Are You Living a Good Life? | James Patterson and Patrick Leddin

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26:30And either way, can you just say a little bit more about the loop? Yeah, first of all, you're right. It is the central model, if you will, Dan, that we use in the book. And what it is, is in the process of studying these positive disruptors, So you come out of the classroom where James talked to my students, then started a research project for a few years at Vanderbilt, where he had a chance to interview hundreds of people to get their story. And I jokingly say, and it's true, really, there are unsung heroes to household names. There's people, everybody knows their name when they hear it. And there's other people you've never heard of before, but we captured their story because they did some really interesting things.

27:01And ultimately, we stepped back and said, okay, what's the pattern? What do they typically do? And what they tend to do is there's this disruptive moment that happens. And it could be something that just stops them in their tracks, like a quick conversation or a time on the turnpike in Jersey where the traffic's going the other direction. It could be a huge new project or an opportunity to move to another city or all sorts of things, a conversation with your doctor about the results of your test, whatever it might be. But this disruption happens, and I think we're all the disrupted, but then some of us choose to be disruptors.

27:31Some of us choose to use that as a catalyst. And what we found is the most effective people, the thing they do when the disruption hits is they don't just react, they step back and they discern. So the first step is to discern and say, okay, this thing happened. So what? What could I do? What's the opportunity in here that I might be able to take advantage of? Or what role should I take on? And we give some roles and examples of that. And then the second step then says, okay, now if you're going to do that, if you're going to take on that role, what strengths do you have? What things do you have that you can bring to the table.

28:03And we had a chance in the interviews to call out 16 positive disruptor behaviors. And the nice news is we all have some of them and nobody has all of them nailed. And there's no perfect combination. We all bring stuff to the table. So what do you bring to the table? And the next step then is to achieve. Okay, what can you do? And disruption, as we talk about in the book, it starts with self first. This is an inside out exercise. We disrupt ourselves. Jim disrupted himself that day on the Jersey turnpike and decided to go a new direction. And then from there, you might disrupt relationships. You might disrupt your family.

28:35You might disrupt your team or your organization or your industry or society. And we give different examples of that. And then the next step or the last step is refine. And refine is just about after you do something, don't just go on to doing the next thing, but step back first and say, okay, what did I learn from this? What went well? What can we do better, et cetera? And we actually interviewed a couple of retired four-star generals from the military to ask them, why is the military so good at these after action reviews, Dan, when they finish a training exercise or a real world exercise, they're kind of brutally honest about what went well and what could we have done better.

29:08And we were like, why do you do that so well? And the answer seems pretty straightforward. It's like, well, because we have life or limb at risk here. But remember that fourth fundamental fact, your time here is finite. Make it count in ways that matter. We also have a lot at risk. So how do we make sure that we learn from it and move forward? And our argument would be that if you follow that loop over and over and over, that's how resilience over time is built. It's not built by going into a classroom for two hours and saying, okay, you're going to come out of there more resilient. It's built by learning and trying and testing and leaning into your strengths and gaining results and then getting over an obstacle and then doing it again and again and again.

29:46And all of a sudden, something that knocked you down five years ago, you need to step over that so easily. in there. You mentioned family and family is very important in this book and overlooked in most business books. How does the family deal in that decision-making when one of the parents has to look for a new job or has to consider working harder or working less or whatever it is? And how does the family get involved in that or your partner or whatever, your friends that are very important to you and bringing them into the process? Most business books don't deal with that, but that's an important thing for most people.

30:17And it's becoming more and more important, which I think is a good thing. I completely agree with you on that. So let's spend some more time on the different aspects of this disruptor loop given its importance for your work. So again, disrupt, discern, behave, achieve, and refine. Disrupt I think is self-explanatory or we've already explained it which is that changes are going to happen and you either are, it's happening to you or you're making them happen. Yeah, I mean to put a fine point on it, Dan, I would just say it can be small, it can be big, it can be unique, it can be ubiquitous. But if it stops you in your tracks and causes you to pause and maybe opens up a door for something new and different, it's probably something worth labeling as disruption at that moment.

31:00Well said. So the second one is discern. And under discern, you've got these five specific roles. Patrick, you made a reference to them, but you didn't list them. But I'll list them. Trailblazer, fire chief, firefighter, torchbearer, and tindergatherer. James, maybe you could walk us through. just remind us of what the discern part of the loop is and what these no patrick has to do all of that he's the trailblazer guy and i'm the storyteller and one of the things in the book is i mean there are for every one of these these things that we talk about there's a story which helps to illustrate it because we both feel me even more that stories are so essential in terms of people understanding, paying attention.

