Why Successful People Still Feel Invisible with John Miles

The environments we're living and working in are repeatedly teaching people that they're replaceable, that their voice doesn't matter, or their value is conditional. Our worth is contingent on what we produce instead of who we are. Our good life is very much dependent on the social relationships that we have. Your sense of worth over time starts to evaporate until the vanish eventually happens. 35% of children today feel like they do not matter. It's happening to hundreds of millions of people around the world. My usefulness was undeniable. My humanity was All they wanted to see was results and they didn't care what the expense was. I could either choose to accept my circumstances or I could do something about it. It's time we moved away from that and begin retracing our steps and recognizing the value of individuals. I was trying to answer a fundamental question. I kind of arrived here that something foundational underneath all of this was causing these other things to happen.

Well, hey everybody, Dr. David Perlmutter here. Welcome to The Empowered Neurologist. We often talk about the importance of finding meaning and purpose in our lives. And my guest today is John R. Miles, and he asks us to consider an even more fundamental human need, and that is to know that we actually matter. John is the host of a very popular podcast called Passion Struck. I recently recorded that podcast with him. He's the author of a new book, That's called The Mattering Effect: Creating a Life of Meaning and Worth. A very, very interesting book in which he explores this subject that is really deeply personal. Why so? Well, he talks about his experience at age 5 years when he had a severe brain injury, lost the ability to speak, to learn, and to basically interact with the world around him. Well, what happened after that? He went on to attend the United States Naval Academy, serve in the military, and then built a very impressive corporate career. Yet, and here's the point, despite all this visible success, he ultimately learned that he was slowly, basically disappearing from his own life. Many of us have had this experience. So we're going to explore the difference between being useful and being valued, how feeling invisible affects the brain and affects the body, and why actually the concept of mattering may be essential to our physical and mental health, essential to our relationships, and really ultimately our ability to flourish. So I'm delighted to welcome John Miles to The Empowering Neurologist and very excited to get started on our program today. Well, John Miles, welcome to the podcast. I'm so delighted that you're here today.

David, it's so great to see you again and congratulations on your awesome new book as well. I loved having you on my show.

Thank you. Well, as I said off before we hit the record button, I really want to start off with the event at age 5 years of age, because I think it was a defining moment for you. It really sets you up for, I think, understanding your position in the world, the head trauma event. Let's talk about it, how you felt thereafter, what the recovery was like, and then how that kind of motivated your sense of need for achievement and recognition. And then ultimately how this book is an outgrowth of your recognition about what that did for you, or maybe not. So take us back to the head trauma. And as you mentioned, you've had several events, but let's talk about that event at age 5 years.

This was definitely a defining moment for me. I lived in Bay Village, Ohio at the time. I was a youngster and I was just playing a simple game of tag, and as you probably know, they tend to get rougher and rougher as they progress. And I was running away from one of my neighbors when he tagged me from behind as I was in a full sprint, and it launched me in the air, unfortunately through our bottom basement window. And that's where a lot of my memory stops. Because I woke up at some point later after blacking out with the tube in my head. And even as a youngster, kind of realizing that my life was never quite going to be the same. I didn't realize at the time how much it was going to change, but as traumatic brain injuries often do, especially when they're, you know, mid-level to severe, It caused a number of acute and then lasting injuries. So the lasting injuries were a sensory processing disorder, which significantly impacted the way I learned. I developed a couple really bad speech impediments. One was a lisp, but the other was tied to my sensory processing disorder. The rate at which I thought occurred at a different speed to the way I would speak. So oftentimes I would misspeak or say the wrong words, which caused a lot of ridicule and bullying, I can tell you. But on top of that, I developed pretty severe migraines. And overall, it really impacted my sense of self and self-esteem. And I had a really pinnacle event that helped me process this. I, at one, while my peers would go to English class, I had to do what I'd call the walk of shame. I'd walk right in front of the school window where they'd all stare at me as I would go to see the speech therapist. And at first I hated it, but she ended up becoming a person who really taught me that in life we have choices that we can make, and I could either choose to accept my circumstances or I could do something about it. So at that point, even as a youngster, I decided I wanted to do something about it. But I think that's where I started to learn that in order to feel like I mattered, It was me having to prove to the world that I should feel accepted and that my worth was beyond the injuries that I sustained and the way that the world saw me.

