305: Is What You’re Wanting Actually What’s Best For You? With Luke Burgis

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All of us probably can just think about why we're choosing the goals that we're choosing and like, what happens if we achieve that goal right? And then paying attention to what happens to us when we achieve that goal can begin to be a process of setting better, better goals.

What's next? This is a question we're all having to ask and answer more frequently. I'm Jenny Blake, your host of the Pivot podcast and author of Pivot. The only move that matters is your next one.

For show notes from this episod, visit pivotmethod.com podcast. If change is the only constant, then let's get better at it. Here we go.

Hello. Hello Pivoters. I am so overjoyed to be here today with Luke Burgess. Luke wins the award for my favorite author of the year. I read his book Wanting in an Instant. Let's just say I gobbled it up as fast as I could and then have proceeded to tell everyone I know about it and mention it multiple previous episodes of this show. He has co created and led four companies in wellness, consumer products, and technology. He's currently entrepreneur in residence and director of programs at the SIOKA center for Principled Entrepreneurship, where he also teaches business at the Catholic University of America. He writes and speaks regularly about the education of desire, and he's the author of two books, Cultivating the Unique Calling of Every Person and Wanting the Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life. Luke, welcome to the show.

Hey, Jenny, it's so good to be here. Even the 15 minutes we spent figuring out our audio was fun, so I appreciate that.

I agree. Likewise. I feel so lucky to have a podcast that I get to read a book like yours, be totally riveted and fascinated both by your story and the research you're sharing. And then it almost is one of these pinch me moments. Wow. We get to talk live and I can ask you all my burning questions. So thanks for being here.

Of course. Yeah, I hope I get to ask a couple of questions too, because I think you and I have been thinking about the same things for a long time.

Yeah, I would love that. Yeah, I sent Luke my invitation email. I said mimetic desire for a podcast guest because I Of course, you know, I binged many of the previous conversations that you had. And I have to start for listeners with the opening epigraph to Luke's book Wanting. It's a quote from a woman named Dana Tortorici who says, we want what other people want because other people want it. And it's penciled in eyebrows all the way down, down to the depths of the nth circle of hell where we will all die immediately of a Brazilian butt lift over and over again. So I already know you have a sense of humor. Why did you choose this quote to open the book?

It just so perfectly summed up everything that I wanted to write about. And I ran across that article in a little literary magazine called N1, based out of New Super Nerdy. And Daniel wrote this article about Instagram and her struggles with Instagram and she'd be on and off the platform and she said that she noticed what it was doing to her desires and how it was affecting the things that she wanted and how she would be inflamed with a desire for stupid things that she'd never even thought about before. And I encourage anybody to read it. It's a really great article. And this book was a seed in my mind at the time when I ran across it and she name dropped Rene Girard, who's kind of the inspiration behind my book. And I knew that I was going to write a very serious book about like a social theorist and philosopher. And I wanted to make sure that it was a little light hearted and that people could actually connect these ideas to things that affect their everyday life. So when I ran across that quote, I highlighted it, underlined it like five times, and like ran in the kitchen and shared it with my wife. And we laughed. And I was like, I already know that's going to be. And the very beginning of my book, if my editor lets me. Right?

That. If the editor lets you, is a key piece. I was laughing because I'm like, it's always such a big choice and it's easy to want to go for some heady quote or really inspiring, but this sums up so perfectly. I feel it's a perfect encapsulation of the way that you're popularizing these ideas. The research from Rene Girard, which was very academic, but then in the book, you're just so vulnerable with your own story and your own relationship to wanting.

I mean, that was the whole key to making this thing work. Rene Girard started writing about these ideas about mimetic desire or how we imitate the desires of other people back in the late 1950s. And there's been this really large academic community that has formed around his ideas. He's been called the Darwin of the social sciences. And they're powerful, but it's just remained very, very intellectual and heady. And I went to some of these gatherings of Rene Girard scholars and I was like, man, this is all interesting stuff, but, like, I feel this at an existential level. And, you know, we'll be doing the world a real disservice if we're not able to share stories about how this has affected us in our real lives, in dating, in school, in career. And I knew that I had a story to tell about my own mimetic desire, right? And I knew that I needed to be vulnerable. So that was the whole premise of the book, was that I saw that gap. I saw that something was missing to translate these ideas into everyday life. So that was just a really important thing for me from the very beginning.

