s so remarkable to see how much these guys accomplished by mindfulness about time and keeping up their youthful schedules. And it changed my life. I followed the Jefferson schedule, got up, did my reading, watched the sunrise. I found myself writing these weird sonnets to kind of sum up the wisdom that I’d learned just ’cause I wanted to kind of encapsulate it in some form and found that lots of people in the founding era wrote sonnets or poems about this literature. And since finishing the book, I’ve tried to keep up a version of the Jefferson schedule. And the simple rule that I’m carrying forward is I’m not allowed to browse in the morning until I’ve done reading or some other creative work. And there’s a difference between reading books and browsing blogs and just being not allowed to check email or do anything else until I’ve read a real book. It’s changed my life ’cause I’ve gotten out of the habit of reading for stuff that was outside of my immediate deadlines. And now reading books just to learn is transformative. And this is what so inspired me about the founders. I mean, just Adams and Jefferson, just think of it in their 70s and 80s, still excitedly learning about Pythagorean moral philosophy and Adams exploring the connections between Pythagoras and the Hindu Vedas. And they never stopped learning and growing. And that for them was the definition of the pursuit of happiness, being lifelong learners. And if they could find time with all the depredations of 18th century living and the freezing cold and the disease and just the sheer difficulty of life and the difficulty of having access to books, which they just had to yearn for to get imported, and then I contrast that with the fact that I was able to write this whole book sitting on my couch because all the books in the world are free and online. And all I need is the self-discipline to actually read them and to swipe left to the Kindle and not right to the blog or to email. So it’s very inspiring. The founder’s schedules in their own lifetime inspired others. And I’m so grateful to have encountered their mindfulness about time. Brett McKay: So yeah, I think the big takeaway from the founders that I got is like, yeah, if you have a goal of self-improvement, you got to put it on the calendar. If it’s not on the calendar, it’s not gonna happen. What I thought was interesting too, and you do this in the book, is you focus on a founder in each chapter. And it seems like each founder had their own personal issues that they were trying to sort out and master with their reading. Let’s talk about John Adams. What was John Adams’ biggest flaw that he worked on during his entire life? And then we’ll talk about how his reading helped him conquer that or master it. Jeffrey Rosen: His biggest flaw was vanity. Anyone who’s a fan of the old musical 1776 remembers, I’m obnoxious and disliked, that cannot be denied. And he’s constantly ridiculed for his self-importance. He wants the president to be called his elective majesty and people mocked Adams as his rotundity. And he’s losing his temper all the time and storming that he’s not getting enough credit for the revolution. He says Adams was the actual author of the Declaration of Independence. He speaks of himself in the third person. And it’s not fair that Jefferson and the Grand Franklin are getting all the credit. And his wife Abigail recognizes this as his flaw. When they’re courting, they decide to make a list of each other’s faults, which is a dangerous dating strategy, but they, in the Pythagorean spirit, do that. And the flaws that Abigail notes for John are that people think that he’s intellectually intimidating and haughty ’cause he’s so brilliant. You know, she puts it in a generous way. And then he counters, well, your flaws are you’re not practicing the piano or reading enough and you’re pigeon-toed. And she says, “Well, a gentleman shouldn’t comment on a lady’s posture.” But Adams recognizes his own vanity and self-importance and is constantly trying to subjugate it ever since he was a student, a young student in college and copying passage from the classics into his diary. And the most endearing thing about Adams is that he wears his heart on his sleeve and he, in the end, does conquer this ruling passion of vanity. He has terrible blowouts with two close friends, Mercy Otis Warren, the anti-federalist, and Jefferson, who he fights with in the famous election of 1800. But the most significant thing is that he reconciles with both of them. And after falling out over politics, he gets back together with Mercy Otis Warren and certifies to her poetical genius in writing the plays that sparked the revolution. And with Jefferson, it’s just incredibly moving that he’s able to set aside all the partisanship that divided them in that election and to have this spectacular correspondence as old men where they confess, Jefferson says, “I love you.” It’s really very striking and beautiful. So that’s Adams. And he is quite relatable, to use our phrase, in both his struggles with his own vanity and ultimately his success in overcoming it. Brett McKay: In his diary he talks about this. He says, “Vanity, I am sensible is my cardinal sin and cardinal folly.” And then he says this, “Oh that I could conquer my natural pride and self-conceit acquire that meekness and humility which are the sure marks and characters of a great and generous soul and subdue every unworthy passion.” Yeah, he was very self-aware and I think that’s the big key with all the founding fathers, they were self-aware of their flaws. They might not have been successful all the time in conquering them, but they kept working at it. And I wanna talk more about Abigail Adams ’cause I thought it was really interesting. Their marriage is… We have all their letters so we could see their correspondences. And a lot of the times they were talking about moral philosophy and how we can become better people so that we can form this new country that we’re trying to do here. The takeaway I got from there is the importance of another person in your own personal development. You can’t do it on your own. You can’t do it in a vacuum. Jeffrey Rosen: That’s a great way to put it. Yeah, it’s so moving to see John and Abigail engaged in this mutual quest for self-improvement. They have a romantic partnership and intellectual partnership and a joint commitment to self-improvement. And Abigail gets it from the same classical moral philosophy and the same Enlightenment novels and poems that John does. And she’s not allowed to go to Harvard the way the guys are but she educates herself by reading books of the classics recommended by John and by his friend, Richard Cratch. And she takes from her reading of Alexander Pope and Lawrence Sterne, one of her favorite novelists and others, the central importance of using your powers of reason to subjugate your passions. And she’s always exhorting John and their son, John Quincy, and their other kids to be perfect. And I thought that having a Jewish mom was tough. Having a Puritan mom was even tougher for John Quincy Adams ’cause she’s constantly telling him, “Subjugate your passions.” She loves to quote the proverb, “He who’s slow to anger is greater than he who’s conquered a village,” and endlessly telling her kids, her husband and herself to be better all the while rooted in this great moral philosophy. Brett McKay: Yeah. Abigail and John’s marriage is very inspiring and again that idea of bringing in another person into your personal development, you see that with Ben Franklin, you mentioned he started the the Junto or the Junto. It’s like a mutual self-improvement club where everyone got together and they shared, here’s what I’m working on, how can I get better? So I think we’re coming up with a great formula here for like the founder’s guide to self-improvement. One, read great books. Two, practice daily self-examinations. And then three, make sure you have another person. You’re doing this with other people ’cause you can’t do it on your own. Jeffrey Rosen: Exactly, that’s just it, and read every day and read deeply and rediscover the radically-empowering practice of deep reading. Brett McKay: Let’s talk about George Washington so we think of George Washington, we see pictures of them or statues and he’s very regal, stoic-looking, unflappable but this guy, he’s a redhead. Jeffrey Rosen: Sure. Brett McKay: We see him in his white wig but he was a redhead. He had a fire, he was passionate. Tell us about how the classics helped Washington get a handle on his temper. Jeffrey Rosen: Washington loves Seneca, whose essay on time is so inspiring. Time is a gift repaid by industry by squandering it. What fools these mortals be, says Seneca in the famous phrase quoted by Shakespeare. And Washington is obsessed with time. He’s got clocks everywhere at Mount Vernon. He keeps up a rigorous daily schedule, always eating and exercising and doing his work at the same times and he struggles ever since he was a kid to control his temper. He’s got a very critical mother, and Ron Chernow, his great biographer, thinks it may have been Washington’s effort to control himself in the face of his mother’s nagging that led to his devotion to self-mastery. He’s observed to lose his temper in public on very few occasions. It’s so notable ’cause it’s so rare, both on the battlefield and in the White House or in the presidency and his power comes from his self-mastery, and the moments when he’s viewed as greatest are these moments where he’s mastering himself. At Newburgh, when the soldiers are rebelling, he exhorts them to achieve patience in not mutinying, but waiting for Congress to make them whole and give them their back pay. And he mounts the temple of virtue and makes an appeal for self-mastery and the soldiers weep because they’ve never seen him confess weakness before as he does when putting on his reading glasses. And really, it’s just the force of Washington’s towering character that makes him the greatest American of his age by all accounts. He presides over the Constitutional Convention. He doesn’t say much. He practices silence and self-control, but it’s the self-mastered presence of his towering authority that allows the whole convention to create a strong presidency ’cause they know he’s gonna be the president, and they trust him and they revere him. So Washington really appears almost greater, the closer you look at him, and his greatness comes from his self-mastery. Brett McKay: So one character that I found incredibly relatable was John Quincy Adams. This is John Adam’s son. Tell us about John Quincy’s personality and disposition. Jeffrey Rosen: I think he’s my favorite of the bunch because he’s both so relatable and so transparent about his own struggles to master his passions and to achieve his potential. As we said, he’s got his mom just on his case from the very beginning, telling him to master his passions. And this creates this lifelong sense that he’s not doing enough. There’s that amazing moment when he’s in his early 30s. He’s just turned down a Supreme Court appointment. He’s ministered to St. Petersburg and he writes in his diary, “I’m 30 something years old. I haven’t achieved anything. I’m not working hard enough, I’m spending too much time at the theater and I’m drinking too much. If only I could have more self-discipline, I might have ended war and slavery.” He puts a very high bar for himself. But then he has this incredible challenge as these knights of the soul. He’s in the White House, and his oldest son, George Washington Adams, commits suicide. The boy can’t take the pressure of the name George Washington Adams and also being Adams’s oldest son. And he descends into alcoholism and jumps off a steamship. And Adams is crushed by the extraordinary sorrow of this loss. And he doesn’t know if he can continue. What does he do? He spends a year re-reading Cicero in the original, in particular, his favorite book, The Tusculan Disputations. He writes sonnets in the morning based on his reading. And he emerges from this after losing the presidency and determines to reinvent himself as the greatest abolitionist of his age. And he denounces slavery on the floor of Congress. He introduces a constitutional amendment to end slavery. And he dies on the floor of Congress after voting against the Mexican War, he collapses of a stroke. And while he’s on a couch, his last words, which he murmurs are, “I am composed.” And he gets this from Cicero, from the Tusculan Disputations, that the perfectly composed man is he who’s achieved the tranquility of soul that defines virtue and happiness. It’s this incredibly mindful, brave. And virtuous life and death, all within the framework of classical moral philosophy. Brett McKay: I think John Quincy, he probably had depression. He seemed like he was a depressive. He was focused on the negative a lot. You can see that in his diary entries. He did a lot of rumination. He’s like, “Oh, I’m a total screw-up. I wasn’t a Supreme Court justice. What’s going on?” And I think that’s relatable. That’s another thing about John Quincy is he used his diary or his journal as another tool in his self-improvement. All the other founders did this as well. They used their diary as almost like a therapist. They used their writing as a way to use reason to temper their passions. Jeffrey Rosen: Completely. I completely agree about how relatable he is. And it’s perhaps the greatest diary of any American president ’cause it’s so candid and so transparent. And so he’s really hard on himself, but he is always trying to do better. He did struggle with depression. And as you said, he does use the diary as an antidote to it. And he also uses Cicero as an antidote to depression ’cause the whole point of the philosophy, of course, is to view things realistically, to focus on controlling your own thoughts and emotions, which is all that you can control. He’s the Boylston professor of rhetoric at Harvard and gives lectures on how to control the passions to be an effective advocate as well as to be a happy person. He uses those lectures and those tips in arguing the great Supreme Court Amistad case, freeing the Amistad captives, which folks may remember from a recent movie. And he hadn’t been a abolitionist before his reflection, but he becomes convinced that slavery violates the Declaration of Independence and the Bible. And he reads the Bible very closely and chooses a passage where Jesus promises liberty to all the captives and says that that’s a prophecy of the end of slavery. There’s also this amazing speech that Adams gave on the Jubilee of the Constitution in 1839 about the urgent importance of studying the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution to save the Republic. And he says, he quotes the book of Deuteronomy and says, “Take these principles of the Declaration and the Constitution and put them as frontlets between your eyes, whisper them to your children before you sleep and while you wake and make them the very keystone of the arc of your salvation.” It’s done with such messianic fervor. And he really believes that these principles are key to ending slavery and preserving the republic… Brett McKay: Okay. So, the founders we’ve talked about, it’s all about developing your own personal virtue. But the idea is that as individuals pursue this idea of excellence or flourishing, that will allow for a flourishing society. So like we said, take away, read great books, never stop reading, reread them, set a schedule for yourself for your own virtue development, have friends who can help you in that process. And I think from John Quincy, we can learn keep a diary, use your diary as a way to work through this stuff. I wanna go back. I just saw, I just came across this. You mentioned that Jefferson had this list of books that he would recommend over and over again. And here they are. We’ll put a link to this in the show notes as well. But you have a selected list here. There’s 10 books. You have Locke’s Conduct of the Understanding in the Search of Truth, Xenophon’s Memoirs of Socrates. Epictetus, a Stoic philosopher. Marcus Aurelius, another Stoic philosopher. Seneca, another Stoic philosopher. Cicero’s Offices, another Stoic. Cicero’s Tusculan Questions or Disputations. Number eight, Lord Bolingbroke. I like that name. Bolingbroke’s Philosophical Works. Hume’s Essays and Lord Kames’s Natural Religion. Those are those 10 books those who wanna check that out. Well, Jeffrey, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work? Jeffrey Rosen: Constitutioncenter.org. It’s the most amazing platform that the National Constitution Center offers. The core of it is an interactive constitution that’s now gotten 70 million hits since we launched in 2015 and is among the most Googled constitutions in the world. You can click on any clause of the constitution and find the greatest liberal and conservative scholars, judges, and thought leaders in America exploring areas of agreement and disagreement about every aspect of the constitution. There’s the weekly podcast I host, We the People, which brings together liberals and conservatives to talk about constitutional issues in the news and throughout history, Constitution 101 classes for learners of all ages, and primary source documents, which are so crucial in learning and spreading light. So it’s just so meaningful to work at the Constitution Center and to offer up all these great free resources. And it’s great to meet your listeners and to be part of their quest for self-improvement. Brett McKay: Well, Jeffrey Rosen, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure. Jeffrey Rosen: Thank you. Brett McKay: My guest here was Jeffrey Rosen. He’s the author of the book, The Pursuit of Happiness. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, constitutioncenter.org. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/pursuitofhappiness, where you can find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you can find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you’d take one minute to give this review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think will get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to AOM Podcasts, but put what you’ve heard into action. This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.…

Podcast Archives | The Art of Manliness

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Podcast #1,074: Ancient Buddhist Principles for Modern Life’s Dilemmas