What an insight from such a young kid. I mean, when you think about it, right? I mean, many adults don't have that insight into into the importance of mattering. I mean, here you are. How old were you when that finally set in?

I was somewhere between 6 and 7 years old. We had— so young.

If we look back at the neurological event and, you know, obviously you recovered substantially, if not fully, from that event, but what has endured, uh, in a, in the positive way? What have you been left with that's positive relative to that initial experience?

Some of my core beliefs and values definitely came from that injury. I would think one of them definitely has to do with how I handle adversity. And what this taught me was really the value of what we now call neuroplasticity, but that our mind, even if it's damaged, doesn't have to remain damaged. We have the capacity to rebuild so much of who we are. Now, it's hard for me to know at this point, would my personality and other things still be the same? Because I definitely think that this has had an impact on how I regulate emotional intelligence for sure. But it taught me that I could persevere, that I could get through rough times. And that I had the wherewithal to change my circumstances if I was ever put in a situation where it caused me some harm, whether physical, mental, or something other.

So walk us through then what does it mean to matter versus having self-esteem or popularity? What does it actually mean? What does mattering mean?

Well, since we're talking about being a youngster, let's use a youngster concept for it. I think we've all been in a situation where we've been in that either recess or maybe in school PT class where we're asked to pick teams and we all know what it's like when your peers are picking who they want on the team. I think when you are picked, that's a feeling that you belong, but there's a big difference between belonging and mattering. Belonging is you were picked to be on the team. Mattering is that felt sense that you're contributing one to the team, but that you are receiving value back from the team because of what you're contributing. And I think that's the core definition of how I think of mattering. It's not only feeling seen, feeling valued, but it's also giving it to others.

So you talk about this for us now, grownups, that we have this progressive kind of decline in our sense of mattering as we get older. You call it a slow fade. So we're, you know, we're ultimately where we matter less and less in our own lives. What does that mean? A slow fade?

Well, the way, David, I would describe it is from my own personal experience. So we talked about that incident when I was young. Another incident that happened to me that really put me on this path was I had spent so many years proving myself and reproving myself after that initial injury to a point that I excelled in sports. I excelled at school. I had rebuilt the ability to have social connection. And I remember after I'd been selected to a number of universities, I was having a conversation with a beloved English teacher at my high school. And I will never forget what she told me. She told me that I would never amount to anything.

Oh my gosh.

So after persevering through so much struggle, to hear that from someone I respected so much really was another defining moment because at that point in time, I was trying to choose between the University of Michigan and Duke where I had athletic scholarships, or I had gotten an appointment to the Naval Academy. And it kind of pushed me over the edge on top of my willingness to serve and other things to actually go to the academy because I felt, again, I needed to prove that I could handle whatever the military was going to throw at me. And To prove to her and others that I mattered because she absolutely made me feel the opposite. And I think that desire to prove myself became a constant in my life for the next 2 decades. I was constantly striving for the next promotion, The next magazine article that would come out about me, the next award I could get. It was all this illusion that I had manufactured, but what it caused was 20 years of me wearing a mask, pretending to be someone else, performing a life that wasn't truly mine. And when I talk about this slow fade, I think so many of us become conditioned, whether it's conditioned from the family that we're born into, the school that we arrive in, or it could be the workforce that we feel we have to perform our way into. But what happened to me, and I think is happening to many people, is I became more and more invisible in my own life. And the way that the slow fade happened is I didn't know what exactly was changing. I only knew that for whatever reason, my life was getting a little dimmer every single day and the brightness and the feeling of being alive was slowly being diminished. And I think many people are feeling this way. Yeah.

I hope that our viewers are paying close attention to this part of our conversation because what you're talking about is people who outwardly have great achievements. They're at the top of their game. They're the best surgeon at the top of the corporate world. They're making a lot of money. They have the multiple homes, all of the outward metrics of, as if they really are, of success. And yet personally, they feel basically invisible and it even gets worse with time. That's what the slow fade is all about. So how does it happen? How does it happen that a person can have all of these accomplishments and accolades, On various metrics and yet progressively feel more and more distant from his or her own life.