31:46I went from being a poor public speaker to being pretty good when I just started telling stories. I just tell one story after another and people listen. So that really helps. And it also makes the book much more readable. A lot of business books are pretty tough to read. This one, we have the story and the stories are, I think they're pretty fascinating. One of Patrick's favorite is The Car Wash. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a great story. I'll tell the story and then I'll tell you about the five roles, Dan. So there's one person we interviewed in the process, which was a guy named Tom Diary. And Tom Diary lives down in Southern Florida, just kind of north of Miami.

32:20And he tells us this story as we're interviewing him about how when he was 22 years old, he's finishing up college and he kind of thinks he knows what he wants to do in life. And he's putting out his resumes to the big consulting firms and plans to live in Manhattan. But at the same time, he has a younger brother who's 20, so a couple years younger, and he's on the autism spectrum. His name is Andrew. And Tom goes home at the Thanksgiving holiday, and he's watching his brother and interacting with his father and talking about it. His father expressed some concerns about what's Andrew going to do in his life.

32:51So Tom goes to Andrew's school, and after a week of his school, seeing what Andrew's learning, what he's going to be able to do, Tom's disrupted. In that moment, he's like, you know what? I'm not going to pursue going to work and consulting, what's more important to me is family and my brother. I'm going to figure out how to do something with my brother. You fast forward a year or so, they opened up a car wash. Tom's like, I know nothing about car washes. I know nothing about leading people with autism, but we're leaning into hiring people with autism and giving them jobs. You fast forward to today, they have three car washes in South Florida.

33:23They have a hundred employees, 90 of them are on the autism spectrum. They're more profitable and more productive than know their car washes. And we just lay out how that's a nice, easy, you know, kind of button it up, perfect story, but it was not easy. It was lots of little steps and equipment breaking and Tom not knowing how to fix the equipment or employees that filling the car isn't detailed quite enough yet. They want to keep going at it. Him having to encourage them to stop at that moment, but also just how Tom's brother found a place in the world. And Tom's brother, Andrew talks about, we have him on film where he talks about, my name's Andrew Dieri.

33:55This is where I work and it's a great place. and I have lots of friends here. And it's just a really powerful story about that moment, that conversation at the dinner table at Thanksgiving that Tom could have said, yeah, I'm worried about Andrew too. And I'm gonna go pursue this job anyway in Manhattan, which could be perfectly fine. That could have been the choice he made. It's not a judgment of that, but it's a judgment where he says, but in his case, his judgment was, that's not fulfilling to me. That's not what I feel like I'm here to do. So that's a great story. And Dan, also the stories, there are a couple of purposes.

34:23One, to help people understand better what we're trying to get through to them. and they also inspire, which is really important. People go, I can step forward. I can do some things. I can be better at my job, et cetera. I'm sorry, Patrick, though, you were going to - No, no, no, no. No, you're great. I'm going to go back to what you were just saying there. Every story is not going to resonate perfectly with everybody, and that's okay. Some stories, you might read it and go, this one's not clicking with me. Then just keep moving. And some things you got nailed down and just keep moving. And the one thing Jim says really nicely is that this isn't a one size fits all book from the fact of like, you have to do all of these things and you have to do what all of these people did.

34:59That's not what we're saying, but you might find something that moves you along. There's five roles coming from the university side. It's like, it's a perfect two by two. So if people envision there's a two by two block, so four blocks, four quadrants, and the quadrants, the two at the top are going toward change and the two at the bottom are going towards stability. And then the two on the left are going toward individual, moving out individually and the two on right are going out collectively. Okay. So we have these four blocks. So the top left then would be moving toward change individually.

35:30And we call that person a trailblazer. So this is like the quintessential startup person who gets an idea and goes and starts a business. You can see that like they're moving toward change. They quit their job. They move cities, they do whatever and off they go. And we talk about a person in the book who does just that, a lady named Josie Natori, who came from the Philippines back in the 1960s, was the youngest female vice president at any firm on Wall Street in the 70s and quit it to start Notori, which has been around for about 50 years and they make pajamas and undergarments and things like that.