5 weeks ago

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When you’re feeling stressed, burnt out, and anxious — when you’re striving and achieving but still finding yourself persistently dissatisfied with life — you might start looking for answers beyond what’s offered by contemporary self-help. One ancient philosophy that can cast light on the sources of and solutions to our seemingly modern dilemmas is Buddhism. If you’ve ever been intrigued by Buddhism but admittedly only have a vague sense of what it’s all about, Brendan Barca — co-author of The Daily Buddhist: 366 Days of Mindful Living — will walk you through its foundational principles. We begin our conversation with how Buddhism is similar to and different from other ancient philosophies like Stoicism, and Brendan offers an accessible introduction to the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path. In the second half of our conversation, we explore how Buddhist principles and practices can be applied to our everyday modern lives and help you deal with the anxiety created by living in an impermanent world, shift your perspective on daily challenges, and cultivate greater compassion and patience. We discuss different meditation methods, the real purpose of meditation, and how to get started with it as a beginner. We end our conversation with the Buddha’s final words and what it means to “strive with vigilance.” Resources Related to the Podcast Shamatha Meditation Vipassana (Insight) Meditation Tonglen Meditation AoM Article: A Primer on Meditation Connect With Brendan Barca The Daily Buddhist website The Daily Buddhist on IG Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!) Listen to the episode on a separate page. Download this episode. Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice. Read the Transcript Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. When you’re feeling stressed, burnt out, and anxious, when you’re striving and achieving but still finding yourself persistently dissatisfied with life, you might start looking for answers beyond what’s offered by contemporary self-help. One ancient philosophy that can cast light on the sources of, and solutions to, our seemingly modern dilemmas is Buddhism. If you’ve ever been intrigued by Buddhism, but admittedly only have a vague sense of what it’s all about, Brendan Barca, co-author of The Daily Buddhist, 366 Days of Mindful Living, will walk you through its foundational principles. We begin our conversation with how Buddhism is similar to and different from other ancient philosophies like Stoicism, and Brendan offers an accessible introduction to the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path. In the second half of our conversation, we explore how Buddhist principles and practices can be applied to our everyday modern lives and help you deal with the anxiety created by living an impermanent world, shift your perspective on daily challenges, and cultivate greater compassion and patience. We discuss different meditation methods, the real purpose of meditation, and how to get started with it as a beginner. We end our conversation with the Buddha’s final words and what it means to strive with vigilance. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/Buddhism. All right, Brendan Barca, welcome to the show. Brendan Barca: Thanks so much for having me, Brett. It’s great to be here. Brett McKay: So you and your wife have a new book out called The Daily Buddhist, where you provide 366 daily devotionals based on Buddhist principles and philosophy. Let’s start with your story. How did you find your way into Buddhism? Brendan Barca: Yeah, so my journey into Buddhism really began in my mid-20s. I was a sales professional in finance up in Boston and really grew up without a concrete religion or philosophy to help guide me, and I was experiencing a lot of burnout. I was like your typical, I don’t know, typical for at least for me in my environment, but type A person who’s striving and trying to do and accomplish and try to achieve and found that even after a few years of trying to just go too hard, I was stressed. I was burnt out and I was anxious. And so it led me to look for answers and look for ways to help cope with that. And I remember actually to this day, I was having brunch with a friend who was my age, so about 25, and she actually said that her psychic, I didn’t know she had a psychic, had told her to try meditation. And that was actually the first person I knew personally who was going to try meditation on their own. And to me, it kind of jumped out as a cool idea and something that could help me what I was going through in terms of that stress. And so I went home that night and started meditating for the first time. And now 10 years later, I’ve never stopped. I don’t know if she continued, but I kept going. And that eventually led me to discovering different spiritual books, read some books by Eckhart Tolle, and then started to read some books that were more traditional Buddhists like Pema Chödrön’s work or Sharon Salzberg. And then eventually I moved to Brooklyn from Boston. I met my wife randomly at a bar. And one of the things we had in common was our meditation practice. And she was originally from Nepal and she grew up traditionally Tibetan Buddhist. And so that really carved the path for me to really take my mindfulness and meditation into Buddhist philosophy and practice and learn with her. And now seven and a half years later, we have made this really our life’s work. And that’s where the book comes from. So it started about a decade ago. Brett McKay: As you learn more and more about actual Buddhist philosophy and principles, did you have any misconceptions about Buddhism that you later learned were wrong or misguided? Brendan Barca: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I grew up in Massachusetts in the suburbs and was raised loosely Catholic. There wasn’t too much in terms of having to go to church on Sundays and all that. But I kind of when I heard about Buddhism or anything of these Eastern philosophies, I think one of the things that I had as a misconception was that to practice that, you had to like abandon your everyday life. Like let’s say you have to leave your career, move to the mountains, maybe in the extreme sense become a monk or something like that. But one of the things I’ve learned over time now, as I’ve really started to ingrain it into my life is you don’t have to follow that path. There’s a way to still practice mindfulness, practice meditation, Buddhist philosophy while living. And I do live right now in New York City. So really in the heart of it and I can use everyday experiences to practices. So I didn’t know that back then. And meditation can help to kind of create insight into my life, but it doesn’t mean I have to abandon everything and then move to like the mountains and practice there. So that’s definitely one thing I didn’t get back then. Brett McKay: One misconception that I had about Buddhism, I think a lot of Westerners have about Buddhism, is that we kind of think of Buddhism as we think of someone sitting on a pillow and it’s just all about being relaxed and going with the flow and being calm. But if you really look at the philosophy and the different teachers of Buddhism, one of the things you take away is that Buddhism, and we’re going to talk about this in our conversation, there’s a discipline to it. There’s kind of a hardness that’s soft at the same time. It can be very bracing, which I think is interesting. Brendan Barca: Yeah, and that’s definitely something now as I reflect back, I probably had too. You kind of see maybe people in the lotus position or sitting serenely on the mountaintop just in this tranquil state. And for anyone that’s first ever meditated knows that that’s not the case, right? When we sit down with our own thoughts for as little as five or ten minutes, it can be a whole whirlwind of things happening within us that are probably pretty uncomfortable. So there’s that. And then also when the philosophy itself, and maybe some of this we’ll get into later a lot of Buddhist principles are really trying to ground you in reality, and reality is not necessarily all rainbows and butterflies. What they’re trying to say life is suffering, and then what do you do from there? Well, that’s where the Buddhist path comes in. So there’s so many elements that I think I didn’t understand back then that have now made the practice or the philosophy feel much more grounded in everyday life versus kind of this element where it’s like really fantasy world, which it’s not. Brett McKay: So you just referred to Buddhism as a philosophy. Sometimes it’s also considered a religion depending on how it’s approached and practiced. Either way, I think a lot of people, particularly in the West, just have kind of like a vague idea of what it’s all about. So let’s start off by making things a bit more concrete here. What’s the origin story of Buddhism? Brendan Barca: So Buddhism really began with one person’s journey, and that is the person we now call today as the Buddha. His name was actually Siddhartha Gautama, and the story goes that he was a prince in what we now call India, and he had all the things that we would want as people, right? He had wealth. He was young. He was handsome, and he was very privileged, and yet as he reflected on this, and he was a curious individual, he felt and realized that even though he had everything one could wish for, he still suffered. He had negative emotions. He had discontentment, persistent dissatisfaction with life, and he also saw other people in his community suffering, whether it was becoming old or getting sick or people dying, and so he set off and left his life as a prince and at first became an ascetic. So he wandered, and he fasted and meditated like that, but he found that even as he deprived himself of those things, food, clothing, and money, he continued to suffer, and I think I can understand that. That sounds pretty difficult, and so he decided to try something different, which we now call the middle way. So it’s a path that steers clear of extremes, and from this new perspective, he began experimenting with his mind and examining it, peeling back its layers, investigating both his inner reality and also his outer reality, and then the story goes that one day while meditating under what we today call the Bodhi tree, he unearthed the cause of his suffering, so his attachments, his ignorance, and then discovered a path out and achieved enlightenment, and this enlightenment or this moment led to his Four Noble Truths, which is his foundational teaching, and that’s now today really the core of Buddhism and Buddhist philosophy. Brett McKay: What are those Four Noble Truths of Buddhism? Brendan Barca: So the Four Noble Truths are first, we all experience suffering, and that suffering is woven into our existence, and there’s all different types of suffering. We can think of it as the suffering of change, so whether that’s having a breakup in our relationships or the suffering of a layoff if we lose our job or as we get older and our skin starts to age, suffering of conditionality is another one where let’s say you go on a fun vacation with your family, maybe you’re in Costa Rica, which we were there a couple years ago, then after it’s over, you’re back in the US, back at your job doing emails, and you’re dissatisfied with daily life because your conditions shifted, and there’s also just simple suffering like your ankle hurts or you have a backache or you have a heartache because someone offended you. These are all things that we all experience, so that’s the First Noble Truth, and the Second Noble Truth is about the cause of our suffering, and so it’s caused by our attachment to the different things in our lives, and even our attachment to ourselves, and this attachment stems to our ignorance of reality, and our ignorance in reality. Misunderstanding is we think that things are going to be permanent, things are going to be satisfying, yet things are impermanent, right? They’re always changing, they’re not always satisfying us, and so we struggle from that breakup, not only because the person leaves us, but because of the suffering and the pain we add on top of that. We even suffer in our healthy relationships because the person we thought would make us happy forever maybe disappoints us here or there, so that’s the Second Noble Truth is about the cause, which is really our attachment, which is rooted in our misunderstanding of reality, and then the Third is really where it starts to get positive, and this is where we can end our suffering, so since there’s a cause, there’s also a possible solution, which brings us to the Fourth, which is the path to end our suffering, otherwise known in Buddhism as the Eightfold Path. Brett McKay: All right, that leads to my next question. I think people might have heard of the Eightfold Path. What is the Eightfold Path? Brendan Barca: So the Eightfold Path is a practical set of guidelines to achieve inner freedom or happiness, right? So if we are suffering, maybe a grasp on our own careers or relationships, our own emotions is out of control, and we’re failing to find happiness in that, the path is going to help us to be able to achieve that. So yes, there’s eight different elements of it. So just to kind of list them out, there’s one, right view, two, right intention, three, right speech, four, right action, five, right livelihood, six, right effort, seven, right mindfulness, and eight, right concentration. And within the eight parts of the path, there are three sort of core components. So a couple of them pertain to developing wisdom, which would be otherwise known in Sanskrit as prajna. And so that would be the right view and right intention where we were trying to understand reality with right view, but also the right intention, try to let go of our attachments and cultivate compassion. And then there’s also ethical livelihood, which is the second of the third key elements, and that’s in Sanskrit known as shila. And that has to do with right speech, right action, right livelihood. So how we talk to people, how we act in the community, even what our work is as we try to make a living. And then finally, the third element is mental discipline, otherwise known as samadhi, and that has to do with right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. So how we’re disciplined and taming our mind, awareness of our body and mind and feelings, and then concentration has to do with meditation. So that’s the high level version of the Eightfold Path. Brett McKay: That’s really good. I think in our conversation, we’ll hit on some of these principles. But as you were listing the different parts of the Eightfold Path off and discussing the Four Noble Truths, I mean, it is surprising, or maybe I shouldn’t be surprised, you can find commonalities in Buddhism and other Western philosophies. For example, I’m a big fan of Aristotle. People who listen to the podcast know that I love Aristotle. And Aristotle has something kind of similar to the Eightfold Path. His goal in life is not enlightenment, but it’s human flourishing eudaimonia. And he says you can achieve that by first getting your metaphysics right, like understanding what the world is like. So that’s very similar to the idea of wisdom. And then once you understand the metaphysics, like what the social world looks like, what reality is like, then from that, you can derive ethical principles. And that’s where virtue ethics come from. And then he also provides practices on how to become more virtuous. I think another thing people will see similarities to in Western philosophy in Buddhism is Stoicism, I think has a lot of similarities. Have you noticed the similarities between Stoicism and Buddhism? Brendan Barca: Yeah, and I’ve actually, I haven’t studied Stoicism like I have Buddhism, but I’ve read Marx’s Aurelius’ Meditations, for example, and I’m familiar with a lot of Ryan Holiday’s work. And a couple of things that I’ve learned over time as I’ve gone deeper into my Buddhist practice is there are some similarities, but also some key differences for people to be aware of. So some of the things that are similar, and you touched on some of these, is definitely ethics. We mentioned ethical livelihood in Buddhism, and there’s definitely some things that are similar there. They’re also both very practical, designed to help us with our daily lives, not just some abstract philosophy. The other two main things that I’ve noticed that are similar is they both have a lot of focus on impermanence. So really trying to internalize the fact, not only that we’re going to die, but also the fact that everything changes. And I’m sure you know the Stoic term memento mori, which is basically remember death. The Buddhists would definitely think that’s a good exercise. So those are some of the similarities I’ve witnessed. Some of the differences that I’ve seen. One thing is about self. So in Buddhist philosophy, there’s a big emphasis on what we can call no-self, which is the idea that there’s no permanent self for us to cling on to. Whereas in Stoicism, at least the way I understand it, they do affirm a rational self or a soul. So for example, in a Buddhist context or from a Buddhist philosophy understanding, we can maybe think of an example with our physical bodies. And in fact, there’s been studies done that cells in our bodies are actually regenerating every seven years. So actually the person who you were 10 years ago, even from a cellular level, from a physical level, is completely different than the person you are today. And so a Buddhist philosopher would argue it’s the same thing with our mind, with our feelings, with our bodies, is that we’re changing all the time. There’s no one part of us that we could label as the self. Whereas I think maybe the Stoics would disagree with that. The other main thing that I’ve seen is the goal. So in Buddhism, the goal would be enlightenment or to be able to see through the illusion of the self and end our suffering. Whereas in Stoicism, my understanding, and maybe you can help me clarify, is to live a life well lived through logic and virtue. So that’s some of the things I’ve noticed. I don’t know what else you’ve seen. Brett McKay: No, I think those are the two big differences. I think you hit the nail on the head with that. Well, let’s dig into some of these principles that you discuss in The Daily Buddhist. And what’s great about this book, it’s like a devotional book. Each day, you just highlight a short little devotional that hits on a principle. So you don’t have to read this all in one setting. I did read the entire thing, but you have a schedule. Like February 13th has something you’re going to read. May 8th, you’re going to have something to read. It’s a really great way to get introduced to Buddhist principles. Let’s discuss some of them. Let’s talk about wisdom. We’re going to get a right, we’re going to work on that first path of the Eightfold Path, which is getting a right view of the world. And so in the first part of the book, you talk a lot about the impermanence of the world. Why start there? Brendan Barca: Yes, we modeled the book, first of all, over how traditional Buddhist masters would almost train their students. And so from a specifically a Tibetan Buddhist perspective, where you would begin if you were a monk or even a lay person who is just trying to learn about Buddhism, it’s really important to start by trying to ground ourselves in the nature of reality. And that has to do with right view, as you mentioned, the Eightfold Path. So a big element of that is reflecting on and really trying to internalize, not just intellectually, but emotionally, that life and we are impermanent. So the problem is, and why we start there and why Buddhism starts there, is that we know intellectually that things change, right? That we will lose our job or that our family will eventually pass away or that even our skin will age. But the thing is, we don’t really live our lives with that understanding. So we might work in a career for 50 years and spend our time there, even though it doesn’t fulfill us. We might believe that our relationship is going to last forever when in reality it doesn’t. And this denial of impermanence leads to a lot of our suffering. And that’s part of the reason why it’s so important to begin there is by accepting and internalizing permanence. When things do inevitably change, let’s say our kids go off to college or we’re retiring and our life is moving on, well, we’re going to be able to meet that with more acceptance and more grace and let go of our attachment to those things rather than cling too tightly and let ourselves suffer. So that’s why we begin the book with impermanence. Brett McKay: Yeah, it’s a foundational principle. And I love that section you have about you have to understand things, not just intellectually, but emotionally. And I actually made a note as I was reading, it reminded me of Kierkegaard, the existential philosopher. He had this famous phrase, truth is subjective. And people are like, what does that mean? Does that mean that truth is whatever you want it to mean? It’s relative. And he was like, no, what I mean by that is he’s coming out from a Christian perspective and you say, okay, you can intellectually know that God is love. So it’s like an objective fact for you. It’s like, yeah, God is love. But if you don’t emotionally, like if you don’t subjectively know it, then it’s not going to transform you. And I think the same thing, you quote a Buddhist philosopher there, you have to like internalize that truth in order for it to have an effect on how you behave and interact with the world. Brendan Barca: Yeah. And that’s one of the things with impermanence, like we might know this, right? But if we don’t think about it every day or maybe integrate it into our meditation or even the way we live, then we’re not going to live our life in a way that reflects. And I think that if we do keep impermanence top of mind, then it’ll help us in those moments to be more present with our loved ones. Like maybe we won’t be on our phone so much, or it’s going to help us to be able to be kinder to maybe a relative who’s not so kind to us because we can realize that these relationships will change. Our life is not forever. And then hopefully act accordingly, which I think is one of the best things about Buddhism and also Stoicism about why we reflect on impermanence so often. Brett McKay: Are there any practices you recommend to help people truly understand and keep that idea of impermanence of life top of mind? Brendan Barca: Well, one thing to do, and it’s part of the reason why we structured the book like that with 31 straight days on reflecting on impermanence, is start to just notice the changes that are happening all around you. You could use the seasons or you can see this with looking in the mirror and seeing how your face has changed from an old photograph. And then even just in a subtle day-to-day changes, like some clients come, some clients go there’s all these subtle things happening that we can start to notice. And if we can notice this both on like a mini level, but also understand like the big picture that this means that our life isn’t forever, then we can start to hopefully change our thought and our action around how we behave given these truths. And in fact, there’s like a Tibetan tradition where people try to treat each day as an entire life of its own. So they visualize when they wake up here I am waking up to my new life, and then they go through their day, which you can think of as a microcosm of your life. And then at night, as they’re lying down, they’re visualizing themselves dying to that day. So that’s another helpful practical reflection that I try to do quite often. Brett McKay: Yeah, I love that. I mean, something that I do is I just think about something that I was upset about that maybe happened a few weeks ago, and then thinking about it now and thinking, well, am I still upset about that thing? And the answer is probably not. I’m usually not upset about it. I mean, I was upset about it then, but now it’s not a big deal. And that just kind of puts things in perspective for me. Brendan Barca: Yeah, I like to think will this affect me a week from now? Will it affect me a month from now? Will it affect me a year from now? Will it affect me five years from now? And then the answer keeps getting more and more like, absolutely not. So then the challenge, of course, of the practice is, okay, how can I not let affect me so much now? Brett McKay: Related to the idea that all life is impermanence constantly changing is that all life is interrelated. Why is that an important concept in Buddhism? Brendan Barca: So one of the things that we learn in Buddhism as we reflect on the nature of reality and try to continue to cultivate, as the Eightfold Path would say, that right view, is since all things are impermanent and so they’re always changing, all things are also what we would say is interdependent, or as you mentioned, interrelated, which is that everything is constantly in flux but also arises from various causes and conditions. So we are now you’re a podcaster and you have your own business, and I’m this author because of who we were before. So each step that preceded us has made us who we are now. So you can think of it as links on the same chain. And where we’ll go next has to do with who we are now, what we’re doing now. So Buddhism really develops that. You can think of that as cause and effect in a way, which is a term we’re used to talking about in the West. But this not only has to do with our lives and our careers, is what I was just saying as an analogy, but also has to do with our mental state or our emotions or our relationships or even our body. Our backache might be there because we’ve been hunched over our computer for 10 years, or our relationship with our spouse might be falling apart because we haven’t been listening to them for five years. So it helps us to keep ourselves accountable because if we realize that everything’s interdependent, we can try to live in that ethical way, which is one of those elements of the Eightfold Path. That’s one part of it and why it’s helpful for us to reflect on interrelatedness or interdependence. Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Let’s talk about the Buddhist understanding of how the mind works. We’re still trying to get an understanding of reality, a right view of reality. So what is the Buddhist understanding of the mind? Brendan Barca: So in Buddhism, they talk about mind, nature of mind is how they talk about it. And really you can think about, although it’s not this simple, you can think about your mind with two, we’ll call them parts, even though it gets a little bit dicey when you start to even label these things. But in Tibetan terms, there’s two terms that maybe might be helpful to familiarize yourself with, which is rigpa and sem. And rigpa is what the Buddhist philosophers would call the true nature of your mind. You can think of this as your true essence. It’s clear, it’s spacious, it’s free, it’s light, it’s free from labeling, dualistic thinking, free from negative emotions. Maybe you can think of it like the feeling you might have after a really long run and you just finished and you’re just feeling so clear and all your problems have kind of fallen to the wayside. So that’s what the nature of mind is, what we are kind of aiming for. And someone who’s living in that all the time would be considered enlightened, which for most of us, we can say, okay, I probably either haven’t seen that lately or maybe just once in a while. Whereas sem is what you can also translate as the ordinary mind. And so the ordinary mind is the one that we know very well. It’s like kind of our own internal enemy. It is the one that will plot and scheme and worry and overthink and overanalyze. And it’s the part of us that gets us into fights with our partner or our friends because it’s oftentimes confused. And you can think of it almost like our lesser selves. So from a Buddhist perspective, we’re constantly dealing with kind of those two major elements and working towards uncovering more and more of our nature of mind. And the Buddha would say that we all have that pure essence in us just waiting to be uncovered. And so our goal working towards enlightenment and working down the path is to get more and more of that so that we can live in that state of Rigpa. I mean, it’s definitely aspirational for most of us, but it’s a good way to strive to get towards. Brett McKay: And meditation is part of the way you get there, correct? Brendan Barca: Yeah. So in Buddhist context, one of the most important things that we can do is to study our mind. And a lot of this, when we’re talking about nature of mind or interdependence and permanence, not only should we be thinking about these with our own minds, like journaling or just thinking about these when we’re on a walk, but we also would want to practice that in a more formal meditation. And meditation, there’s a lot of different meanings and definitions out there depending on how you practice or which tradition you follow. From Buddhist perspective, there’s a couple of different styles. So one thing that is a good starting place for many people is what’s called shamatha meditation. And that really translates as calm abiding. And the point of that is to focus on a single point, like the breath, for example, and to start to calm the mind. And what happens when we start to calm the mind is we start to remove those different parts of the ordinary mind or the sem, or not remove them, but see them for what they are and they start to kind of dissolve a little bit, like more than usual. And then that’s where we can maybe start to peek into the nature of our mind and start to live both inside our meditation. And the idea is for it to spill over into real life too, with that more calmness, with that more ease and lightness. And so meditation is definitely a big key to working towards the path. Brett McKay: There’s also vipassana. What is that? What kind of meditation is that? Brendan Barca: So that would be called insight meditation, and you can practice these separately, but I would say is that for a beginner, we’d want to start with shamatha and then you could always transition into vipassana. So let me explain the two. So if shamatha is the calm abiding meditation, which is focusing on the breath and basically working to calm the mind, the idea is that if you do that for a couple minutes, like let’s say five minutes, and you notice that your mind starts to settle, it stops jumping around from thought to feeling to prediction, right? It stops doing that, at least quiets down, then there may be opportunity to transition to what they would call in Sanskrit vipassana, which is insight. And the idea with insight meditation is to start to perceive things more clearly. So it’s not to say you’ll have an insight in terms of a big idea that you’re gonna, I don’t know, use for your career endeavors, but more of like insight into the true nature of reality. So the fact that our mind is always having fleeting thoughts, the fact that things are always changing, the fact that things are interrelated, these are all things, not necessarily you’ll have these in the meditation itself, but we’ve kind of worked towards by giving ourselves the space in a vipassana meditation. So instead of focusing on the breath, we would try to not focus on anything, which is quite challenging, but that’s how we would transition from one to the other. Brett McKay: For someone who’s never meditated before, can you kind of give us a sample practice that they could start doing today to get a taste of what Buddhist meditation is like? Brendan Barca: Yeah, and I think it’s important also to provide another definition in terms of how we can think about meditation. The Tibetan word for meditation is gom. So gom actually translates to being familiar with. So when we are sitting down to meditate, our goal, although it’s kind of a slippery slope to say goal when it comes to meditation, would be to be more familiar with ourselves. And that starts by studying and watching and sitting with our own mind. And so for a beginner, and I was a beginner only nine or 10 years ago, I think the most helpful thing we can do is first carve out the space for us to be able to meditate on our own. So if you have kids like I do, and like you do, Brett, what that might mean is before anyone wakes up in the morning or before they come home from school or at night when everyone’s in bed. And then when you have that space on your own, then to simply set like a, you can use an app, the Calm app or Insight Timer. Those are great free apps out there. And simply set like a bell that would go off for, and I would think five minutes is a great starting point for most people. And then within that time, work on focusing on your breath. You don’t have to try to make the breath do any tricks. You don’t have to try to slow it down or speed it up, but just notice its natural rhythm and watch how your mind responds to this. And at first, when you’re new to this, if you’ve never meditated before, it’s going to feel maybe a little bit overwhelming, like all these ping pong balls are bouncing around in your mind. You might want to even get up, but I would encourage you to sit with it and just see that and notice things as they are. And even that awareness is going to be a really beneficial practice. And then after a few minutes, you will notice a little bit of a shift and that’s the practice. So you might want to start there and then think of it just like something that has to be practiced repetitively, just like we might exercise. We want to meditate consistently. Otherwise, if we do it once and wait a year, then the benefits aren’t going to be there. So it’s got to be consistent practice. Brett McKay: How long does a session need to be? Brendan Barca: So it varies, but I would think for most people, the most practical thing we can do is make it short. Three to five minutes would probably be where I would suggest people to start. It’s long enough for the mind to start to settle, for us to also watch it. But if we aim for 10 or 20 minutes, like there’s some practices that require like a 20 minute session in the morning and the afternoon, well, then the risk is that we don’t actually follow through and we drop the ball. So if we can integrate this into our busy lives with a short five minute session, then it becomes not only attainable, but it’s also beneficial. There’s been studies out there that just five minutes a day of meditation can reduce stress significantly. So I think that’s a good amount of time for people to aim for. Brett McKay: All right. So the trick is just be consistent with it. So figure out a way to be consistent with it. How do you know if you’ve had a good meditation session or is that a bad question to ask? Brendan Barca: So it is a bit of a, yeah, a bit of a tricky question because one of the things that we learn in meditation over time is that it’s not always going to be fun. And actually oftentimes it isn’t even after meditating now for 10 years, almost every single day, oftentimes I sit down and my mind continues to race and it doesn’t slow down. It doesn’t feel calm like I wish it would be. But I think one of the things that we can do to make it “successful” is use it as an opportunity to one, familiarize ourselves with our mind as we go back to that Tibetan word gom, but also to be able to create more awareness around our thoughts, create awareness around our emotions. Because if we’re aware of these things in our meditation, then we’re outside of it the next day or that afternoon, well, then we’ll have a little bit more insight into our mind and a little bit more control over our emotions. So if we start seeing, for example, that our calmness or our patience or our compassion in meditation starts to bleed into other parts of our lives, and that’s a sign that we’re progressing. So that would be, I guess, a long-term success, but we can’t expect results right away. Brett McKay: Something I’ve noticed when I’ve done meditative practices, I’ll do really well for like a month because when I start meditating, I’m like, oh wow, I’m feeling calmer. This is great. I’m noticing these benefits. And then after a month of meditating, you don’t get the same sort of, you don’t notice it as much. And then you’re like, oh man, I’m not noticing any changes. I don’t feel any calmer. This is dumb. I’m just going to stop doing this. But I’m wondering if I should just stick with it. And like you said, you got to be disciplined with your meditative practice, even if you don’t feel as calm as you did when you first started. Brendan Barca: Yeah. Meditation is one of those things that even if you’re not feeling like in the session itself, that calmness or that benefit, whatever it is that you’re looking for, we don’t want to let ourselves give up and think that it isn’t working. One of the studies we point to in the introduction of our book was they were putting an fMRI machine around some of these prolific Buddhist monks who have meditated for tens of thousands of hours. And one of the things that they found from that level of practice and that commitment was that they were, from a scientific perspective and psychological perspective, they were less stressed, more happy than the average human. They had ways of measuring that. So if we want to experience these things and we want to use meditation as one of the vehicles to get us there, then we can’t necessarily rely on our experience of meditation because as you mentioned, that’s when we give up. But rather think of it as like just something that we need to do to be able to keep our mind stable, be able to progress on the path, as they would say in Buddhism, and treat it like a ritual that’s needed. Not always fun, but something that’s necessary for our well-being. Brett McKay: It’s like brushing your teeth. Brendan Barca: Yeah. And not even as fun as that. Brett McKay: Yeah. Brushing your mind. That’s what you’re doing when you’re meditating. And so that leads me to my next question I want to discuss because you have this section, there’s just filled with reflections on patience and diligence. What insights from Buddhism can help us cultivate more patience with others, with ourselves, with our goals to be better? Brendan Barca: So let’s stick on the topic of meditation as being one of the important tools in Buddhism. And one of the benefits of meditation, although it might not be calming and peaceful all the time, is that by understanding our own mind, and we can inevitably do that if we sit with it for long enough, then it’s going to help us to better understand both ourselves and others. So when we sit with ourselves and we start seeing, oh, wow, I just had this distracted thought. Oh, wow, I just thought about some random high school memory. Oh, I just thought about something that’s going to happen or not happen in 10 years. Or I just noticed a thought of agitation or anger or envy, whatever it is, then we not only understand that we experience these things, but we look out the window and we know, oh, wow, there’s 8 billion or so other people out there that are going through these things too. So when we start to have that right view, then we can start to, the idea is, and the practice is, starts to develop patience for both ourselves and others. Because if we see that our mind is really this crazy, and it doesn’t mean all these thoughts are necessarily ours. In fact, Buddhists would argue that they’re not. Oftentimes thoughts are just kind of coming into our minds versus actually being things that we’re originating. That’s another important point. We can be more patient with ourselves, but also with other people who are going to have their own afflictive emotions, or as they say in Buddhism, defilements that are hurting them. So then when we’re, for example, in line at the coffee shop and someone’s taking forever to pay, we can be a little bit more patient with them because we can understand, okay, maybe they’re having a rough day or they can’t find their wallet or whatever it is. So that’s one of the ideas of where we can develop patience for others. And I think for ourselves, being in meditation helps us to hopefully develop more self-compassion. And that’s going to help us to be more patient when we make mistakes, when we fall on our face and help us to be able to pick ourselves up again. So I think those are some things that can help with patience specifically. Brett McKay: One of the things I love about Buddhism, and you do a good job in the book with this, is highlighting all the different ways Buddhism talks about dealing with negative emotions. So anger, frustration, sadness, anxiety, even envy. What does Buddhism say about how we can better manage these, what you said Buddhism calls defilements. Brendan Barca: So one of the things that we can first start to understand that these are emotions and feelings that are happening across all of humanity. So everyone out there, ourselves included, are dealing with negative emotions like anger, anxiety, and envy. And so this is part of the human condition and part of the condition of suffering, which goes back to the first noble truth. But what the Buddhist perspective that would help us to kind of start to deal with these is if we can not only through meditation, but also through what you would think of as mindfulness, which is watching our mind, let’s say when our partner says something that triggers us and we get angry and we start to react in a negative way. If we have started to cultivate some mindfulness, which means being alert, which means being aware, then we can begin to, instead of just react haphazardly or react too quickly, we can start to respond in a more intentional manner. So think of meditation and mindfulness as a way to almost create a gap or a space between our emotion and our reaction to it. And that could be outwardly towards someone else or even internal self-loathing. So when we get angry or we get anxious or we get sad, we can start to almost create a space between us and those feelings. And one of the things that I like to think about, and I use this all the time, is we tend to label ourselves as our feelings. How often do you hear someone say, I am anxious or I am sad or I am angry? So we’re literally saying, I am this. But the truth is we aren’t those emotions. Those emotions are things that are passing through us. Those are things we are dealing with at a practical level, but they aren’t us. So one thing we could do to reframe that is think, I am feeling anxious. I am feeling sad. I am feeling angry. And it already creates a little bit of that space between us and the emotions themselves. Brett McKay: I love that. I also think too, just thinking about those noble truths about the cause of suffering, that life is impermanent and we get attached to things, really coming to understand that emotionally, not just intellectually, can go a long way to staving off those negative emotions. Because you’re like, wow, why am I getting angry about this? There’s no reason to get angry about this. Of course, the vacation got canceled. That’s just part of life. And then you just learn how to roll with the punches. Brendan Barca: Yeah. The Buddhist monk and great teacher Thich Nhat Hanh once said, when someone makes you angry, picture them in 300 years and then picture yourself. What will become of them? What will become of you? Ash. The idea is that that’s going to help to dissolve your anger because we all have the same end. So it’s a little bit humorous, but also true. And every time I think about that, it kind of zooms out because we’re always too zoomed in to our own lives, our own problems, thinking that all these things are going to get fixed one day and all of a sudden we’ll wake up happy. But in reality, if we don’t work on our own minds, first of all, if we don’t try to have more patience to ourselves and others, then we’re going to continue to be upset or be suffering no matter what we’re going through. Brett McKay: You mentioned that compassion, developing compassion for others and for ourselves can be an antidote to a lot of these negative emotions. How is compassion defined in Buddhist philosophy? Brendan Barca: So the word for compassion in Sanskrit is karuna. And the definition for that is having a genuine wish to alleviate the suffering of others. So we can think of that, and I would also expand the definition. When we say others, it can also and it should also include ourselves. But we’re pretty good, most of us are pretty good at giving ourselves a break, being compassionate towards ourselves, being generous towards ourselves. I think there’s some exceptions to that. But one of the things that we’re not so good at doing is extending that not only to our loved ones who we do have some attachment towards, who we do want to help, we do want them to succeed, but then layers or steps beyond that. So to our friends, to our neighbors, to our colleagues, to strangers. And the idea with compassion, with karuna, is to be able to have a genuine heartfelt compassion for other people. And that is one of the pathways or one of the things we can use. The more we cultivate compassion, the more we mature our mind and start to see that, first of all, we are all struggling, so all of us deserve that compassion, but then also help to change our action so that we actually do want to help other people. Not just necessarily being altruistic, although that’s one form of compassion. But even by, let’s say our partner or our friend gets angry with us and gets us upset, well, how can we be compassionate in that moment and be there for the other person? Because we can see or we should start to see that they’re suffering and they actually need us now in that moment more than ever. So they need compassion. They don’t need us to get angry too. Brett McKay: And there’s actually, you highlight this in the book, there’s like a meditation you can do to help develop compassion. Brendan Barca: Yeah, so one of the meditations you can practice is called Tonglen meditation, and that’s a Tibetan Buddhist idea and exercise. And how Tonglen meditation would work, or when you could use it, is first you could use it when someone you know is suffering. So actually the first time I was introduced to this, I didn’t know Buddhism well at all at the time. I had kind of stumbled across this. It was one of my friends was dealing with a gambling problem and was an addicted gambler. And I remember when I heard about Tonglen, which is trying to wish for the other person’s suffering to end, it was a helpful meditation to try. And so you can use it when a friend is suffering or when you’re suffering. Let’s say you get sick or you’re dealing with something difficult, you can use it for yourself. And how it would work is basically you would do like a seated meditation, and you would still want to be doing your breathing, which obviously we’re doing all the time, but more intentional breathing. And what you want to practice is when you’re breathing in, visualize taking in the other person’s suffering, the other person’s pain. And then as you breathe out, visualize breathing out that purified air. So to send them relief, to send them comfort. And so what we’re doing is we’re not taking in their pain and feeling it ourselves, we’re almost purifying it and sending it back to them. And what you find through this meditation practice is that yes, it can actually help the other person, but the other thing too, and you’ll notice this if you try it, is it also boosts you up because in that moment you’re acting out of pure compassion and you’re at kind of a new heightened level in your mind. So that’s called Tonglen. And yeah, I encourage people to try it if either they’re in pain, or someone they know is. Brett McKay: One compassion meditation that I’ve done, and maybe it’s related to this, but I got this from Rick Hansen. We’ve had him on the podcast before. He’s a psychologist, written a couple books about meditation, particularly Buddhist meditation. And he suggests a meditation where you wish someone well with a mantra like, may you be safe, may you be happy, may you feel strong. And he says, when you’re starting off with this meditation to kind of get a toehold into it, is you want to start off with someone who you naturally feel warm towards. So like your wife, your kids. Of course, you’re just going to naturally have compassion for them. So it’s kind of easy to do that. And then he says, once you’ve done that for a bit, then you move on to a more neutral person, someone you neither really like or dislike. And then to really challenge yourself, you pick someone you don’t like and then try that same compassion meditation where you wish them well. So you repeat the mantra, may you be safe, may you be happy. And that’s hard to do. So you do that for a while. And then once you’ve done that, you direct the meditation toward yourself. And I found that really useful. And I actually still do that occasionally. Brendan Barca: Okay, yeah. So actually now I know what you’re referring to. That’s like the loving kindness meditation. Brett McKay: Yeah, loving kindness. 0:43:41.1 Brendan Barca: Okay, yeah. So maybe that’s what Rick was referring to. We do have that in the book too. So another great practice. And you definitely walk people through the steps very clearly. So that’s another great one to cultivate compassion for yourself and others. Brett McKay: So we started our conversation talking about how people in the West, we typically think of Buddhism as a contemplative philosophy, which it is. There’s the meditative practices that you’re doing to help you understand reality. But it’s also, it’s very action oriented. And you have a whole section of reflections about how to put into action these Buddhist principles. So what role does action play in Buddhism? And what does Buddhist action look like? Brendan Barca: So one of the key parts of the Eightfold Path, as we were mentioning earlier, has to do with ethics. And with ethics, when we talk about it from a Buddhist perspective, has to do with a couple key elements such as right speech, right action, and right livelihood. And all of those are examples of action. With speech, it’s are we speaking truthfully? Are we speaking kindly? Are we avoiding lies and gossip? With right action, are we making sure that we’re not harming others through our actions? Are we trying to help people? Or at least if we’re not helping them, let’s make sure we don’t harm them. And then for livelihood, it’s more about are we earning our living in an ethical way? So while everything we do starts in our mind, right, and how we perceive the world, also how we determine what our actions are, we have to make sure that we then follow through. Because if we just have a thought that, let’s say, we want to donate to a really great charity, but then if we don’t follow through on that and all of a sudden our life gets in the way, things get busy and we don’t do it, then our generosity, even though we had the feeling in it, isn’t complete. So what we want to do is not only be able to think compassionately, think generously, think and also in accordance with a way that’s true to the nature of reality, but we also want to make sure that we’re following through in living in a way that aligns with our virtues. And so in the three doors that we can use for that is going to be our thoughts, so what we think, our speech, and then also what we do. So those are some of the things that we can start to strive for in terms of Buddhist action. Brett McKay: And I mean, you talk about this throughout the book, any point in your life or the day where you experience frustration, anger, things are just off kilter, instead of seeing it as this, just an annoyance, see it as a chance to get to actually practice this Buddhist stuff that I’ve been reading about and put it into action. So see life as practice, basically. Brendan Barca: Yeah, we can think of it like everyday scenarios. If one of your colleagues gets you angry, we can think, oh, this person, I wish they weren’t in my life, or you can start to see them as your teacher, see them as someone that can help you to practice self-control and patience, because if we didn’t have difficult people in our lives or difficult situations, how would we ever practice these virtues? Our life would just be so smooth, we would never have self-control or patience. So I think that’s another way we can think about it in our day-to-day lives as we come up across new obstacles. Brett McKay: Another practice to help people think about whether they’re put into action, these things they’re meditating on and reading about, you offer this nighttime reflection from a Buddhist philosopher. So I’ll just kind of read it here. How do you say his name? Patrul Rinpoche? Brendan Barca: Yeah, Patrul Rinpoche. Brett McKay: This is what he said. I like this. At night, when you go to sleep, do not just drop off into unconsciousness. Take the time to relax in bed and examine yourself in this way. So, what use have I made of this day? What have I done that is positive? Yeah, so it’s just a time to reflect. Like, hey, did I actually do the things I’m trying to live out, these principles? And it reminded me of Benjamin Franklin had a similar thing. He had this journal that he would keep, and he’d ask himself, what good have I done this day? I mean, it’s just a time to self-reflect. And then if you didn’t do as great, well, there’s always tomorrow. Brendan Barca: Yeah, I think that there’s two huge benefits of that practice. One is that it’s important to redefine our measurements of success in that day. Like if, I mean, I speak for myself as someone who’s like kind of that type A sort of career-driven individual. One of the things I’m trying to rewire in my own brain is that like making that sale or finishing the book, whatever it is, aren’t necessarily like, yes, they’re markers of some success, but what’s more success is if I can create harmony in my household, if I can be kind to my neighbor who’s difficult with me, if I can maybe text my parents, not every day, but more often. Like these are markers of like true success and making sure I’m living virtuously. Then the other major benefit of that reflection is that the idea is as you drop off to sleep is that it’s going to encourage more of that behavior the next day as it kind of bleeds into, I don’t think your dreams, but into the next day. And then you can think, okay, how can I continue to be that person or change into the person I want to be. Brett McKay: So let’s end with this. The final words of the Buddha were supposedly strive with vigilance. I really like that. So what did he mean by that? Brendan Barca: So with strive with vigilance, the word that we’re translating from for vigilance is apra-mata. That’s the Sanskrit or Pali word. And there’s a couple of different variances to that word in English. So we can think of it, yes, as vigilance. Also, you can think of it as carefulness, alertness, mindfulness, even diligence. And what the Buddha was saying, or at least what we believe he meant by this based on all of our research is that, first of all, our mind is the root of our suffering, but it’s also the root of our freedom. So what we need to do, and he was saying this to his disciples at the time or his students, is that we need to have absolute vigilance at every moment. Because if we don’t have vigilance over our minds, then it’s going to go back into poor behavior. It’s going to go into reactive emotions. It’s going to lead us into a life of non-virtue. So if we can remain vigilant of our own minds, then we can start to alleviate our suffering and work towards the inner freedom that we want. Because if we want to practice compassion, if we want to practice loving kindness, whatever these things are and be there for ourselves and our family, it all is held together by vigilance. If we don’t have that, then everything else falls apart. Brett McKay: Well, Brendan, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work? Brendan Barca: Yeah, thanks so much for having me. So people can catch us, and it’s me and my wife who wrote the book, Pema Sherpa, at thedailybuddhist.net to learn about the book and where to get it. And then we’re also on Instagram these days at daily.buddhist, and we post every single day on there too. Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Brendan Barca, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure. Brendan Barca: Thanks so much, Brett. Thanks so much for having me. Brett McKay: My guest today was Brendan Barca. He’s the co-author of the book, The Daily Buddhist. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about the book at the website, thedailybuddhist.net. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/buddhism, where you find links to resources where you delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com. We find our podcast archives. And while you’re there, sign up for our newsletter. We’ve got a newsletter for the Art of Manliness. It is free. We have a daily option and a weekly option. It’s a great way to stay on top of what’s going on at AOM. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you’d take one minute to give us a podcast on Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think is something out of it. As always, thanks for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you to stay on my podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action. This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.…