David, I know you love research and you do a ton of study yourself. It is always amazing to hear you talk and how much you bring forth that. And for me, this journey has been much of the same. I have done about a decade worth of research on this now because I was trying to answer a fundamental question. I kept thinking that the mental health crisis, the loneliness epidemic, the rise in anxiety, the rise in youth mental health, people feeling hopeless, the rise in people being disengaged at work, people being burned out, they all can't be separate. I thought that there had to be something connecting them. And when I started this journey, mattering was not what I ever expected was going to be the word that was the one-word answer to it. But my research, whether it be in self-determination theory or studying ancient, you know, texts, including the Bible, I kind of arrived here that something fundamental, foundational underneath all of this was causing these other things to happen. And Gordon Flett has a term— Gordon Flett, if people don't know who he is, he's not a household name. He should be because he's been studying mattering longer than anyone I know. He came up with this term called antimattering. Antimattering. Antimattering is what we feel inside When our significance has been eroded from us over time throughout our lives, it's the end result of that slow fade. I came up with a different term that creates it, and I call that systemic unmattering. And this is the environments and the systems that surround us that cause antimattering to happen. I call it the architecture of erasure. And it basically is the existence of us living in what I call a mattering market where we are constantly shown again and again that our worth is contingent on what we produce instead of who we are.

Wow. That's a whole podcast right there, that our worth is contingent upon what we produce instead of who we are, instead of our nature. And I think that engenders the term that you bring up in the book called the mattering gap. And how do we know that we are living within this gap and maybe just first define that mattering gap?

Well, the mattering gap is really, as I was kind of alluding to, it's the distance between your inherent worth and the amount of value that the world allows you to experience. And I think for many, many people, that gap is a chasm. I know it was for me.

So the chasm then between what the world is basically allowing you to experience by virtue of how you feel valued based on the various metrics versus your intrinsic sense Of self-worth and mattering.

Yes. Well, I, part of my thinking on this book is derived from the teachings of William James. And I started to really look at this idea of being a source versus being a resource. And I think so many of us today are living our lives as a resource. We constantly feel Like we have to give of ourselves and yet it's not being returned to us. So when that happens constantly, your sense of worth over time starts to evaporate slowly, which is why I call it the slow fade until the vanish eventually happens.

So what, or is there, I mean, your book describes clinical evidence that relates higher levels of this feeling of lack of self, lack of mattering with things like depression, feeling of loneliness, and even physical ailment. Talk to us about some of that evidence.

Yeah. Well, for, in order to understand this, I needed a case study. I wanted to look at something before and after to kind of analyze the effects of this. So I'm a huge fan of Malcolm Gladwell. So I don't, I don't want to say I'm the first person to look at this case study, 'Cause he used it in The Tipping Point. But I used the study of Roseto, Pennsylvania. And if people aren't familiar with this, this was a town in Pennsylvania that defied modern medical wonder for decades and decades and decades. The people there didn't experience the same levels of cardiovascular disease. They didn't experience the same Levels of neurological decline, of physical ailment. They were much happier. Their tables during the week and weekends were overcrowded with neighbors and friends. And then over time, what Stuart Wolfe, who was the person who researched this, discovered was that Roseto started to go towards the national norms that the rest of America happened. And what he found correlated was that the more people were, were exposed to American culture, the more that they started to see common levels of cardiovascular disease, neurological disease, and other things start emerging in Roseto. And when they started to look for a common denominator, what they found was that it really amounted to, uh, what the work of Robert Waldinger has shown. That our good life is very much dependent on the social relationships that we have and connection. So Roseto became an excellent case study for this book of what happens when mattering and that felt sense that you matter was present through the communities that were in existence and what happens to us both physically and mentally. when mattering is gone.

And then there's a correlation between this sense of invisibility and even things like stress hormones, inflammation, neural circuitry. All of these things can downstream be really consequences of worsening sense of not mattering, of being basically invisible. I mean, I think what you're talking about really is supported by Blue Zones kind of research.

Absolutely.