36:00So she's a trailblazer, but you don't have to quit your job to be a trailblazer. You might be the employee who decides, hey, I'm going to learn about this AI thing, or I'm going to be the employee who hears customer issues three times and I decide I'm going to figure out what the problem is there. So you can lead out and trailblaze. More and more companies are, they want Not trailblazers, not troublemakers, trailblazers, people that are bringing positive energy and ideas. Some companies, unfortunately, do not encourage that. But a lot of companies now, more than ever, they want trailblazers. Exactly.

36:29And then the other side of the moving toward change is moving toward change with other people, kind of creating a movement. And that's a torchbearer. You might start as a trailblazer and then you move over to be a torchbearer and you bring other people along with you once you figure something out or dig into it. So that's moving toward change. The lower part is moving towards stability. And this kind of throws people for a loop. When they pick up the book, they think it's called Disrupt Everything. Notice it's not called Change Everything. Change Everything would suggest like turn everything over.

36:55What we're saying is you need to be open to the disruptions that are going on and then make a choice in that moment. Sometimes you might move toward change. Sometimes you might move towards stability. I might double down on something I'm already doing. And we call those people firefighters and fire chiefs, individual movementist firefighter and collective movementist fire chief. One example, they're not in the book, but they ran our research around it. And we were talking to them as Dillard's department store as an example. I don't know if you know them, Dan, but your listeners might not, but it's a 80 some year old family owned business department stores kind of compete with the Nordstrom's and the Macy's of the world.

37:30And just like everybody else being in the retail space during COVID or leading up to COVID, even with technology started putting their stores online and people were shopping online. And there was some degree of cannibalization between people buying stuff in the store and people buying stuff online, but the net was bigger. So people liked that at the business. And then when COVID hit, of course, they brought your goods to your car to keep you safe outside. So you'd have to come in the store. And then maybe they started putting racks in the store where people could come in after they ordered something online and just pick it up and take it with them.

37:58And up until that point, I would say that Dillard's was probably moving with the same change the rest of the industry was. But at one point along the way, they said, hold on a second. We see where the industry is going with this. And there's a good chance that if we keep going down this path, a sizable part of our in-store footprint, our square footage is going to be warehouse where people are coming in, getting their stuff and leaving. If we keep going down that path, we lose who we are. What makes us special? They realized they weren't competing just against other stores. They were competing against the couch.

38:31They had to get people up. So they said, we're not going to go that far down. In this moment, we're going to actually seek some stability and create a movement that says internally that says, you know what? what makes us great is the in-store experience. Now, here's the neat part. From a business perspective, if you were to invest in Dillard's in 2020 and hold on to their stock for four years, it went up 1 ,200%. An 80-plus-year-old retail store beat out companies like Amazon or Tesla or whomever you were looking at at the time, which is pretty darn incredible. But they did it by going after stability.

39:02And we would argue that in the face of everybody else chasing a change, if you're the person or the family or the business or whatever it might be that says, nope, we're not going there, we're going to double down on who we already are or our values, that can be the most disruptive thing you can do. Yeah. I mean, one of the disruptive things for a lot of companies, they spend an incredible amount of time and energy talking about artificial intelligence and doing nothing, just talking about it. What is it going to be? What will it, you know, it's an incredible, for a lot of companies, incredible wasted, unbelievable amount of time and energy and money and not accomplishing anything.

39:39That's another area. How do you intelligently, sanely, economically deal with questions like that? Because it really comes down to what can we do positively right now to take advantage? And the other piece of it, how do we protect ourselves? Actually, in the process of doing some research around it, I was talking to this one guy who was concerned about AI, just individual concern about AI. And we're not talking organizations or industries, just one guy saying, you know what? I'm really concerned about AI. And I said, why is that? And he said, well, because my job for my company is I'm a writer.

40:11I write copy. I write marketing materials. I write stuff sometimes that our CEO reads. And he said, our CEO just read something. He's like, I swear to you, 90 % of it was written by ChatGPT. And it was. And he said, I feel like I'm just going to lose my job. And in that moment, And I just said to him, hey, do you see a world where you could be more valuable to your company, not less valuable with AI existing? And he said, yeah. I said, okay. After he thought about it, he said, yeah. And I said, all right, which role would you have to take on? And that's all I'm asking him to do. And he just thought about it.

40:43He said, I think I need to be a trailblazer for a while. That doesn't mean I'm going to quit my job and start an AI company. It just means I'm going to get smart about AI. Smarter than my company expects me to. I'm going to lean into this thing. And then maybe down the road, I'll move over and be a trailblazer and kind of lead a movement in the organization to help them use how we can use it more effectively. So that's what we mean by the roles. And the roles are not a personality thing, although you might have tendencies, like you might tend to be more of a trailblazer, but they're not personality things.

