Want to CHANGE YOUR LIFE? Change Your Story!

A lot of what I'm interested in, in kind of a fundamental way, is to think about the essential act of narrativizing your life, creating a story that helps you explain who you are to yourself.

You know, one of the things that I love about your work is the way in which you break things down. You kind of make it complex issues, very digestible, especially when it comes to living in the transitions. Right. And I find that so many of us, especially the last two years, have been living in a variety of transitions, and I think we're heading into an economic winter. At least it's all about us. So let's talk about transitions and what it means to kind of live in the transitions.

Well, I think. I mean, I like the way you say that. That's very generous way of framing it. And I. You know, the backstory here is that when I went looking to really explain the confusion and the sense of upheaval that I was going through, I wasn't looking for transitions. Right. I wasn't looking for this idea of life quakes, and I wasn't looking for kind of a toolkit for how to navigate challenging times. I was basically trying to kind of answer the kind of pickle that I was in. So let me just set that stage a little bit. So, as you know, I grew up in Savannah, Georgia, and I spent most of my life kind of traveling around the world, entering different cultures and writing about that. I wrote a book about Japan. I spent many years going back and forth to the Middle east writing books about contemporary religion. I wrote about families and my sort of. This was my life. And I had, in many ways, kind of the fantasy life that we all think. Like, you know, I figured out what I wanted to do early. I did it for no money. I had some success. I got married, children. Like, that's the hockey stick. Like, to put it in entrepreneurial terms, like, I had the hockey stick life, yeah, until my 40s, when suddenly I got beaten up by a back to back to back set of disruptions. First, as you know, I got cancer at 43 as a new dad of identical twin daughters. Then I had some financial troubles in the last recession. My family owned a bunch of real estate in Georgia. And then my dad, who himself is a small business owner in Georgia, got Parkinson's and got very depressed and tried to take his own life six times in 12 weeks. So suddenly it kind of felt like life was coming at me from all different ways. And I'm a storyteller, right, as you are, but I didn't know how to tell this story. And I didn't really want to. Right? There's shame, there's fear. What are people going to think? But when I did start telling people this story, everybody had a similar experience of how their life was up and down, Right? And so I actually was at a college reunion, and I mentioned this, and people were coming up to me. And I called my wife, who works as you know, with entrepreneurs in 50 countries around the world through this organization that she started called Endeavor. And I said, linda, you know, no one knows how to tell their story anymore. And I got to do something to help. And so what I did was I set out, I created this thing that I now call the Life Story Project, where I collected what became hundreds and hundreds of life stories. Americans, all walks of life, all 50 states. People who lost limbs and lost homes and changed careers and changed, you know, changed religions and got sober and got out of bad marriages. And I. Yeah, I spent a year coding these with 12 people, looking for patterns that could help all of us in times of change. And I will say back to the idea of transitions. That was the big idea. Like, the big idea is that our lives are disrupted at all times. And so what happened was I sort of was wandering my house for years saying, we should talk about life transitions. Like, no, why has there not been a book about this in 40 years? Like, why is no one using this language? And then suddenly this book arrives in the middle of the pandemic when the entire planet is going through a transition at the same time?

Well, let me ask you this, because I think one of the most interesting stories that I think we tell is the one we tell ourselves, right?

Yes. Nice.

It's the one that either inhibits our success or propels it. What did you discover about this transitionary time, about how we talk to ourselves and how we kind of live out those stories?

Well, the first thing I discovered is that there has been a scientific breakthrough in understanding how powerful that story we tell ourselves is. So if you go back to the 70s into the 80s, what you just said would have been a radical, kind of unpopular idea. Okay, so what happened was there was a group of scholars in the 1980s led by a man named Jerome Bruner and Dan McAdams, who began to understand that we tell these stories, right? And then that kind of got joined by neuroscience, which made us understand that our minds are wired to process information and stories. Right? So I. You and I are having a conversation, right? Let's just run a little experiment here, okay? So it's winter. It snowed last night. We're taping this in summer, but you get the idea. I put on my jacket and I put on my boots and I walk downstairs and I open the door and what do I see? Okay. I tell that story. And then your mind.

