James Patterson Shows Why Comfort Can Be a Trap

23:46Obviously, there's risk associated with that type of climbing, but there was a change in the weather, and they ended up spending five days on the mountain. And that was very – obviously, that could be framed as a negative disruption, certainly. Not framed. It is. I mean, you would wish that on your worst enemy to wake up in a hospital and be told they're going to have to amputate your hands and your feet. But he decided to go very incrementally in the idea of somebody brushed my teeth today. I'm going to brush my own tomorrow. And started to take ownership. When I met Jamie Andrew, he actually traveled from Scotland, where he lives, to the United States and walked in to give a presentation.

24:17I mean, it's one little disruptive choice he made after another. When you talk about ones that are more gradual over time, I think to the idea of we had a chance to talk to, happened to be another climber, but a young lady who was the youngest female North American to climb Mount Everest at 18 years old. And we talk about the evolution of a relationship with her father, where initially he was guiding her on small family hikes. And then she became his peer because she became as strong as he was. And then at the end, as she climbed Everest, he stayed at base camp and she went forward. You talk to her father, his name's Rodney Westlake.

24:48You talk to him and you feel that disruptive momentum that he felt over the course of time. And he had to process his way through it too. I mean, and when you think about she got to the top of the mountain, yes, but he also stayed in base camp. The relationship was disrupted. So it happened over the course of time. What we found is that everybody we talked to, regardless of how it came out suddenly over the course of time, we just started to realize there's a pattern that they follow and there's a way that they look at things and the way that they approach things. And that's what we found so intriguing in the research.

25:17Can you elaborate a bit more on the patterns that people follow who are successful at positive disruption and not just what are they doing, but what is it that they're not doing? What are the things that they're avoiding? I would say the first step is discernment. So the thing they're not doing is reacting immediately. They're not just shooting from the hip or somebody said something to me and I'm just going to lose it type of thing. What they did is they discerned. So that's what they didn't do. On the behavior side, they didn't focus on all the stuff they couldn't do well. They didn't focus on, I can't go left.

25:49So therefore, Jim was referring to earlier on the basketball court. They said, what can I do? And I'm going to lean into that. I'm going to find some people around me who can do some other things. They leaned into their strengths, not focused on trying to build up their weaknesses. One thing that they didn't do is they didn't limit themselves in the ability they could have a big impact. There were people that may have just disrupted themselves, but others disrupted family, industry, society, and they didn't put those self-imposed constraints on themselves because they started to see what was possible.

26:18And the other thing they didn't do is they didn't just move on to the next thing. They always step back and say, what did I learn? What can I do differently? How can I recommit to something new? And storytelling is really important to both of us and important in terms of getting people to understand, getting them involved, getting them to stay involved. Every company has a story and that story either moves you forward or moves you back. When I was in advertising, we had Ford and in those days Ford was having trouble and it was Ford found on road dead or fix or repair daily. That's a bad story.

26:52Bill Clinton had a bad story initially, which was pot smoking. And he changed the story in terms of what he accomplished in Arkansas. Sometimes we have to leave our job and move to another job because we need to change the story. Sometimes you go in at your first job and you're still the kid there. And six years later, you're still the kid. And you can't get past it and you have to leave because you're not the kid. Maybe you never were the kid, but you have to change jobs. with our families sometimes, it's very difficult to change the story. Mom and dad always kind of, well, you know, you've always been, well, but I'm not that way anymore, mom and dad.

27:28And it changes the story. Changing the story is important. You were the CEO of J. Walter Thompson by the age of 36, and yet you had to dramatically change your story to become an author. How do you know when it's time to disrupt inside of your organization, like if you had stayed at J. Walter Thompson versus when you hear that whoosh of traffic on the highway and you think, you know what, I'm driving in the wrong lane. It's time for me to, rather than disrupt within, I need to disrupt in a totally different lane. Frequently, it's harder than it should be. Sometimes it's just hard for us to step back and be kind of rational.

28:06I should have been able to step back at Thompson. There's some good things about this. I love the people that I work with. One of the things in terms of hiring there, I would only hire people who were talented and good to be around. So that was a pleasurable thing about the job. Interfacing with clients, I didn't like as much in terms of just what you had to do or not do in terms of promoting their projects or products. At that point, I was writing novels and beginning to get successful. I should have been able to logically figure that out, But I didn't. Patrick, I don't know his situation at a certain point.