What I found so compelling about your story is that you're part of the startup world. And, you know, Silicon Valley gets a lot of press. I grew up there. We lionize our entrepreneurs and these getting big funding or having a large exit. And you took us to that moment of thinking that having a big exit, getting acquired by at that time, Zappos was going to be the answer. And it's this, like intense wanting and longing and it's built into the process of building a big project like a startup. Can you take us to the moment you realized maybe that was not going to lead to all the happiness and fulfillment that you had been seeking, but the kind of the mimetic aspect of.

Startup culture, even before the moment when I had this big business deal blow up on me, I had started to wonder if there wasn't a lot of kind of shallowness involved in theater and if a lot of like idolizing certain kinds of entrepreneurs and founders. This is back in between 2006 and 2010 was kind of the peak of my startup days when, I don't know, Groupon had launched. I don't know if you remember that. It was like totally crazy. They got a valuation of over a billion dollars in like less than a year or something like that. I was like reading these stories, hearing these stories and realizing that it was kind of affecting me in negative ways. And I myself had a very fast growing company, but also feeling like really dissatisfied and kind of just not happy. But I wasn't really willing to admit that to myself. And I entered into negotiations with Zappos with Tony Hsieh. And they had agreed to basically buy my company for. For an amount of money that would have put tens of millions of dollars in my pocket. And then to the point where we literally went out and celebrated the deal. And then the board changed their mind. Literally the next day on the plane back to San Francisco. Their board meeting had been in Vegas. It was. And I'm not going to pretend that I wasn't disappointed, right. But I sort of, at the same time it released me from something that I don't know if I would have had the power to release myself from. I just know I had this feeling in my gut at the time over those 24 hours when the news sank in that I really would have just continued on the treadmill on like this Ferris wheel. And I don't know when I would have ever been able to get off. It helped me to be able to admit to myself that the journey that I was on was, was causing me to neglect important things about myself because I was just going so hard and struggling to keep my head above water and striving and comparing and doing all of that stuff that it just gave me a chance to have like a coming back to myself. And you know, I said in the book, I experienced this unexpected sense of relief that I could now think seriously about who I wanted my models of desire to be. And you know, maybe they're not all entrepreneurs, right. And I started to like explore my world and select some different ones and ultimately that gave a very different shape to my life.

I appreciate how you shine light on the fact that mimetic desire is like gravity, you say? It just is. Gravity is always at work. What gravity is to physics, mimetic desire is to psychology. Because you're right, you were at maybe at that time unconsciously modeling after a memetic desire of other people. And then what a powerful, we'll say gut wrenching, but also powerful wake up call. Because I think that's what appealed to me about this work was it was finally shining light on something that causes a lot of angst and agita. And the moments that I've been unhappy are because I'm in a state of compare and despair. That's really what you described Dana's article. It's why I'm not on social media, because it is just a hyper device for mimetic desire. And right around the time I read your book, I read this New Yorker article called the haves and the have Super Yachts. Did that cross your path?

No, no, But I love the sound.

Oh, my gosh, yes. I'll send you the link and I'll put it in the show notes they were talking about. Even the richest people that buy super yachts immediately start comparing to the guy that has the bigger super yacht or the newer super yacht or the next superyacht, and that there's no there there. And we know from you're deeply immersed in the world of theology, but we know that envy is one of the seven deadly sins. And our culture acts like jealousy and envy are so wrong, and yet so much of our life sparks it. That's what I find. I find it so hard to resist that comparison turning into jealousy, turning into mimetic rivalry, as you describe. And that's something I just really appreciate is how you kind of give us all permission that this is an operating system of being human.