41:09What they are, they're roles that you choose to take on. And it's like putting a hat on. You can choose to take that role on. And sometimes you might feel compelled to do something, but then you have to look at context and say, okay, my family matters to me. Is that the right role right now? My company matters to me. Is that the right role right now? The fifth role, just to kind of close the loop on that, sits right in the middle. And we call it a tinder gatherer. And what that is, is that's gathering firewood, just like you would to build a fire. And sometimes you go in this role because your job is to analyze it more, think about it more, not just make a knee-jerk decision.

41:39So you're going to spend some time thinking about which role you want to take on after that. And sometimes some people are just really good at that role. They live in that role and they allow and help other people to do these things. And actually, early on in the research, James said, hey, you need to talk to this gentleman who's been my representative. Was he a publicist, Jim, for a long time? Bob? My agent. Your agent for a long time. And you said, you need to talk to him. And I did. And I was like, oh, he's a trailblazer. I don't know, Jim, if you can tell anything about Bob. But it was really a quintessential person who helped other people take off in their roles.

42:12Yeah, he was my agent, a lawyer. It's interesting. He died recently. Wonderful, wonderful guy. It was actually one of the most amazing, the memorial for this guy. He handled just about everybody as an agent in terms of their books. And he handled both sides, Republicans and Democrats. And the memorial service for him, I've never seen a more emotional 800 people there, none of whom needed to be there. And that included the Clintons, the Bidens, that included the head of Fox, that included the head of CNN. It was just an amazing, amazing thing. And he had said at one point that if you ever put all my clients in the same room, it would be World War III.

42:53But here they were, and they didn't need to be there. And I spoke a bit, and I said that with Bob, Bob hated to be called an agent. He just hated that idea, and he loved being a lawyer. He thought it was really a respectable thing to do. And I said, well, I personally, I'm not really that keen on agents or lawyers. So I called Bob my bookman, or shortened it, my bookie. So Bob was my bookie instead of, I want to call him an agent or a lawyer. I think you're referring to Bob Barnett, who was actually my lawyer for a brief period of time as well. And he's a wonderful, wonderful man. Oh, really? Okay.

43:29Yeah, I am. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So you can see when we sat down with the publisher and we said, Tinder gather and they said, tell us about that role. And we said, Bob Barnett, they're like, we get what you're talking about here. No argument here about the amazing nature of the dearly departed Bob Barnett.

43:48Coming up, James and Patrick talk about some more ways of leveraging disruption for a better life.

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45:20The SameMonday.com that your team will actually love using. The SameMonday.com with an easy and intuitive setup. Go to Monday.com and try it for free. Yes, TheSameMonday.com. To get back to the positive disruptor loop. So we've talked about disrupt. We all get what that means. Discern is to kind of figure out like, okay, which of these five directions do I want to go in? Trailblazer, fire chief, firefighter, torchbearer, tindergatherer. And then the next step is behave. So Patrick, why don't you start again on what behave could look like, and then we'll bring in James to be the color man. Okay, that sounds good.

45:58So behave is the second step after discern. So discern and then behave. And behave is really about getting clear on the strengths that you bring to the table. And as we went through the process of studying this, we started to realize there were certain strengths in people that came up time and time again. There were 16 of them. And 16 is a big number, right? It's hard to remember 16. And if somebody reads it and goes, my goodness, I have to have all 16 of these things. A, we try to make it easier for you to digest by organizing it a certain way. And B, nobody had them all. Nobody had them all nailed.

46:29So rest assured, you don't have to have all of them. And there's no perfect combination. I wish there was. I wish it was like, if you had number one, seven, and 10, you're going to nail it because it didn't exist that way either. But the beautiful thing is that we all have strengths. So let's figure out what we're good at when it comes to being a positive disruptor. How can we lean into those? And maybe if we need to bring some other people around who can help us out. So the way we organize the 16 is we call it the anatomy of a disruptor. And it's a head to toe kind of organization with each body part of the eight body parts we pick having two behaviors.

47:00So I'll just say a couple of them really quickly just to give you a feel for them. One example would be brain. We start at brain and some people, the behavior they have is they're really good at looking deeply at something to garner an insight. So they're paying attention to what's going on around them. They're not just sleepwalking through every situation. And occasionally they'll pick up on something and go, hey, I wonder why that's that way. And they kind of think about it for a while. They move to study, they ask questions to try to figure out the insight. And an insight is something that is valuable and few people know.

