47: Live Fiercely, Study Deeply . . . While Earning a Living — with Jonathan Fields

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Hello everybody. Welcome back to the Pivot Podcast. I am here live at Good Life headquarters, which is the home of Jonathan Fields. Jonathan is a longtime friend and New York City dad, husband, award winning author, teacher, speaker, media producer and entrepreneur. His book Uncertainty Turning Fear and Doubt into Fuel for Brilliance was one of my favorites and a guiding light for Pivot and was named the top personal development book in 2011 by 800 CEO Reid. Jonathan's current focus, Good Life Project is a media and education venture and global movement that empowers people to live more meaningful, connected and vital lives. Today we're talking about his new book, how to Live a Good Life. Just a little tiny topic that you bit off. Jonathan, welcome to the show.

It's awesome to be hanging out with you on my couches.

This is one of those moments where I pinch my myself that existed five, six, seven years ago and read Career Renegade asking how can I do this? So JF Doing it. Thank you. We're hanging out for everything along the way.

We're literally in the hq My living room. Also known as earning our living and having fun.

I know. Lucky us. And we we did a podcast for your show, which I will point everyone to in the show notes too. You open your book by saying my role has been to live fiercely and study deeply. That's a really interesting personal mission statement. How did you come to that?

I didn't come to it, I just lived it honestly. And I think I've been doing a lot of reflection over a period of years, if not decades now and just kind of trying to understand.

What am I doing here on the planet and a huge amount of just self discovery and one of the things I've learned about myself Is that anytime I take a strength based thing, and I've known this anyway, is that the number one driver for me is a love of learning.

And also like creativity. I love to learn and then turn around and create things. And I'm also, while I read ferociously and I devour knowledge, I'm always also in pursuit of what I would call embodied knowledge. I want to actually do, I learn through doing. And so as great as it is to be able to learn from the work of others in a compressed form, I want to go out there and actually a test what I learn and see if it's valid to me. Because I, I don't actually take much at face value, which is probably part good and part bad, but I also want to live it, I want to feel it, I want to go out and I want to spend a chunk of time living in the world and also contemplating and then see what evolves from that.

When I read that line, live fiercely and study deeply, I had two reactions on the second. I'm curious one, I thought, me too. How did you capture that? And then my second thought was, that's allowed. Like that can be the driving mission, to live fiercely and study deeply. And this little gremlin pops in saying, but how do you earn a living from that? So I'm wondering how you have translated that to your body of work that you get paid for.

Yeah. And it changes on a pretty constant basis. Yeah. You know, this year we've talked about a little bit with, there's, you know, I've, I founded, grown, built, sold a handful of different companies in different spaces. So, you know, it's basically the way that you earn a living at anything. There are only two ways to earn a living. You're either solving a problem or you're delivering a delight. If you're lucky and creative, you do both simultaneously, you know, and the truth is, even if you think that you're purely on the delight side of the spectrum, there's always a shadow side of delight, which is resolving pain. If you look at Pokemon Go, you'd be like, well, that's utterly delight based. If you look at Flappy Birds, massive explosive apps, you're like, well, nobody knew that they needed Pokemon Go or Flappy Bird before they played it, so it wasn't solved. Those things are not solving a problem. It's utterly delight, almost to the level of addiction to dopamine hits of delight. But if you actually dig a little bit deeper, you find that, well, what's really happening there? Why are people so drawn to that, it's because there actually is something missing. There's a malaise, there is a lack of awe, there's a lack of novelty, there's a lack of deep interest, there's a lack of something to strive toward.

That'S there. So there's always that shadow side. So for me.

It starts with generally deep fascination or a knowledge quest.

And at the same time, I love creating something from nothing. And if I can take a quest for knowledge, blend it with a quest to create something from nothing, and figure out how to marry those two in a way that's of value to other people, that's where being able to earn a living comes in. It's not always easy, you know, a lot of times it requires a whole bunch of experimentation. And sometimes I get it wrong a whole bunch of times before I get it right, sometimes I never get it right and I just shut it down and move on. I think a lot of people don't talk about their failures enough. But man, have I failed.

What would you say is your biggest failure to date? And do you even believe in the term failure?