It is. And there's nothing inherently bad about mimetic desire, right? So it's, like, not something to beat ourselves up over. It's just part of what it means to be human that we're social creatures. Our desires are formed through relationships with other people. And that can be a very beautiful thing. You know, you can have wonderful, good desires, right? Like, shaped and reinforced in friendships in your relationship with your spouse or whoever, even with work colleagues, maybe. Another reason I picked that quote by Daniel is that, like, it helps to have a sense of humor about the stuff, sort of to be able to laugh at ourselves sometimes. Like, I wrote this book, and I still do this stuff all the time talking to my wife, Claire. I had this, like, for, like, a couple of months earlier this year, I started getting this idea, like, I have to write another book and I have to write it now kind of a thing. And it was like, I had, like, one of those moments where I, like, totally convinced myself of this. And I had a sort of a breakthrough moment where a couple people asked me the right questions. And I realized that that was a desire that had just been modeled to me by a couple of very specific people. And I actually didn't want to write a book. I don't want to write a book. For now. I'm not quite ready to. Right. I don't know when I will be. But it's just so funny that I was like, wow, that was 100% mimetic desire. That was, like, propelling me to do this thing for. I don't know, probably for, like, all the wrong reasons.

That's what I find interesting about success, too, is that success can spark unconscious memetic desire. Like I could imagine your publisher saying to you, hey, Luke, wanting was such a big success. We've got to ride the momentum of that. Now's the time. Strike while the iron's hot. Or your agent telling you something like that. And it's so easy for other people as well, to shape those shoulds. But what you should do, that's absolutely.

Part of what was happening. And apologize if anybody can hear. I'm watching a hawk attack a flock of crows outside of my window here in Washington, D.C. and the Crows are being very loud. I'm sorry about that.

This can be a metaphor for something in our conversation. We saw a hawk really close yesterday at Red tailed hawk. I love sightings.

Yeah. Yeah, I think that's what it is. These crows are going crazy. I apologize.

That's okay. There's something very epic about this.

I live in the middle of Washington, D.C. this is not a sight that you see every day. So other people telling us what we should want really is a core problem. And I see this all the time with students. One of the hats that I wear is as a college professor, and I teach mostly freshmen, and they're just told by people, well, you're really good at math, therefore you should go into finance or something like that. And maybe they are, maybe they're not. And also, just because you're good at something doesn't necessarily mean that they might be good at many different things. Right. Why does that necessarily lead to that? Or why does the success of wanting mean that I have to write another book? So we get on these, like, mimetic tracks or pathways where we begin to think that I have to take this very specific next step because that's just the way life is. Graduate from high school, I go to college, I go to college, I have to do this. And I, you know, work in investment banking for two years and then go get my mba and then, you know, which is the cycle that I was stuck on when I graduated from a business school. But everybody should question their idea of the track, where they got the idea from in the first place, and whether or not it's even healthy.

Yeah, 100%. Especially being younger. It's so easy to be influenced by all these outside forces. Speaking of Dana's opening epigraph to the book, I mentioned it to you before we hit record and speaking of Brazilian butt lifts, that I feel that the Kardashians are such a central part of at least American culture. But I'm pretty sure it's gone global. And for the longest time, I Resisted watching at all. I can't watch it. I'm not gonna watch it. Okay. And then they moved to Hulu, and I couldn't resist, like the magnet of my hand on the remote. And finally I put the show and I watched with a very strange sense of schadenfreude. Like, I don't actually enjoy it on some level, but then on another, it has completely hijacked my brain. So I was both watching from a cultural anthropological standpoint, but clearly there's something in me that's drawn to these shiny things. Even though if I would tell you out loud, I don't wanna be or do any of that, some of it really annoys me. But why is it that, for example, the Kardashians have captured with a K so much of our collective consciousness? We'll throw some more Ks in.