Yeah, it's like white snow and a little tree in the corner and.

Yeah, exactly. So what your mind has done is filled in because I'm processing story. You're processing story. So we have it now. Let me tell you the story. So it snowed last night. It's the middle of winter. I put on my jacket, I put on my boots, I open my door and what do I see? I. A giant pile of donuts.

Okay? So you laugh. You laugh because suddenly the story I tell is different than the story you expected me to tell. Okay, now what's happened? We all get excited now. We have a moment. What's going to happen? Okay. You want to know what I'm going to do with the donuts? I want to know what I'm going to do to the donuts. Okay. What life is, is what happens when a giant pile of donuts end up outside your door. Okay. In Hollywood, they call them plot twists. Right. Aristotle had names for them. They don't know me. There's all these languages. But essentially, what I have come to call a lifequake is. Is what happens when a pile of donuts shows up in your life. Okay. Am I going to go back inside? Am I going to start eating the donuts? Am I going to push the donuts aside? Right. Who put them there? Right. Suddenly, that's a story. And so essentially, what I have come to call life quakes or are what happens when the traditional, familiar, expected story that we're telling gets disrupted. Yeah. Okay. And that happens a lot more than we think.

Yeah.

That was the big revelation. Right. So the big thing that emerged from these conversations is, number one, the idea of a linear life. It's deader than it's ever been.

Right. You and I were 20 seconds into meeting each other, and we're talking about illness, and we're talking about our children, and we're talking about, you know, what happens when our workout schedules get disrupted or whatever it might be. We. That's what we have in common. But we think we're going to have one job, one relationship, one source of happiness. Our entire lives. That's gone.

Yeah, for sure.

It's been replaced by what I call the non linear life, and that involves many more life transitions. Right. So my data show that we go through three dozen disruptors in the course of our lives. They could be as small as a fender bender. Right. Or twisting your ankle. Or as big as losing a loved one or having a startup go under.

Okay, well, I think you're. You're correct if I'm wrong, but your research also show that we live about half of our total life inside of the transitionary phase.

That's exactly right. So these disruptors, we have them every 12 to 18 months, and most of them we get through pretty well. Okay. We know how to adapt. But one in 10 of those comes what I call a life quake. And their average length is three to five years. Okay. Excuse me, Their average length is five. Let me do that again. Okay. So most of these disruptors, we get through relatively easily. We're pretty good at navigating this. But one in 10 of them becomes what I call a life quake, right? A massive burst of change. Their average length is five years. So we have three to five in our lifetime. Five years. Do the math. Okay. That's 25 years. That's half. Half. That's 50% of our adult lives we are spending in transition. And if you look at the language, resilience, Right. You know, getting through it. We view these periods as things we have to grit or grind or resilience our way through. Yeah, that's just wrong. If it's half of our lives, we need to see them as periods of potential. Okay. And so the last of the big lessons in my experience and in life is in the transitions, is that transitions are a skill. It's a lifelong skill that essentially no one's teaching us how to play. So let's see if we can learn to play it better.

Well, and the crazy thing to me is I think this is the first time in history. I could be wrong. I think this is the first time in history that the entire globe.

Yes.

Dealt with the same transition at the same time.

Certainly the first time anywhere close in 100 years. Right. You could argue the Great Depression, maybe World War II, but, yes, this is the first time in a century. And here's what's interesting about that. Right? So I do all these. You know, I have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of these life quakes. And we. We analyze them. And I should just say a life quake is the disruptive experience. The transition is the solution for the life quake. Right. So the life quake puts us on our heels and kind of as a way of thinking about it, and the transition puts us back on our toes. So I analyze Them. Right. Okay. So I'm going to like, you know, use all these metrics. About half were voluntary and half were involuntary. Okay. So what's an involuntary life quake? An involuntary life quake is you get laid off. Right. Or a natural disaster, or you get a cancer diagnosis. What's, you know, or your spouse cheats on you. What's. What's a voluntary life quake? Okay. You leave a big company to start, you know, to run a startup. Okay. You get married. Some of these are positive, right? Yeah, I have twins. That was joyful, trust me. It was a lifequake, you know, I mean, it was difficult. You cheat on your spouse, right? So these. So that's about half and half. And then the other one that I looked at was voluntary versus involuntary. Okay. And the smallest group was collective, involuntary. I think it was like 8%. And there's a line in life is, in the transitions that had I done this a century ago, two world wars, right. Depression, civil rights, women's rights, we would have had more collective involuntary lifequakes. Cut to the pandemic. It's a collective involuntary life quake. And what's interesting is, is that it's sort of deceptive because on the one hand, we know that everybody has been disrupted in some way.