That people have to feel as if they matter. And I think that, I mean, your book makes it very clear that there are correlates then with an increased sense of mattering and belonging and having a role and not being invisible to lower levels of stress hormones and lower levels of inflammation and improved brain circuitry.

Yeah. And I don't think people realize how early this begins. I think 2 people who I've spoken to about this, one being Dana Suskind, who I love her work, the other being Gordon Flett, often talk about how early this mattering instinct becomes apparent in our lives. By the time kids are 3 to 8 years old, they're in their WEX cement years. And Gordon Flett's research has shown that there is a huge Parent-child perception gap. One of the most striking findings I found looking at Flett's work was that nearly 35% of children today feel like they do not matter. But what was interesting and cited in his study is that only 8% of parents believe that their child might feel that they don't matter.

Yeah. So that I could see that.

One, we've got an issue going on where kids don't feel like they matter, but then we have a perception issue with parents who can't believe it could be true.

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becoming that person? Does that— what, how does that interface with the sense of mattering in society?

So, man, this is a, this is a big philosophical debate right now. And you kind of have a number of people who are looking at this. On the one side, You have Jonathan Haidt who's been studying this, and in his book, The Anxious Generation, he clearly believes that this rise in mental health came about somewhere around 2010 with the advent of the iPhone and then social media behind it. In the other camp, you have Peter Gray and a number of researchers who believe it has to do with the evolution of our school systems and with No Kid Left Behind and other things that we're treating our school environment almost like a boardroom where instead of shareholder value being what they're evaluated against, it's test scores, et cetera, that demonstrate their worth. I don't think either of them is wrong, but I don't believe either of them is entirely right. I look at both of those things as an accelerant to a fire that's already been raging. To me, this goes back all the way to when the first factory whistle blew. And the reason I believe this is because that is when our value system started to radically change. We started to get valued more and more by what we produce rather than our humanity. And I believe when mattering erodes, what I allude to in chapter 3 of my book is that it's a social immunity issue. And so from generation to generation, that social immunity is not getting passed down the same way it was before the Industrial Revolution started.

What does that mean? Social immunity?

As I was going through this book, I had a fantastic mentor who was helping me try to think about When you're trying to solve something as large as what is causing the loneliness epidemic, I wanted to make sure that my thinking was clear. So I sought out who I think is one of the biggest experts at how do you frame a book right? And that is Dan Heath. So what I learned from Dan is you have to continue asking the hard questions. So I started to ask, you know, what is causing this? Why, what is the root cause? And then who is the person who's affected the most? So when I started to get into who gets affected the most, I initially thought it was going to be adults. What the research showed is it's our children. And that's where social immunity comes in because Just as, you know, what is the rampant conversation today about giving our children shots to boost their immunity? The same thing goes with their social immunity. And I think where this accelerant has come into play, if a parent is on their phone, disengaged by things that are happening at work and not giving their children their full attention, how many times do you think it's going to take for an excited child to come in and say, mom or dad, you will never imagine what happened today at school. I drew this incredible drawing, which could be just a bunch of squiggly lines. But when the child gets reinforced time and time and time again that they're not important and the parent is staring at their phone or their head is somewhere other than with that child, How many times do you think it takes a child to realize that they no longer can come to them because that mattering instinct isn't getting reinforced within them? And I think that this has slowly been occurring for the past 200 years.

Yeah. And then oftentimes I think that that is a motivator for this individual, the child in this case, to do whatever he or she can do to hopefully gain a sense of mattering, often from that parent or group or both parents who did not recognize the need early in life. I mean, I can, I'm speaking now about myself and, you know, sometimes it takes an awful long time and digging pretty deep to understand why we are motivated to do some of the things that we do, achieve the things that we achieve. And I think it can date back to early life invisibility. That was, that is what we experienced.