Yeah, I don't view it as a failure. But when you're in it, it sucks big time. And it feels like a failure, like spending, especially if it's public.

But in my world, the only way that you fail is if you move on from an experience that had an outcome that was negative in a way that you didn't want to have it. And you move on without actually doing a postmortem and understanding and learning everything that you can, extracting the knowledge from it and then applying it moving forward. If you do that, in my mind, it's not a failure if you don't do that. Yeah, it's a failure if you ignore the astonishing lessons that just came out of that and you move on blind. That's failure to me.

One of my big man. There are a lot to list, but one that just jumped into my head was I ran for seven years a large size yoga center in New York City. But part of my early vision for that was to see if we could actually create the first national franchise.

I literally went through the entire franchising process. We hired lawyers and went through and created these filing documents and filed in different states and then did two test franchises. And what I learned was that I actually didn't want to be in the yoga franchise business. It was just really, really, really hard. It's a very difficult space to try and standardize on that level. And while I could have pushed forward with it and I think we would have done okay. I realized it actually wasn't the business that I wanted to be in, but I had already invested a lot of money in making it happen. We were public with this. And.

So it meant a big hit to my ego. It meant a big hit to my bank account. And as sometimes happens with entrepreneurs, the core business, because I'd spent so much time on scaling, I hadn't given the core business what it needed. So it was still succeeding, but not nearly on the level of flourishing that it could have been. So I made the decision that I was going to shut it all down. So we wound it down. It took, you know, a whole bunch of stuff to wind it down. And then I just focused all. Basically I asked the question. I was like, okay, what did I just learn here? And then I said, I need to now repair. I need to bring the core business back up to the level that I know it can operate at. So I spend another. The next probably two years bringing coming back first to baseline and then back to flourishing on a really high level. But I don't. While it was brutal going through it, I look at that and man, I learned so much in that process. So much about business process, so much about scaling. Why to scale? Why not to scale? So much about systems and management and program development and just the franchising process also, which is kind of fascinating.

And how so many people do it wrong. So it was hugely valuable as I looked forward and then decided that I want to build other businesses because it gave me just a body of knowledge that I didn't have before. Hard earned and painful, for sure, but valuable nonetheless, once I was able to sort of come back from it.

What I find so interesting about your career is that first you're a lawyer. So to pivot from lawyer to starting and running a yoga studio and experimenting with franchising it. But then take me to that moment of deciding that even running the yoga studio was no longer for you. How. How did you answer that question of what's next in that moment and coming off the heels of what felt like a failure.

Yeah. And so we brought the core business back to a great place and we were doing really well. You know, we were consistently ranked as one of the top studios in the city. And so it wasn't the moment that I decided to sell it. Not really the moment, but the process wasn't about.

Things not working. It was actually working really well. But it was about me personally being ready to move on. And there were a couple of awakenings. One is it was a community based business. It still is, it's still there and thriving.

And any community needs a deeply invested leader. And I had started to check out and I realized it wasn't fair to the community. And while nobody said anything to me, I'm pretty confident that the people closest to me sensed it. I had pulled back to a point where at one point I had a heavy teaching schedule, we were training tons of teachers and I had pulled back to the point where we had a great management staff and I was literally working probably five hours a week and teaching one class a week. And the students, the community, the teachers, people had to have been wondering and it wasn't fair. A community needs a shepherd who really cares and was invested. And I had checked out and I needed to own that. And at the simultaneously with me.

I was getting more and more interested in other stuff. You know, I was getting really deeply interested in writing and speaking and in the digital world and in producing media and just serving in a different way.

So I started to explore that and started to do test the waters a little bit. And I actually was able to sell my first book while I was still.

What year was this?

This was. Sold the book in 2007, I think.

And so you were still with Sonic?

Yeah, yeah, I sold the Yoga center in 2000. The end of 2008. Yeah, my last day was like December 2008. It was about a year.

So that whole year I knew I was on my way out and was negotiating the sale of the company and stuff like that. But nobody from the outside knew exactly what was happening. I remember to this day teaching my last class and nobody in that class knew that it was my last class until the end. So it was like full lunchtime class and 90 minute class. And at the end.