By the pandemic, right? Yeah. Some people, it's health. A lot of people have moved, by the way, 60% of people move in a transition. You're now seeing with the great resignation, kind of the long tail of it, because people began to think, am I really doing what I want to be doing? Do I still want to be commuting? Do I want to go to an office every day, et cetera? Um, but the lifequake manifests itself differently. So I think we have more empathy, if you will, that everyone's going through it, but it's, it's a reminder that everybody kind of manifests itself or experiences the life quake in a different way.

I've been through several life quakes in my life, right? So I've had a. I've had a very up and down upbringing, very up and down business career, very up, like a lot of ups and downs. And I noticed that when I would get stuck and, or lost in the life quake, it was because I refused to do anything about the life click. For example, during the pandemic, one of the questions I used to get all the time was, well, what should I be doing? I can't go to work. I said, well, you should be raising your value. How do I do that? You read some more books you watch some more videos, you get yourself up at 5am like you would normally would and do your push ups in your house and this kind of thing. Whereas someone who's not doing those things is not making themselves market ready when the market then returns. Kind of same premise, and my experience has been that when I was homeless, it was because I wouldn't take action to get myself out of that particular predicament to begin with. The choices that led me there, I continued making those same choices over and over again. So I think my question kind of comes down to is how does someone who's maybe going through a major life quake, has maybe been lost in that life quake for some time now, get themselves out of that life quake, or at least get them get themselves kind of early start momentum, getting themselves out of that lifequake.

I love this question and I appreciate your honesty and your vulnerability. And I not only appreciate it, I salute you for doing it and for modeling how to be real. Because that's a challenge for a lot of people, particularly men. So let me say this. When you first get into a lifequake, people tend toward kind of one or two polls. Either they make a 212 item to do list and say I'm going to be a super achiever and get through in a weekend and be better than anybody else and give me my gold star and my blue ribbon and everything else, or they lie in a fetal position under the covers with their cat and say, woe is me. Like, I'm never going to get through this. No one's ever had it worse than I have it right now.

Well, I've done both of those.