For people to understand that, like, a lot of this is John's opinion, but a lot of it isn't. So one of the core researchers I used in this chapter was Albert Bandura. And I really looked at his concepts of social learning. And what I was alluding to right there goes into a lot of Bandura's work. Children learn what human worth looks like by observing what the adults in their life model. So mattering isn't simply taught verbally, it's caught behaviorally. And I think that is one of the most important things that, that parents who are listening—

Well, I could see that as a, as a powerful evolutionary tool for, uh, you know, transmitting information for survival to the next generation. And, you know, it's one way of looking at it that these things matter in life. Pay attention to it these days. You know, what seems to matter to many adults, certainly not all, is the things you mentioned earlier that are going on in their phone conversations, et cetera, because of, you know, the hyperconnectedness. But you have this MATTER framework. Can we unpack that a little bit and then apply that to, you know, what can be valuable information for our viewers?

Yeah, David, before I get into that, I think there's one other concept that's important for people to understand. I have in my, one of my initial chapters, something that I call the mattering pyramid and the mattering needs pyramid. And it's important as we go into the matter framework for people to understand this is, as I started to look at this, I was trying to understand where does mattering disappear in ourselves. And so the way I look at it is the foundation of the mattering needs pyramid is internal belief. I matter to myself. It really gets down to, do I possess an internal sense of worth myself that doesn't rise and fall with many of the things we've been discussing, like approval, achievement, productivity, Or fear of other people's opinions. The next layer is the relational reflection. Am I seen? Does my existence register to someone else? And this is more than being surrounded by people. It's the felt sense of being seen. And that's where the third layer comes in, which is emotional resonance. You know, am I known? Am I known By the people I surround myself with? And then lastly, do I make an impact? So as I was unpacking those 4 layers, I started throughout these interviews I was conducting to try to understand, you know, what are the key ingredients that make those layers either stay intact or disappear? And so I just so happened to come across 6 conditions that actually spelled out matter. So M is meaning, A is autonomy, T is trust, T is time, E is energy, and R is reciprocity. So as this applies to our sense of mattering, when I look at meaning here, meaning is really about, am I connected to something In my life that makes me feel significant. Autonomy is really this felt sense that I have authorship over my own life, which I think with the rise of AI is becoming more and more difficult for a lot of people to believe. Trust is really baked based on a lot of the work of Amy Edmondson and psychological safety. Do I feel safe enough to be fully myself. And I think this is one of the conditions where many people start feeling invisible because they don't feel safe. Time here is a little bit different than the Oliver Burkeman type of definition. What I'm really getting at here with time is, do I have enough shared presence to actually experience my life and my relationships? Energy is really the return on energy that I'm getting. And this really goes back to that source versus resource. Is my life replenishing me? Am I a source or is it simply extracting from me more of the resource? And then the last word, R, is reciprocity. And a lot of this work really came from my study of Sonia Lyubomirsky and Harry Reese and their idea of a shared seesaw. And this really gets to the concept is about, is care contribution and significance in my life moving both directions? Am I not only giving it, but am I getting it back? So those are the 6 components of matter.

For close to 40 years, I have I found myself in examining rooms watching a family struggle through the loss of a loved one, not because that loved one aged, but because that loved one had lost his or her cognitive function. And, you know, basically I think we were all told that there was nothing that could be done. And in fact, I even parroted that narrative for quite some time, but ultimately I found myself in a place of not being able to accept that. I'm Dr. David Perlmutter. I'm a neurologist. And Brain Defenders is my new book, clearly the book that I have spent my entire career building. It's officially launched and it's available for order right now. And I truly believe that this is the most important work that I've ever done. Inside, what you will find are the hidden threats that are working against your brain right now, and also the exact science-backed actions that you can take to protect your memory, to protect your cognitive function, your clarity, your independence, your ability to interact with other people, starting today, not someday, but actually starting today. For those of you who want to be all in, I'm excited to announce that we now have the Brain Defenders Immersion Course, which is a guided path to put the very work that we describe in the book Brain Defenders into action step by step so that protecting your brain isn't something that you just read about. It's something that you actually participate in, something that you actually do. Your brain's future is actually being decided right now by the choices that you are making today. So order Brain Defenders and join the immersion course today. And you can get all this information by visiting my website, which is drperlmutter.com. That's drperlmutter.com to learn more about both the immersion course and the book. I wrote this book for you. And for everyone you love. Let's defend your brain together and defend the brains of everyone you love as well. Remember, the time to defend your brain is right now.