I brought everyone down to Shavasana, which, if you're not exposed to yoga, sort of final relaxation. Everyone's just kind of lying there with their eyes closed for about four or five minutes. And I was just sitting on a mat in a little half lotus position and the room was quiet. And nobody knew that this was the last class that I would ever teach. And I just looked around and I was trying to hold it together because I was looking at this room and here are these like beautiful souls, many of whom had been with me for years.

As students and ostensibly, but truth, you know, as my teachers just as much as their students. And I was about to walk away.

And I knew that, that when they opened their eyes, I was going to have to tell them that.

And.

It was a moment where I had a lot of trouble talking, and I asked them to open their eyes, come sit up. And I shared that.

This was actually the last class that I would be teaching there, and people were kind of like, what?

And I made the decision not to. To say anything before, not to sort of announce it, because I just. I wanted to just kind of step aside and let. Let the community continue, you know, And. And what was interesting is that moment was really hard for me. But the day that I literally walked out and handed over the keys, I never looked back. You know, I was complete. I was good. It was ready.

Yeah. It's amazing. Sometimes making the decision is tough. So is communicating it, and they're two separate things. Were you at all worried at the time about how you would support yourself in this new direction, primarily as an author, before you had created the rest of your digital empire?

I'm trying to put myself back there. Yeah. Yes and no. So just from a pure nuts and bolts standpoint, I just sold a company, so I was okay for a while. I had a new book with a major publisher that was coming out, and I figured, you know, this is the perfect setup. I've bought myself a nice chunk of time to just invest in this next career. I've got a book, I'm writing it with a major publisher who should get behind it, and everything was looking great. And then the end of 2008 hit and the economy collapsed, and I was coming out with a book where the fundamental message was, hey, think about leaving your job and doing something deeply meaningful to you and unconventional. And that was not what most people wanted to hear. My publisher went black for two, two weeks immediately before the book came out because nobody knew if publishing was going to exist.

Wow.

Yeah.

How did you handle that? So this book is coming out. It seems ill.

There was a lot of anxiety, a lot of tap dancing. But what I still believed was that the fundamental message was still really powerful and timely, but we needed to change the conversation around it. So rather than, you know, everything that the media was saying was doom and gloom, the sky is falling. If you have a job, dear God, hold onto it for life. And I wanted to say, listen, I'm not going to deny the pain. This is a really bad time for a lot of people. A lot of people are losing jobs, and the companies and the jobs and the positions don't exist anymore. So not like you could find it again. When things are better, they just. They're gone for life, I said, but for so many people, You've hated that. The thing that you've been doing has been a cage that you felt locked into for years, if not decades. And the only thing that's kept you locked there is because you felt like if you walked away from it, whether it's retraining for another company or starting your own thing, you would have been completely outcast and judged by those who are looking to you to be secure and stable. And now they can't. You can't be judged anymore because you don't have anything to go back to. So why not take this as a window, as an opportunity, you know? And it was like, rather than running around with an umbrella to try and protect you from the sky falling, why not run around with a bucket and gather up the possibility that's draining from the clouds?

What a great metaphor. I love, too, how this turned into the message of uncertainty, which came out in 2011. And I referenced this book of yours all the time, which is essentially how to turn fear into fuel for brilliance. Fear and un security. And you talk about how uncertainty is actually fundamental to creating meaningful work, even though we grapple with it so much and we resist it and we feel sick to our stomachs about it. You know, you even write in your book that you said, living perpetually in the question often gutted me. And yet we're born to create. You say you were born to create something from nothing.

How do. How have you learned to cope with this? I don't even know if it's a paradox, but just this notion of uncertainty as the fuel for creativity, even though it continues to be uncomfortable.

Yeah, it's funny, as soon as we start talking about creativity, the sirens in the background, it's like, red alert, warning, warning. We're going to uncharted territory. Welcome to New York City.

Your brain is on fire, Right?

I know. I love the podcasts that are filmed, like, in private places in small towns. It's like all you hear is, like.

Lush silence and maybe a bird chirping or two. Ours, probably. When people are listening, they're walking down the street, like, where's the siren? No, it's just in your earbuds.