Yeah. And both of those are wrong. Right. So I think that because when you look at enough of them, as I have been doing now for years, certain patterns become clear. So the first thing to know is that life quakes have a kind of shape to them. Okay. And so they involve three phases. I call them the long goodbye, where you say goodbye to the life that's not coming back. There's the messy middle, where you shed certain habits and experiment, create new ones. And then there's the new beginning, where you unveil your new self. And the thing is, so the question that people always ask is like, well, where do I start? The answer is it doesn't matter. Right? So the idea of transitions to kind of geek out on the science for a second was invented by a guy named Arnold Van Gannup, who was a German anthropologist. A hundred years ago he invented the phrase rites of passage and he talked about what you don't think about as a phrase that would be invented. Like he invented it, right? And he said that transitions are sort of involve leaving one room, kind of walking down a hallway, and then going into another room. It sounds incredibly convenient. It's totally wrong. The reason that it's wrong is that it's not that clean. Life is nonlinear, and the transitions are nonlinear, too. So where do you start? Wherever you're good. So maybe you are a list maker, right? And you like analyzing. You're good at the messy middle, right? You can make lists, you can call people, you can make a plan. That's great, but you're still going to have to go back to the messy middle. Excuse me, to the long goodbye, where you deal with the emotions. Maybe you're good at the long goodbye. You turn the page, okay? You're not a people pleaser. You slam the door, but you get stuck in the meta. Fine. Wherever you're good at, start there. But the thing to remember is you got to go do the other one. So when you tell me, right, that you want to, you know, develop a new skill, you know, come up with a workout plan. We bought a peloton. Like, we were the cliche, right? We bought a peloton so that we could work out at home, right? We powered through it, we rewired our homes that we could all do our work. We handle all of that. But we still have an emotion. I mean, you still got to go back and do that or you're not going to get through it to the best of your ability. I mean, I looked. I have looked hundreds of people in the eye and said, what's the biggest emotion you struggled with in your time of change? Number one answer, fear. How am I going to do it? How am I going to get through this? How am I going to pay my bills? How am I going to meet payroll? Number two, okay? Sadness. I like my old life. I like being married. I like having my legs before I lost them in an accident. I like having my father before he died six months ago, okay? I like being number one in my space before I was overtaken by my competitor. Number three, shame. And this surprised me, particularly as a man, I would say, because, you know, I'm ashamed of what I did when I drank too much. I'm ashamed that I have to ask for help, okay? I'm ashamed. I just moderated a panel on transitions at a. At a milestone family reunion. You know, guy, top of the world lawyer, beautiful, you know, spouse, four children, beautiful house. In the suburbs. Three of his children are bipolar. So a very simple thing. You run into someone at the supermarket, hey, how are the kids? Was incredibly painful because he. He didn't want to say it. He wanted to talk about everything great in his life. But in fact, the dominant thing in his life was the fact that first one, then another of his children were in an institution for mental illness. So we have these emotions. And while you may be pushing through, don't forget, if you really want to get through it, you're going to have to double back and deal with the inner feelings that are going to haunt you and prevent you from getting where you really want to go.

That is such a good reminder.

Because I agree with you. I have seen two camps. I've been in both camps. Someone who's taking action, someone who's scared to take action.

And I've discovered that the small step is the correct step. But I've also been the same kind of person that, you know. Another little piece. My flagship company of the seven that I own, the larger one, in 2017, I had to fire my entire management team overnight for embezzlement.

Right.

That was not something that was. Definitely wasn't voluntary. I didn't see it coming necessarily. Now, were there warning signs? Yes. But in that season, I had to spend a lot more time in the action of doing. And then it took me another three years to recover emotionally, like from that betrayal and from that hurt. And it took a long time before I could get to where I was at a place where I was thankful for that pain because of what it had produced. Now, I'm curious to know, in the research that you've done.

Is it possible or is it normal for people to come out the other side of a difficult transition, a major life quake, and actually be thankful for it and better because of it, or do you find that people are typically impeded by that for their future, future endeavors?

A lot of what I'm interested in, and kind of a fundamental way, is to think about the essential act of narrativizing your life, okay? Of.

Creating a story that helps you explain who you are to yourself. Okay? Life is the story that you tell yourself. That's a huge change, a generational change in how we think about ourselves. That story. Everybody listening to us.

Will pause for a second and listen to that story going on in your head. It's where you came from. It's what you've achieved, it's how you've suffered. It's where you failed. It's how you got Back up.

If you got a call right now to someone you love who's in the hospital and you were racing, the story you would be telling is your relationship with that person. That story isn't just part of us. That story is us in a fundamental way. So what you're talking about, and I think even more what you're doing, is normalizing the process of telling a story that doesn't just move and a single direction.

Yeah, Yeah.

I got interested in storytelling because I met a man named Marshall Duke at emory University about 10 years ago, and he studies family stories. And what he said to me was that there are three types of family stories. There's the ascending narrative. We came from nothing. We worked hard. We have a lot. There's a descending narrative. We had a lot. There was a war or a recession or a famine, and we lost it all. Or there's an oscillating family narrative. Okay, Grandpa came here, worked hard, became the vice president of a bank. You know, his house burned down. His daughter was the first in her family, the first woman in the family to go to college. She got breast cancer. Children who understand that their family comes from an oscillating narrative are better able to navigate the ups and downs in their own lives. It's the number one predictor of a child's emotional well being.

Is it because of some level of expectation? There. There's an early onset of expectation of what could be.