It's a great question. Why do we find joy in hate watching? Right? And this sense of schadenfreude, I think that people have built billion dollar businesses on that emotion or on this kind of weird form of envy in the form of mimetic desire. I think, you know, this is just a theory that I have and I've talked about. There's a member of my household who watches the Kardashians every Saturday morning. I won't say who. And, you know, we talked about this, and in some weird way, it seems like what the Kardashians have done is sort of make themselves seem like enough like you and I for us to be able to relate to them in this weird way, but also, like, not being able to relate to them at all because they live in extremely different lives, but they've somehow managed to, like, hack our brains or something where we feel this strange sense of kindredness to them. I mean, now maybe it's just because they beam themselves into our households and into our lives all the time. And I guess maybe, you know, you just start to think that you're more familiar with them than you really are. And I think we probably say the same thing for many people that we follow on social media or who we watch on tv, which begins to create this, like, sense of kinship, which in my book in Rene Girard says that the stronger that sense is, like, the more we feel some sense of similarity, the more powerful a person becomes a model of desire for us. And I think they've managed to hack that. I don't think they did it intentionally. Maybe they did. I don't know. Maybe they're just social media and TV geniuses or something like that, but I think that has something to do with it.

We'll be right back just after this.

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There is almost a Trumpian skillfulness of just getting coverage. Getting coverage, knowing what people will want and like giving it to the people. And I was reading some think piece on it that as well. Even if you hate all but one of the Kardashians, there's one that we might connect to or resonate with. And then now there's so many of them, even into another generation of Kardashians, that it's like we can each tap into one that maybe we think we're like. I found that so interesting, the idea of mimetic rivalry that people that are so far away from what we could be, do or have, we feel less of that hot sense of rivalry, envy, jealousy, whatever you want to call it, but that it's actually people closer to us. In our circle you described a friend or we can imagine someone who maybe we started out careers were in the same place and then seeing people, I don't know what triggers the mimetic rivalry. You could say it better than me, but why is it so triggering the people that are closest to us sometimes?

Well, I mean, I think it's why high school reunions are so weird, right? Because we have so much in common with those people. We're the same age, we have the same shared experience. So it's just way easier to compare ourselves to those people. There's a direct correlation between like proximity, like social proximity, and the propensity for Envy or rivalry. So I'll often ask people, like, so who are you more sort of jealous of or envious of, like, Jeff Bezos or the person that you work with who has a slightly nicer car and, like, might make 5 or $10,000 more? And for almost everybody, it's the second person, and it's like, huh, that's interesting. Like, why is that? Again, it goes back to the similarity, right? It's just easier to compare ourselves to them. They seem less otherworldly to us, so we see part of ourselves in them. And it's easier for us to sort of see our own deficiencies in people that are more like us. So we've got to be really mindful of that. I mean, it's interesting. If you look at the 10 Commandments in the Bible, one of the most fascinating things about them to me is that, like, many of them, at least the last five, have to do with your neighbor. And the last three. You mentioned the word neighbor five times. It's like, what's special about our neighbor? Well, I think it's very intentional that it mentions our neighbor, because our neighbor is the person who is easiest for us to see, right? To see and compare ourselves with. And that's one of the problems with social media, is that we now see, like, now everybody is our neighbor, right? We now see things that we never saw before. Like what? Somebody our age living on the other side of the world, what kind of music they're into, what kind of clothes they wear. Sight is closely connected to mimetic desire. So the idea of proximity is important. And people can move in and out of close proximity, right? You can have somebody who wasn't close to us all of a sudden become close to us, and it stokes something that wasn't there before. Right? Like, this happened to me with a business partner. We lived on different sides of the country. We didn't talk that much, and we had a great relationship. And then all of a sudden, they were in my same city, lived on the same block. We were spending like 40 hours a week together. And all of a sudden there was a bit of, like, strange things started to enter the relationship.

I was going to ask you about that. You know, anytime you write a book, I feel like we were called to then live that message and that the book shapes you at the same way that you shape the book. Have you had experiences since where, even though you're the guy that wrote the book on wanting, even though you're so close to this research, I'm just curious how the process of writing or launching the book tested you in these ways?

It tested me tremendously. Like it opened up doors to a world of publishing that I didn't know at all before I wrote this book. Right? I mean, this book was. I mean, in some ways was just kind of like dumb luck. I won't tell you the whole story of how it came into being, but like, I wasn't even set out to write it. It just sort of happened very fast and it just opened me up to this world of like blurbs.