Yeah.

So the question was, how do I deal with that?

Yeah. How have you learned both from writing the book and doing all the research and even in the years since.

Yeah. So my practice, my daily practice is essential. And being able to stay in that place where I don't know where things are going to end or how they're going to end. And for me to be able to Stay in that space of not knowing of the unknown, of uncertainty, long enough for the really good stuff to emerge. Practice mindfulness, practice, meditation. Movement is part of it. So it's a big part of it. And that creates a persistent ability to breathe through it and to know that this is actually a valuable and necessary place to be if you want to actually go a level deeper. And I do.

And the other part of it is experience. I've probably been through this. I'm 50, which freaks my friends out in the online world. They're like, dude, you're so old. There's a certain truth to that. But at the same time, there's a certain amount of wisdom. There's a certain amount of iterations.

Through highs and lows and successes and failures, and throughout the. Trying, through, wading into that space so many times now and knowing how uncomfortable it can be and wanting to run through it or run back out of it and finding some way to stay in it long enough for really juicy stuff to emerge and knowing that that is, in fact, the process and that there is an end, that if you stay in it long enough, if you equip yourself with the skills and the practices to be there and you do the work while you're there, rather than just wallowing and waiting, that good stuff happens.

Why is it that the end is usually farther out than we want it to be? Sometimes it seems like it's never gonna end.

Yeah. And the truth is, you know, it is never gonna end.

This is true.

You know.

It ends when you choose to stop growing as long as.

Or you choose to stop seeing the unknowing as a person.

Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, if you look at. So I'm wired to pursue possibility, and there is no possibility without uncertainty. You know, the moment that you close the door on uncertainty, the moment you move from uncertainty to certainty.

You close the door on possibility, on opportunity, on growth. And I don't want to live in that place, you know, So I choose to continually wade into that place where I don't know what's coming next, because that is the place where possibility takes root. And I don't want to live without having that a part of my life.

You mentioned your daily practice and in the book, too. Keeping your channel open. Unpack it for us. What does it look like exactly?

Yeah. So it's really simple. Morning practice. And. And it's kind of fun. We're actually building a whole sort of practice guidebook around this book, too. But for me, it's pretty simple. In the morning, it's a 25 minute mindfulness practice. Starts with actually about three minutes of yogic breathing. And then it moves into just a very traditional, very simple mindfulness practice. So I wake up really early in the morning without an alarm clock before anybody else. It's very quiet in the house with my eyes semi closed and in a hazy state. I kind of feel my way into the kitchen where the coffee machine is basically set. So I just have to hit one button to grind some fresh beans, put it in and hit a second button where it just starts to percolate in the background. I come back and I sit and I do my breathing and my meditation, knowing that by the time I'm done, the aroma will be wafting. And then I'll go and have my cup of coffee and then I usually sit and, and try and spend a few hours really trying to do the most meaningful work of the day, the stuff that is most important, which is not always the stuff that I'm most looking forward to, to be honest with you, but it's generally the most generative, creative stuff so that I can have that done. So very often by the time mid morning comes, I've had a good day.

What do you most look forward to?

It depends on the day, you know, from a work standpoint or a life standpoint.

You know, I know how it is too and we put the big priorities up at the top and use your best creative energy windows. But I'm curious because I love. There's certain stuff I love procrastinating with. I'm curious what that is for you.

The procrastination for me is anything involving process and instructional design. Me too. It is my wall of suck here in a huge, huge way. Which is funny because, you know, like we've built these big courses and all sorts of stuff.

So you're saying you don't like dealing with the process stuff?

No. The stuff that you love, I hate.

Oh my gosh.

Oh my God.

It's like I know little zaps and automation.

We're like the Ying and yang with that. That for me is, is pure evil.

Like I know there are people like you, and I thank God that I know them because they're on my team and they're my friends and I can run this stuff by them. But at the same time, I know that I have to be involved in a certain amount of that with some of the work that we do. So translating ideas and fundamental frameworks and patterns and awakenings and the real deep creative work and the theoretical stuff into stuff which is program based and iterative and has a really intelligent instructional design behind it. I know is super valuable. But it comes so hard to me. So that's not the stuff that I love doing. The stuff I love doing you play hooky with. Yeah.