Yes, it's normalizing. What is the shape of your life?

Okay. Yeah.

Okay. And for. Since the origin of this country. I mean, I'm actually writing a new book right now about work stories that gets that from the origin of this country. We have said that success is only about climbing. Climb the ladder. Bigger office, greater view, more benefits. Get to the top. It's all about climbing. But in fact, almost anybody that you talk to who has gotten to the top or is happy in the middle has had ups and downs in the course of that journey. And so the question that I'm interested in is why did it take you three years?

It didn't take you three years to respond to the business challenge. You fired those people. You resolved it. You. You know, presumably you did some forensic accounting, and you either shut the business down or you recovered the business now.

We recovered. Thank God. I think, you know, it took me three years. I think it's year one. It took me. It took me a year to realize that it mattered, that I had to work on it.

Nice.

All right. It took me two years to actually filter through the Emotions that I was going through because these are a lot of. These people were people that were super close to me. Like people that I had, had been with my business for 12 and 15 years, long time. Right. Who were paid very well. Right. So there should have been no enticement for them to want to do what they did. And I think the third thing that the third year took, the desire to want to make it an intentional focus, where the two years prior to that, it was more about sporadic understanding as, as they surfaced, dealing with the, the. The angry. Dealing with a new team member that I'm, that I'm accidentally making feel bad because they had. Because they reminded me of said team member back here.

I hear you. Oh, good. That's good.

Right? So these are all types of things. So I think year one, it was, it was about, okay, am I at a place where I can emotionally deal with this? Year two is more about, okay, I'm, I'm starting to deal with the symptoms. And year three became. I know I need to deal with this for the betterment of my family, the betterment of myself, and the betterment of my teams.

Here's how I respond to that as someone who's listened to a lot of these stories. Okay.

First of all, I will remind you what I said at the beginning, which is that the average length of a life transition is five years. It just takes a long time. Okay, so you started in the framework that I've said. Remember my framework? You got a long goodbye, you got a messy middle. You got a new beginning. You started in the messy middle. Okay, you got a crisis. Okay, I don't have time to think about my emotions and what I might have done. I got a crisis in front of me. I gotta deal with the pile of donuts in the middle of my office.

Okay, so you pile of donuts have families.

Yes, those pile of donuts have families. Those pile of donuts have a certain flavor to them, which is not the flavor we normally associate with donuts. Okay, so you've got a, you got a, you got a pile of it in the middle of your office. Okay, well, what are the two things in the messy middle? First, it's shedding. You got to shed the people and if you're smart, you got to shed the patterns of management that created whatever it was. The lack of oversight, the lack of double checking, the lack of accountability, whatever it might be. So that's the shedding. Then what's the other half of the messy? Metal. Remember, in my model here, there. This is all of course, in the book, et cetera is there's three phases and there are seven tools. So the two tools in the middle are the shedding and then creating. You gotta hire new people, you gotta create new patterns. You have to have new oversight, you have to have a new, you know, kind of check and balance to make sure this doesn't happen again. So that's good. And that itself takes a while. Okay? That could take anywhere from a week to fire them to 18 months to get the new team in place. So that's time consuming thing. But there's other two faces. And on the surface, and my guess is what you could tell to your investors or your stakeholders or whatever, I don't know if this is a public company or not a public company. From there you can probably tell them we're through it, we're back on course. Okay, but there are two more phases. One is the long goodbye. And what is the long goodbye? The long goodbye is dealing with the emotions, the fear. Oh my God, what are people going to think of me, right? You know, what did I do right? Is this going to happen again? Okay, there's the sadness. I like these guys. I was paying them well. You know, we were, we were working on all cylinders. Like why did they ruin such a good thing that we had going? Right? And then there's the shame. Did I play a role in this? Was I distracted? Am I running too many other entities? Okay, Am I. Is there something in me that is gullible and vulnerable? That people. I'm a mark. That people thought that I could be taken advantage of it. So that, and by the way, there are two most. There's two there, there's the emotions and then there's rituals. There's things we do, whether it's going into therapy or jumping out of airplanes or throwing parties or whatever it might be doing. Getting a tattoo that reminds you that you got taken advantage of. But there's a third phase. What's in the third phase? That's the new beginning. And what is the new beginning? In essence, it's telling a new story. And specifically what it is, is a new story that adds a chapter to the end in which you learned something from the difficult time so that you don't repeat it going forward, that you acknowledge it. And then because of who you are and what I'm learning about you, who then is prepared to go forward and share that story with others to help them try to shorten and quicken the process? And that gets us back to your question. The answer is the best way to. Way to get better at it is to label it, is to talk about it, is to normalize it. We are two men, you know, of a similar age and generation. Okay. And maybe even a similar success profile, who were sitting here talking openly about the difficulty. That is a generational shift that you would not have seen. Okay. In the same way that you wouldn't have seen women in leadership positions who feel. I have so many stories. I felt as a woman. My wife is a woman who runs an organization that has 500 people and $100 million budget. When I got cancer, she was like, I'm not going to show vulnerability because I want to be a tough woman, and I'm going to support my husband and I'm going to. And people thought it was strange that she wasn't being vulnerable. And it was only when she was being vulnerable that she became the leader she was destined to be by accepting that it didn't make her look weak. So it's not just men who have this problem. Women who are in leadership positions also have it. My wife has a saying now that she talks about less Superman, more Clark Kent. We all have to be willing to tell the story that our weakness is also our strength, and our strength is often our weakness.