Podcast Archives | The Art of Manliness

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Podcast #1,073: How to Turn Vices Into Career-Advancing Virtues

6 weeks ago

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What if the traits you’ve been taught to suppress your entire career are actually the very qualities that separate those who get what they want from those who stay stuck waiting for recognition that never comes? Today on the show, Jenny Wood argues that most of us are living in what she calls “an invisible cage” created by an overabundance of caution, and that the biggest lie you’ve been told in your career is to keep your head down and let your work speak for itself. Jenny is a former Google executive who developed a career development program used by 56,000 people in nearly 100 countries, and she’s the author of Wild Courage: Go After What You Want and Get It . In our conversation, Jenny explains how traits that have a negative rap can be used for positive ends that will advance your career. We discuss how being shameless, reckless, nosy, manipulative, obsessed, and more can help you overcome your success-hindering fears, take bolder action, and achieve your goals. Connect With Jenny Wood Jenny’s website Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!) Listen to the episode on a separate page. Download this episode. Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice. Read the Transcript 0:00:07.4 Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness Podcast. What if the traits you’ve been taught to suppress your entire career are actually the very qualities that separate those who get what they want, from those who stay stuck waiting for recognition that never comes? Today on the show, Jenny Wood argues that most of us are living in what she calls “an invisible cage” created by an overabundance of caution, and that the biggest lie you’ve been told in your career, is to keep your head down and let your work speak for itself. Jenny is a former Google executive who developed a career development program used by 56,000 people in nearly 100 countries. And she’s the author of “Wild Courage: Go After What You Want and Get It.” In our conversation, Jenny explains how traits that have a negative rap can be used for positive ends that will advance your career. We discuss how being shameless, reckless, nosy, manipulative, obsessed, and more can help you overcome your success-hindering fears, take bolder action, and achieve your goals. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/wildcourage. All right, Jenny Wood, welcome to the show. Jenny Wood: Thanks so much for having me, Brett. Brett McKay: So you were a successful Google executive. While you were there, you also developed a career development program that helped employees advance their careers by learning how to advocate for themselves, stand out for the crowd. So you’ve made a career for yourself by being unapologetically ambitious, like going after what you want. Have you always been like that? Were you like that as a kid, or was there a moment in adulthood where that switch finally flipped and you’re like, all right, I’m gonna start turning my ambition into action? Jenny Wood: Ooh, there was a moment, Brett. There was a moment, and it was in 2011 on the New York City Subway, when I was riding the subway home from work, and about 20 feet away from me stands this really good-looking guy, gorgeous blue eyes, thick brown wavy hair, the whole works. And even though I wanted to talk to him, something held me back. The things you would normally think about some stranger on the subway. What if he’s a convicted felon? What if he’s married? What if 100 people stare at me on this packed train? So I sit there, I do nothing while the train passes stop after stop after stop, and his life, frankly, passes me by. But I’m so taken by him that I make a deal with the universe, and I say, if he gets off at my stop, then maybe I’ll try to strike up a conversation with him. And if not, c’est la vie. Well, he gets off at the next stop, which was not my stop, and just as the doors are about to close, I feel this wave of wild courage wash over me and push me out of my subway seat and off the train. I chase to catch up with him, tap him on the shoulder. I say, excuse me, I’m sorry to bother you, but you were on my subway and I thought you were cute. You’re wearing gloves, so I can’t tell if you’re wearing a wedding ring, but in the event that you’re not married, any chance I could give you my business card? And then I wait for what feels like forever for him to take my card, thinking this was a terrible idea. But he does take the card. He calls the next day. We go on a date a week later, and we’ve now been married for 11 years with two small kids who are nine and seven. Brett McKay: No, I love that story. I love how you started your book off with that story, ’cause that really captures the title of the book, Wild Courage. So what were you like before that moment? Were you sort of just someone who played it safe, tried to stay in the background? Jenny Wood: Yeah, I was a confident Google employee on the outside, but scared and timid on the inside, always worried about what my boss was going to think about me walking out of our Tuesday one-on-one, always concerned that nobody would forget that one client presentation I flubbed, always nervous about when I eventually had direct reports and indirect reports as a Google exec, what they thought about me and how they were gonna score me as a leader at Google because there’s a lot of upward and sideways and downward feedback at Google. And it’s funny, just yesterday I gave a keynote to a Google team that happens to be led by the guy who hired me at Google almost two decades ago. And he’s like, Jenny, it’s so interesting and wonderful to see you come into your own because when you first started, you had a hard time having a perspective. You had a hard time sharing your thoughts. I knew that you had smart ideas, but you were too nervous and timid and held back to share those out loud for business impact. And I was like, wow, it’s so interesting because sometimes I think people push back on me and they’re like, it seems like you were just born this way, Jenny. You seem really confident. You could sell ice to Eskimos. And it was such an interesting moment when I was doing this talk and getting this feedback from the guy at Google who hired me to realize like, yeah, I was not born this way. And you don’t have to be either. You might not be a subway chaser, but wherever you are sitting right now, there is something that you want. And wild courage is what closes the gap between what you want and what you get. And it’s this set of tools that help you go after those things and get them. And it can be learned. It is not an innate skill. It takes practice, it takes reps. It takes building the muscle of wild courage. Brett McKay: And as you described yourself in the book before you made this jump to wild courage, you remind me of, I was like this in high school too. Correct me if I’m wrong. This sort of describes you how you were in high school and college. You worked hard, you were quietly ambitious, you kind of just like, I’m gonna work really hard, do my best, and then I’ll just wait for people to notice. Jenny Wood: Yeah, exactly. Brett McKay: And then if people notice me, then okay, that’s fine. But if they don’t, I’m just gonna stay in the background. I think there’s a lot of people like that. They’re really conscientious. They do good work, but they wait for people to notice before they actually put themselves out there. Jenny Wood: Absolutely. I was like that. I would almost take it a step further and say that I was really hesitant to stand out, even to acknowledge my own ambitions or share them. Brett McKay: Yeah, you have this great line in the book that says, “Most existential anxiety in life isn’t about a lack of ambition, but an overabundance of caution.” So the book’s called Wild Courage. What makes wild courage wild? Jenny Wood: Well, wild courage consists of nine traits that create the bars of an invisible cage that keep you small, that keep you quiet, that keep you following instead of leading. And my goodness, do they raise eyebrows. They are weird, selfish, shameless, nosy, obsessed, manipulative, that’s a spicy one, brutal, reckless, and bossy. And those are not traits we typically think we want to aspire to. So that is the wild piece of it. Brett McKay: Okay, so your traits of wild courage are weird, selfish, shameless, nosy, obsessed, manipulative, brutal, reckless, and bossy. And what you do in the book is you reclaim these words, which they typically have a bad rap, and you reframe them with new definitions and lay out how they can be used for positive ends. And you say people can use these traits to overcome the three fears you think hold people back. It’s the fear of failure, the fear of uncertainty, and the fear of judgment of others. So let’s talk about some of these traits. The first one is weird. This is all about standing out. Why is learning to stand out such an essential skill and trait to develop if you want success in life? Jenny Wood: Yeah, well. The world is just too busy and competitive for you to be invisible and make a dent in your career or in your life. So weird is about having the courage to stand out and be authentic, because within your so-called weirdness lie your greatest strengths. So hone every ounce of weird you’ve got. And that might be what I call playing it hot, which is respectfully disagreeing with your boss in a one-on-one, or sitting in the front row of your VP’s presentation, or being the first person to raise your hand and ask them a question. Or actually, you referenced this program I started at Google called, Own Your Career. That was kind of weird. I played it hot. I did not ask for any permission. This was not my full-time job. I ran an operations team that sat between sales and engineering and helped drive billions of revenue for the company annually. But people would come to me for mentorship, and this guy came to me, and he was asking, he was one of the many people who came to me for mentorship, and was asking, hey, how do you navigate entry-level to executive here? And I was like, okay, let me just scale this. Let me write down 10 tips that made me successful here, everything from navigating politics, to stakeholder management, to influence skills, to getting promoted. And I’ll just put together a quick training. I’m sure that maybe 30 people will come. Well, 2,000 people came to that first training, and that grew into Own Your Career, which was used by 56,000 people in nearly 100 countries. But here’s the thing. I was playing it hot. I was being weird. I was not in HR. I was not in people operations. I just decided to go for it without asking for permission from anybody, or running it up the flagpole, only for it to die in committee of approvals. I didn’t ask HR, I didn’t ask legal, I didn’t ask comms. And then all of a sudden, I was writing emails that went to 56,000 people at Google. So it’s ’cause I played it hot. I just went for it, and I begged forgiveness, not permission. And there are so many smart, talented people sitting on brilliant ideas that never see the light of day, because they’re waiting for permission or waiting for perfection, quite frankly. And they don’t just start and put something out there like 10 bullets on a document, hoping that maybe two dozen people will come, and then it ends up being a lot bigger than that. Brett McKay: All right, so being weird is about embracing your quirks, sharpening them into strengths, standing out in a good way. It’s all about leaning into what makes you unique. And then playing it hot is a stance towards life where you show up with your weirdness, with boldness, and energy instead of trying to play it cool and blend in. There’s risk with this though, with playing it hot, ’cause people could just think you’re weird in an off-putting way, or you might step on some toes. But the benefits will typically outweigh the risk. Jenny Wood: Yeah, let me touch on that for a moment, ’cause this is critically important. When I was launching this book, Kim Scott was a big mentor of mine. She’s like, “Jenny, this is your time to beg.” This might fall a little bit more into the selfish or shameless trait, but she’s like, “This is your time to beg.” I had built relationships with a lot of authors and influencers, and I asked maybe 100 of them to help promote the book, whether it was sharing it on social media or on their blog or if I could be on their podcast, or it was actually probably closer to 200, or whether they’d write a newsletter about it. And there was one very, very famous author, and if I said the name, I will not for their privacy, but if I said the name, every single one of you would know it. And this person not only said no, but also ended our friendship and our mentorship relationship, and man, did it sting. I lost sleep over it. This was just a couple of days before a pub date, and it was a time when I needed to not be losing sleep, and it stung. But if I had used that rejection as an indication to just start playing it cool and not asking for help or not being weird or not shamelessly putting myself out there, then this book would not have been nearly as successful as it has been. And so, even though the outcome wasn’t what I would have wanted, and it really felt like a punch in the gut, and it still hurts to this day, it still hurts to be told no from someone you deeply respect and admire because you’ve played it too hot. But it doesn’t mean that the decision was bad. It was just the outcome that wasn’t ideal. And so, I still carry that play it hot mentality with me because, 80% of the other people said, “Yes, we’d be thrilled to help.” And then 20% said no respectfully. And this was like the one outlier who said no, in a way that was painful for me. But it’s okay, because we push past those painful moments and we keep doing great things. Brett McKay: Besides playing it hot, another way you suggest you can be more weird is sharpening elbows. What do you mean by that? Jenny Wood: Yeah. Well, this is an example of when I was at Google, and the most senior leadership team, kind of the equivalent of the C-suite of this org of Google, was meeting in London to decide a reorg and the fates of the people below them. Now, the people below them, myself included, were not invited to London for the actual meetings. But lo and behold, a bunch of us showed up in London to rub elbows. It’s like call, sharpen our elbows to be in the same proximity, to have coffee chats, to be present. And again, if you wanna be invisible, you can, but it’s not going to help your career because being in the same room, if you’re not invited, if you don’t have a seat at the table, bring a folding chair, as they say. But I think just showing up makes a big difference. It’s like the classic line, 80% is just showing up. And it was astonishing who decided to fly to London and who decided to not and what the outcomes looked like. Because politics are real, relationships are real. And again, it goes back to the biggest lie you’ve been told in your career is just keep your head down, your work will speak for itself. It won’t. Brett McKay: At the end of each chapter, you have a section of what you call trait traps. And this is how the quality you’re talking about in that section can turn into a weakness. And for the weirdness section, you say the trait trap there is when you start thinking of weirdness as being rude, annoying, just obnoxious. So the takeaway for weird is that you wanna be weird in a good way. Just by doing the things that other people aren’t doing, doing things that might be unusual or unusually bold, just standing out from the crowd. But it’s in a good way. You’re not being obnoxious about it. Let’s talk about another trait, and that is selfish. Nobody wants to be known as selfish, but let’s talk about this first. How can selflessness be harmful? I think that’s a good way to start this question. Jenny Wood: Yeah. Well if you give everybody a leg up at your own expense, you’ll end up getting trampled. So start showing up for yourself. I redefined this as the courage to be your own champion. And even when I was running the, Own Your Career program, I feel like I took my eye off the ball on my core job a little bit, and I was almost over-delegating to the leaders who reported to me. And then, I had one conversation with my manager who was basically like, Jenny, get your eye back on the ball on your core job. And then it even meant that I had to kind of reshift some of the priorities to either peers who I delegated to or direct reports because I had to look out for myself. I needed to maintain a good performance course that I could continue bringing this good work to the world. And it’s tough. It’s tough, especially as a leader, to be selfish and say, my career matters too. But at the end of the day, I deeply believe that as much as your manager is supporting you and your career, they’re gonna put their career first. And they should, because if we’re not showing up for ourselves, then who is? And for the parents out there, you might say, oh, well, if I were to ask you the question, who’s more important than you? Start showing up for yourself. And if you were to say, oh, my child is more important than I am, but does your child need a martyr who’s exhausted and depleted and hungry and sleep deprived? No, go to that yoga class, go to that golf, Sunday regular session that you do with your buddies, and take the time that you need so that you can replenish and show up for the people in your life in a thoughtful and intentional way. Brett McKay: So being selfish actually allows you to serve better? Jenny Wood: Yeah. Brett McKay: Yeah. So what does positive selfishness look like for you? Jenny Wood: Well, it’s saying yes to the big and no to the small, at least in a work context, but also in a life context. So what’s big? The Q2 strategy project that your C-suite really cares about. What’s big? Improving customer satisfaction by 12% quarter over quarter. Again, in a work context, what’s small? Being the 18th person to reply all on the happy birthday Jimmy email. Give him a high five when you see him at the water fountain. What’s small? Attending every single meeting where you neither add value nor derive value. And how often do we do that? And what’s small? Being the person who always takes notes in the meeting or always raises your hand to lead the wellbeing pillar. Like, yes, these things are good for community, for culture building. Yes, it’s nice to occasionally plan the company picnic for the summer. But if you did it the last several times, if you took notes the last several meetings, then those small actions constitute what I call nap work, not actually promotable. So avoid more than 10% nap work. Because no one ever gets promoted for being responsive to email. And yes, do a little bit of it. But if you notice that you’re dialing up to 30%, 40%, and granted this stuff can be easy, it can be simple. Sometimes it avoids the big scary projects of the customer satisfaction increase. But if you do too much of it, it’s just not gonna serve you well. So I say don’t nap at the office because you wanna do the big work that moves the business, because what moves the business is what moves your career. And same thing in your life at home also. Like, what are the things that you need to respond to on a given day and what are the small things you can avoid? And maybe it is not responding to every text that comes in, right? Brett McKay: Yeah, that nap work, I can see that can be a trap for people in their career. ‘Cause often nap work, it’s easy and it’s concrete and it’s actionable. It’s like, oh, I’m doing something. But if you look at it, it doesn’t really move the bottom line on things. And so, I can see it can put someone in a position where like, I just do so much for the company. No one appreciates what I do, but you’re doing stuff that, it’s nice, but it’s like not necessary. Jenny Wood: Yeah it invites more work, but it doesn’t invite more responsibility. Brett McKay: Yeah, so say yes to the big, no to the small. But a lot of people have a hard time saying no. Any advice for people who have a hard time saying no to that sort of rinky-dink stuff because it makes them feel bad? Jenny Wood: Yeah, so two tools are the agenda avenger and the power postpone. ‘Cause nobody wants to say no, and then feel like a jerk. But there are so many ways you can say no and not feel like a jerk. In fact, I do have a freebie if people wanted it. It’s @itsjennywood.com/sayno. It’s eight scripts tools, tricks to say no to meetings, projects and favors, because we get them all the time and we feel guilty. We don’t have the wild courage to say no. And then sometimes a yes turns into like 20 other yeses. It’s like, can you do this quick thing? Okay, cool. Now can you schedule this thing as a result of it? Oh, we’ve got to reschedule it. Now we’ve got to inform this one person. So one little yes can turn into 20 different yeses. But you can use the agenda avenger, which is, let’s say for example, someone asks you to hop on a call. You could say, I’d love to get a better sense of what you wanna cover. Could you send a quick agenda first? If you push back, and that’s why it’s the avenger, the agenda avenger. If you ask them for an agenda, they’re gonna have to think real hard if you really need to have that meeting. And by the time they put together that three, five point agenda, they might just realize that can be solved over email. How many times have we been in a meeting that really should have been an email? And then, another one is the power postpone. So I’m planning to take a sabbatical coming up here for six weeks. And so, that’s a natural power postpone where I say, I can’t meet now, but I can meet in about eight weeks. And then, sometimes it just resolves itself. Or if they really, really wanna have that meeting or have you on that project, then they can wait. But oftentimes, it just disappears. And those are two of the eight very practical tools I share with people to thoughtfully say no without feeling like a jerk. Brett McKay: Yeah, the asking for an agenda, I’ve used that a lot in my career. So I’ll get people who will email me like, “Hey, I got this thing. I’d love to hop on the phone to talk about how we can partner together.” And it’s like, what does that mean? Okay. So I send an email like, hey, this sounds great. What are some concrete ideas you have right now on how we can partner? And then they’re like, oh, I don’t know. Okay, well, once you have some ideas, maybe we can hop on the phone then. But when their ask is kind of vague, it’s like, well okay, I’m gonna have you be a little more specific so we can figure out if there’s actually something here for us to do. Jenny Wood: Yeah, definitely. Or another version of it is, I’d get tons of people who’d reach out to me and say, “Hey, my nephew would love a job at Google. [laughter] It’s always someone’s nephew would love a job at Google. Another strategy here is yes, if, or yes, when. Yes, we can do that if you put together three job recs that look interesting to you. Or yes, we can do this when you send me your idea of the perfect job or something like that. So again, it’s similar to the agenda avenger. You’re not specifically asking for an agenda, but you’re saying, yes, we can do it if you do this or when you do that. So yes, if, or yes, when, to also see if that meeting really needs to happen. Brett McKay: Another tactic you have for being more selfish in a positive way is winn. W-I-N-N. What’s that? Jenny Wood: I love this one. I’m so glad you’re bringing it up. So this is play to winn. What I need now, W-I-N-N, as you said. And this is about being selfish about how circumstances might change. And there’s this wonderful story about a session singer for Pink Floyd named Clare Torry. A session singer is someone who is hired for a very small fee to come in and sing backup vocals or something as part of a track for one individual song for a band. So in London, Clare Torry came in and she was paid 30 pounds to sing these backup vocals for the great gig in the sky on a Pink Floyd album. And so, she collected her 30 pound fee and went home and didn’t even know that the song had made the album until it came out. Well, it turns out that album went 14 times platinum. A little bit more than, and her vocals are legendary. If you know the song, it makes the song. And so, she played to win. She said, what I need now is to sue Pink Floyd and ask for a much significant part of the royalties and a songwriting credit. And then she was really smart and selfish to do that. And Pink Floyd was smart to settle out of court for an undisclosed sum. So what might that look like for you? Maybe your company has just gone through a reorg or layoffs and you’re now doing the job of two people and you’re overworked and overwhelmed and feel like you’re underpaid. Well, what I need now might be giving yourself the advice that you might give to a friend, which is put together three slides, go to your manager, explain the work that you’re doing, ask for a new title, ask for a raise. And we selflessly say things like, oh, but I’m just happy to have a job. Or, what about Alan and Sarah and Louisa? They’re doing hard work too. What about their raises? Well, being selfish is standing up for yourself. And sometimes what I need now is the permission we need to recognize that it’s okay to ask for something when the circumstances have changed. Brett McKay: Yeah companies or CEOs, they play to win. Jenny Wood: Heck yeah, they do. And that’s why they’re so successful. Brett McKay: Yeah, if they never think, well, we promised this guy this job for a long time. It’s like, well, okay, the situation now is like, we’re losing money and we have to make cuts to keep this company afloat. That’s the situation now. So we got to make the cuts, I’m sorry. It’s not personal or anything. They’re playing to win. Jenny Wood: Yeah, one of my best managers, Mike, said to me in a one-on-one when I was really being a workaholic and not taking any vacation, he’s like, “Jenny, you are capped out on vacation. When is your next vacation gonna be? I’m worried you’re gonna burn out.” And I said, I know, Mike, I’m just so passionate about this project and this new team. And I just, I love Google so much. And he was like, I think about my saying this and like what a ridiculous, it’s not that, Google’s an amazing company. Don’t get me wrong, but what a funny thing to say to justify me not taking vacation. And I will never forget his retort back. He said, “Jenny, that is great. But I want you to remember that Google doesn’t love you back.” And just like you said, Brett, they’re gonna be selfish. Any organization is gonna be smartly selfish if there’s a financial crisis and they have to have a RIF, a reduction in force, if they need to shift priorities and take a big project away from you, if they need to freeze hiring, if they need to pause promotions or give lower raises or bonuses, they will be selfish left, right, and center. So you can be selfish too, but there’s this power imbalance. Where we look to our companies or we think that our boss’s boss has so much authority and that we can’t ask for what we want, but the best leaders, the future leaders are the ones who ask for what they want because you’re displaying future leadership skills. Brett McKay: Are there any trade traps with selfishness? Jenny Wood: Yeah you want to, with all these traits, be expanding the pie and not re-dividing the pie. So I do advise people to look for ways that are mutually beneficial as opposed to, for example, when I needed to be a little bit more selfish about my career and kind of get my eye back on the ball, if I was going to insert myself more in a project that I delegated to a peer or a direct report, I would think about something else that they could do that would bolster their profile as well. Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. All right, let’s talk about shameless and shameless. This is all about leaning into your strengths and not being afraid of showcasing them. It’s all about having some swagger. Jenny Wood: Yeah. Brett McKay: What do you think holds people back from promoting themselves? Jenny Wood: I think that this is the biggest challenge with Wild Courage. I do. I think that people feel insecure. They feel rife with imposter syndrome. They feel like they don’t deserve it as much as somebody else. They feel like they don’t have the skills that somebody else has. But there was a moment in a meeting that I was leading where there were maybe 20 people in the room and this guy came in and he’s like, “This is a shameless plug, but I put together this spreadsheet that might help you.” And he shared it over the group chat. The emojis go flying. The chat explodes. Oh my gosh, this is gonna be so helpful. This is gonna save me 20, 30 minutes every time I need to create this project proposal for clients. And yet he led with, this is a shameless plug. And it’s like, what’s the shame in that? You’re sharing something useful and helpful and a time saver for people. And yet we hesitate to share our wins. And I think one of the most helpful tactics here, is to make it consistent, make it a system. If, for example, you shared every Monday what I call a shameless Monday email with your boss with four bullets, two things you’re proud of that you did last week and two things you’re excited about for this coming week, that is so powerful. First of all, it makes it a lot easier to put together your performance review at the end of the quarter and your accomplishment bullets. But it also just systematizes talking about your wins and it becomes more natural. It becomes more of an update. There’s huge positive externality of then they might CC their boss. Or if you’re a leader, you could share this with your team and CC your own boss. And then you’re sharing with your team your priorities, which people love to know what their boss is up to that day. So the shameless Monday email can be really effective as you lean into your strengths and not be afraid to showcase them. Brett McKay: Yeah, that’s a powerful idea ’cause your boss has no clue what you’re doing. He might have a little bit of a clue, but he probably doesn’t know everything. So this just makes it more explicit. Jenny Wood: Yeah, definitely. Brett McKay: You also have the power portfolio. What’s that? Jenny Wood: Oh, I love the power portfolio. So the power portfolio is made up of your power assets. And just like a financial portfolio, you wanna have a mix of soft skills and hard skills or of business skills and people skills like you’d wanna have a mix in your financial portfolio of stocks and bonds. So these are the three strengths you have or the three things that you bring to the table that can move the business forward. So I had a coachee named Martina and she came to me with three power assets. She said, “Mine are communication, organization, and supporting others on launches.” And these were okay, but they needed tweaking because again, we want a mix of business and people skills. So yes, people skills matter, but managers and leaders want to know what business problems you’ll solve, because that’s what their boss is grading them on. So that’s why you wanna diversify your power portfolio and aim for a mix here. So we tweaked it. So communication became executive communication. Organization became project and program management, which she was phenomenal at. And supporting others on launches became go-to-market strategy. Again, same ideas, different word choice, higher impact, shameless, right? But it’s just being more powerful in your language. And again, like organization versus project and program management does have a very different je ne sais quoi. To me, organization sounds weak. It sounds feminine. Not that that’s a bad thing, but in the context of wanting to show your leadership skills and show more of the value you bring to the customer, project and program management just sounds a lot more powerful. And so, we strengthened them by doing that exercise. But even aside from your specific language choice, a lot of people, don’t know their strengths at all or their talents and can’t articulate them in a bit of an elevator pitch. Like some people might just draw a blank if I say, what are the three things that, often I will say execs draw a blank when I say, what are the three things you bring to your team? And they really have to think about it. So it requires writing down maybe 20 things that you think you are pretty good at, things you’d love to do as a child, things that you’ve helped move the business forward on in the past. It might require bringing them to a coach or a mentor or a boss and triangulating it with other people think, and then you can whittle it down to three. Brett McKay: And I imagine after you whittle it down to the three, you need to figure out what are some things that, like concrete things I can show, that showcases that I have these traits, be able to show that to people. Hey, I’m great at this thing. Here’s what I’ve done. Jenny Wood: Oh, absolutely. If you’re talking about these in a resume or again, an accomplishment bullet, preparing for a performance review or promotion, you want to use what I call ROI, not the classic ROI return on investment, though this does give you return on career investment. It’s role, objective, and impact. What was your role in this go-to-market strategy? What was the objective? You wanted to launch the product with 10 million users in the first year. And what was the impact? You exceeded that goal and launched it to 11 million users in the first year. And also double your numbers. In any context, double your numbers. Or even going back to… When I say double your numbers, I mean in that example, I used 10 million. Maybe you could say 10 million by day 90. Use physical numbers. It is so much more powerful. They don’t have to be fancy, like revenue growth percentage or actual dollars. It could be, I cut this email sequence down for onboarding new clients from five emails to three, making it more efficient. Or I’m 70% of the way through the fall athleisure line competitive analysis. Even just saying, I’m 70%, or I cut this down from five emails to three, has a big impact on showing the concrete, the tangible value that you bring to the table. So double your numbers anywhere you can, whether it’s in your shameless Monday email or a resume or accomplishment bullets or your power portfolio when you’re talking about your strengths in the specific situations with ROI where you demonstrated these power assets. Brett McKay: How are you being shameless with the promotion of this book you’re doing? Jenny Wood: Well, a big part of promoting the book is having companies buy the book in bulk. So there are books that are sold one at a time, and there are books that are sold 500 at a time. Because this book is so much about, it’s about wild courage in all areas of life, but there’s a bias toward professional wild courage and really thriving within your company, within your organization, and not saying, hey, go quit your job and be a solopreneur, be an entrepreneur. It’s really helping you feel engaged, feel happy, feel successful, feel motivated within your organization, which companies should love and want to buy. So I think this has the potential to be the kind of book that people buy 500 at a time. So how am I being shameless? I recognize that opportunity, and I sent about 300 emails to leaders, friends, acquaintances, secondary connections, subject line, are you interested in buying 200 copies of Wild Courage? And then I put a bunch of details. I’d happy to do a 20-minute complimentary fireside chat if you did. And I sent the first 100, and Brett, I thought that by the end of the day, those checks would just be rolling in for those bulk purchases. But as it turns out, the budget is not always there. The timing’s not always right. There was a lot of ghosting, a lot of rejection. So shameless in this context is having the courage to just keep going despite all of that rejection. And this was different than the rejection of the one person who cut off our friendship. This was rejection at scale because there were so many people. I probably didn’t hear back from 90% of the people in that first 100. So what did I do? I tweaked the offering. Rather than 200 copies in the subject line, I put 50 copies. Rather than overwhelming them with too much information about the details of how this partnership could work and me coming to do a fireside chat, I whittled it down to just a few sentences. So you can use that rejection and tweak, dial your shamelessness up and down to what might better appeal to the audience. Brett McKay: Well, this kind of ties in nicely to one of the other traits of being reckless. Like you’ve been reckless with your being shameless. Jenny Wood: Yeah. Brett McKay: Let’s talk about that. What does healthy recklessness look like? Jenny Wood: Well, it’s the courage to err on the side of action, because better to learn from your mistakes than waste time predicting the consequences of every decision. Think fast and fearless. And if you’re on the fence, do it. And for all of you overthinkers out there, for all of you pro-con list makers and like me, left-brain thinkers who are in a lot of analysis paralysis, just thinking about like, what’s the worst that could happen. Even leaving Google for me took a lot of recklessness. And it was hard for me to get to the point where I knew I wanted to leave. And that was a moment where I felt my eyes fluttering closed when I was driving my son back home from choir practice because I had just taken on too much. I had my day job. I was running the, Own Your Career program. There was all this external interest that was budding about my work, including this book. And I was also trying to be a wife and a mom. It’s like five roles. And I was exhausted. I was struggling with lowercase a anxiety. I was oftentimes up between 2:00 and 5:00 AM. And I just was totally sleep deprived and physically, emotionally, and mentally unwell. And so, I reached the moment where I felt my eyes closing as I was driving Ari home from choir, that it was probably time to go. But it took me about 12 to 18 months to muster the courage to do it. And that’s ’cause I wasn’t reckless enough. And so, I think I was caught in truths and tales. Truths are facts. They’re verifiable facts. This microphone I’m speaking into is black. I’m holding a piece of paper in my hand. But tales are the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of the facts. And so, part of recklessness is separating the truths from the tales. And so, I really struggled with that leaving Google. The tales I told myself were, I’m gonna have no identity if I leave Google. Another tale, what if we run out of money and have to move out of our house in Boulder by all the trails that I love so dearly? Another tale I told myself is my parents are gonna be disappointed in me because I’m the breadwinner for my family. But then, when I broke it down to actual truths in that situation, a truth would be, yes, I’m not gonna get a paycheck every other week with the Google logo on it. A truth would be, I can find other ways to have a new identity. A truth would be, my parents have always supported me and are supportive of me leaving Google as well. So that helps you be reckless when you separate the truths and the tales and really break it down to fact versus fiction. Brett McKay: So another thing you talk about in this reckless section is this react framework. What’s that and how can that help you overcome failures so you can maintain that bias towards action? Jenny Wood: Yeah, well, sometimes failures are not big colossal, I lost the project or I lost the deal. Sometimes a failure is just a moment that happens that’s cringeworthy during the day. And we’ve all had those. And one of mine was when I sent an email intended for six people to, I think it was 23,000 people at the time. That’s how big Own Your Career was at the time. And I sent it instead of to the volunteers working on Own Your Career, I sent it to the entire Own Your Career alias. And Brett, this was an unintelligible email. It was just a subject line that was three sentences long with nothing in the body. And it was a testimonial of someone who had said they loved the Own Your Career program and that they’d gotten promoted as a result of it. And so, the subject line was just TT: Atkinson Me, which is the person’s name, but it’s a really unusual name. And then I had typos in the subject line. And this went to 23,000 people, including many in the Google C-suite. So I was mortified. I pressed send and then I slowly dragged the mouse to the unsend only to not get there in time. And here’s what happened. So React is how I overcame that horrible moment of mini failure. It stands for recognize, empower, apologize, celebrate, and trust. Recognize that not everything you do will be perfect. E, empower yourself to own it quickly and clean it up. Take a deep breath. It happens to everyone. And so, I really just had to put on my big girl pants and say, I can clean it up. I can recover from this. Then I did. A is for apologize. I directly apologized to TT. She was not intending for her feedback about Own Your Career to get broadcast to 23,000 people. C is for celebrate. Celebrate the unexpected goodness that comes out of a mistake. I got hundreds of pings and emails back, and not a single one of them said, you jerk, I can’t believe you distracted me with this nonsensical subject line. No, everybody was checking in on me. Everybody wanted to take care of me. Everybody wanted to help me and empathize with me. And they all said things like, Jenny, I promise nobody cares about this, like you do. Nobody’s paying attention. Everybody understands this. It happens to everyone. They were so empathetic. So that’s celebrating the unexpected goodness that comes out of a mistake. And that’s also the T is trusting that your fellow employees will have your back. And by the way, the other part of C, celebrate the unexpected goodness is, I wrote up this react framework. I then shared it with the whole Own Your Career alias and said, here’s how I recovered from this mistake. And it ended up being the most popular tip of all time that I had ever sent. So it just goes to show you that you can make lemonade out of any lemon. And that’s the react framework. Brett McKay: All right. So reckless, just take more action, have a bias towards action, and you can overcome those little setbacks and failure. It’s not a big deal. It’s not gonna be a career ender for you. Another trait is being nosy. And I love this section. ‘Cause you start off that section talking about how your grandmother was nosy and how that probably saved her life during World War II. What happened there? Jenny Wood: Yeah. So my grandmother was in hiding during the Holocaust in Budapest, Hungary. And she left to get a bucket of water for the other people in hiding with her. And she walked down the street and somebody from the Arrow Cross Party, which was sort of the Nazi equivalent ruling party in Hungary, rounded up her and some fellow Jews at gunpoint. And they marched them to a building and they had them against a wall. And my Bubbie, my grandmother, I called her Bubbie, knew that there was no getting out of this. She was doomed. The options were, basically she was gonna get marched onto a train and taken to Auschwitz, like so many other people had, or she was gonna have a summary execution and get shot right there against the wall. And there were literally dead bodies in the street when this was happening, as she told the story to me, in Hollindale, Florida at the age of 93, when we were recording her Holocaust survival stories. And her only option, she told me, was to get nosy. And so, she asked the soldier, this scared, terrified, timid soldier, a question. And she asked, what would happen if I were to step out of line? And she wasn’t necessarily looking for the answer. She was looking for his reaction. And he answered with the Hungarian idiom, which I will translate to English, which equals, is the mademoiselle so stupid or just pretending to be? And it was a little bit of a jokey answer. She saw a lightness in his voice. He almost cracked a smile. And she really saw his nervousness. And it made her realize that she had a small window here to step out of line, because he didn’t yell at her. He didn’t hit her with the gun. He didn’t cock the gun. And so, just by being nosy, having the wild courage to ask a question, it was the only way she was able to survive that scrape. So she stepped out of line and started walking down the cobblestone street. And she said she remembered hearing the click of her heels every time she took a step as she just kind of slowly breathed in and breathed out and hoped that nothing would happen. And it didn’t. And she returned back to the attic safely. And so, she really only survived because of her nosiness, because she had the courage to ask a question. Brett McKay: So this is all about asking questions, what it means to be nosy. Why do you think people have a hard time asking questions in their career? Jenny Wood: We think it makes us look stupid or uneducated or unknowledgeable. Or think about how many times, for those of you who work in an organization that has a ton of acronyms. You think, oh, well, it’s too late. I’m already in this role for four months. I can’t ask that basic question. I can’t ask that simple question again. But nosy is the courage to get insatiably curious because curiosity drowns out fear and pulls you toward what is most exciting to you. So use it as a compass. And curiosity shows leadership, it shows ambition. It’s a great way to overcome nerves at a networking event rather than feeling like you have to impress somebody. Go ask them a bunch of what and how questions like, what was the most interesting session for you so far? Or how long have you been in the industry and what brought you here? Or how have your peers been responding to these sessions? Or how are you using AI right now? What and how questions are so powerful and they take the pressure off of you in any kind of new relationship or networking situation or a meeting with a mentor where you feel like you’ve got to be all buttoned up and prove yourself. Just start asking and start listening. And even the best leaders, going back to the person who’s a few months into the role and they’re like, oh, I’m too far in to ask what that three letter acronym stands for. But the leaders who we admire most are the ones who have the confidence, the shamelessness, the boldness, the recklessness to say, “Hey, what does PRT stand for on this slide? I just wanna make sure that for everybody in the room who’s new, we redefine that.” And everyone sighs a sigh of relief that somebody finally, had the boldness to redefine that acronym of the thousands that are used at the company. And when it’s a leader who does that, I really admire it. Brett McKay: You also talk about how you can use nosiness or asking questions to turn envy into a springboard to success. What does that look like? Jenny Wood: Well, we’ve all got those people in our life who we’re jealous of. It could be a friend, it could be a colleague. And I say use envy as your engine and steal their blueprint. So, there was someone named Molly who I just deeply admired. She was a peer of mine. We were always competing for promotions and I always thought she was three times as good as I was. But instead of being jealous and having it create a scarcity mindset for me, I thought of it as an abundance mindset where I could learn from her. I could get deeply nosy and I could kind of discover her recipe for X, Y, Z skills. So she was really good at project management. And anytime we were launching a new program, she would have this awesome Gantt chart, which had all of the dates and the accomplishments that needed to happen over a six-month period of time. She was really good at communicating next steps. She was really good at delegating. She would bold the person’s name in each email and put a deadline for what needed to happen next. She would thank everybody and be very positive and empathetic. And so, rather than just be jealous and say, oh, why am I not good at Molly? Like I resent her. I just went to her and I said, Molly, could I do three 20-minute sessions with you where you review some of these project management skills with me and I can basically steal your blueprint? And I would write down these things on an index card and I would put them by my desk and I would use her strategies. Or I did this with another manager, Ted, who was just such a phenomenal presenter and never said, um, in his presentations. And so, then I would gamify it for myself and I’d say, I’m gonna count how many times Ted uses um, in a 10-minute presentation, and I’m gonna try to beat it. So again, rather than being jealous, I used envy as my engine and I would steal their blueprint. And that is rooted in being nosy. It’s being curious versus jealous. Brett McKay: This reminded me of Plutarch, the famous Roman biographer, philosopher guy. He talks about two types of emotions. There’s envy, where you see someone who’s better than you and you just feel bad and you wanna bring them down. And then he says, “The opposite of that is zeal.” It’s where you admire someone’s excellence and then you wanna imitate it. Jenny Wood: I love that. Brett McKay: So curiosity, being nosy can lead to zeal instead of envy. Jenny Wood: I love that. Brett McKay: I really like that. Jenny Wood: I love that. Brett McKay: Let’s talk about being manipulative. You had an instance where you used manipulation on a past AOM guest, and that’s Vanessa Van Edwards. She talks about charisma. How did you manipulate Vanessa into helping you achieve one of your goals? Jenny Wood: Yeah, well, I really wanted to meet Vanessa. We haven’t talked about obsessed, but I’m obsessed. I wanna meet the best people. I wanna do the best work. I wanna help people in the most high-impact way. And I knew that part of that was building those relationships with authors so that I could partner with them around time of book launch, and also just learn from each other and enjoy each other’s friendship and mutual value exchange. So I was headed to Austin for some work meetings. Someone had just introduced Vanessa and me over email. And so I said, I’m gonna be in Austin Thursday through Sunday. I would love to take you out for coffee. And she said, “Oh, what are the chances? I’m actually gonna be out of town those exact dates for a keynote.” And so, I think a lot of people would just take no for an answer and be like, okay, another time. And of course, another time never comes. But I wanted to capitalize on this opportunity. So I said, what time does your flight depart on Thursday? And she said, “It departs at 3:00 PM. Well, my flight was scheduled to get in later than that. But a quick little switcheroo flight change and $60 to Delta Airlines had me coming in before her flight so I could meet her. And I said, what are the chances I get in at 1 O’clock? And so, what if we met right by your gate for coffee? So, did I lie? Yeah, sure. Liar, liar, pants on fire. But I will stand behind that lie all day long that I wasn’t actually originally getting in at 1:00 PM. And maybe I even said I was getting in at 1:00 to just make sure it worked for her before I made the flight change. So I think I actually did lie about the time my flight landed before I made the change. But I tell you, $60 to meet Vanessa Van Edwards in person, it’s a bargain at twice the price. And so, we feel like everything has to be coincidental or just has to work out or fate. But man, I just believe that serendipity isn’t found, it’s made. And manipulative reclaimed is the courage to build influence through empathy and to build lasting relationships. Because whether you’re selling a product, an idea, or yourself, the ability to end friends, allies, and supporters is all about mutual benefit. So figure out what people want and go get it for them. In fact, something happened this morning where I got an email from the person who ran the PR campaign for the book. And she said, actually, I got an email a couple weeks ago, but I totally forgot to respond to this. It said, hey, would you be willing to write a testimonial for me on LinkedIn? So I would call that nosy, right? That’s great. And then I forgot to respond because I’ve had a lot going on. And then she followed up. I’d call this bossy. She said, “Hey, I hate to nudge you, but I’d really appreciate this review on LinkedIn. Any chance you could do that?” And so, what I think would have made it even more powerful, is if she’d been manipulative and said, “And by the way, I’ve drafted a couple sentences for you that you can tweak as you see fit.” Because when I talk about manipulative and how it’s all about finding mutual benefit and figuring out what people want and getting it for them, what I want is time back. So I love doing favors for people, but they take time. And so, had she been manipulative and said, “I’ve already written it for you.” That gives me what I want, which is time back and makes it a lot easier for me to say yes. So I did say yes, but now I have to do the work. And it’s still something I have to add to my to-do list. So that’s where manipulative can be such a good thing and win-win and expand the pie, whether you’re changing your flight to meet somebody because relationships should be high reward, but also high investment, or asking someone to do a quick favor for you, like my PR person did today. Brett McKay: Yeah, so being manipulative, it’s all about just being influential. That’s what it’s all about. And your definition of just being influential is like, thinking win-win, finding out how you can get what you want and need, and while at the same time delivering what someone else needs and wants. It reminds me of this famous quote from Dwight Eisenhower about leadership. And he said, “Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done, because he wants to do it.” Jenny Wood: Oh my gosh, that’s so beautiful. Brett McKay: Manipulative, but that’s just leadership. That’s being influential. Jenny Wood: Yeah. Brett McKay: Yeah. So last one, you talked about obsessed. You’re obsessed with meeting Vanessa Van Edwards. That’s another one of your traits of wild courage. What does positive obsession look like? Jenny Wood: Well, it’s pushing, persisting, performing, because frankly, none of these traits will serve you if you don’t learn to deliver, not for some company, but to achieve your own ambitions. So obsessed for me was, I wanted a job at Google in 2006. I was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and I submitted my application online having no clue what the job was that I submitted it for. But I discovered there was maybe sort of possibly a formatting funkiness when I uploaded my resume. And whether there was or wasn’t, when I didn’t hear back from Google, I used that as an opportunity to print out that resume on a piece of paper and hop in my mom’s 10-year-old Honda stick shift and drive to the Google office and sit there on the couch until someone came out and talked to me. And I remember the receptionist, it was a shared office space, was like, no, it’s not really protocol for Googlers to come out and talk to you. You can drop the resume here. And just like firm as a tree rooted to the ground, with my smile kind of like, cheeks quivering as I kept that smile on. I was professionally persistent and said, oh, it’s okay, I’ll wait. I really do need to talk to somebody because there was a problem with my resume. There’s this study that says, people defer to because. It was a study about people standing in line to make Xerox copies and someone from the back went to the front and said, “I need to go to the front of the line because I need to make copies.” Just because they said the word because, they were more likely to be let into the line, even though of course, everyone was there to make copies. But the research suggests that people defer to the word because X, Y, Z. So I said, because there was a problem with my resume, I need to speak to someone. And eventually someone named Elizabeth came out, and I talked a little bit about how I had just come back from working abroad and backpacking through South America, which I understood were very googly skills or things that people did to be kind of well-rounded and global citizens. And then, then and only then, did I hear back from Google once I showed up. Actually, not even then. I didn’t hear back. I didn’t get her business card. And then I tried every single permutation and combination of first initial, last name, first name, last name, just last name @google.com. Her name was Elizabeth Kelleher. So I emailed E. Kelleher, Elizabeth Kelleher, Liz Kelleher, Elizabeth@google.com. And then finally, I found the right combination. And when I followed up, then I heard back. So that is my flavor of obsessed. And it’s okay to be obsessed. It’s okay to stick your neck out. It’s okay to show that you want something deeply, because people like enthusiasm. People like energy, people like positivity. And that’s what I was trying to show, because it didn’t work just submitting my application online. Silly protocols and rules are there to deter the deterrable. But I just decided I was gonna be undeterred. And I got the job. And here we are almost 20 years later. Brett McKay: Yeah. You got to play it hot. Don’t play it cool. Jenny Wood: Yes. Definitely. Brett McKay: So we’ve talked about these different traits. Is there one you think that people would get the most benefit from working on or like the one that people struggle with the most that if they started working on today, they’d see a lot of ROI? . Jenny Wood: I think shameless. I think there’s just a lot of change in the world right now, a lot of economic uncertainty, a lot of change with, the onset of AI, a lot of layoffs, a lot of reorgs, and that’s hard. There’s this moment where my husband and I were living with my grandmother on her pullout couch in Manhattan while we were job hunting. And John shared some unfortunate news. We sat down to dinner. He said, “I’ve been part of a major company restructure and I got laid off today.” Well, I’m crushed as a newlywed, but I look across the table at Grandma Lila, who was like, a total spitfire at four foot 10 and 90 pounds. She was not just shameless. She was unstoppable. And she said, “John, no is just an opening offer. Don’t sign the paperwork.” And John and I look at each other trying to silently communicate what we’re thinking. And then finally, John sighs and says, uh, I think a layoff is like a one-sided thing, Grandma. They say, you don’t work here anymore. And I say, okay. And that’s when Grandma Lila sighs and says, “Well, sure, it would be more comfortable to take no for an answer, but don’t let fear shape your decision, don’t let shame shape your decision. You both want something, right? They wanna get stuff done, even though they can’t afford to pay you. And you want a job because it’s easier to get a job when you have a job.” So finally, John relents. And the next day he goes to his VP and he half-heartedly offers to stay on for 10% time and pay, while he job hunts. And shockingly, they accept. Now, I’m not sharing this as some influence tactic per se. The point is Grandma Lila’s lesson. Don’t let fear, don’t let shame shape your decisions. Get shameless. Brett McKay: Yeah, and it worked out for your husband, ’cause he got some time off. He had a little money to live on, kept his benefits. And then a few months later after this crisis that this company was going through, he kind of abated. The company hired him back full time. And it was all because he’s willing to do something we think of as a bad thing, to be shameless. He had to be uncomfortable and ask for something that apparently wasn’t an option. Well, Jenny, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about you and your work? Jenny Wood: Well, the book’s available anywhere. Electronic, e-book, audiobook, hardcover, Amazon, anywhere books are sold. And then you can find me on itsjennywood.com. And I love helping organizations with keynotes. I love helping execs through one-on-one coaching. I do some small group coaching. And I would love to be in touch and help you find your wild courage wherever you are and whatever you are chasing. Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Jenny Wood, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure. Jenny Wood: Thank you so much, Brett. Brett McKay: My guest today was Jenny Wood. She’s the author of the book, “Wild Courage” It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about her work at her website, itsjennywood.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/wildcourage, where you can find links to resources and we delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you can find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you can think of. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you’d take one minute to give us a review on the podcast or Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think would get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it’s Brett McKay. Reminding you not just to listen to the AOM Podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action. This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.…