Like where you just steal away to go do it.

So I. I steal away just to steal away. I mean, seriously, like, you put me in nature, you put me by the water. That's where I touch stone. I don't need to be doing anything. I just need to be being there. Those are big resets for me. Working with my hands is something that I'm trying to do a lot more. We're sitting in my living room and there are two mic stands in front of us. And the mic stands are attached to a table that I built. And it's built from plywood and a whole bunch of torn out pages from 1950s Archie's comics with resin poured over it. On the other part of the room is a living room table, which I built also, and that's poured concrete built on these, like steel legs. So I. And I haven't been doing that nearly as much over the last year or so. And it's killing me. Like, I'm really looking forward to getting back to creating with my hands, which I did for a lot of my life. And my next big project I've been talking about for years now, but it's gonna happen soon, I hope, is I want to learn Luthery, which is building guitars.

So that's something that I'm really into. And also I was a painter as a kid. I loved creating stuff, but also wr. So I really enjoy not just the information in writing, but I love. I obsess over language, over the craft of language, which is not something that was an earlier part of my life, actually. It's something that's kind of touched down a little bit later in life.

You also have such a gift for storytelling, both your own personal stories and interviewing. You've done hundreds of interviews now for good life projects. One in particular that you mention in the book is with Elizabeth Gilbert. And you say you describe it as being magical and that it seemed like space suspended for those moments you were talking to her. And what a joyful experience to have had. And I did go and listen a second time after reading your book to just hear that moment as you had described it. What do you think? What are the ingredients to those magical moments? When they happen? Are they just. Do they just fall from the sky or is there something that you do or that we can do to really tap into that flow, either with people or with our work.

That's such a good question. I don't know if I have any universal answer to it, so. But I can try and maybe deconstruct a little bit of. If I think about when it's happened in my life or in some of the conversations that have been so blessed to have over the years. And I think it generally happens when you have. When you're in a space where through some combination of reasons, there's an experience of safety. Like, we can drop the facade. We can be who we are. We can be dorky, funny, vulnerable, stupid, brilliant. Whatever it is that you feel like is the true. You probably shouldn't have used the word stupid. Stupid. Right. None of us are stupid. Sometimes we feel. But just being utterly you. And when you drop the weight of everything and everyone that you're trying to be, there's a truth and a joy and a lightness that emerges. And if you have people doing that in a space together and then you're either engaged in an activity or exploring ideas and constructs concepts, stories that where in some people, both people are genuinely interested, like whatever the topic is or the activity is, it's a true spark for both people.

That there's something that happens. There's just something really powerful that happens. A lot of us have heard the term flow. And it's the state where you become. There are like eight characteristics of flow, where you become absorbed and there are all these things. And it's. That we may call it being in the zone where you just lose time, fugues and you become this activity. And most of us have had moments of that. Less explored but actually researched is something which popularly you would call group flow. And there is. I'm trying to remember the scientific term. I think it's autolytic or auto. I can't remember exactly what it is, but you can actually have groups of people who enter that state together. And you see this very often in athletic teams competing at a really high level who've been playing together for a long time, where they just. They know each other so deeply and so intuitively. You know, like if somebody's playing basketball and one person doesn't even have to look. They throw the ball up in one direction and they know that that other person, the woman they've been playing with for the last eight years, will be in the air at that exact moment in time, 19 inches from the hoop with their hand, ready to just slam it in. You know, there's Something stunning about that.

And it happens with groups and with individuals. And so I think part of it is about everyone just being utterly real and completely there in the moment. And part of it also is about the nature of the activity where it's the thing that everybody is just sparked by.

I had chills as you were describing that. That's so cool.

I also have been kind of looking at this concept of people flow that I think we hear so much about flow in our work. And like you said, when we feel in the zone. What I find really interesting is when people start, we click into some flow around people who, who we meet, when we meet them, how the conversations go like with you and Liz Gilbert.

So there's also probably something else, which is where you probably get a little woo woo with this, which is there's sometimes you meet somebody and there's just a knowing that this person is your person.