Tell us. I love geeking out about this kind of stuff.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like I got to a point with seeking out blurbs that I was told my editor and my agent, like, this is crazy. Like I'm spending so much time and energy and. And I care way too much about this that is it really worth getting these things right? Do we really need another one? And I just find myself caring about it way more than I should. I think they matter just less than most authors at least think that they do. And that same story sort of played itself out in numerous ways, right? I'm trying to make a bunch of people happy, including my publisher and my agent. And at one point I found myself caught in a cycle even with that. And I tell you so many examples of how that happened with publishing the book. And then comes like the media sort of thing. And if you don't have sort of good boundaries, you know, you do go through a phase when you write a book where you say yes to pretty much everything, right? You know how that is. But like, when's enough, right? Like, do I do that, like forever? Like, how do I draw the boundaries? Am I going to do that for six months? Am I going to do that for nine months? Like, what are the kinds of things I say yes to? What are the kinds of things I say no to? And if you don't sort of have a hierarchy of values, right? Where does my family fit into that? Where does my sanity fit into that? All that stuff you can just get. Mimetic desire can just begin to take over your life. Like I notice it like start to pull me like a riptide. And the difference between me now and me 10 or 15 years ago is that now I usually know that it's happening and I feel it. It's almost like motion. And I'm able to sort of gain self possession back. That's the real difference.

What an apt description. I notice it start to pull me like a riptide. Specifically, how do you experience that Riptide feeling.

I feel it in here. I am like at this event or doing this thing. I have no idea how I even got here. It's almost as if like the person that said yes to all of these things, like, I have no memory of it.

Almost like fascinating.

I was like operating on just sort of like outside of myself, right? Like operating in some protocol without having a sense of intentionality about it. So like thinking like, how did I get here? Why am I here? Why do I feel such tension inside that just like, helps me to wake up sometimes and just realize that I need to have a greater level of intentionality. So, like, in the moment, processing of things, being honest with myself about my emotions and what I really want to do. Just recently I was like, wow, I really just want to sort of be with my wife and have dinner tonight and not have to go do this thing. It brings me back and helps me reprioritize things.

I had that same feeling last night. Got invited to something, some fancy New Yorky thing. But I was so tired and I could feel. Talk about the riptide. I could feel the FOMO riptide starting its work. Like, but you better go. But you never know who you could meet.

You never know who you are.

There was nothing in my body that wanted to go. It was just all those shoulds. And I've been thinking a lot about. I mean, I constantly think about the relationship between setting goals and launching a big project and wanting it to be successful in the world with also complete surrender. And I find it very challenging when doing something like launching a book. Most people would set goals like how many books they want to sell, how many Amazon reviews, where to fall on the rankings, trying to make a list, win some awards. There are so many external markers of success and some of that can be fun, gamifying life in that way. Or business book writing, book selling. But then for me, it's so quickly curdles into disappointment. And I noticed that I don't know for some reason, when I set goals that are big and audacious and too specific. The way that that mimetic desire kind of goes wrong for me when it's not positive is when. Then I start grasping. Now it's not enough. However many I've sold is not enough. Oh, now I see another book. It launched way more recently than mine and it has 10 times the number of Amazon reviews and it has sold 10 times the number of copies. And I find it so hard. I hate that feeling of being like disappointed or sad or comparing and same as you, it's like I have to just pull myself back from it. But in the business world, it's all about the goals and the metrics and the competition of it all.

It is. But so often, I mean, goals are a very tricky new thing, right? I mean, there's just so much that's written about how to set goals, right? Like, make them specific, smart goals, all that stuff. But nobody really talks about, like, why we choose the goals that we choose in the first place, right? Like, might it be because of a sense of insecurity? There's a lot of questions, right, that go at the heart of why we're attracted to certain goals in the first place. Like, sure, I can help you set the goals in a really smart way. But, like, are those the right goals? Like, nobody talks about that.

That's true.