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Podcast #1,072: Men Don’t Run in the Rain — And 7 Other Essential Lessons for Being a Man

7 weeks ago

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When Rick Burgess was growing up, his father, Bill Burgess, was also his football coach. But Bill was a mentor on and off the field not only for his own son but for the many young men he coached at both the high school and collegiate level. Though Bill has passed on, his lessons remain timeless and valuable for all men. Today on the show, Rick shares some of his old-school wisdom with us. Rick is a radio host, a men’s ministry leader, and the author of Men Don’t Run in the Rain: A Son’s Reflections on Life, Faith, and an Iconic Father . In our conversation, he discusses what his dad taught him through football and beyond, including why men don’t run in the rain and why you need to get out of the stands, avoid being stupid, refuse to rest on your laurels, understand the difference between confidence and arrogance, and take full responsibility for your life without making excuses. We also talk about how Rick drew upon his father’s wisdom when tragedy struck his life. Resources Related to the Podcast Bill Burgess Sunday Firesides: Quit Acting in Bad Faith AoM Podcast #849: Live Life in Crescendo Connect With Rick Burgess The Man Church Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!) Listen to the episode on a separate page. Download this episode. Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice. Read the Transcript Brett McKay: Hey, before we get to today’s show, I want to let you know that enrollment for The Strenuous Life is now open. Summer is the season for movement, challenge, and growth, and there’s no better time to embrace it than right now. The Strenuous Life is our membership program that helps you put into action all the things we’ve been talking about on the AOM Podcast, and writing about on the AOM website. You’ll take on weekly challenges, earn skill-based badges, and work towards becoming a more capable, well-rounded man. Whether it’s fitness, craftsmanship, service, or personal development, there’s something here to push you forward. Join over 11,000 members who are done just thinking about change and are actually doing the work. Enrollment closes Thursday, June 12th at 10:00 PM Central, so don’t wait. Sign up at strenuouslife.co. That’s strenuouslife.co. I hope to see you on The Strenuous Life. Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness Podcast. When Rick Burgess was growing up, his father, Bill Burgess, was also his football coach. But Bill was a mentor on and off the field, not only for his own son, but for the many young men he coached at both the high school and collegiate level. Though Bill has passed on, his lessons remain timeless and valuable for all men. Today on the show, Rick shares some of his old-school wisdom with us. Rick is a radio host, a men’s ministry leader, and the author of “Men Don’t Run in the Rain: A Son’s Reflections on Life, Faith, and an Iconic Father.” In our conversation, he discusses what his dad taught him through football and beyond, including why men don’t run in the rain, and why you need to get out of the stands, avoid being stupid, refuse to rest on your laurels, understand the difference between confidence and arrogance, and take full responsibility for your life without making excuses. We also talk about how Rick drew upon his father’s wisdom when tragedy struck his life. After the show is over, check out our show notes at aom.is/rain. All right, Rick Burgess, welcome to the show. Rick Burgess: Thanks for having me, Brett. Excited to talk about this topic today, ’cause this is one that you and I both have a lot of passion about. Brett McKay: Oh, for sure. So, you got a new book out. It’s called “Men Don’t Run in the Rain: A Son’s Reflections on Life, Faith, and an Iconic Father.” And this book is all about your father and college football coach Bill Burgess. So your dad, he was a football coach in Alabama. He played football for Auburn from 1958 to 1962. After that, he became a high school football coach and athletic director. He coached at Woodlawn High School and Oxford High School there in Alabama. Then he became the coach of Jacksonville State University. Had a lot of success there. He took his team to three National Division II championships, won one of those, won multiple Gulf South conference titles. He was named, National Coach of the Year, was inducted into the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame. So he had a very successful coaching career. And it seems like your dad, he was born to coach. Like, this was his calling and he filled it. Rick Burgess: Yeah, there’s people that maybe wanna be a coach, and you just put it best Brett, then there’s people that were born to coach. And he just, because it came so natural to him, it was kind of like breathing. I don’t think he even put a lot of effort into saying, I must do this and I have to do that. And I think it’s just what he was born to do. And he was one of those people that if he came into a room, he would influence people whether you wanted him to or not. Brett McKay: What I love about this book is, we were talking before we got on the show, I played high school football here in Oklahoma, and your dad, he reminded me of some of the football coaches that I had. And his sayings that he had, he’s like, witty one-liners that he had without even trying to be witty, the way he carried himself. And I love how you start off the book, this physical description you give your dad. Because I think it really captures the way he dressed and carried himself. It captures his philosophy towards coaching and life. So what was the Bill Burgess uniform that you knew like, that’s dad. When you think about your dad, that’s what you remember. Rick Burgess: He wasn’t really, when I look back, he wasn’t, I don’t think over six foot tall, but he seemed like he was seven feet tall. But he was very muscular and he was old school. So he always had the trucker cap on with the team logo right on the front. He wore a coach’s shirt, the standard with the team logo then Cigna on the left chest. And then he would wear these black coaching shoes. You probably remember these, Brett. They were, I think Rodale made them? Brett McKay: Yeah. Rick Burgess: They were black, and then of course he would do tube socks of course, and he would pull those up to his massive calves, which were legendary. And those calves would kind of break the elastic of the tube socks and then the socks would fall down around his ankles, never staying up. And then of course he had his whistle on, had kind of a piece of leather around it and it had a whistle. And then on the end of the whistle, was athletic tape. My dad believed that athletic tape could cure any problem. And of course it would have that on the end, tobacco juice, and sometimes blood would be stained on the athletic tape. And then of course the final part of the uniform was always the bike coaching shorts. They were super, super tight. And that’s the way he was standing in that Alabama sun. He was just the iconic portrait of those classic football coaches from that era that had influence on everybody they coached. Brett McKay: How do you think that exemplifies his philosophy or sort of his stance towards life? Rick Burgess: Dad was always about keeping it simple. He probably was one of the most humble people that I’ve ever known for the… Considering the leadership role that he was constantly being put in and the accolades. And he was never an I person. He was always a we person. He always complimented the staff, complimented the players, everybody who worked, the equipment person, the trainers, the janitor, whatever the case may be. And so, I think if you looked at the way he dressed, he dressed in a way that shouldn’t really it did, but it shouldn’t have really. The intent was not to bring attention to himself. He felt like if I was gonna be coaching, this is the things I need to coach. And I’m certainly not trying to make a fashion statement or bring any attention to myself. I’m here to work. Brett McKay: It made me wanna go get some bike shorts for myself. Rick Burgess: Oh, goodness. Could we bring them back? Brett McKay: Let’s bring them back. Rick Burgess: Could we bring them back? Brett McKay: I think that’s the next trend that’s gonna happen here. Coach bike shorts. All right, so let’s talk about some of these lessons that you highlight in the book. And the first lesson that you highlight that you got from your dad was, it’s the title of the book, “Men Don’t Run in the Rain.” It’s a very evocative phrase. What does that mean? Rick Burgess: It meant more than what it literally means. In the intro, I tell you the story about me being with my dad, and it was actually one of my friends. Dad was, “This doesn’t surprise you.” He was our biological father, but he was a father figure for so many of our friends and, of course, the multiple players that he coached. Because they either didn’t have a father at all, or they may had fathers that were not great people. And so, dad became kind of a pseudo father for many, and one of my best friends in school. And in growing up, his father, was not involved in his life and unfortunately was actually eventually murdered. And so, he looked to dad as his dad. He was at our house all the time. And he was the first one that said to me, when we were little boys, we weren’t very old, and he saw dad in a downpour and dad wasn’t running. He was just walking methodically. He wasn’t picking up his pace, he wasn’t slowing down. As if the rain wasn’t really hitting him. And he looked at me and he said, “Your dad doesn’t run in the rain.” And I thought, okay, and I didn’t think anything much about it. And maybe dad’s just odd. I didn’t know. So when I got a little older, somewhere around 12, 13, something like that, I was leaving his office and one of those classic Alabama afternoon downpours came with the daily thunderstorm, with all the humidity. And so, I went to run to his truck and he put his arm out and he stopped me and he says, “No, men don’t run in the rain.” And I remember thinking to myself, I don’t think I fully grasp it, but almost what he was saying is, men should never be frantic. Men should not make a big deal out of things that aren’t a big deal. It’s just rain. And I don’t wanna see you nor any man scurrying like the rain falling on them is going to hurt them. And he said, we walk to the truck. And he’s teaching something there about steadiness. He’s teaching something there about not being fearful of things that we shouldn’t be afraid of. He’s speaking about a confidence, a calm that a man should bring to a chaotic situation. So he was saying something much bigger and it took me a while to realize that, but I see now, he was starting to teach that as soon as he could. Brett McKay: That phrase, that advice, men don’t run in the rain, it reminds me of this Nassim Taleb quote. Are you familiar with Nassim Taleb, Antifragile, Black Swans, he’s this economist guy? Rick Burgess: Sure. Brett McKay: But he has this line, “I don’t run for trains.” And I think it’s very similar. And he says this about why he doesn’t run for trains. He says, “I have felt the true value of elegance and aesthetics and behavior, a sense of being in control of my time, my schedule, and my life.” And also, just yeah, so it’s just like your dad didn’t run in the rain because he was in control. The rain’s happening, no big deal, I’m still in charge. Nassim Taleb doesn’t run for trains because, first off, you look kind of silly when you’re running in the rain or running for a train. But it also just asserts your agency, hey, you know what, this doesn’t bother me. Rick Burgess: That’s exactly right. And I think sometimes that’s what’s missing in our homes. See, I always had this sense that as long as this man was here, then we’re good. And if I had looked up and never saw him panic in situations that might have been fearful or scary, it would have caused the entire family to lose all hope almost. He was a calming factor, a steadiness, a foundation in his family’s life, and you’re right. They’re both saying the same thing. If we cast a different vision, it doesn’t just affect us. It’s not about them, it’s the impact it has on all those you influence. Brett McKay: All right, so you actually played for your dad when he was a high school coach at Oxford. What was that like? Rick Burgess: My dad was probably the best that I ever have seen or heard of. When you see all these movies, anytime there’s the, here’s the authoritative dad, and he’s coaching his kids, and then he makes them run sprints, like the great Santini that Pat talked about in his famous book that went on to be a movie. It wasn’t that at all. Dad really separated the fact that he was the coach and that he was our father. He never mixed the two. It wasn’t any harder on us than it was anybody else who played for him. It wasn’t any easier on us. Our playing time was earned. That was understood. Now, probably the only thing that was a little bit different, and I understand his caution on this, is he had to be careful about patting us on the back publicly, in interviews and things like that. I think that was difficult for him, and I think at times he might have said maybe you and your brother deserved. He was more apt to do it for my brother than me because of our personalities, but is that maybe there were times that I could have gotten a pat on the back publicly about a game, and if he wasn’t my dad, the coach probably would have done more of, but that was no big deal, because we didn’t have any of the bad stuff. Hey, I didn’t like the way you played today. What were you doing in practice? Get out in the yard, and let me show you again how to do that. There was none of that. Even if there was something wrong with the team, and he was at home and we were eating dinner, he would never bring it up. And then we got back to the field the next day, he’d bring it up. So he never mixed the two and never made it weird, and playing for my dad was actually a very positive experience, and I’m glad I got to do it. Brett McKay: I think there’s a lesson right there for men learning how to separate work from home. A lot of guys, they bring work home, all the stress and whatnot. Rick Burgess: Oh, yeah. Brett McKay: It just makes their family miserable, and that’s a skill. I think it’s a skill you have to practice and develop. It doesn’t just happen, I don’t think. Rick Burgess: No, I think he was intentional about it. I think it would have embarrassed him if he’d have done it any other way, and I think he found, and there were some of these men around, like through youth league and things like that, and I remember dad was always repulsed by the Little League Dad. My dad was not a huge fan of Little League. He didn’t keep us from playing it, and he didn’t try to encourage us to play it, but he knew that there were a lot of men that were putting themselves in positions with influence over boys that probably were not gonna be a great influence. Luckily, I had a dad that could kind of offset that, but I remember him being very repulsed by the coach dad that was screaming at his son on the mound, and the son’s obviously upset, and here’s this dad who’s coaching the whole team, and he’s focused on traumatizing his son in front of everybody, and my dad really, really disliked that. Brett McKay: So one of the lessons you learned from your dad when you played for him, was nobody cares about last year. What’s the story behind that lesson? Rick Burgess: Yeah, my dad ran a program, and you being from Oklahoma, you saw big programs, and it was very rare that there would be someone younger than a junior to actually play and be in the starting lineup, and in those days, and I’ve even seen in my home state of Alabama, this has changed a lot. Even the biggest schools will still take what we used to call the B-Team. Some people call it junior varsity, and they combine them, and I’ve always wondered why that is, because dad didn’t have near the coaching staff as these big schools have now in high school, but he still made sure the B-Team had it’s own coach, had it’s own practices, it’s own games. You didn’t practice with the varsity and then go play like I saw my sons doing, even at big schools. So he didn’t do it that way, and so for you to be on the team as a sophomore, be on the varsity was almost unheard of. So the year that I was coming up, I had four other friends that we were sophomores that had had good. We were always playing a year ahead, and his senior class that year was weak, and the numbers were weak, their win-loss record wasn’t very good, and so he pulled five sophomores up to the varsity, which was unheard of, and I got to start. He was not my position coach, but the position coach made me the starter. So I had a good year for a sophomore, and so I was coming back my junior year going, well, I know who’s the starting, defensive or tackle. I know what that is. And so, the first play of the two-a-day practices for the new season my junior year, he erupted, and he pulled me out of the lineup. He told me to go sit on the bench, and they were gonna get somebody in there that was ready to play, that was hungry, and then as that player is running on the field, he walks over to me as I’m confused and standing on the sideline, and he said, “Nobody cares what you did last year, and if you think you’re gonna come out here and start on what you did last year.” He said, “Nobody cares what you did last year, that’s in that year, and today is a whole new day. And you’re gonna have to earn the starting position on this team, just as if you’ve never played a down for me.” And I even remember thinking, Brett, I don’t think I was given a bad effort. But he knew that was his opportunity, and he was not gonna let a sophomore’s head blow up and was never going to make me think or anyone on that field, that you played for any other reason than you earned it. And he was letting me know, that if I phoned it in and leaned on last year, that I would probably find myself on the bench. Brett McKay: How have you carried that lesson over to other areas of your life beyond football? Rick Burgess: Yeah, I don’t want to get overly spiritual, even though the book does have a spiritual component to it, as you saw. But I think a lot of times people and men in their spiritual life, in their careers or whatever, it’s sad for me to think that a man ever has already lived his best year. I’m 60 years old as I’m talking to you, and I remember doing the research, and somebody making me aware of it asked me had I seen it, and I said I had not. And I found out that research shows that if a man has his mental and physical health, that 60 to 70 is the most influential decade of his entire life. Well, if I’ve maxed out in high school, and wanna tell you about me making All State in high school for the rest of my life, and I’m doing that to the point that I’m not even remotely attempting to accomplish something right now, I use the example in the book of Philip. When he had the Ethiopian and he had this big moment where he baptizes this Ethiopian and interprets the book of Isaiah, and I said, a lot of people would have just the rest of their life they would have been Philip, and that would have been the last thing you ever heard. But it says in Scripture, that Philip immediately left that area and began talking to other people about Christ and interpreting Scripture for them. He didn’t rest on the Ethiopian story. And I think a lot of times men, tell these same stories when there’s a lot of life left as if they’ve maxed out. That was my greatest moment, and I think it also makes us lazy that we think, well, I’ve done enough. And that’s not true. Until we take our last breath, there’s still value to our lives, and we should be having impact and influence and making a difference. And dad was teaching me a life lesson that you don’t rest on your laurels. Nobody cares what you did in 1982. What are you doing in 2025, 2026? Brett McKay: Yeah, that idea that when you’re 60, you still might have 20 years left, that’s a long time to get a lot done. And just that idea that you can still keep doing things and trying to be better. Reminded me of a conversation I had a while back ago with Cynthia Covey. She’s the daughter of Stephen Covey of Seven Habits of Highly Effective People fame. Rick Burgess: Oh, yeah. Brett McKay: And she finished a book that her father had started. He passed away, and then she finished it. It’s called “Live Life in Crescendo.” And it’s all about your most important work is always ahead of you. And she talked about her father. Like, this is a guy who has written one of the most influential self-help books in history, but he always thought, I can do something better than that, and he was always striving more. And he says, “I might not be as well-known for my later work as I was with Seven Habits, but I still got something important to do, and I got to keep working at it.” And he was doing that until his dying day. Rick Burgess: Yeah, no doubt. Even at 60, I did the same radio show for 31 years, and when that show ended in December, and I sensed that it was time for it to end. I thought it’s best days were behind it, and I started getting a feeling that we were an oldies act. We were starting to rest on the things we’d done in the past, and we had a very successful career, and I decided that it was time for me to do something different. So literally, I’ve been as you and I are doing this interview, I’m four or five months into a brand-new show, and I host a radio show for my day job, and I’m loving it. And I’m talking about, in January, I was sitting down listening to research. They put research in the field. I wanted to know what I was doing poorly, what I could do better, and it would have been real easy to be at 60, say, hey, I’ve been in radio for over 40 years. Y’all have nothing to tell me. But that’s not true. I still need to bang on my craft and continue to get better at what I do, and as you just stated, I don’t know that I’ll be remembered in my industry, as much for what I’m doing now, as what I did in the past, but if I’m looking in the mirror and I think I’m better at what I was doing and I’m actually doing this job better, then that’s good enough for me. Because I think that I can still improve, there’s no doubt about that. But am I willing to improve? You could come to the reality, you could still improve and still be too lazy that you won’t do it. Not only do I know I can improve, I am trying to improve, which is the second half of it. Brett McKay: I love this lesson, another lesson you got from your dad, because my dad told this to me. I had football coaches say the same to me, and I’ve told this exact same thing. I coach flag football for my son and his team. I said the same thing to my flag football players that I coach. Don’t be stupid. What did your dad mean by being stupid? Rick Burgess: My dad was obsessed with removing all stupidity from the planet. He hated for you to do stupid things, and then he had all these analogies. If I’d have ordered a truckload of stupid people and all I got was you, I would have got my money’s worth, which is one of my favorites. But dad thought that a lot of things in life could be avoided if you just wouldn’t be stupid. What you just decided to do was stupid, and if you would minimize the stupid things in your life. For instance, it’s third down. It is third and long. And they throw a pass for eight yards when they needed 12, but I tee off on the quarterback late, and now they get an automatic first down. That’s stupid. We had this handled if you had just not been stupid. And he would say things like, be smart. “Hey, be smart.” Like if he saw us starting to elevate a little bit on the field, you’ve got to think this through. Be smart right here. Hey, they’re probably gonna go on two, or they’re gonna change the cadence. If it’s fourth down and a half a yard, you can bet they’re gonna try to draw you off sides. Don’t be stupid and jump. You can actually watch the ball. You shouldn’t even be listening to what the quarterback is saying because we move on the ball. It’s stupid to listen to him. And a lot of these things were very simplistic, and that’s why he marveled that we would still do them when it seemed so obvious that these were bad decisions. Brett McKay: No, I think you’re right. A lot of the problems that people have in life are just the result of being stupid. Rick Burgess: No doubt. I look back at my life and the problems that I have brought on myself, really, it’s because I just made a stupid decision. That far outweighs anything that happened to me that I said, I don’t think I had anything to do with that. A lot of it is just if I had just stopped and said, let me use logic, which is now common sense is a superpower. Let me just think this through and just don’t be stupid. Brett McKay: That reminds me of a Charlie Munger quote. He says, “It is remarkable how much long term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid instead of trying to be very intelligent.” Rick Burgess: That’s good. Brett McKay: Yeah. Rick Burgess: Yeah, that’s good. And I’ll tell the story about us setting, the woods behind our house on fire by just being stupid. We thought that we would take dried out pine limbs and suddenly we could turn those into torches like we saw in all the adventure movies. They’ve always got a torch. And so, we thought, let’s make torches out of dried out Alabama sun dried out pine. There’s nothing more flammable than pine straw. So let’s pick up limbs that are brown and let’s light them, and pretend like we have torches in the woods in a drought. That’s just stupid. And then of course it didn’t take long for somebody to go, oh, mine nearly burned me and threw it over to not be burned. And then it set that on fire and off we go. Brett McKay: How do you not be stupid? Let’s say you’re a 40 year old guy, you feel like, man, am I being stupid? How do you know? How do you stop being stupid? Rick Burgess: Well, I think the first thing we need to do is to not make decisions without, there’s, have you ever heard the term, and I know it’s been used quite a bit, if you take a rifle, let’s ready ourselves, let’s aim, and then let’s pull the trigger. Well, a lot of times, somebody will shoot ready aim. I’m just squeezing the trigger, and I didn’t take any time to think about what I’m doing. So a lot of times, if you’ll just stop for a minute and go, okay, I’m thinking about taking action on this. Let me go ahead and look ahead of that potential regret. Okay, if I had not done this, then I wouldn’t be sitting in the situation I’m in right now. A lot of things are avoidable in life if you’ll just stop for a minute, reason it out, and then take action. We tend to take action, then think about it later, and that’s a huge mistake. The five Ps, prior planning prevents poor performance. Maybe do a little more thinking and a little less reacting. Brett McKay: Yeah, something that I told my players when I coached them, and I tell it to my kids too, it’s like one of those things I’m trying to get into their head. I want them to develop this stance towards life. It’s just situational awareness. Pay attention to what’s going on around you. I feel like a lot of the mistakes that happen on the field or even when your kids do something stupid, they just weren’t paying attention. They were just kind of off in la-la land. And I’m like, hey, just keep your head on a swivel, pay attention to what’s going on, know your business so that you can make good decisions. It’s a tough lesson to teach young people. Rick Burgess: It is. And do you think too, Brett, when you think about this, another thing I would say is look at the history of people who made this same decision. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been counseling men, and I’m like, okay, so you started a relationship with a woman at work when you’re married with three kids. Did you not… There’s quite a bit, if we can look, we can see a lot of examples, that this never ends well. There’s a lot of times you can just look at the history, how many people who’ve made this decision that it turned out well for. And I don’t know why people always think, well, maybe this time I’ll find a way to maneuver through it. And in the very serious scenario I just mentioned, that man is only thinking about one thing. He’s thinking about satisfying some sort of desire, and he’s not even thinking about the mess he’s about to make. Brett McKay: All right, so another lesson there, to not be stupid, or an antidote to not being stupid. Read, read literature. That includes the Bible. There’s a lot of examples of people being stupid there. But even like The Odyssey, The Iliad, there’s just so many examples, and just history books, so many examples of people being stupid. And you’ll learn, you know what? I’m not gonna do that. Rick Burgess: That really is helpful. Brett McKay: Yeah. We’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. So, at the beginning of every season, your dad would give these epic speeches to kind of set the tone, particularly for the new players. And during those speeches, he would throw the gauntlet down by telling the players to get out of the stands. What does that mean? How have you taken this advice and applied it to your life? Rick Burgess: Don’t we all want to be on the field? It’s amazing to me that men, especially when they’re watching sports, they’re disgusted by the thought that they would not want to be in the starting lineup. But then we get into life, and men in life seem to be perfectly comfortable with being third string, not participating, not accomplishing anything. And a lot of men are like, nah, I’m just gonna farm that out to somebody else, and I’m not gonna do that. I don’t wanna get involved. I don’t wanna have to get my hands dirty. But if you were to say to them, would you like to be on a sports team and sit the bench, they’d go, “Absolutely not.” But yet we’re sitting the bench on the important things in life. And so, dad’s deal was, and he would add a little caveat to that, he would say, “Now, if you can’t handle the way things are gonna go here, then leave right now and go sit in the stands and then tell everybody how great you could have been if Coach Burgess hadn’t been so difficult.” And men do that, and that kind of gets into another thing we’ll talk about, but they’ll sit in the stands and then talk about all the coulda, shoulda, woulda if life just hadn’t been so unfair. And that is just so counter to how men were made. That’s how we act in our fallen state. And the one thing that always gets me, I’ll have people sometimes that’ll be critical of how I’m doing things, and I always ask a man, say look, before I want to listen to what you have to say, what do you do? Because I found being a Christian doing secular entertainment, I don’t do Christian radio, I’m a Christian who does radio, but most of the complaints that I get in the way that I’m in the world but not of the world and try to use entertainment to earn the right to share my faith, the most critical people I deal with are not people who disagree with my belief system. It’s usually people within all the denominational garbage of the Western Church. They complain the most. It’s more of the, “You’re not doing it right.” Now before somebody, because sometimes I do need to be held accountable, so I’m not saying I’m perfect, but one thing I always wanna know, Brett, what do you do? Tell me, what impact have you had for the faith? How do you use the gifts that God’s given you to advance the kingdom of God? I’d like to hear that first, or are you just some guy who sits in the stands, and tells the rest of us on the field what we’re doing wrong? How about get out of the stands and get on the field and let’s see you make a play? Brett McKay: Yeah. And he also talked about in that same chapter, a lot of men, or even you see this in high school sports, a lot of boys, they want the perks of playing football or a sport. They want to wear the cool uniform. They want to come out of the tunnel on game night. They want to be cheered, but a lot of people, they don’t wanna do the work that is required in order for you to do that, the two-a-day practices and the practice every day after school for two or three hours. And your dad had this saying, sometimes he’d stop practice, and it’s like 3 O’clock, and you see the buses leaving, taking kids home, and he’d tell the players like, “Hey, there goes those 3 O’clockers.” Rick Burgess: Yeah. He would tell us, ’cause you remember this, Brett, there’s a lot of days you’re out on that field, you wish you was on that bus. You kind of want to go home and watch Andy Griffith reruns and eat a snack too. And he was basically letting us know that the sacrifice we’re making now, will pay off in the end because he would say, now, we come Friday night, and this isn’t high school, you can change it to Sunday or Saturday if you played at even a higher level, but he said, “Come Friday night, all those on the bus that don’t wanna be you right now.” When the band’s playing, the stadium’s full, the cheerleaders are cheering, and you’re walking out of that tunnel onto the field, every one of them would switch places with you. So what you have to understand is they’re not willing to make the sacrifice you’re making, but when it gets to the reward, they’re gonna wish they would have been you if they could have somehow avoided sacrifice, and he said that doesn’t exist. And so, we think about that all the time. I remember a very, very jolting statement that was made by Vance Havner. Vance Havner was an old school pastor, and he said this. He said, “The Western church would stop praying for revival, if they had any idea what it was really going to cost.” Brett McKay: It reminds me of that whole line about, you aren’t willing to pay the price. This is a line from Ronnie Coleman, he’s a bodybuilder. And he says, “Everybody wants to be a bodybuilder, but nobody wants to lift no heavy ass weights.” [laughter] And it’s true. Like everyone wants the big muscles or whatever, but no one wants to do the stuff you have to do to get there. Rick Burgess: Oh, I’ve said this recently ’cause I’ve always struggled with my weight after football when I stopped playing, ’cause when I walked out of that last workout, I said, well, I’ll never do that again. And eventually, I just came into conviction that this was not fair to my wife. This wasn’t fair to my children. And it certainly made me less effective in men’s ministry because it looked like I had no discipline. So I started committing myself and lost weight, got myself in better shape. I wanted to hit my 60s wide open. And I’ve done that. And then people will ask me, and you can tell they don’t wanna hear it. They’ll say, “So tell me how you’ve lost the weight and got yourself in a little better shape. What have you done?” And I know what the reaction is gonna be. And I looked at them, I say, well, I practiced good nutrition, I don’t overeat, and I exercise. Who knew? And I’m admitting that I spent most of my life knowing that, and I wasn’t willing to do it either. So I’m not being hypocritical, but you can tell that is not the answer they wanna hear to your statement that you just made about the bodybuilder, is how can I somehow not be overweight and be in better shape and not be so sick, but I don’t wanna have to put any effort into it? And that’s why these shots and these pills and all this stuff is so popular right now, because people are trying to find a way to be healthier without ever doing anything. And you may lose the weight with these things, but there’s a bigger question. Are you really healthy? But when somebody says, “What would you suggest?” And you go, I would suggest good nutrition, less eating and more exercise. That does not draw a crowd. Brett McKay: No, it doesn’t. So get out of the stands, get more involved in life, in your marriage, in your family, in any organizations you belong to, even at work. A lot of guys just kind of stay on the sidelines at work and just carp about things that have been like, “Hey, what can I do to make things better here?” But recognize, there’s a price. There’s gonna be some sacrifice involved in not being in the stands. Another mantra your dad had throughout his career was no excuses. Rick Burgess: No. Brett McKay: And I’m sure everyone listening at a football coach probably heard that. No excuses. What did that look like for him as a coach, that mantra? Rick Burgess: This drove him as crazy as stupid things. People making excuses. And one of the things my dad never did, never, if we lost a game, he never made an excuse. You could have the worst call in the game ever that went against you by the officials. And I can remember some dillies, some good ones. And he would never bring that up. He said, “If we played the way we were supposed to play, then the calls would have made no difference.” There were moments throughout the game we could have won the game and we just didn’t get the job done. And then, he would take most of the responsibility on himself. He would never. I thought one time he was gonna just completely lose control when he started watching these college head football coaches that if it didn’t go well, they would send one of the coordinators to the postgame press conference. They wouldn’t go themselves as if they were blaming the coordinator. That infuriated him. And I remember the first time that I was playing for him and we had a defensive end that let containment be broke. They bounced outside of him. And he said, “Where were you? You’re supposed to, this funnel that play back inside.” And the defensive end said, “Well, I slipped coach.” And he looked at him. He said, “But you can’t slip. Don’t make an excuse, just tell me you didn’t get the job done. If you’re the person in charge of containment, slipping is not an option. Just say you didn’t contain. And then we work with that. But please don’t make an excuse about it.” And so, he felt like that you should ultimately just admit there was nothing more freeing than if you didn’t have success, is to actually say you didn’t get the job done, not blame it on something else. You didn’t have any responsibility. Well, now he’s teaching more than football there. ‘Cause people are always willing to blame other people for really things they need to take responsibility for. And he taught that lesson. He taught it hard. I never heard him make an excuse. I do remember one time, and this is in the book, and you probably read that when he had the game where they beat a team really bad in college and it was in a torrential downpour. So he was leaving the house on Sunday after we’d gone to church and was headed back to the office for the next week game. And the other coaches coaches show was on TV. And that guy was talking about how hard it rained and how they couldn’t move the ball because how bad the weather was. Now, dad’s team had beaten the other man’s team 35 to nothing. And so, my dad looked at me as he went out and he said, “Boy, I’ll tell you, listen to this guy, you would think it only rained on one side of the field.” And that’s all he said, but he was making the point, there he is making excuses. He didn’t make them and he didn’t have much respect for other people who did. Brett McKay: So how can taking, it sounds like your dad was advocating for something like just radical ownership of your life. How can that change a man’s life? Rick Burgess: Well, if I’m always justifying everything in my life and I’m always making an excuse for the things that are in my life, then ultimately, I’m never gonna go anywhere. I’m sorry if you’re listening to this and you had a bad family life. That’s terrible. I’m sorry if you had a rough go of things. I’m sorry if you’ve had a kind of a rough time. But at the end of the day, that can’t be used as an excuse for you not to succeed. If you saw bad examples in your life, then why don’t you be a good example? We are in control of the things that we do. We may not be able to control what other people do, but my dad always taught, control what you can control. So ultimately, you got to take ownership of how this turned out. And if it didn’t go well, at the end of it all, it’s probably because you didn’t do the job as well as you should have. Brett McKay: Yet in existential philosophy, there’s this idea of living in bad faith. When you’re living in bad faith, you’re denying the responsibility. You can make decisions that change whatever situation you’re in. You still have the ability to make decisions. Like that can’t be taken away from you. Rick Burgess: Exactly. Brett McKay: And so, whenever you try to make excuses, you say, yeah, you’re living in bad faith. You are denying your agency. Rick Burgess: Yeah, whatever happened to, that’s on me. And I will tell you this, one of the biggest obstacles that I face every single day is myself. I’m my biggest enemy. And so, I try to get myself under control. And if I can do that, what’s coming after that usually is not near as difficult. [laughter] Brett McKay: So something else, a sort of thread throughout this book, is your dad teaching about the difference between confidence and arrogance. Your dad sounds like he was a confident man, but not an arrogant man. What’s the difference between confidence and arrogance, according to your dad? Rick Burgess: Well, there’s no doubt he was confident. I think my dad truly believed that there was nobody alive that could take him and that he would overcome anything. And there’s a thing out right now. I don’t know if you’ve been seeing it where, could a hundred men defeat a silverback gorilla? Have you been watching that? Brett McKay: I’ve been watching that. Yeah. Rick Burgess: I think my dad thinks he could. And I don’t think my dad… My dad would be like, me, I’ll handle that. That’s not a problem. You think a gorilla could take me? But his confidence was not arrogance. Because also, the same man that was confident that he could stand against anything that life could throw at him, was also the same man that an equipment salesman found cleaning the bathrooms when he was athletic director and head coach. And so, when he went in to find my dad in a stall cleaning a toilet. And he asked my dad, “What in the world are you doing, coach, cleaning the toilets?” You’re the athletic director, you’re the head football coach. And dad said, “I’m cleaning the toilets because it’s my turn.” He never thought he was above cleaning toilets. So yes, he was confident, but he wasn’t arrogant. He always kept that servant’s attitude. My ultimate leadership is actually to serve the assistant coaches, to serve the players, to let them know that though I am confident in my abilities, I would give myself for your benefit. And I remember he had the attitude of he could get onto us, but nobody else could. He became our advocate if others tried to get on us. And talking about teams and even talking about us as his children and his family. So my dad was confident, but then arrogance is something that I struggled with. And you see in the book, he tried to teach me ’cause I was a bit of a hot dog, which drove him crazy. And of course, he would always try to take me down that road and tell me about that fine line between being confident in your job and being arrogant about what you can do. And the point that he always tried to make, is that if you are not willing to put the work in, if you’re not willing to sacrifice yourself for the benefit of the team, that’s not confidence, that’s arrogance. And when you’re arrogant, you’ll get us beat. Brett McKay: Let’s shift themes here. It’s not football related, but your dad, he was a hunter? Rick Burgess: Yes. Brett McKay: He’s a big time hunter. And one year when he was older, and you were older, you’re an adult, you gave him a GPS device ’cause you thought, hey, this would be handy for my dad to have when he’s out hunting turkey or whatever. But the thing is, he never used it. Rick Burgess: Never. I have it in my office. I still have it. Brett McKay: Why is that? Like, what lesson did you take from him? Rick Burgess: Well I thought I was gonna give him the greatest Father’s Day gift ever. I would shame my siblings, because I got this new technology and knowing that he loved the outdoors, I thought, well, he can go anywhere he wants to go now, by just entering in. These were the old garments, still they were a little bulky and you had to put them in your car and all that. These were the early days of the GPS. But what dad said back to me, I’ve never forgotten. He asked me what this thing was. And I said, dad, that’s a GPS. You just enter in wherever you wanna go. It’ll take you right to it. So he doesn’t even take it out of the box and he kind of pushes it to the side. And I see him doing that. And he even asked me for the receipt. And I said, dad, what’s the deal? Do you not want that? And he goes, “I’m not trying to hurt anybody’s feelings or anything.” He goes, “But I don’t need it.” I said, you don’t need a GPS? And then he said, “No, I don’t go anywhere that I don’t know where I’m going.” And I thought, my goodness, I don’t even have a response to that. His point was, I always know where I’m going. I don’t wonder where I’m going or need someone else to figure out where I’m going. I always know where I’m going. And boy, what a lesson, right, Brett? How many men right now are just kind of making it up as they go? They think that somebody else needs to tell them where they’re going when they need, if you don’t know where you’re going, I don’t know how we expect anybody else to tell us where we’re going. Brett McKay: Your dad’s story reminded me, I just recently finished Moby-Dick. I finished a couple months ago. Have you read Moby-Dick? Rick Burgess: I have. Brett McKay: Yeah. Well, there’s this famous scene with Ahab, and he’s got this quadrant. That’s what the sailors use to navigate. Rick Burgess: Sure, yeah. Brett McKay: And there’s this moment where he just destroys it, ’cause he realizes the quadrant can’t tell him where he wants to go. It’s like, that’s on me. And so, he smashed it. He’s like, I’m in charge here. So yeah, your dad’s story, the GPS reminded me of Ahab a little bit. Rick Burgess: Oh yeah. What’s exactly the same thing? Ahab is realizing this can’t help me decide where I wanna go. I got to figure that out. And of course, then dad was adding the other part, figure out where you wanna go, but you also need to know how to get there. Brett McKay: So how can a man figure out where he’s going in life? I’m sure you deal with a lot of men who have no clue where they’re going. Rick Burgess: Yeah, I think first of all, what is your passion? Is there anything you feel called to at all? Is there something that kind of keeps you awake at night? Is there something that’s down in like their guts where you’re like, man, I really feel like this is where I should go. I think this is what I need to do. I’d love to have more impact with my life. But until you figure out where you wanna go, then there’s no way to put together a plan on how to get there. But then you have guys that do the other. They know where they wanna go, but kind of we’ve already touched on this, but they’re not willing to figure out what it takes to get there. And then sometimes they figure out what it takes to get there, and they’re just not willing to give that to go, but somehow they still expect it to happen. So I think that the thing that I find with men a lot, Brett, and I remember this period of my life, if you’re listening to this right now and you’re just kind of making it up as you go, news today for a time to change. Rick Burgess: I’m gonna stop just making it up as I go. I’m gonna figure out what is important to me, what I think I’m supposed to be doing with my life, and then I’m going to put together a plan to do it. Brett McKay: In 2008, your two-year-old son tragically drowned. Losing a child is the worst thing that can happen to a parent. How did the lessons you got from your father help you prepare for that moment? Rick Burgess: Well, the thing that you’ve already heard is, men don’t run in the rain. And boy, it was pouring and storming and raining when that happened. And I immediately began to draw on the things that he taught me about, right now your whole family is looking to you. Everybody needs to feel steady. Everybody needs to feel calm. They don’t need to see you panic. You don’t need to become an apart. Now, I didn’t take that to the point that is unhealthy where I didn’t mourn. But there was a moment in the beginning, where your wife is falling apart, your children who are the siblings are falling apart. And frankly, whether you like it or not, we don’t have that luxury. Because if we don’t hold this thing together until everybody can get back on their feet, then it’s all gonna fall apart. And I had been taught, that I don’t run in the rain, that I stand sturdy and I go, and I minister to my wife, and I pull the children together and I start talking to them about life and who God is in these situations. But I would challenge every man, and it’s kind of what we just talked about, about a game plan. It’s impossible for me to tell my wife and tell my children, who God is when a two-and-a-half-year-old little boy dies, or what’s going on in the world when a two-and-a-half-year-old little boy dies if I don’t already know those answers. See, I didn’t know that this was ever gonna happen, but I had spent a large portion of my life preparing for whatever was coming. For me, it was the word of God. I went there, I wanted to know everything about God I could possibly know. And you say, well Rick, how do you do that? I don’t like studying. I was the same guy. The early days of our family after I was redeemed, my wife was the spiritual leader. I’m not gonna act like that wasn’t true. But that radically changed in my life when I realized that I was actually quite knowledgeable about everything that I deemed of value, and everything that I loved. I knew about hunting. I knew about fishing. I knew about football. I knew about how to run a business. I knew how to do a radio show. I knew how to run that equipment. Well, if I don’t have good study habits, how in the world did I learn all this? I learned it because I was passionate about it and I cared about it. And I had to come to a terrible conclusion, that I didn’t know who God was and I didn’t know the word of God, because I didn’t deem it of value and I didn’t love it. So I changed that, and began to seek God in a way that I never had and began to study His Word. Well, when this moment arrived, I had the answers. Now, I didn’t come up with them. They had been provided to me by the very God that created me. But in that moment, what the family and my wife can’t see, is me falling apart and running in the rain. And I’ll never forget the words of my wife when it was all kind of clearing and we were reflecting, and it’s always with us. But she said, “That night, at Children’s Hospital, our pastor couldn’t comfort me, our friends couldn’t comfort me, our family couldn’t comfort me, ’cause we all knew one thing. They couldn’t be my husband. They couldn’t be the children’s father, so we waited on you, because no one could replace you.” Brett McKay: How did your father help you during this time? Rick Burgess: My father helped me by confidently encouraging me, and telling me that I was doing a good job. And the thing I think that I’ll never forget is, my father and I and our interaction at my son’s memorial service, when I got up to speak and didn’t expect to speak the way it went. It was a supernatural moment. But when it was over, he and I had an interaction. And that was that we were both kind of redefining what it looks like to be a man. And I won’t give it all away. You can read the book. But he basically is telling me that, he knew it was raining. He knew it was storming, and he watched me. And he let me know that I didn’t run. Brett McKay: Yeah, when I read that scene, basically your dad was telling you, you’re a man. Like, you’re a man. And I think every man, they crave that from their dads. They want that recognition from their dads. Rick Burgess: Yeah, my dad didn’t patronize me, but my dad never robbed me of hearing, I’m proud of you. And then in that moment, it was the thing that even goes beyond I’m proud of you, is does he see me as a man? Does he see me as his equal? And I remember that moment vividly because he looked at me after it was over, and like you said, and he just looked at me and said, “Now that right there is a man.” And to hear that in that moment, he gave me the confidence I needed to continue on. Brett McKay: Yeah. I think there’s a great lesson there of a father’s blessing or a father’s recognition. I think that’s something you got to think about as a father. You might not be thinking about that when your kid is five, even 10, maybe even 15, but once they start getting into adulthood, you got to start thinking about that. Rick Burgess: Yeah, and I think before that, ’cause they’re not men yet, but you definitely need to find these moments to tell them you’re proud of them. Don’t ever assume that your son or daughter knows you’re proud of them. Don’t ever assume that. Don’t ever assume that your wife knows that you love her, if you have a wife. These things need to be vocalized by us clearly, and it really, really has an impact when we do so. Brett McKay: If there’s one lesson you got from your dad that sort of encapsulates all the wisdom you got from him over the years, what would that be? Rick Burgess: I think the thing that I take away the most, is that though you are in the leadership role, be someone that is still fun to be around. My dad was intimidating. My dad was clearly in charge and had influence, but he also was fun. It wasn’t just the, I’m whipping everybody into military shape and you never see him. I’m always stoic. He wasn’t like that at all. My dad was a huge cut up, and he picked and chose his moments correctly on when he needed to kind of let the pressure off a little bit and let’s lighten things up a little bit. And so, I looked at him, and I realized that I learned from him, how to love a wife, which he did with my mother incredible, how to be authoritative but still be close to your children, to still be able to cut up and have a laugh with them. And I think that probably of all the lessons we talked about today and talked about in the book, I believe the lesson of being steady, the lesson of not panicking, the lesson of let your family and let society see that you’re there, you’re at your position, you’re watching, you’re over them, and ultimately take responsibility for the mistakes you make in life, and own them, and then change and don’t make those same mistakes again. So taking full responsibility for who you are, and leading while at the same time encouraging with the same amount of power. Don’t just be strong to correct, also be strong to encourage and take responsibility for when you mess up. Brett McKay: Well, Rick, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work? Rick Burgess: You can go to themanchurch.com. We’re a men’s discipleship strategy. All of our resources are there, but this new book will be there too, themanchurch.com. And you can also contact us if we can help you in any way with your men’s ministry, if that’s something you’re interested in. But if not, at least get this book, and it’ll be right there on the homepage. Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Rick Burgess, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure. Rick Burgess: Thanks for having me, Brett. It means a lot. Brett McKay: My guest today was Rick Burgess. He’s the author of the book “Men Don’t Run in the Rain.” It’s available on amazon.com. You can find more information about his work at his website, themanchurch.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/rain where you can find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you can find our podcast archives as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you can think of. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you’d take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It helps out a lot. If you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think would get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it’s Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to the AOM Podcast but put what you’ve heard into action. This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.…