Yes. I call those soul travelers.

Yeah. Where you're just like, yeah, we're kind of meant to be here, like doing this thing and talking about this stuff right now. And we may actually split and never talk to each other again. But at this time, in this moment, these people.

There'S a knowing like you know each other on some level which transcends this particular moment. And I don't usually get all that metaphysical, but the older I get, the more open to experiences that I just can't explain through research like that become.

How do you think this idea of group flow relates to. You know, you run your own business and of course you have support and you have a team and your wife Stephanie is so wonderful. Can we experience group flow even when we're working independently? And do you have a sense for that in your business?

Yeah, that's an interesting question. Working independently or working remotely?

Well, running your own business, you're not on a team like the basketball team. I mean, of course you have your team of people under you, let's say.

Trust me, in my team, everybody's over me.

I'm really good at doing what I'm told to do with the totem pole.

Yeah, that's good.

Can you have that in sort of a distributed team or even a. Not a team.

Not even a team.

Like a group of people. I don't know. I think you can move in and out of it. You know, there are certainly people that have been like small groups of people that have been, you know, become very close friends with where we're all kind of. It's more like when you got a kid in the very early Days kids don't actually play together. They play next to each other. They call it parallel play. And it's almost like that we're all creating our own stuff, but we're sort of following a similar paradigm and a similar ethos. And.

Actually I think you can have that because we've created that in some of the experiences that we've done in the past. It's on hiatus this year, but for years we ran something called the Immersion Project. And we would bring together people from all over the world for a solid chunk of months, a better part of a year, and everyone's working on their own thing. But we created the container. We basically brought together people with shared values and aspirations and then moved them through a process of self discovery and connection and progressive revelation and vulnerability. So they felt deeply connected. And.

The level, the depth of relationship that's sustained with each one of those groups has been really astonishing to watch. It's a real gift to kind of have been able to participate in and then see continue on just independently. And I would probably think that a lot of that is pretty close to the experience of what we're talking about.

I love you're relating it to the concept of parallel play. That's a nice way to think about it. You also mentioned the idea of metaphysical concepts. And in the book you debunk, or at least you share your thoughts on manifesting. This is something that I've grappled with over the years because I have what I call in my brain, the personal development police. If I ever think anything is at all out of my control, they start wrapping on my brain like, you just have to think the good thoughts and anything is possible. And yet, on the other hand, there's this concept of surrender. Tell us, what are your thoughts on the concept of manifesting? What does it actually mean to you? What do you call that juxtaposition?

I have an interesting relationship with the word.

So my wiring tends to be. If there's a scientific explanation for something, if there's a phenomenon that happens and there's a clear scientific explanation for it, I'm going to default to that.

Because that lets my rational brain take action. And also because if I'm sharing that with other people, I want their rational brains to have some place to hang the hook for action. If there isn't, but I can still see the phenomena is clearly happening, I'm open to something that I can't explain being behind it. So when I look at manifestation, which to me my brain kind of puts the filter on, says well, this is.

I don't want to say metaphysical or spiritual. It's a non scientific overlay on goal achievement. Yes, the word itself is somewhat tainted. So essentially what you're saying is I want this to happen. I want this to happen in my life, which is, this is a goal. But the difference being manifesting would then say, but don't make it a goal, just allow it to happen.

So the thing is, if that was the process, if it was 100% about just that, about seeing it happen, giving it permission to happen, asking for it to happen, then waiting for it to happen, which tends to be a lot of what the general manifesting process is, some variation of that. If there was no science behind any of this stuff, I'd be like, and we saw that that particular thing works consistently over time, I'd be like, okay, I'm open to that. Well, it turns out there is science and there's very little reproducible outcomes around. Sort of like the popular approach to manifesting. People love to cherry pick the successes and prove them. You know, prove the rule by the outliers. But in fact there's, you know, Gabrielle. I always butcher her last name.