47:31I mean, if everybody knows it and it's valuable, it's not really an insight. If everybody knows it and it's not valuable, it's not an insight. If you're the only one who knows it and it's not valuable, it's not an insight. It's got to be something few people know and it's valuable. And some people are really good at gathering insights. Some people are really good with their eyes of casting a vision. That's another one. Some people are really good with their feet, which is standing firm in the face of doubters. So we go through the eight body parts and just lay out these various behaviors. years.

47:58And then for each of them, each of the body parts, we tell a story of someone who has those behaviors pretty well nailed down. And is there a way to, I guess my curiosity is what more should we know as a takeaway in terms of developing some of these? Well, one is to know what they are, right? So if you don't know what they are, it's hard to say if you've got them or not. The second one is you can actually do a little assessment in the book where you can score yourself and see how well you're doing. You could ask other people to do it as well, because sometimes we lie to ourselves whether we know we are or not, but also just to look at each of the stories because each of the sections where we talk about the body part and we share the behavior, we then have some reflection questions for you to consider and a little challenge.

48:36So those reflection questions are just something that can cause you to pause for a moment and think about that behavior. Where is that shown up in your life? Have people ever told you you're pretty good at that thing, whatever it might be? And then a little challenge, nothing massive, just something you might try today to see if it affirms that you're pretty good at that thing or confirms it for you, or does it make you say, maybe that's not my one. For example, there's a behavior in that it's trusting your instincts. And I remember Jim and I were talking about this early on and I'm like, hey, don't you think most people have instincts worth trusting?

49:05He's like, absolutely not. No, they don't. And I was talking to this group early on in the research. I was going out, one thing we did, we were doing the research, but we were also going out and testing it in front of audiences, just talking about it to see how they react. And I was talking to this one group at a hotel that had a big casino in it. And I said, how many of you think that people have instincts worth trusting? And like 80 % of the room raised their hand. And I was like, really? What if you went out to that casino floor at 2 a.m.? Do you think they all have instincts worth trusting?

49:31Setting aside the fact that maybe they've already had a few drinks and they're like, yeah, we get the point. And also this balance is in life about trust your first impressions and stuff. Our first impressions are wrong so much, man. We pass up so many people. One of my best friends, he was to me, one of the great catchers in New York, nice guy, interesting, funny, whatever. And he would just freeze up when he would meet a girl and they would all go, oh, I don't know about this guy, you know, blah, wrong, wrong first impression, man. And we're constantly doing that with first impressions. And the other is just so many, just being able to question what's going on.

50:07Our son is 27 and he's just questioning what's going on there. Is there a better way to do this? I'm friendly with Steve Schwartzman, the Blackstone guy. And at a certain point, he and Pete Peterson, they just said, there's a better way. And they started Blackstone. In the book business, when I went in there, it was like, you do a book a year or every two years, and that's the deal. And I went, why is that? Maybe, but what's the rule there that I'm missing? I remember there was a meeting, and I went and I'd started the Alice Cross books, and they were very successful, so they were listening to me a little bit.

50:42And I said, this year, I want to do three books. And I said, I want to do Alice Cross. He said, good good good and then there's another thriller summer house that i wanted to do and i said okay oh that's great great great and then i told him another story suzanne started for nicholas and it was a love story tragic love story and when i told it the head of little brown started crying and then at the end of it he said well we want to do the alice cross in the summer but we don't want to do the love story because it's not your brand and i said well i don't really think of myself as a brand but i think this is a really good story and i think if there is a brand it's that when James does a book, it's just going to keep you reading.

51:19And then you'll self-select whether you want a love story or not. And they reluctantly did the book, Suzanne's Diary. It's now the second biggest selling book I've ever had. So it's just like, does that make sense, what they're doing in the company? And then another thing in the publishing world was writing with co-writers. And they go, well, what's that all about? And they said, well, I don't know. I think it would be good because in advertising, you work with other people. You generally will work with an art director and a producer. So you get used to working with a team or Patrick and I obviously worked as co-writers.

51:48Since then, I've did a book with Dolly Parton, three actually with President Clinton. I have one with Viola Davis coming out this year and then one with Mr. Beast. Do you know who Mr. Beast is? Of course, yeah, viral superstar. Mr. Beast. And you go like, well, you know, Jim's a little older than Mr. Beast who's 27. And, you know, but, you know, it's a great collaboration and really cool. But once again, you're just breaking rules, not to break rules, but just because you just question things and go, what does that rule have to do with anything? You're not doing it to break the rules per se. You just question, question, question, question, I think.