Well, I find that, you know, one of the. So people have asked me, you know, the reason I named the show Stuck to Unstoppable is being stuck to me is nothing more than not making progress. Right. You're not making. And it doesn't mean making the progress that you're. You could make. It means you're not making progress. You're. You've been in the same occupation, whatever, same circumstance, the same previous chapter.

Yes.

For a long period of time.

And telling the same story over and over.

Exactly. And no one's turning the page, right?

Yep.

Unstoppable, on the other hand, to me, has always been about consistently making progress, however micro.

Right.

And then I got asked a long time ago, you know, one of the questions I get all the time is, well, how'd you go away from stop being homeless? Or how'd you stop doing X, Y and Z? And my defining answer that I've noodled on, filtered on for a number of years now has been radical honesty. Being radically honest with myself without being judgmental, without being temperamental or condemnatory in any way, shape, or form. Looking at my life from a series of exploration and discovery moments, stepping outside of my story and looking at it as an editor. Right. You know, what is. Where's his character headed if he doesn't change his ways. And at the end of the day, I find that that has helped shape the new narratives. But I'll tell you, I'll be honest with you now. One of the things that I've really struggled with, in fact, this is the one regret that I'm still working through, was that I regret that I missed the two years of my wife's health because I had to put that business back together to just support my family because her health deteriorated rapidly within those two years. And we have yet to get the health back. So I can understand why this topic is so powerful, why it's so important, especially with what I think is an economic winner a little ahead of us. And people are going to have to challenge themselves to fight through these stories again.

So let me say a couple of things about that. So first of all, I think.

And I'm looking at you, and you have your colorful logo there with the stuck in the green and the blue and the unstoppable bigger and white. And there's a couple of responses I want to say. And that is one of the things I've learned about this idea of shape, right? I'm interested in narrative shape. I'm interested in life shape. One of my favorite questions to ask people is, what shape is your life? Because few of them are aligned.

Is that even if one part of our life is stable, is linear, if you've had one job for a long period of time or one relationship for a long period of time, other things in your life are not okay. So maybe your beliefs have been nonlinear. Maybe your relationships have been nonlinear. Maybe your children have been up and down. Maybe you've had drinking that you've lapsed in and out of sobriety or whatever it might be. So we all have things in our lives. We have these kind of five basic narratives, these five stories that we tell ourselves. And one thing that happens in a life transition is that we adjust these various priorities so it's not for whatever reason. One of the hardest things for me to figure out about transitions is something that you just said, and that is.

They tend to clump.