I'm sure I'm not saying it right. Did a lot of research and actually said that one of the big things in the world of met fetching is don't ever focus on the negative or the obstacles. And in fact, it turns out that if you deliberately anticipate the obstacles, especially the internal obstacles, and open to the possibility and say, okay, this is an obstacle, I'm owning it, I'm thinking about it, I'm identifying it, and if this happens now, I'm actually creating a plan for how I will respond to that if in fact it happens. So if you actually not only don't ignore it, but bring it into the conversation and your thought process and even build a plan around it, your likelihood of getting that thing that you want increases dramatically. So when you have something where there is science around it and it's validated and tested, especially in peer reviewed, I'm gonna default to that, you know, so that's kind of where I am with this whole thing.

Yeah.

Tosha Silver, I love her work. Her book Outrageous Openness and Change Me Prayers. She says that a lot of manifesting these days is like giving a grocery list to God. I want this and this and this and this. How do you approach.

Having goals? Your book is coming out, for example, having goals of how you want it to do versus just surrendering and saying, well, let the book take the path that it's meant to.

Yeah. So I'm also not entirely against the idea of surrender, but here's the missing piece of this puzzle.

Most of the people that I've known that point to surrender as the most immediate path to generating something that you want to happen in your life don't actually also include the step that happens before surrender as a critical part, as a critical precursor to the process. And that is almost without fail, the thing that happens before surrender is that somebody works.

Their asses off until they can barely work any harder and then at some point they're like, screw it, that's it, I've done everything I can do. I'm done. I surrender. I give up, universe. Just do what you need to do, right? That's actually a really important part of the process. It's not the fact that they've just said, woken up one day without having done any work and said, universe, give me something, you know, it's the fact that they have worked furiously to define what this thing is and built a series of practices and actions and worked really, really, really, really hard and then surrendered and then almost invariably planted so many seeds of possibility in the days, months or years leading up to it that those seeds very often flourish then when we pause, when we give them room to breathe and to get some sunshine, you know. But the really like the process that happens before that is really important. You know, living a life of complete and utter surrender all the time without alternating that, without effort and practice and focus.

Yeah, it's not. I just don't buy that.

That'S the way to actually move through life and experience the things you want to experience. I'm also not a huge goalie oriented person. I'm a practice oriented person. I think it's important to identify what matters to you and then just. And what's meaningful to you and what are the relationships and activities that fill you up and every day make sure that you build a practice of interacting with those things every day and then, you know.

Have those pictures. But there's another big problem with the goal side of things very often that I've seen, which is that most goals are not based on a level of self knowledge that would allow them to reflect what we really want even when we get them. And that's why so many people who get exactly what they've strived for get there and they're like, oh damn, this isn't what I thought it would be.

So to me the bigger part is that you spend a lot more time developing practices that allow you to know yourself better. And then from those practices, things truly worthy of pursuing in a more focused way tend to emerge organically.

I love how you describe it in the book that they pull you forward. Ben, at the start of our conversation, you laid out a really interesting framework for honing in on this, which is solving problems and delivering delight. Solving problems. Seems like there's a lot of literature out there and we can kind of unpack problem solving for frameworks. But delivering delight, how do you do that?

How do you cook? It's not easy. It's like I said, like nobody knew that you couldn't live without Pokemon Go before they had Pokemon Go. That's why it's so delight based. Businesses or solutions or experiences are in my, it's been my experience working with a lot of people and just in what we've created, they are, they're exponentially harder to create, but when you do, the impact is exponentially greater and they grow exponentially faster. The reason is because if you ask somebody, if I was going to ask you what's bugging you right now, you might not be able to tell me everything, but you could probably give me a short list.

What are your top three problems that you have right now and what are the pains associated with those problems? Almost anyone could answer that question, right? And if I said to you, what are the delights that are missing from your life right now? People would be like, huh? Right, Right. So you might be able to tap into something that was really delightful in your past that you're not experiencing right now, that you really love to. But to a certain extent, you know, if you hadn't experienced it yet, you don't yet know that it's missing from your life, that it's actually something that you would deeply value and yearn to experience. So it's very hard to create around something that people don't yet know that they need. So it revolves very often. It involves like a lot of.

A lot of faith, a lot of having your finger on the pulse of what you think will really matter. I'm deeply fascinated by the concept of awe right now and which your.

Since you love the research, it does show that awe is a very emotion physically.