52:23It's interesting that you said a moment ago, and I agree with you, Jim, when you said that sometimes there's too much of an unhelpful cliche around trusting your gut, and it can be true to a certain extent. But with you, your gut, at least the common denominator in many of these stories, is that you trusted your gut and it really paid off. I do trust it, but I tend to question and think it through. And I just had the chancellor from Vanderbilt in here, and Guy's really, really, really, really smart. And he considers, in general, the college system, it needs an overhaul. And I think they're doing it there at Vanderbilt, like so many other things that need overhauls.

53:00And they're doing it in a big way. But what he does before he makes a move, he tries to think it all the way through. What are the obstacles? What could get in the way? Where could this thing screw up? What's the hard? And sometimes when you go out that far and you go like, I can't figure out how to get past that obstacle. So you don't make that move. And that's what my instincts would be. I'll follow something out and I'll go, you know, this is good. This is good. I don't know how to really take it to that final step or the next to the final step. And I'll back off of it. I don't think I've ever done anything where I really consider it to be risky, which is weird because people think all these things should be so risky.

53:36And I don't know. I wonder if Elon Musk thinks he's doing risky stuff. In theory, yes, electric car, in theory, very risky. Space pro, in theory, very risky. But apparently he has the ability to think these things through and go, nope, I know how to do this and it's doable. And, you know, Jimmy Donnelly, Mr. Beast, he has very good instincts about, especially in the arena that he's playing in the videos and all that. He knows what the right moves are. So for you, Jim, it's about instinct and then, you know, careful execution. And I wonder, Patrick, to get back to the disruptor loop, we've gone through discern and behave.

54:15We're now at achieve. Is what I just said about instinct plus proper execution and planning, is that relevant to the achieve factor? Yeah, it definitely is. Proper execution and planning is definitely thinking through the obstacles. What's going to get in our way? What can hold us back? And how can we work to get around those obstacles or mitigate them or eliminate them or transfer them to somebody else to deal with? Definitely. It's huge. It's huge. you know, I'm 280 pounds and I want to be a ballet dancer. I don't know. Let's think this through. You know, I mean, that's another thing in terms of people's dreams.

54:47Some of the dreams are very reasonable and some of them you want to be a dancer, but you're probably not going to do it professionally. Maybe, probably not. Sorry, Pat, go ahead. No, you're fine. There's actually a part around instinct that to me plays out so strongly in this section of the book. When we were out talking about it, I remember one time Jim and I were on the phone after I was out talking to an audience. He said, okay, what resonated with this group? And I said, well, I think when I was talking about disrupting your family, that really resonated because I told a story and then people came up and talked to me about it afterwards.

55:18And he said, what was the story? And I told him it ended up being the only personal story that's in the book other than Jim's introductory stories. But I tell a story about my parents. I was prompted by somebody who was doing something, asking you to think about the roles you fill in your life and pick out the ones that are your key roles right now. So they said, you know, you might fill out, you may have 20 or 30 roles in your life that you're filling. Like I'm a husband and I'm a dog owner and I'm a project manager and I'm whatever, but which ones are really critical right now? And I picked out a handful or so.

55:45And one of them I decided to pick was son S O N. And then they said, okay, assess yourself. Are you doing an ordinary job, an extraordinary job, a really poor job? What are you doing? And after I looked at the roles, I said, you know, I'm kind of struggling with the son thing. It's not like I'm a bad son. My parents wouldn't join the podcast right now and say, let me tell you about this kid, but it was just not that great. And at this point, I'm around 40 years old. And I started saying like, why is it that it's not that great? So I guess you could say, I didn't have the language for it, but say that was a disruption for me just doing that little assessment.

56:15So I looked at it and I said, well, when I call my parents, it's usually once a week, frankly, kind of obligation. I call and check in. I was living in Louisville, Kentucky at the time. They were living in Chicago, which is where I grew up at. I call them up and the conversations were almost the same every time. What's the weather? What's the traffic like? what's on your schedule this week? We both would exchange and then we'd hang up. And I kind of checked the block mentally. And after I looked at it, I said, could I be a little better? Could I ask them some questions? They raised five kids. I had two kids.