Just when you got a business problem, your spouse has a health problem. Just when granny needs a cataract surgery, you got a child who has an anxiety disorder, like whatever. Like, this is not in the language of the social science that I've been able to read. So I ultimately named this a pile up because it kind of reminded me of those old black and white movies, you know, where the first car stops like you were in a pileup. And so it's not. So in the spirit of normalizing, it's not surprising to me that they both happened at one time and that by virtue of being kind of focused on one, you might have over, you know, overlooked or not been as attentive as you were to the. And perhaps being a little bit less hard of yourself and acknowledge that the circumstances were such. But now that the businesses may be smoother, now you can focus more. I call that shape shifting, like where we focus more. Okay. You know, on one thing, maybe we were focused on our work and we want to spend more time on our family. Or maybe for a lot of women out there, you've been the primary caretaker and the kids, you're an empty nester and you want to go then finally do something for yourself. Or maybe you've been giving it, you know, giving back. Okay. And you want to write, you know, write a memoir or start a nonprofit. So we, in the course of our lives go through these periods of transition within our priorities. I call them the ABCs of meaning, which is these different sources of life that give us meaning. So I think it is very powerful. But what I want to say about stuck to unstoppable is.

To stuck to unstoppable. To stuck to unstoppable. In other words, even if you get from stuck to unstoppable, you're not done with getting stuck. Something else is going to come along that's going to get stuck. It's the nature. So I just want to make sure that everybody hears, even if you got that business cooking, there are going to be other changes, some of which you choose. Maybe I want to move. Maybe I want to change my job, right? Or as we've seen, some of them may be a natural disaster, a war, a recession.

Raging inflation, a pandemic, whatever it might be, that I want to be sure. Half our lives involve getting unstuck, and maybe half that leaves half. There can be periods of unstoppability.

But the stuck is going to come back. And I think that the best way to be able to get through the next stuck.

More efficiently is to name it. Okay? And I'm very fond. I wrote a book, as you may know, called the Secrets of Happy Families. And I spend a lot of time talking to parenting groups. I spent a decade writing about families in a column in the New York Times. And one of my favorite kind of nuggets of research is if you have a 12 year old who is going to have a big ball game, right? Or Having, in the case of my children, a big ballet recital or a big test. If the night before you have that child tell a story, the last time they had a big ball game or a big ballet recital or a big exam, they did well, it will boost their confidence going into the next day. So the next time you get stuck, tell yourself, ah, last time I did this, I got unstoppable. Let's see if I can kind of channel and resurface those patterns to make this one go a little bit better. It ain't gonna go perfect. But even if you cannot fight the last war and then discover a new set of problems on the battlefield, it will help you get through the next stock.

I'm glad you mentioned that, because, again, one of the things that I see people struggle with a lot, and it happens a lot with entrepreneurs, for some reason, a lot of. Well, I don't know if it's all entrepreneurs. I haven't done any research on this, but because I am an entrepreneur, I would assume that many of them deal with worth issues, which is why they strive rather than can get to a place of contentment and just creation. But more importantly, one of the things that I see is people getting trapped in that last story. And you just mentioned it so beautifully. And I've used that technique over and over and over again when I'm in the crap storm. Like, for example, when I went through the embezzlement scenario, I had to remind myself, dude, you used to be homeless. It worked out. Just keep going.

Yes, Right. Nice. Right?

I went through the embezzlement, dude.

You made it through the business, got refined. You started getting around your family more. Great pandemic, dude. It's a pandemic. Just keep going. Like, it's constantly reminding myself that unstoppability is nothing more than continuing when I don't want to.

And I think that. That, you know, kind of fake it till you make it. There's a lot of wisdom in that, actually, of putting one step in front of the other. The other thing I was going to say about entrepreneurs, because entrepreneurship is pillow talk in my house because of my wife, Linda.

Mine too.

Linda Rotenberg is her name, and she wrote a book called Crazy as a compliment based on her kind of idea. From working with hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs in 50 countries around the world that have, if they're not calling you crazy, you're not dreaming big enough.

Another quality, not the other, but another quality that entrepreneurs share is that they're good salespeople, they're motivators. They can make the pitch, they can get someone to come along. They can invite people to share their vision. They can take people on a journey from Napkin to nasdaq.

That's a good line.