I mean, it really does some powerful things to you and it is increasingly devoid in our everyday experience. You know, my theory is that the reason that filters exist on images in social media is because we're trying to put the awe back in the images that capture our everyday lives.

Do you mean the ones with like Butterflies as a crown around the.

Also just like, you know, the things that amplify color and amplify contrast. You know, we want more color, we want more contrast. We want more vividness in our everyday experience because we feel like. And we don't even know that this is what we're doing. You know, when you look at picture and you're like, that's not. It's not popping enough. Like, are you actually saying, my life is not popping enough? The things that I'm surrounding myself with and interacting with are not popping enough because I'm not popping enough. And how do I light that up within myself again?

Fascinating.

Yeah. Right?

Yes. That's like. That gets really deep around putting a photo filter.

It's actually an area that I'm probably about to explore in a lot more detail. I focus a lot of it in the keynote. I recently gave it a giant design.

Conference.

You've been in this incarnation of your business for eight or nine years, almost a decade now. What is the biggest lesson you've learned, either personally or professionally or both?

Biggest lesson?

Probably.

Be intentional.

Yeah.

The moment we define ourselves and the things that we commit ourselves to by reacting to what other people determine is important, we've already lost.

There's a phrase that I coined in the book Reactive Life Syndrome, and it really represents a basket of symptoms that define most people's lives very sadly, which is you wake up in the morning and you feel like you're already behind, and then you are maniacally busy all day long, and you've checked off a ton of lists at the end of the day, and then you lay your head down on the pillow and you're like, that was crazy busy. And you feel like you're actually more behind than you were when you open your eyes in the morning. And when you think about all the things that you've just checked off your list, very few of them actually matter to you. They matter to other people and to their agendas. And we move through life reacting to other people's demands for who they want us to be and what they want us to value and how they want us to spend our time and our attention, our love and our energy. I think it's tragic. I really think it's tragic. I mean, a lot of what this book is about, a lot of what my work is about, a lot of what Good Life Project is about, is about awakening from that state, is about, you know, sort of reclaiming a life of intention and awareness as the precursor to everything, and then living by choice. Not by default.

It's almost like being a life renegade. We have career renegade.

There's dots connecting again.

Yeah, exactly. They just came all the way around.

Can't get away from the dots. But I love.

There's something really powerful you just said at the start of that, which is also not fixing our own identity. And we talked for your podcast that just because something has worked or got us here doesn't necessarily mean it's the best fit to take us forward. And I think that's really hard to shed that. Let's say, like a snake shedding its skin, and then to stand there naked saying, well, I'm not that person anymore. I'm not into those ideas and creative pursuits anymore. But the next thing isn't here yet. Yeah, you've done that beautifully.

Trust me. From the outside looking in, it may look like it's beautifully, but from the inside looking out, it's quite fitful. I would love to say that there's this grace and ease that pervades everything that I do and all the transitions and to use your language, the Pivots.

And sometimes there is. You know, but I'm human. I'm in the weeds just like everybody else for a lot of the time. I'm a student constantly and just exploring. I mean, a lot of what I do is just, you know, I'm looking for embodied teachers, teachers who embody, not just talk about or write about, but actually live some of the answers that I'm looking for. And. And I don't have all of them yet. You know, whatever I have, I hope I've been able to sort of convey and share in some way that's meaningful. But I'm very much still on the road.

And that's the good news.

Yeah, totally.

Jonathan, thank you so much. Where can people find you if they want to keep in touch?

They can find me@goodlifeproject.com awesome.

And Jonathan's book, How to Live a Good Life, launches this week, so go grab your copy. Jonathan, thank you so much for your mentorship, friendship, and for being on this podcast.

It's my pleasure. Thanks for inviting me.

All right, that wraps up this episode of the Pivot podcast. I hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as I did. And Pivot is officially out, so grab your copy wherever books are sold. Even better, tell a friend and leave a review on Amazon. Reviews help other readers decide whether to purchase a copy, and it helps build a lot of momentum in these early days of the launch. Thank you all so much in advance. I couldn't do this without you.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Pivot Podcast. Make sure you don't miss an episode or my insight, 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 ennyblake.

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