56:44Maybe I could ask them some questions. Guess what? They were pretty smart about kids. I would tell them about when I was traveling, what I was doing or send them a postcard while I was on a business trip. And it just changed the relationship. And I remember a few years later, after I started doing this, I got a call from my brother. He said, hey, you need to come home. Mom's gotten really ill. And I said, all right, I'll be home this weekend. And he said, no, you need to come home now. I was traveling. So I flew back, grabbed my wife, Jamie. We drove up and we got to my parents' house. And if you've ever heard that conversation where someone's the last person to show up, I was the last person to show up.

57:15I was the fifth of five kids to show up. Saw my mom. She rallied for a little bit. And a couple hours later, she passed away. Then you get into the whole rigmarole of planning a funeral and doing all that. And when it's all over with, I remember sitting back at my dad's house the day of the funeral. Now it's my dad's house. And I said to my wife, I'm so glad that I did that. I focused on my role as son. And she said to me, you're still a son. And across the room's my dad. And my dad's the no guy. My mom's always been the yes. Like, mom, can we go here? Yes. Dad, can we go there? No, we're fine.

57:45You know, that type of personality. And I said, oh yeah, I'm still a son. So I walk across the room and I said to my dad, I said, hey dad, I travel a lot for work. Do you want to come with me sometime? Fully expecting him to say, absolutely not. And he said, where are you going? And I grabbed my phone. I'm like, I'm going to Topeka, Kansas. And my dad goes to Topeka, Kansas with me. And then he goes to Florida with me. And the whole point on that is I didn't do anything massive to blow up my life. I just did a few things differently and stuck to it for a while. My dad's 94 now. He's almost 95.

58:16And I see him so much differently than I, he wasn't the no guy that I thought he was. He was a guy who had five kids and three jobs growing up on the South side of Chicago. That's who he was. He was busy. He was the guy who didn't always say, I love you that much. It just wasn't wired into him, but he's a great guy. And our relationship is so much different now. I love that story. Is there more to say about the achieve piece before we move on to refine? I mean, just from an organizational context, because Jim mentioned this book is a business book. It shows up in different spots and stores. It's kind of funny.

58:49It'll show up in the business part. It'll show up in the self-help. I don't really care personally where it shows up at, as long as people pick it up and check it out. But from the business side, absolutely. If you can get more people in your organization when they get hit with the disruption, when something changes or a new system gets implemented or customer expectations change or you name it, to go, all right, what's my vision for this thing? What could we do? What are the obstacles I can run into? And how can I test this thing? If you could just get them to do those three steps over and over and over in the achieve step, you're going to go a long way because all of a sudden it's not you as the leader trying to carry the whole company up the mountaintop.

59:23It's a thousand different people running little experiments about what they see can happen in the face of this disruption. And that's a pretty cool thing. Well, let me go backwards to Patrick's story about his dad. That's a great achievement. We don't think of it in that area. We think of achievement in business. No, in your regular life, I think it's even more important, personally. You became a better father. You became a better mom. But it's the same tools that are going to get you there. the tools that we're talking about in business. That's why I think the book is, it's one of those unusual books that it is a business book and it is a self-help book.

1:00:00Yeah. And I would just amplify your argument, Jim, by saying that in my experience and in my opinion, frankly, the better your relationships with your family, the better you're going to do at work. Yeah. A hundred percent. Yep. Yep. Yep. You know, it's funny though, to me, I spent my 20s in the army. I was an army ranger years gone by. So I'd jump out of planes and run around the woods and do things that people would consider bold or courageous. But making those phone calls to my dad and mom and sending postcards in some ways took a little bit more different type of courage that wasn't always that bold, but it was causing me to change how I saw things.

1:00:41And I think that was really key. James, I know that Patrick is supposed to do that heavy lifting on the various lists and all that stuff in the book. But the last piece of the disruptor loop is refine. And I feel like you're more than qualified to talk about it. You have disrupted in so many ways, but I think most famously in the publishing world, as you launch these various projects, to what extent do you come back, learn, and use those learnings to refine how you move forward? Well, every book, what it's about, for me, not all writers do this, but I start out with a long outline. When I started the Alice Cross series, I wanted to make sure I got it right if I could.

1:01:22I wound up writing a 320-page outline. And that's where the short chapters came from. And every book that I do, it's about refining. When Patrick and I did Disrupt Everything, it was about refining. We kept refining. We kept doing it over and over and over again. James Clear, when he talks about atomic habits, it took him years to write that. He kept refining, refining refining making it better fixing it as i said we added a lot on families to the book when we realized that that was so important and this book is relevant to families extremely relevant to families maybe more important for a lot of people to their families and the work part of it is during covid you're stuck in a house a lot obviously and i wasn't going to do this in a million years but i started writing an autobiography and i just started writing down story after story after story.