In a business context, goals can just be totally, like, manipulated, right? So in the nonprofit philanthropy world, you know, you'll just see people play with goals all the time to sort of get funding for a project or something like that, and then the goals sort of change or you can kind of like fudge how you meet that goal. So I think that goals are just often used as part of some kind of a game. I think goals are good if they're genuine, real goals and, you know, you've arrived at them through a serious process of reflection. All of us probably can just think about why we're choosing the goals that we're choosing and like, what happens if we achieve that goal, right? And then paying attention to what happens to us when we achieve that goal can begin to be a process of setting better goals.

You talk about to that end, the difference between thin desires, I think you call them thin and thick desires. And in the theology world, there's even a process of discernment. So how have you, I mean, even since diving into the research. But what's your process now for calling to get to those thick desires?

It's a long process. There's really not an easy hack to it. There is a process of discernment. But for me, you know, I no longer take my desires for grant. It was one of my fundamental problems growing up. I just thought that everything that I wanted was just the product of my all knowing, autonomous, confident self, right? And I was this confident kid. So I never examined the things that I wanted and asked myself the right sort of questions about them. I never put my desires to the test. And there's many ways to put them to the test. You can sort of project out 1015, 20 years into the future and ask yourself questions like, okay, if I get everything that I wanted here, then what. What comes next? And you can sort of do exercises of imagination to sort of help you kick the tires of your own desires a little bit. Taking breaks. I mean, every year I go on a silent retreat, and it's amazing, like, the insight that I get after three or four days of letting all of the noise die down, I actually. Thick desires begin to bubble up that I had forgotten about, that I didn't even know were there. I do an exercise that I describe in the book, like digging up stories of times in my life, going back to even my childhood when I was engaged in deeply fulfilling activities that had some enduring satisfaction or sense of joy attached to them. Because those are kind of a hint that maybe there's something about those specific kinds of desires that I was fulfilling that have a bit of thickness to them. Like, the definition of a thin desire is something that's driven through mostly mimetic desire. And it's sort of a throwaway desire. It's the kind of desire that once I fulfill it, it's just gone, and I just move on to the next thing. Right? And just like cycling through crappy movies or something like that, I would say knowing your history of desire and going through that is kind of a sacred space, in my opinion. And learning the history of desire of other people can begin to give you an insight into what's a thick desire and what's thin. I mean, everybody knows how this works, right? You look back to, like, some of the things that you cared about in high school or college, and you realize that they were kind of silly, but all of us still are still those same people. And there are probably things that five or 10 years from now, we want really badly right now that we're going to realize we're kind of, you know, ultimately not going to be fulfilling. Journaling is helpful for me as well, like tracking these things throughout the course of a month and then going back and being able to tie why I wanted certain things at certain times to the external influences on me. So I'd mentioned that I went through a couple of months or I really wanted to write a book. It took me going through this exercise to realize that, well, that desire started around the exact time that I started having conversations with a couple of professionals, particular people who were sort of very aggressively pushing that. And then as soon as they went away, that desire went away. Well, that might be an indication that that's a pretty thin desire on My part.

Yeah. It makes me think of the Buddhist phrase hungry ghosts that they're never fed. So I love how you're describing your practices and that. That's so good to kind of look back and reverse engineer almost. Which desires we had that they're almost insatiable. It's never enough. It's a hungry ghost versus the ones that are deeply rewarding.

We'll be right back just after this.

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This was the first time in all the business books I've read so many. But the first time you talked about the chefs who had stopped caring about Michelin stars, you know, the number one signal of achievement in their industry for a certain type of restaurant. And even now, to this day, I had my husband read wanting, of course not had I just told him, don't miss this book. It's amazing. And he is still constantly referencing the Ferrari Lamborghini rivalry and how who opted.

Out of that Lamborghini.

Lamborghini. Okay.