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Podcast #1,071: The Making of a Supreme Commander — How Eisenhower Became the Leader Who Delivered Victory on D-Day

8 weeks ago

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That Dwight D. Eisenhower became Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe, orchestrating the largest amphibious invasion in history on June 6, 1944, was far from inevitable. He came from the middle of nowhere — Abilene, Kansas — had never led men in battle, spent most of his career as a staff officer, and didn’t make general until he was in his fifties. How, then, did he become the leader on whom the fate of the world would rest? Today, we trace the making of Ike with Michel Paradis, author of The Light of Battle . We talk about how Eisenhower’s Midwestern upbringing shaped his character, and how his most important education happened outside the classroom. Michel shares how crucial mentors were in Ike’s development, and how Eisenhower made the most of those relationships. We discuss the books that were most formative in shaping his thinking, including what he got from Nietzsche. We also get into some of the practices Eisenhower used to lead effectively, including how he budgeted his time to maintain his morale while under the pressure of planning D-Day and what he did the evening before the invasion to deal with the stress. Resources Related to the Podcast AoM Podcast #641: How Eisenhower Led — A Conversation with Ike ’s Granddaughter AoM series on Eisenhower’s leadership AoM Podcast #996: Remembering D-Day 80 Years Later The Line Man’s Bible: A Football Textbook of Detailed Instruction by Ernest Graves. Sunday Firesides: You Never Know How Many Chapters Are Still to Come Fox Conner The Czar of Halfaday Creek by James B. Hendryx Connect With Michel Paradis Michel on LinkedIn Michel’s faculty page Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!) Listen to the episode on a separate page. Download this episode. Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice. Read theTranscript Brett McKay : All right, Michelle Paradis, welcome to the show. Michelle Paradis : Thanks so much for having me. Brett McKay : So you got a book out called The Light of Battle, which is about D-Day. D-Day is one of the most studied and written about events in modern history. What do you think gets missed in the books on D-Day? And what were you hoping to bring to our understanding of D-Day with your book? Michelle Paradis : No, that’s exactly right. There are so many great books about D-Day too that I definitely knew in starting this one that I couldn’t write just another book about D-Day. If only because like, you know, competing with people like Max Hastings is going to always be impossible. And so, you know, to me, I think the thing we missed, to answer your question about D-Day, the thing that fascinated me is not just the actual heroism of the men who hit the beaches, you know, on Omaha or on Juneau, but how much went into it. How much was behind them? We think about those 176,000 men who hit the beach in the first day, you know, obviously correctly. They are the literal heroes of that story. But, you know, depending on how you count it, about 2 million people made D-Day happen. And that kind of collective action, right, that working together for a common goal was essential to D-Day’s success. And that ultimately is what drew me, especially to Eisenhower. And obviously there’s no lack of historical celebration for Dwight Eisenhower, but I also think we almost take him for granted. You know, there’s a book, a minute about people like, you know, about Churchill, about Patton, about D-Day itself, but there are actually very few serious studies of Eisenhower. The last, you know, significant biography, certainly covering his wartime experience, is at least about 10, 15 years old now. And I just thought that was amazing, right? I couldn’t understand that because here you are, you have this guy, he comes from the middle of the country, right, about as far away from anywhere as you could possibly get, which is Abilene, Kansas, and not only comes to the heights of military leadership in the Second World War, he commands the most complicated, and I would argue consequential military operation of that war, which is D-Day, and then goes on to be probably one of the preeminent figures of the 20th century, the first president we call the leader of the free world. And so many, I think, even admiring takes of Eisenhower sort of look at him as like this inevitable figure or a boring figure at worst, like the, you know, the 50s, the mayonnaise on white bread kind of thing. And to me, I just knew that there was something more going on there. And so in thinking about D-Day and thinking about the heroism of the men on the beach on D-Day, I really wanted to just understand how they got there and how they got there in a way to succeed. And that took me to Dwight Eisenhower. Brett McKay : And that’s what I loved about the book. You get into his personality or try to, because he is kind of an enigma. He’s kind of a Sphinx character in a lot of ways, just kind of this affable, smiling guy. And I think that’s why he gets overlooked. But you try to paint a picture of him that, no, there’s a lot going on with this guy. And that’s why he was so successful as a commander and later as a president of the United States. So let’s dig into Eisenhower and try to figure out how did this guy manage to carry off one of the biggest military invasions in the history of humanity? You mentioned he grew up in Abilene, Kansas. How do you think his Kansas upbringing prepared him for his role in World War II? Michelle Paradis : Yeah, I mean, he’s such a fascinating figure, like as you say, because he’s known, certainly in his lifetime, particularly as president, as being, you know, everyone likes Ike. He is this smiling guy. He’s sort of almost seen as, again, bland or non-threatening. And yet he is probably, you know, responsible literally for the deaths of millions of Germans and one of the most, I think, cunning and in some ways ruthless military and political figures of the 20th century. But it’s all concealed around this very sort of bland, deceptively bland, I would say, packaging of smiling Ike. And a lot of that traces to his upbringing in Kansas. And there are a couple of things that I think shape him. You know, he’s born in 1890, which is sometimes celebrated as the year the West was closed, and he grows up in Abilene, which had been a, you know, a cow town from the Wild West, but by that point had become a fairly reserved, very religiously oriented community around the River Brethren. And his family, his father’s family, was a very prominent religious family, a farming family. But his own father was a, you know, a complicated guy. He wasn’t a drinker, but he was definitely abusive. And even for the time, I would say, abusive. You know, late 1800s Kansas. And so Eisenhower grows up in this community in the middle of Kansas, which emphasizes a certain kind of, you know, humility. You know, if you talk to anyone from Kansas, the most important thing they’ll let you know is, well, Kansas is nothing to talk about. You know, we’re just humble people from the plains. And so that sense of Eisenhower of being, in a way, self-effacing is right out of Kansas, right? Everyone in Kansas recognizes that. But I think the other things he gets from growing up in his very unique circumstances is, one, a real burning desire to see the rest of the world. I don’t know that he travels more than about 100 miles or so before he ends up enrolling in West Point when he’s 19 years old. And as the middle child of a fairly low-income, large family, he just has this itch to want to see the absolute rest of the world. And that leads him to cultivate all sorts of mentors, both in Abilene and then really for the rest of his life. It’s probably one of his greatest skills as a sort of a man in development is that he looks for people who seem to have figured something out that he wants to know. And he gloms onto them and tries to learn from them in a really intimate way. And in Kansas, one of his first mentors is the publisher of the local Democrat newspaper, the Dickinson News. And he just goes to this guy’s newspaper shop, hangs out there after school, typically with some friends. And this publisher sees in Eisenhower a curiosity, and Eisenhower wants to know what’s going on in the rest of the world. And so this guy starts just giving Eisenhower books to read. And one of Eisenhower’s favorite, or the one that makes the biggest imprint on him, is The Life of Hannibal. Now, when I said Eisenhower is the middle child of a very large, low-income family, that’s also a religiously pacifist family. His father and his mother were part of a movement called the Bible Students, which we now know as the Jehovah’s Witnesses, but were much more, how would we say, mystical movement at the turn of the 20th century. And his religiously pacifist mother is not at all impressed when he brings home The Life of Hannibal, and in fact confiscates it from him and puts it away in her closet. And as Eisenhower sort of tells the story later, he would wait until she was out in the garden culling some of the crops, and he would sneak into her closet like he was looking for the Playboy and read The Life of Hannibal sort of in secret, and just became fascinated by, really in love with, a kind of military heroism, a kind of manly figure. And the thing he would always say about Hannibal in particular is that he knew from the time he was a young boy that Hannibal was one of the greatest generals in all of history because he was recounted as such, but only ever by his enemies. There are no extant tracts or histories by the Carthaginians of Hannibal’s exploits, only those written by the Romans. And to Eisenhower, the fact that someone could be so compelling as a figure, so powerful as a general, so brilliant, so heroic, as to go down in history that way when the only people writing about you are the enemies who fought you in battle, really impressed Eisenhower from a young age. And so that upbringing in Kansas, that combination of, you know, it sounds cliche, but it’s true, small-town values, but combined with this real burning itch to get out of Kansas, to see the rest of the world, to be a part of the world, formed Eisenhower’s character at a young age in ways that you can see almost to the day he dies. Brett McKay : So you mentioned West Point was his ticket out of Abilene. He went to West Point. How did West Point prepare him to be Supreme Allied Commander, you think? Michelle Paradis : A couple of different ways. You know, Eisenhower went to West Point as his, you know, ironically enough, his way of rebelling against his parents and his ticket out of Abilene. And he gets there, and he’s really quite awkward. You know, he is a country boy, but he has a sense of this is where he wants to be. And this is where he’s, in a sense, always wanted to be since he was a boy. And so ends up doing two things in his career at West Point that end up, I think, shaping him and the sort of the Eisenhower we know forever. One is he has this deep concern about his background. He is not the son of a general. He is not part of the sort of burgeoning American aristocracy that is filling the ranks of his classmates. But that gray uniform they all wear at least covers up how sort of shabby and country his clothes are. But the way he talks, where he’s from, right? No one’s ever heard of Kansas, really. But people have heard of Abilene, that old west sort of history that Abilene carried as being the place where cowboys had shootouts in the town square. Eisenhower fully embraces as part of his personality. And it’s where he begins to take on the nickname Ike as well, because Ike is this sort of typical name for a cowboy in the dime westerns that you’d get. You know, a cowboy who was out on the land all alone, who was his own man, who was always there to do the right thing, even if he was a little uncultured. And really leans into this identity of being sort of from the cowboy town, even though that is not at all consistent with how he actually grew up, but develops this kind of like cool, right? It’s funny to say Eisenhower was cool, but in West Point, he definitely develops this sense of cool and devil may care, big smile, you know, always ready for a good time that cultivates, I think, a very warm kind of friendship and respect between his classmates who go on to be his contemporaries in the army over the next 30 years. The other thing though, and this is, I think, underappreciated now, just given how different we think about sports, but he also was a star football player in his freshman and sophomore years, and not particularly skilled, Right? He wasn’t a very, very fast runner, but he was a hardcore player, right? He would just throw himself into the opposing line. And so he was known as a bruiser and started, you know, having a lot of success and gaining quite a reputation for himself as a football player, but then blows out his knee. And at the time in West Point, if you had an injury like that, you could get kicked out, not of West Point, but kicked out of the army. And so Eisenhower is faced, you know, from a young age with the prospect of really not having a military career left just because of his knee injury. But the one thing he does, and the one thing the army sees in him is, you know, once he’s literally back on his feet, he can’t play football anymore, but he can coach it. And he becomes the assistant coach of the football team and demonstrates a kind of genius for the game, a genius for organizing men on the field that just as a practical matter, the army really appreciated back then because people used to play a lot of very competitive football. It was kind of the way softball leagues are maybe today. But that in turn is what keeps him in the army. The army always wants a good football coach. And he basically spends the first 10 years almost of his career as like a star football coach in the army. But that also gives Eisenhower the first real lessons in leadership. And those lessons in leadership of leading a football team, coaching a football team end up, I think, shaping his understanding of what it means to lead in battle, to lead an army in ways that far surpass anything he actually learns in the classroom, either at West Point or the Command and General Staff School or anywhere else. It’s really at West Point and that opportunity to be a football coach that he learns to really be a leader. Brett McKay : In this section about his role as army football coach and as a player for the team, you talk about this guy, Ernest Graves. He was an army football coach and he wrote this book, Ernest Graves wrote this book about coaching offensive and defensive alignment. And mixed in with it were these sort of just insights about leadership. And after I read about that in your book, I was like, I have to go buy this book. I’m gonna go find this Ernest Graves book. And I read it in just like one setting. It was really easy to read. But you’re right, there’s these leadership lessons that I think Eisenhower probably picked up from Graves on how to lead not only a football team, but an army, a military unit. Michelle Paradis : Yeah, absolutely. And I’ll flash forward to, I think, one of the most, spoiler alert, but one of the most climactic moments in the D-Day story, and certainly in my telling of it, is when Eisenhower ultimately has to make the call based on some very unclear weather predictions about whether to launch this invasion. And launching this invasion is either going to be the grand success that it became, or it’s going to be a complete and utter disaster. There is literally a hurricane outside the doors as he’s making this decision. And when he finally does, the thing he says is, okay, let’s go. And that’s his famous sort of send-off speech for the D-Day invasion. And that exact quote is something Ernest Graves used to say and used to tell coaches to say right before the men were to go out onto the field. He’s like, well, okay, when it’s time to go, the coach needs to take control of the situation and say something like, okay, let’s go. And again, whether or not that was sort of in the back of Eisenhower’s head, whether or not it was just a coincidence, we’ll never really know. But yeah, that sense of, okay, it’s my job to lead this team. And the way to do it is the same way you would lead a football team, I think is totally correct. And this section about his role as army football coach and as a player for the team, you talk about this guy, Ernest Graves. He was an army football coach and he wrote this book, Ernest Graves wrote this book about coaching offensive and defensive alignment. And mixed in with it were these sort of just insights about leadership. And after I read about that in your book, I was like, I have to go buy this book. I’m gonna go find this Ernest Graves book. And I read it in just like one setting. It was really easy to read. But you’re right, there’s these leadership lessons that I think Eisenhower probably picked up from Graves on how to lead not only a football team, but an army, a military unit. Yeah, absolutely. And I’ll flash forward to, I think, one of the most, spoiler alert, but one of the most climactic moments in the D-Day story, and certainly in my telling of it, is when Eisenhower ultimately has to make the call based on some very unclear weather predictions about whether to launch this invasion. And launching this invasion is either going to be the grand success that it became, or it’s going to be a complete and utter disaster. There is literally a hurricane outside the doors as he’s making this decision. And when he finally does, the thing he says is, okay, let’s go. And that’s his famous sort of send-off speech for the D-Day invasion. And that exact quote is something Ernest Graves used to say and used to tell coaches to say right before the men were to go out onto the field. He’s like, well, okay, when it’s time to go, the coach needs to take control of the situation and say something like, okay, let’s go. And again, whether or not that was sort of in the back of Eisenhower’s head, whether or not it was just a coincidence, we’ll never really know. But yeah, that sense of, okay, it’s my job to lead this team. And the way to do it is the same way you would lead a football team, I think is totally correct. Brett McKay : So he graduates West Point in 1915. World War I is happening, but he doesn’t get sent off there. Instead, he gets kind of sent off to different training positions, and then he becomes sort of this staff officer. Not really on the battlegrounds. How did those staff positions prepare him for D-Day, you think? Michelle Paradis : I think they prepared him uniquely well. And it gets to something I was saying a few minutes ago, is that one of Eisenhower’s, I think, most important leadership lessons is the importance of followership. And it’s the importance, particularly when you’re young, particularly when you’re coming up, to understand that your job is not to be the smartest person in the room. Your job is to figure out who the smartest person in the room is and make yourself as useful as possible to them. Because in doing that, not only are you going to be much more effective than kind of butting heads with the person who actually knows what they’re doing with your own ill-conceived ideas, but you’re going to learn a lot. If you keep a genuinely open mind and pay attention to what that person is doing and how they’re making decisions, you’re going to learn a ton from them that you can then use as you rise up the ranks. And so for Eisenhower, one of the ways I even thought about telling his story is by telling it through his mentors. And I could rattle them Off, but the big ones certainly are people like Joe Howe, who was that newspaper publisher, Fox Connor, who he spends a long and very formative period with in Panama. But then people like General Moseley, who is probably one of the more suspect figures in history, but who has a big influence on Eisenhower. Same thing with General MacArthur, and then obviously General Marshall, and then I would even say Roosevelt and Churchill. As Eisenhower rises up the ranks, there’s always someone who’s the smartest person in the room, and he gets that. But he makes himself as useful as possible to fulfilling their vision. And in the course of doing that, learns their skills, learns how they either command an army, how they manage a team, or how they develop and use political power in ways to get things actually done, the way Roosevelt and Churchill did. And so it’s by having the humility, really, to be that staff officer, to be the one who helps the leader execute their plans, that Eisenhower really does grow into an incredibly formidable political figure in his own right. Brett McKay : One thing I’ve taken away from Eisenhower’s experience as a staff officer is, yeah, that humility, and then also patience with your career. I know Eisenhower lamented when World War I was over. He’s like, is it? My military career is over. It’s not going anywhere. I’ve gone as far as I can go, and I missed it. I missed my chance. And he didn’t know he was about to embark on the biggest part of his military career. And it would happen in his 50s. So I mean, I think that’s a great lesson there for a young guy, or even if you’re a guy in your 30s or your 40s, you think, man, I missed the boat. This is as good as it’s going to get. Maybe not. You could have a whole big, giant book of life ahead of you, like Eisenhower had, after his staff positions. Michelle Paradis : Yeah, it’s definitely an encouraging story to anyone who’s still not yet in their mid-50s to see that Eisenhower starts World War II as a colonel, and within a matter of three years, he’s a five-star general. And again, one of the preeminent figures of the 20th century, too. And yeah, it wasn’t just after World War I. There are a lot of false dusts in Eisenhower’s career where he thinks he’s just finished. It’s all over. I’ve wasted my best years. This is the end. And each time, he’s proven wrong because there’s a new and often greater challenge just waiting just a little bit further down the line that he ends up having to take on. Brett McKay : So you mentioned one of Eisenhower’s mentors during this staff officer period of his career was Fox Connor. This was when he was in Panama. This is one of my favorite sections of the book because you explore the education that Connor gave Eisenhower. This is where really Eisenhower got his education. He didn’t get it at West Point. It was when he was in Panama with this Fox Connor guy. So what did that tutelage look like under Connor? What did he tell Eisenhower? What did he assign Eisenhower to read? Tell us about it because I think it’s really interesting. Michelle Paradis : Yeah, yeah. Fox Connor, he’s the son of a Confederate wounded veteran, has an army career, a quite distinguished army career in its own right. He’s probably the principal military planner of the American Expeditionary Force in World War I, where he comes to know George Patton, George Marshall. Fox Connor has a pretty amazing repertoire of connections that obviously matter a lot in Eisenhower’s life too. And Eisenhower gets stationed with him in Fort Gaillard, Panama, and this is a backwater in a backwater. I got to be honest with you. And one of the things that I never was able to fully pin down is why Fox Connor got marooned to command this podunk post in the middle of nowhere. It’s not obvious. But one of the things that is suggested though is that Fox Connor was not an easy person to get along with at all. He had a Mississippian sort of rigidity to his personality. He was extremely serious. He inspired very little loyalty, let alone affection in subordinates who saw him as extremely high-handed and brusque. And Eisenhower, frankly, is no different, I think, when he arrives in Panama. Fox Connor basically makes him every day write out these very complicated orders of the day. What is everyone to do for today and how are they to do it? And there’s no point in this exercise, right? The army’s job in Camp Gaillard is basically to make sure the camp doesn’t fall into the Panama Canal. And that’s it. There’s nothing going on there. He was first in his class, and it’s from then on that Eisenhower’s career just takes off. Brett McKay : We’re going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors. And now back to the show. You mentioned that one of the books Conor gave him was The Philosophy of Nietzsche, and you talk about the book. That book actually had a big impact, a lasting impact on Eisenhower. How did Nietzschean philosophy influence Michelle Paradis : Eisenhower, you think? Oh, that was a real surprise to me, right? Almost the last person you think about when you’re thinking about Eisenhower is Friedrich Nietzsche. But sure enough, I was able to, again, one of the real difficult things as a research matter, but one of the most satisfying in trying to understand Eisenhower was just figuring out what books he read and then reading them. So what’s in his head and where can you see these ideas pop up later, if at all? And when I read the copy of Nietzsche that Fox Connor had, almost right away, I’m looking at almost verbatim things Eisenhower says later. And there are a couple of things that are going on in Nietzsche, or at least the Friedrich Nietzsche that Eisenhower reads, that are incredibly formative to Eisenhower. One is what we probably would just call basic stoicism. Going back to at least Marcus Aurelius, this idea of manhood being about seeing the world as it is in an unsentimental way and knowing that the truth is always going to matter much more than any ideology or idea or wish for how the world could be. And that anytime you find yourself, as he often did and would, complaining about, oh, things aren’t turning out the way I hoped, knowing that, shut up, your feelings don’t matter. What matters is what is. And as soon as you can reconcile yourself to that, the better. And so that’s a big part of Eisenhower’s own philosophy, just being very objective and really quite hostile to ideology, which I think is one of Eisenhower’s most important and laudable traits, whether or not it’s Nazi fascism or communism or any of the other sort of, how would you sort of say it, sort of ideologies or theories of the day. Like he’s always worried and always thinking fundamentally about brass tacks. Okay, how does this really matter? What’s really going on? What’s really motivating people? Another big thing in Nietzsche that Eisenhower like fully embraces is the virtue of toughness and the manly virtues, so to speak, the willingness to fight for something bigger than yourself as a virtue in and of itself. And then the third thing I think that Eisenhower draws directly out of Nietzsche, actually quotes it several times without attributing it, but it’s right out of Nietzsche, is this idea that human beings all have a fundamental desire to be free. And that when you motivate that, when you can appeal to that individual desire to be free, people are willing to do anything, to fight and to die for their own freedom. And indeed, one of the biggest quotes he often repeats that again is verbatim out of Nietzsche, is the idea that there is nothing more powerful than a motivated democracy. That democracy fundamentally is all about allowing free people to be free. And if you can harness that energy, that drive towards something greater than themselves, that individual desire to be free, to make their own choices, to pursue their own happiness, that you harness the most powerful force that human beings can muster. Brett McKay : So Eisenhower graduates from the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College. He’s still confined to sort of administrative positions. He’s the aide to General Douglas MacArthur. He serves as the chief of staff of the 3rd Infantry Division. He holds various staff positions in Washington, D.C. He’s a colonel when World War II starts. He’s never led a battle. He doesn’t have that big personality like a MacArthur or Patton, but he still gets the job of Supreme Allied Commander in Europe over George Marshall, who is also in the running. And there’s a whole interesting story there. But from the time he takes that command, he’s got less than six months to plan Operation Overlord, D-Day. What kind of physical and emotional toll did the pressure in planning that invasion take on Eisenhower? Michelle Paradis : Yeah, it’s an incredibly compressed time frame. The day by day is just stunning. And yeah, it has a huge toll. It has to. Eisenhower is basically sick the entire time, to varying degrees of severity. His cold basically comes and goes. He smokes like a chimney. He’s up to three packs a day by the time the D-Day invasion launches. I did the math on that. That’s about 11 to 12 hours of smoking per day. He begins to drink too much. He sleeps like three to four hours a day. And he really does bear the weight of it internally in ways that you, you know, it’s almost difficult to imagine anyone else being able to endure. You know, he’s lonely. He misses his family. He misses his son. There’s a moment when he, which I recount in the book, which is so poignant, when he’s asked to essentially give the commencement address at Britain’s equivalent of West Point and, you know, gives this very solemn speech about how the weight of the world is on these young men who are going to be literally his subordinates in a matter of weeks. And he writes this letter home that’s so meditative. It’s quite dark, where he says, you know, I just don’t understand this human need to destroy and how so many lives are put to waste and how we haven’t learned as a species to do better, to be kinder to each other. And I think the poignancy of that moment came not just in the fact that he’s looking at these young men who he is confident he is sending to their deaths at some point or very well could, but they’re his son’s age. His son John is actually graduating from West Point, ironically enough, on June 6th, 1944. And, you know, as he’s bestowing awards and shaking their hands, like they look and act and are exactly like his own son. And that has to occur to him in terms of just like what is really putting what at risk? What are the costs? What are the dangers that these young men who are going to be crossing that beach, what are they confronting and why are they doing it? And he’s the one there sending them off, right? It’s his responsibility ultimately. He owns that. And the pressure is insane. Brett McKay : So besides smoking and drinking a lot, another thing that helped Eisenhower deal with the pressure of the battlefront was spending time with what he called his official family. And this was like his tight inner circle of individuals he was close to. It included Case Summersby, his driver. There was his personal naval aide, Harry Butcher, his secretary, Mattie Panette. What role did Eisenhower’s official family play in kind of boosting up his morale during this period? Michelle Paradis : Yeah, yeah, I don’t want to overstate. He’s not a drunk, to be clear. You know, he basically spends, no, but he spends his nights. Eisenhower’s very disciplined about organizing his time. It’s actually one of the more interesting and I think prescient leadership traits that he has is that he knows that a big part of his job is just making so many decisions day after day, high consequence, low consequence, just one after the other. And to do that effectively, to make the best decision he can, regardless of how it turns out, he has to keep himself healthy, both physically and mentally, as much as he possibly can. And so he’s very disciplined ultimately about budgeting out his time, right? This is an era before smartphones. And so when he goes home basically to the official family, he basically is disciplined from about 7 or 8 o’clock at night when he can about turning off the office and playing bridge and watching movies together and chatting and reciting poetry. It’s a really, I think, important opportunity he has to just be as human as possible under the circumstances. And this official family is both his literal Aides, right? There are secretaries and drivers and things like that. But I think they’re just also the people that he can relax with. These are the people who are not gunning for him. They’re not trying to get anything from him. They’re not trying to use or manipulate him for their own ends. These are just the people he can trust day in and day out. And he knows he needs that retreat and he needs to take advantage of that retreat and not just constantly be working because otherwise he’ll collapse, he’ll burn out, and he won’t be able to make the hard decisions that he Brett McKay : Has to make. I think it’s a great lesson for even if you’re not the Supreme Allied Commander, take your rest time seriously and make time for it. If Eisenhower could have done it during Overlord, you can do it when you’ve got your 9-5 job. Like, you’re okay. Michelle Paradis : That’s right. Turn your phone off. Hang out with your kids. Have a meal without looking at your Brett McKay : Phone. So you mentioned there’s a lot of internal struggles that Eisenhower had. He knew the impact his decisions were going to have. He was going to send lots of young men to their death. I mean, how did he do that and think about the human consequences while not letting it paralyze him? Because I think that’d be really hard. I mean, if I were in that position, I would think, oh my gosh, I can’t even make a decision. I would just freeze. What do you think Eisenhower did to overcome that while maintaining his humanity at the same time? Michelle Paradis : I think actually the key thing was that he maintained his humanity. You know, we talked a bit about Nietzsche and this is sort of a Nietzschean idea or a stoic idea at least, but I think it also comes right out of Nietzsche, is that he never looked away from the consequences of his own decisions. Like he fully embraced them only as a corrective to make sure he was making the right decision. And being able to hold those things in his head at the same time I think was a key part, certainly of his ability to lead in crisis and some of the hard decisions he made. I’ll give you just one example of it that almost brings me to tears every time I think about it, is the night before D-Day launches, he goes around and sees off the 101st Airborne. And there’s probably the most famous picture of Eisenhower addressing these young men who were all painted up and getting ready to jump out of these planes over France. And he had been given an estimate just before that about half of these guys are gonna be lost. Half! And he’s sending thousands of these young men across the English Channel. So he goes and he goes to see them off and there’s no fanfare, right? This is not a review. He literally just has Kay drive up as quietly as possible, gets out and just starts mingling between them and shaking their hands and talking to them. And again, there’s this very famous photograph where his hand is forward and he looks like he’s very sternly telling them some sort of great rallying cry to get them over the beaches. And with a little bit of tracking down, Ribna find the actual story behind that photo. And the guy he’s talking to, he’s talking to him about fishing because he would just go up to these guys and be like, what do you like to do? Where are you from? What was your job? What’s your hobbies? Anyone from Kansas? And this guy said he likes fishing. And Eisenhower is an adamant fisher himself, and a fly fisherman on top of that. And he’s like, so when you throw a rod, this is how I throw it. And he’s demonstrating the throwing of his rod, and the photographer just sort of happened to catch the moment in this way that has this very sort of commanding overtone to it. But what’s really going on there is he’s just treating that young man like a human being, like his son, like himself. And when he goes around and meets these young men and shakes their hands, he forces himself to look each one of them in the eye when he does it. And think about that. Each hand he shakes, he knows that basically every other one is going to die, right? Every other one is some kid who is either his son’s age or younger, who’s just not going to go home again, who’s not going to see his own father again. And Eisenhower made himself do that, not only, I think, to be there for them and to let them know that he saw them and saw them not as soldiers to be sent across the border, but as young men who he cared about, who had their own lives and dreams and interests, but to remind himself of that too. And when he finishes, he just collapses into the back of his car and just said, well, no one can stop it now. And that’s how he ends June 5th, 1944. But I also think that’s how he does it, because he doesn’t numb himself to the costs of what he’s doing. He understands it, he internalizes it, and owns it. And so that when he has a hard decision to make, such as sending them over there, knowing how many of them are unlikely to ever come home again, he’s able to do it because he’s weighed the costs, the benefits in a real way that he owns. It’s as much about responsibility and owning responsibility as it is just making the best decision you can. Brett McKay : Yeah, I mean, the idea of owning responsibility. Eisenhower famously wrote two memos before D-Day happened, and one of them was, if it was a failure, it’s like, if this mission failed, I take full responsibility for it. But he didn’t have to publish that one, but he kept letting me know that. Yeah, the guy took responsibility. So okay, this is June 5th, he sent off the men personally. How did he spend the night before the invasion in the morning? What was he doing? Michelle Paradis : Smoking. He basically, he stayed up the entire night, best as we could tell, smoking and reading Westerns. He was an adamant Western reader. He had his guilty pleasures, as we all do, and he was very emphatic that he got to enjoy them. And so really from about two in the morning when he gets back to base camp to about 7, 730, when he finally sort of gets up and meets the day, he’s just sitting on his bed, laying in bed, reading Westerns and smoking cigarettes and just waiting for the news to come in. Yeah, Brett McKay : You talk about the Western you read about. Black John is the name of the story. Michelle Paradis : Yeah, the Tsar of Half a Day Creek. Eisenhower really liked good shoot-em-up Westerns. Those were his favorite. Tsar of Half a Day Creek is not one of those. It has like a sort of more humorous vein to it, and there’s not a lot of shooting. But it really was apt. It really kind of met the moment very well because it’s all about this guy, the Tsar of Half a Day Creek. His name is Black John Smith, who is the kind of the doer in the small camping town in Alaska, or in Yukon country I think it is actually, where he’s always up to something, but he’s keeping everyone just everything in line. Everyone kind of thinks he’s this old hillbilly, but he actually is the guy who’s always got the plan and is one step ahead. So it was a very apt book for Eisenhower to be reading on Brett McKay : D-Day. Another lesson there from Eisenhower, don’t feel bad about just indulging in a guilty pleasure when you’re going through a stressful period. He read Westerns. It’s okay if you want to, I don’t know, watch a crappy movie on Netflix. That’s okay, as long as it kind of just takes the edge off. That’s fine. Michelle Paradis : No, that’s entirely true because one of the things that I found super interesting about Eisenhower, which you don’t see on the surface at all, but is very true, is that he thought a lot about how he thought. And he understood that if he was tired, if he was exhausted, if he was overwhelmed, that he was going to make bad decisions. And bad decisions didn’t mean that those decisions would not turn out the right way. He understood that there was always risk, just like any poker player would. But he wanted to make sure he was always making the best decision available to him based on the information available to him. And so doing things like making time for guilty pleasures, making time for friends, not beating up on yourself too much about your own vices. Everyone’s telling him he’s got to stop smoking, otherwise his cold will never get better. And he’s like, yeah, yeah, I get it. But he understands that he only had so much energy, only so much sort of self-discipline and focus that he can direct. And so prioritizing what you’re paying attention to, what you’re really investing your emotional and mental energy in, is honestly just as important as any one decision you Make because your ability to make those decisions is going to be entirely contingent on how focused you are, how clear-minded you are, and your ability to just take everything in and decide. And so, yeah, just giving yourself your guilty pleasures and focusing on the things that matter and figuring out what matters is just as important as any one thing that you do. Brett McKay : Yeah, that idea that Eisenhower thought about his thinking and he was kind of this master self-psychologist. Another thing that I remember reading about him that he did, he had an anger drawer. So Eisenhower, he had a temper, and he struggled with it his entire life. But he had this tactic whenever someone would piss him off and he wanted just to light him up. What he did instead is he wrote this letter out, exactly what he wanted to say, no filter. And then he just put it in his drawer. It cooled off and he’s like, okay, I got it out of my system. Now I can approach this with the cool head. Michelle Paradis : Yeah, no, as you say, he was his own psychologist because there was no one else around he could trust for that role, really, other than maybe Kay Somersby or Harry Butcher. And yeah, so he would do those sorts of things. Or if he just was like feeling overwhelmed, just same thing. He was feeling overwhelmed and he was like, if he was having trouble focusing on any one thing, he would sit down and literally just write himself a memo of all the things he had to think about one after the other and putting down a couple of thoughts about each one just to, again, put it out on the page, get it out of his body and into something tangible so that he could focus on it more clearly. He’s just full of all of these very specific habits and techniques for making him a much better thinker and leader than he otherwise would have been. Brett McKay : So something that Eisenhower is known for is his political ability. He was able to manage these big egos, Montgomery, Padden, Marshall, Churchill, DeGaulle. Did it deftly. I don’t think any other person could have done that. But the other thing that impressed me about Eisenhower was his grasp of public relations. He knew how to manage the media. How would you describe his approach? I think this is underappreciated about Michelle Paradis : Eisenhower. Oh, yeah. A hundred percent. I agree. I think it’s totally underappreciated. He got in a very sophisticated way that media had changed a lot and had changed politics a lot by the 1940s. And he understood that there were really two things that he needed to do to be an effective manager of his public persona, which in turn would give him a much freer hand in dealing with difficult political issues. And one was, you’ve got to be friends with the press. And he made sure that when he was playing bridge and smoking and drinking, that reporters were always with him just to kind of hang out, with a few exceptions, as guys. And having that kind of intimate friendship-level relationship with reporters enabled him to know what was going on, what they were going to print and publish before they did, and also gave him opportunities to, in what we would now call, shape the narrative before things hit the press. And that helped him on several occasions, not the least being with people like George Patton. But the other thing, though, and this was so – I mean, it’s part of who he is, but it’s so prescient that it demands to be remarked upon, is he also understood that as the media was becoming more intimate and celebrity-driven, where you had these personalities who were not just on the radio or in newspapers, but actually on film and could be seen, that there was a huge value in being seen as ordinary. And I’m not saying he put that on. This is, in a way, who he is. These are his Kansas instincts coming out. But he leaned really hard into it in a way that was certainly designed to conceal the sophistication of his own thinking in most situations, where he understood that being kind of folksy and having this, like, oh, I just like going out fishing, and being very seen as not grasping for power in an environment where most politicians, to include Roosevelt, and Roosevelt being only sort of a marginal exception to this, were still seen as these very stern, statuesque figures, was its own kind of political power. It’s where we get the idea of I like Ike. The idea that a politician should not be only a leader but likable more or less draws directly from Eisenhower. And I know this, again, almost seems too obvious to say now, but it’s difficult to overstate how revolutionary it was for a general, like a major powerful general, to be known broadly in the public for smiling. A smiling general. There’s almost nothing more incongruous than that if you really think about it. And Eisenhower fully leaned into that and had a kind of folksy celebrity that obviously becomes his trademark. And I think in the environment that he’s in particularly, with people like de Gaulle, with people like Churchill and Stalin and Roosevelt, is crucial to his ability to wield power because none of them understand that yet. None of them understand the importance of likability in the media as a kind of political power. And so everyone around Eisenhower just underestimates him all of the time as just being sort of like a smiling nice guy because they’re obviously very much still in the Marvel statue mold. And Eisenhower both, I think, understands that and uses that to such great effect that now it’s actually difficult to think about a politician who doesn’t smile all the time, right, where it’s not this sort of like happy, I’m a nice guy, I’m just like you, whether or not it’s George W. Bush on his ranch and Crawford clearing brush, or Donald Trump eating a Taco Bowl, or Barack Obama smiling big and throwing baskets, right? All of our politicians now, we want them to, quote unquote, to be just like us. And Eisenhower kind of sets that mold and sees that that’s where society is going way earlier than anybody else does. Brett McKay : So after researching and writing about Eisenhower, what’s something that stuck with you the most about his life or his leadership? Michelle Paradis : I think for me, in addition to giving hope to 40-year-olds everywhere that life is not yet over, I think the most both inspiring and cautionary aspects of Eisenhower’s life to me are that he really did come from nowhere to achieve the absolute greatest heights of political power in the 20th century. He, through a combination of, I think, intelligence, luck, and ruthlessness, pulled himself up to that height to great, I think, benefit to not only the United States but to the world. And so the both encouraging but cautionary things that I always think about when I think of Eisenhower is encouraging is that talent is everywhere. Talent can come from the middle of nowhere, from someone you’d never expect, where it wouldn’t even be recognized by most people until well into their 30s or 40s or even 50s. And the cautionary piece of that that I worry about sometimes is, do we still live in that America, right? Do we still live in a society where talent can rise? Because we have more people than ever. We have more opportunity for more people than ever as well, and fewer barriers based on old lines, whether that’s gender or race. But do we still have a society that allows the very best to rise? And I don’t know the answer to that. I worry about that sometimes because all the opportunities Eisenhower had have become much more difficult and much stricter and much more tied up in tradition or bureaucracy or sort of other kinds of red tape that I worry we may not be getting the talent that we have at our disposal to have the kind of leaders that we possibly could have. Brett McKay : Well, Michelle, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work? Michelle Paradis : Yeah, the book is available anywhere fine books are sold, The Light of Battle. It makes a great gift in time for Father’s Day. I’ll plug that. And yeah, feel free to always reach out. I’m very easy to find. And so if you had any questions or ideas or thoughts about the book, good, bad or ugly, feel free to email me. I try to respond as quickly as I can. Brett McKay : Fantastic. Well, Michelle Paradis, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure. Michelle Paradis : Thank you. It was a lot of fun. Brett McKay : My guest today was Michelle Paradis. He’s the author of the book, The Light of Battle. It’s available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can check out our show notes at aom.is slash supremecommander. We find links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmaleness.com where you can find our podcast archives. And make sure to check out our new newsletter. It’s called Dying Breed. You can sign up at dyingbreed.net. It’s a great way to support the show directly. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it’s Brett McKay reminding you to listen to the podcast. Put what you’ve heard into action. This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.…

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