So what, what do parents do to help their children realize that there's more to life than winning, then grades, then achievement, and really allow them to focus on their self-worth, why they matter? How do we help parents distance their interaction with children away from the perpetrated metrics, I think, that society indicates are the benchmarks that children must achieve?

Yeah. My research kept bringing me to 2 conditions which represent too many households throughout the world. In one household, a child is taught that by being silent, that is how they're seen in the household. So this is the child who's taught very early on that being invisible in that family ecosystem is what makes them feel loved. I think the more prevalent one that many people, especially in Western culture, probably see play out are the households where you have to earn your sense of being loved. And that could be through the grades that you achieve, Through what you do on a sports field, what you do on a dance floor, what you do, you know, in a gymnastics class that you feel like you constantly have to perform in order to get that feeling that you're valued, seen, and heard by your family. So I think what parents can do, and it's a lot simpler than we ever think it's going to be. The first thing is, and you can do this for your spouse as well, is you can take 2 moments throughout your day. The first would be the first moment that the child sees you when they come down for breakfast in the moment, in the morning, instead of being on a device.

Did you do your homework?

Yeah. Saying things like that. It's being fully present For about 90 seconds with them and just showing them, like, let your face light up. Let them see that they're the most important thing in your world. Tell them how much they matter to you. The next thing, which it gets to the homework, is instead of asking them about their homework and things like that, you can change the whole conversation to make it be more observable, like Who made you feel like you mattered today at school? Who made, who did you make feel like they were important in school or even in exercises we were, we see a child doing instead of like praising them for completing a homework assignment or completing a puzzle, you can simply say, I saw how much effort you put into that, John, and I am so proud of how much you've given to that and how much it shows that you're trying to complete this project or this homework assignment rather than giving them a whole thing.

Interesting that you chose your own name for that. I'm just saying, I'm just saying. What about in the workplace? I mean, workers are really valued for their productivity, not for their humanity. So does it not extend to the workplace?

Man, David, this is one of my favorite things to talk about. When I got to Lowe's, I was hired by Lowe's Home Improvement to fix the worst hacking incident in retail history. So you would think that in itself would've been a big enough job. Within the first week, I'm called into the chief human resources officer's office And she says, John, for the first time in Lowe's history, we decided to conduct an employee engagement survey. So not only do I have to fix this broken cybersecurity issue, I'm told by her that out of 350,000 employees, 1,800 stores, tons of supply chain nodes, that my group is the least engaged in the entire company. Out of 350,000 people. And so for the next 2 to 3 weeks, I'm trying to figure out why. And so I would talk to peers in the IT group and I would talk to our business customers and I kept hearing the same thing. You got to replace everyone who's in your entire group. They don't care. They're worthless. They're unskilled. And then I started to actually talk to my employees. And what I realized was that none of them had a clue how the job that they were doing mattered in the big scheme of things. They didn't understand how a computer incident in the data center mattered to a customer who was shopping in a store or to low shareholder value or profits or expenses in the company. So the first thing I realized I needed to do was they had to have a line of sight between why they were valued and the company strategy. And so you, so one, you needed to show that linkage. But the other thing I found was that people weren't talking to them about them. I mean, no one was asking them, what are your aspirations? What's going on in your life? Are you trying to create a family? Are you going back to school? What do you want to do longer in your career? Is this where you want to stay in your career? And then the other thing I found is that they were all order takers and no one had given them the ability to create order, to become order makers. I had managers and directors who felt that they didn't have the ability To come up with ideas on their own on how to solve problems. So of course, if your managers and your directors are tuned out, what do you think is going to happen to your employees? So, and this is what is happening in so many environments is we treat everyone the same. We're not situational at all about what's going on. And we don't concentrate on making the employees themselves feel that they're seen, valued, and understood and are important. No matter what level they are in the company.

You have a quote in your book, my usefulness was undeniable. My humanity was optional. And it seems like if you want productivity, you need to change your emphasis and recognize the humanity of individuals. I learned that in running my medical practice and people often throw the term around, well, we're treat each other like family. It's often way overused in business, but boy, it becomes a place where you want to go and you want to do your best. And because you're part of a team and you're recognized as having value on that team. You had an event earlier that was pivotal in your life where your 9-year-old son asked you why you never laugh. What happened to you at that point?