The story that I told in the book comes from a book that I found in Italy, and it was only in Italian, and it was Ferruccio Lamborghini, the founder of the Lamborghini car company. His son was telling this story, and I realized that it didn't exist anywhere else in the world outside of the Italian language in this one particular particular book. So that was my source for the story in the book of, you know, Lamborghini got this idea to start a car company, really just do a rivalry with Enzo Ferrari, who was the most popular automobile manufacturer in the world, and then succeeded, really. And then at a certain point opted out because he saw it was just going to lead him to a never ending cycle of rivalry. But it was pretty cool because just last week that a movie, like a major film, is coming out in the US Next year based off of that very book I used as source material for Want. So it's gonna be super cool for me to see that movie. Hmm.

Do you get a writer's credit?

I wish.

I wish for some royalties on that one.

Yeah.

Wow. That was a deep dig that you did. To pull that out and find that's incredible.

That was incredibly satisfying to me. Cause I felt like I had stumbled on this gem and being able to translate it right. And pull out the gems. Cause the book is long and I didn't have that much room. Right. To be able to pull it out and translate it as work that I find brings me a lot of joy.

Wow, that's amazing. And Even now, with F1 becoming so popular because of the Netflix series, we can see the path that Ferrari took. And just knowing that backstory about Lamborghini and how it just speaks to such a sense of integrity within oneself to opt out of that, even if the other one's competing with you. You're like, no, I know what's important to me.

Yeah. And speaking of F1, that's so funny that you mentioned that because I have like a bunch of friends who have been like, you gotta watch the F1 series. Like, we're super into F1 now. You know, it's so funny because there's this whole like, mimetic thing, right? Like, you know, we're not into football and baseball anymore. We're into Formula One, Right. It's like these American friends that I.

Talk about another show that they turned into brain candy. It's fast, it's colorful, it's competitive, but my dad loves it. But in later seasons, they've realized that the drama between the players is what supposedly people like. So now my dad calls it the real Housewives of F1.

This show is kind of over the top in terms of the drama and manufacturing these rivalries.

Sure, it's good. I've watched some of it. I'm not a total F1 fan quite yet. Quite yet. Even though I lived in Europe for a few years, you know, on the Michelin star thing, I think the important question to ask ourselves is, like, what are your Michelin stars? Right. Like, what's a Michelin star to you? So I read this story about this French chef who had received three Michelin stars for over a decade. Every year he got three Michelin Stars. It's the highest amount of stars that you can get. There are not very many restaurants in the world that have three Michelin stars, and he opted out. He told the Michelin Guide not to come back to his restaurant, which had never happened before, because his entire world began to revolve around keeping the third star. And every time the inspectors came, he was terrified. So he tailored his whole menu around what he thought these Michelin Guide inspectors wanted to see from him. And he just said, you know what? It's not worth it. Right. I've worked my whole life to get these stupid stars. And, yes, they can be reflective of a great dining experience. I love food. I love great restaurants and dining experiences, not just the food itself. It just happened so easily. And so I traveled there and I interviewed him and got some more detail out of him, and he said it was one of the best decisions that he ever made. And I realized, like, well, what Michelin stars do I have? I don't know. Is it some bestseller list for my book? I don't know. But I think most of us have them buried in our heart somewhere, and it's worth taking the time to try to figure out what they are.

Yes. And then. Oh, just seeing the relief. And even then, they tried to kind of shunned him a little bit. They did their own petty things. But the relief that he described, that you described, way to put that one on the business card. Let me just travel to an exotic restaurant.

They shunned him, and then they came back after taking a year off, and they gave him two stars. It's like, really? Yeah. I said, well, how did that make you feel? I said, what did you do when you learned that you had two Michelin stars right now? And he just said, I laughed.

Exactly.

And I just thought that was the perfect response. What more can you do, right? You've done what you need to do. And there are certain things that are out of your control that you have to be able to just kind of throw up your hands and just laugh at.

And then I'm a big believer that he'll be so much happier. So will the staff, so will the customers. People will still word of mouth pass along the restaurant. Like, I don't believe that the negative impact that we think will happen when we say no to one of our inner Michelin stars is the case, but just our fears would have us believe that.