I like that one.

That's in the next book.

Okay. But I had a friend who was one of the top people at the biggest entertainment company.

In the world, and he told me a story once that stayed with me, that when he got there, they were looking at television ratings for one of the television networks that this company ran. And he was like, every single day, we put out 10 press releases between 9:00am Pacific Time and 1:00pm Pacific Time, boasting about how our shows did so well. Can somebody please give me a document that tells me the truth that isn't spin? So I think that when you, when your natural vernacular is sales, spin, enthusiasm, recruiting, getting people excited, taking them on your journey, articulating your vision. Because if you don't know where you're going, you're not going to get there. You do also need to make sure that you spend time probably with some of your chief team members, but certainly with yourself, where you are. Checking the truth.

Yeah, yeah.

And you're saying, I'm struggling or I'm not sure where I'm going, or okay, I need to course correct or I need to shed some old systems and habits that are not working and create some new ones. So just make sure that you're not always spinning yourself, but sometimes you're looking in the mirror and being true to yourself because that's the only way that you're really going to get where you're trying to go.

Oh, that's so good. That is so good. Well, look, before we, as we kind of close out, I think what I would like to know from you is, is there one piece of research that you're excited about that we haven't talked about today, or one special idea that, that you feel in your heart we need to communicate to the audience. What would it be and why?

Well, I'll say two things that are kind of related in different sides of the same coin. First, I will tease an idea that's in my new book about work and navigating work transitions that will be out in the spring of 2023. And I mentioned earlier that.

Kind of the default narrative of American success is all about climate. Up by your bootstraps, climb the ladder, reach the top.

Grab that brass ring. But the people that are truly successful don't just climb, they also dig. Okay. They go deep into themselves, understand their own internal story that they are responding to every day. There is no universal story of success. Each of us has our own scripture of success, I like to call it, which we are trying to fill and live up to. That's based on a whole bunch of things that I explore in this new book. And that leads, I think, to the other kind of big idea, which is what is. What is the ultimate story? What is the ultimate shape of a story? It's a fairy tale.

Yeah.

And the fairy tale has a hero and it has a happily ever after. But if you just have a hero and a happily ever after, you don't have a story because. And you don't have a fairy tale because what makes it a fairy tale? It's the wolf.

The Italians have this wonderful expression, lupus and fabula. Right? The fabulous is the fable. It's their fabulous life. It's life when everything is going well. The lupus is the wolf, and it means in Italian, just when things are going swimmingly, along comes a wolf to muck it all up. Okay? And our instinct as storytellers, as humans, as leaders, as executives, as entrepreneurs, as spouses, as parents, is to banish the wolf. I got no problems. It's all going well. Don't worry. We got a winter coming. No, no, no, no, no. I got a plan. I'm going to get through it. But if you banish the wolf, you banish the hero. Because ultimately, what makes the hero the hero is the hero's ability to get over, around, or through the wolf or the ogre or the storm or the woods. If you banish the wolf, you banish the hero. And if there's one thing I know is that we all need to be the hero of our own story. And in order to do that, we have to have those dark chapters in order to get to the happily ever after.

Man, that is so good. Bruce, I have flat out enjoyed our conversation today, brother. I appreciate you coming on and hanging with us today. Where can everybody find out more about you and how to connect with you?

I appreciate that it's been a total delight. And again, I want to honor and celebrate your voice and the vulnerability and the radical honesty that you're sharing and modeling. I'm Bruce Feiler. It's F E I L E R. You can go to brucefeather.com, you can follow me at any of the social media. I have a new TED talk that just is out, as you mentioned, called how to Master a Life Transition. Keep in touch, share your story and we will get through this.

Everybody love it, man. Thank you again, dude.

Seriously, thank you for coming on my cheers. See you down the road.

I hope you liked that video. And if you did, make sure you check out this next video right here.

When we see something that's not real, our brain loves completion, right? It loves to close the loop. That is the power of vision. I mean, it is not. There's not bullshit there, man. This is how your brain works. Sit there and imagine what needs to be real and then let that emotionally charge you to say, okay, now what are the actions I need to take?