Yeah, I want to talk about 2 different things. So here, I want to go back to what you just said about my humanity, because that moment and my son's question came around the same time in my life. At this point in time, I was a C-level executive working in one of the largest computer manufacturers on the planet, a household name that anyone would be aware of with a billionaire founder who is now in the top 5 high net worth people on the Forbes list. And at this time, I had been put in charge of a failed acquisition and I was spending countless weeks having to go to India trying to turn around These 30,000 employees that we were trying to absorb in a $5 billion entity. And man, it was tough. And I was working my butt off. I was 100-hour weeks every single week. I had just gotten back. It's like a Monday and I get into this meeting where we're talking about it and the way I was just treated by some of the presidents for why wasn't this thing turning around as quickly as they expected it to. They could care less about the physical toll that was having on me, my family, my relationships, my physical health, emotional. All they wanted to see was results and they didn't care what the expense was. And this was at a point in time where I didn't realize how invisible I was feeling. I was in the middle of this slow fade on kind of on the cusp of hitting the full hockey stick to feeling full numbness in my life. And what my son was experiencing was every sense of aliveness of me feeling joy in my life was being extracted from me because I was giving so much to the constant churn of this job that everything else that mattered in my life, even the most important things, became secondary or tertiary elements in my life because there was so much pressure on me to turn this thing around that even when I was in his presence or their presence, my mind was a million miles away. And this is why, you know, I'm not just a person here who's pontificating. I, you know, I felt this and I think we're best positioned to serve

I think we all feel it. I mean, I think that's what the value of your book for those who have been pushing all these years, we're all feeling it. And when you were at that time, were you in India or the company that you were having to work with was in India?

No, we acquired a company that was based in Dallas.

Okay.

But the vast majority, it was a consulting services business. So the vast majority of their employees, including like the company I was working for, we had 130,000 employees, but I would say 90% of them were outside of the US.

Okay. So is this paradigm that's set up about lack of value of workers, there's cultural nuance to that, isn't there?

Well, I mean, there's definite cultural nuance, you know, and I've been lucky enough to travel to 50+ countries. So you see it with the different regions that you work in.

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Well, part of the inspiration for that quote came from Richie Davidson, who actually exists in your space, David, and also Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, who I think is one of the greatest teachers to me, an equivalent of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. on innate basic goodness. And what Mingyur Rinpoche was telling me is that our innate basic goodness is always there, but so many of us have forgotten that because we're forgetting who we are. And so my point was our worth starts coming back to us When we stop pretending we're someone else than who we were intended to be and the superpowers that we were put on Earth to use in service of humanity. And I'm starting to see it as that more people are starting to realize the need to end the polarization and other things that we're feeling right now in society and getting back to the innate basic goodness that all of us have in our core.

Wow. That's a great conclusion. So, you know, the message here is to realize that we've already done the work and that you don't need to keep proving things to yourself with external validation, that you are internally validated for however much time you have left. Do good things and And recognize the worth of others and why others matter.

Yeah. And I'm going to give people 2 great examples of this. Like we see the entrepreneurs who we aspire to be. One of these for me was Blake Mycoskie, who was the founder of TOMS Shoes. And I recently interviewed Blake and he started a new movement about being enough because after doing everything that he did to create TOMS, give away 100 million pairs of shoes, sell his company for hundreds of millions of dollars, he still felt like he wasn't enough. Another great example is I just interviewed the actor Josh Duhamel, and Josh told me that after everything that he's accomplished, Transformers, the movies, the show he's in, the most recent one, Ransom Canyon, he still feels like there's more to prove. And he's recently, over the past decade or so, bought a cabin because he's trying to reset his life because he's realized that at the end of the day, does he want his kids to remember him as this famous actor or do they want Does he want them to remember him for being the dad who was around, who spent time with them fully in presence? So my point in raising these 2 gentlemen is this can happen to anyone. It doesn't matter what your occupation is, how great you are, how low you are. It doesn't matter. It's happening to hundreds of millions of people around the world. And that's why to me, this book is so important.