1:02:10It's just nothing but stories, one after the other. And I found that because it was the autobiography and I was so invested in it and my passion was so good, I found that I was paying attention to writing sentences more than I had in a long time. And my writing got better. My writing in the last couple of years, I think, has been the best it's ever been. And once again, it's that refining. I'm paying more attention to the sentences, to the paragraphs, to the page, to the chapter, refining, refining, refining. Yes. At a certain point, you just have to say it's biscuits, meaning it's over now. We could keep writing this forever, but we're not going to do that.

1:02:50We're going to move on and do another book. I'm nowhere near as accomplished or prolific a writer as you are, but in my experience, the most important part of writing is rewriting. Yeah, sure. For most writers. There are a couple that for whatever reason, boy, they can spit it out and spit it out. that first draft is pretty magical, but that's rare. This has been phenomenal to talk to both of you. Let me ask you both the two questions I always ask as we're winding down. One is, is there something that you were hoping to get to that we haven't gotten to? Anything that we've missed here, Patrick?

1:03:21I'll start with you on that. No, I don't think so. I think we hit all the highlights. The thing I would just want to make sure that people take away from this is the idea that you don't have to change everything. You can just take that one step to begin moving forward. And that one step might make all the difference over the course of time. I don't want people to read this and think this is the diet book that tells them they have to change everything they do. It's not that. Maybe it's to see what already they're doing well and add a thing or two to it. Yeah. You know, when I go out and I speak, especially because we do a lot of philanthropic stuff and I'll go to groups and maybe a big group of librarians or teachers or whatever.

1:03:57And one of the things I always say is, you know, we sat here for an hour and we talked a lot, don't pat yourself on the back because you listened for an hour. We didn't do anything. All we did was talk about stuff. So all we're doing here is talking about stuff. It doesn't mean anything unless you go do it. So, you know, even if you go to the library, go check out the book. And I'm not to sell books per se, but because we haven't done anything yet. But if it's interesting to you, then do something. It's all about doing things. You know, do it for yourself, do it for your work life, do it for your family, do it for your partner, whatever, you know, whatever your situation is.

1:04:32Take another step, take that first step to move forward with your life. And you kind of do now, because if you don't keep moving forward, I really think this is going to be the future of people in this country. If you're not moving forward, there's going to be a lot of pain in people's lives. James, I'll start with you on the second closing question, which is, can you just remind us of the name of the book and frankly, anything else you've written or put out in the world that you want. I know that's a long list. You Threw Up Everything and When is the book that Patrick and I did together, which, as I said, it is that unusual business and self-help.

1:05:08And I love the idea of helping people. The two things I have coming this year, which I think are stunning to me, the book I did with Viola Davis, the novel, it's the best novel I've ever done, and she's a big piece of it. She's great to work with. She's very tough in a great way. great way. And she just kept pushing, pushing, pushing to make sure these characters get stronger and stronger and stronger. And then the book with Mr. Beast, which is going to come out in September, which is also pretty amazing because his notion is that every individual, we have the ability to make some change within the world.

1:05:43And he preaches that to kids. And I think that's a really good thing in terms of motivating kids to, uh, I know you can do something. You can do something. You can make things better. You can make things better for yourself. You can make things better for the people around you. And it might be a small group or it might be a larger group. So those two projects in particular have me passionate and excited, which is very cool. I don't work for a living. I play for a living. Amazing. Anything to add, Patrick? Yeah, as you said, the books disrupt everything and win. And my biggest focus these days, honestly, is going out and talking to audiences about the book and working with executive teams to help them think about the disruptions facing their business and really just trying to create a movement of positive disruptors in the world.

1:06:25Well, Godspeed. James Patterson, Patrick Ledden, thank you to you both. Thank you. Great pleasure. This was great. Thank you, Patrick. You're the best. Thank you.

1:06:38Thank you again to James Patterson and Patrick Ledden. Great to talk to them. Don't forget to check out my new meditation app if you want to learn how to handle disruption more seamlessly. There's a 14-day trial if you want to try before you buy. You can get it at danharris.com. Finally, thank you very much to everybody who worked so hard on this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir is our executive producer.

1:07:11And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.

1:07:21Thank you.