No. And we know. We know right through science that we completely always sort of overvalue the risk side of things and make a lot of Decisions driven based on fear. Kind of. This is what, you know, what's behind FOMO and is a huge driver with memetic desire. You know, it's fear that drives so much of this fear of being insignificant, you know, all of these things. So coming to grips with our fear, recognizing our fear, you know, it's possible to overcome it, but it's hard to do it if you don't have people that support you. Right. Like people that are able to help you on that journey. Good friends. Right. People that help you recognize the lies that you may be telling yourself or that other people might be telling you, but the lies that you might be telling yourself. Hard to do alone, right? In isolation. He had a family and friends and support. For instance, his father, who started the restaurant, the saying, you know what, Sebastian? It's okay. Like, I love you. Right? You can do this. And there was no sense of condemnation if things didn't go well.

So, last question before we wrap up. Will Storr wrote a book, maybe it's on your radar, that I would call cousin to yours. It came out after yours, on the status game, and specifically the three status games that we're all part of, like it or not. So how do we reconcile the fact that just the nature of humanity is to play status games, and yet they can just turn so quickly? So I guess I'm just wondering, knowing we have these aspects of ourselves, maybe you've already said it. Like, knowing that on some deep level, we do crave status within our industry, within our career path, within our community, how do we keep that status game in check?

Well, I'd love to read the book. I haven't read it yet, so I'm.

Interested to see me either. It's just on my radar.

Yeah, well, it's on mine as well. Now, we live in a hierarchical world, and that's just sort of the structure of reality. And I think that's part of what we're looking for with status. It just depends on what form the status takes, right? Like, why are we seeking the status? I think, like, a healthy form of status would be like a form of professional prestige where you say that you're going to do something and you always show up and you have integrity and honesty and. And therefore you're recognized with certain positions of authority, but it's tied to something beneath it that's real, where there are other forms of status that are simply the status, and there's nothing real underneath it. When you actually pull back the COVID I'm just speaking off the Cuff here. I think that thinking of status in a thick way, where the status is indicative of some deeper reality, where the status is just a label or a name or a perception. Who cares? If there's something real attached to it, then we're completely justified in seeking recognition for the person that we really are. Right. Because that is the only kind of recognition that's ultimately going to be truly satisfying for us.

I love that. And we'll have to get in next time into the theological aspects that I know you're deeply studying. Like, I think a lot about our soul's calling and some high status or fame or celebrity or even tons of money, like, may or may not be in our soul's path as well.

I would love that. The time went by too fast, Jenny. So let's continue the conversation.

Oh, it really did. And I was thinking our hawk attacking the crows could be the homework for listeners, which is look like a hawk for all those Michelin stars that you're attached to and no longer want. So what do you think the hawk is? Our aware mind looking for all the faulty Michelin stars.

I love it. Hey, symbols are important. This is a really good one.

You really had a movie. I was like, I don't even know how he's focusing right now because it was a whole movie happening.

It's so funny. My computer's situated in a window and I'm looking directly out the window into, like, a wooded backyard. And this happens, like, once a month. And I was like, I really hope this doesn't happen on a podcast. This hawk just terrorizes this murder of crows, which is what a group of crows is called, apparently.

Yeah.

And it finally happened. But I think we got some good out of it.

That's right. That's right. Well, Luke, thank you so much for being who you are and the heart and soul and spirit that you bring into your work and to the world. Where can people find you if they want to keep in touch?

Well, thanks so much, Jenny. You can find me@luke Burgess.com and I write a weekly newsletter on Substack, which isjust@read.lukeburgis.com Amazing.

I'll put those in the show notes. And do not miss your copy of Wanting the Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life. Luke, thank you so much. And big thanks, everybody, for listening.

Thanks so much.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Pivot podcast. Make sure you don't miss an episode or my insider tips and templates by signing up for Pivot List, a curated twice monthly newsletter where I share the inside scoop on what I'm reading, watching, listening to, and the latest tools I'm geeking out on. Sign up@pivotmethod.com pivotlist get show notes from this episode@pivotmethod.com podcast and connect with me on Twitter at jennyblake.

Remember, build first, then your courage will follow. Hasn't it always.