Well, it brings up a question in my mind. What is the difference between having something to prove and having something to accomplish? You know, playing upon what you just said, we don't want to not accomplish great things, but I mean, there's, there's sort of a bit of a nuance to the term prove that we have to prove something versus accomplish a goal.

Well, to me, it's And I wish I would have learned this when I was much younger. It's, it's refusing to wake up one day and to realize that you become the manager of a life you've never consciously chosen.

You wake up and you are the manager of a life that you didn't choose. And then what happens?

We start experiencing the slow fade that we started the whole conversation with because we start losing more and more of ourselves Through the interactions that we have through the environments and systems that we exist in, which is the whole systemic unmattering and where that comes into play of us living in a mattering market.

Well, John, let me tell you, I can absolutely relate. I can relate 100% to so much of what you've written about and It's just really, it's great information. It's so helpful. And especially not only as a person who ran a business, but also as a parent and recognizing the lack or the degree of invisibility that one may have experienced in childhood, how that may have been perpetrated as a parent on one's children, And as an employer. So there's great information here for, I think, various stages of our lives. I think that the most important thing that you offer up is that, okay, that's the paradigm under which we grew up or which we became bosses or whatever it may be in our relationships. And most importantly with your book, okay, once you recognize that's half the battle, here's what to do to really regain visibility, really regain the sense of mattering in this world. And importantly, I think, not to be thrown under or given second-order status, the recognition of the role of others in terms of their worth and their ability to matter and their, ultimately, their visibility. And I think for my physician colleagues, we all, you know, can kind of easily fall into that trap of, this is the cancer patient, this is the hypertensive, this is the whatever it may be, or here's the patient with a glucose of, you know, 285. As opposed to, you know, I think it was Hippocrates who may have said that it's much more important to know the person who has the disease than the disease the person has. And I think that for me as a physician summarizes, you know, my take-home message from your book. So thank you. Thank you for sharing this with us and writing this book.

Thank you, David. And I would just conclude, want to conclude with this. Angela Duckworth recently released a book called Situated, and I want to relate, her book is about the environments that we exist in, and I think it has a close tie-in To this whole concept of systems, systemic unmattering. Um, what I want to end with is we've gotten very good at individualizing human problems. If you're burned out, fix yourself. If you're lonely, fix yourself. If you're anxious, optimize yourself. But my question throughout all of this is, what if some of these things are also signals? What if the environments we're living and working in are repeatedly asking and teaching people that they're replaceable, that their voice doesn't matter, or their value is conditional? And I think that's the beginning point of the recognition. And it's also what we need to repair in each, in each person who's feeling those things.

Yeah, I hear you loud and clear. There's no question that You know, when you look at society and I'm not pointing fingers, but especially in younger generations, it is, you know, just a quest for recognition, identity, and a sense of having a role. And I think to be fair, technology is significantly responsible for that to a big, significant degree. And you're right. I mean, it's time we moved away from that and begin retracing our steps and recognizing the value of individuals. So, John, thank you for spending time with us today. This is great, great, and very helpful information.

Thank you, David. It was an honor to be on your show. Thank you so much for having me.

You bet. John Miles, author of the book, The Mattering Effect. I want to thank you for joining us today on The Empowered Neurologist and reminding us of really something that is so easily lost in a culture that is dominated, that values so highly the notion of performance and productivity. And that is that our worth is not something that we have to earn. We have worth regardless of those extrinsic metrics. What is especially resonating with me is that mattering is not something simply acting as an abstract psychological concept. Feeling seen, feeling valued and connected to others influences how we all experience things like stress, how we relate to others, how We ultimately inhabit our very lives. So the book is exciting. It challenges each of us to ask 2 important questions. First, do I truly believe that I matter? And do the people around me know that they matter to me? John's new book is The Mattering Effect: Creating a Life of Meaning and Worth. And I encourage you to read it and share this conversation with really anyone who needs to hear its message, Because it's really an important message. John Miles, thank you for joining us here on The Empowered Neurologist. I'm Dr. David Perlmutter, and thank you to all who have joined us today. We'll be back soon. Bye for now.