28:44He might have said, okay, it's time. It's time for something else. Yeah, I think of it a little bit like when a disruption hits, you have to think a little bit about the emotions and process through them. So you have to think about, I liken it a little bit to a roller coaster. Some people love to hold on to the bar and scream, and other people like to raise their hand and smile. And that's how we hit disruption at times. But the ability to think like how you feel about this and what do you do with it? You got to process through those things. Like when Jim was talking about things he liked about his work and didn't, you have to kind of process through that emotional piece before you make a good decision.

29:14And I think that when, for me, when James Patterson comes and asks my students, are you living a good life? And then starts to tell about how he created his own good life. At that very moment, it was disruptive to me in that I was like, I want to study that. I want to know how people can take these disruptive moments, whether it's I'm driving in traffic and I don't want to go into the office today and I've kind of hit a limit, or I got caught on the top of a mountain or whatever it might be, how do they do that and say, okay, I'm going to make a move and I'm going to see something good really come from this.

29:47I'm going to innovate something new. And that was really interesting to me, which then when you have a good question that you're trying to discover, it becomes a great research piece. You have a terrific idea for your company or your team or product or something you want to, a company you want to start yourself. You don't kind of know exactly how to take that next step. Right. Patrick, how did you know when you made the transition from being an army ranger to running a business and then later from running a business to becoming a professor, how did you know when it was time to make those shifts?

30:18He was tired of jumping out of airplanes. Takes a toll. For me, on the military side, I was just kind of good at the military. They tell you to turn right, I turn right, tell you to turn left, I turn left, tell me to shut up, I shut up. I was pretty good at that. And then you just progress. I went to infantry school and airborne school and ranger school and did all those things. And my last job in the army was a company commander in the 82nd airborne division. And I'd heard so many people tell me, enjoy the time as a platoon leader, enjoy the time as a company commander, because after that, it all changes.

30:46And that was kind of all changes in that you get away from the soldiers. You're doing a lot more staff type of things. And I was like, I love this part of being with the soldiers. I don't know if I'll love that stuff. And I just decided at that moment, I'd heard that enough. to me, I was like, I'm going to move in a new direction. And it was tough in many ways, because you're on a pretty good track. The path I was on was a good, a good path, probably to high rank. But on the other hand, once you start to lose that passion around something, are you serving the soldiers in my case? Well, and that's when I decided I'm going to, I'm going to make a move.

31:18It wasn't that I lost the passion to make a positive impact in people's lives. I hope I do that across my whole career, but it was the passion of, I don't want to keep putting on the uniform and sit in a cubicle. For me, that just wasn't the right fit. So when I pivoted to coming out of the military, I still wanted to build something and do something cool. And that's eventually started on a business. And I ran it for 12 years and I was out of the country doing some work. And I came back after three months out of the country and somebody said, my boss would like to talk to you at their company.

31:45And I said, why? He said, because you've been gone for three months and your clients haven't quit, your employees haven't quit. We're looking to acquire someone. So that was an acquisition situation. situation and in that type of situation when you exit it's tough too because it's like the business was our we had two children and then we had our business it was like our third child at every meal my wife and i worked together on the business but we decided it was the right thing to do and move on to the next step so sometimes you know other voices will help you figure it out sometimes situations arise and those disruptions like my boss wants to talk to you maybe buy your business was a moment for me to say i could hold on to what i have which could be a perfectly good choice or I can move and go in a new direction.

32:21Actually, this new company can take my employees to a whole nother place that I probably won't get them either. And sometimes it's the case of trying to help people get past their fears, their large fears, which is really important. And pretty much all of us have those fears. Okay, I'm not sure if this will work. I'm not sure if I really want to change. I'm not sure if I can do this. I'm not sure. So helping people to get comfortable. Don't be afraid of it. You don't have to make the move necessarily, but let's figure it out. and then let's see if you're still afraid or as afraid. It's hard for a lot of people to open their minds up.

32:54It just is. They have difficulty at helping people to open their minds up. With our son, Jack, with Sue and I, my wife, it was always, let's just open doors for him. Not that you should do this, but what would it be like to do this? What's it like to play soccer? What's it like to take an extra math course? What's that like? And you don't have to do it, but let's just open the door and take a peek in there. There's a lot of times people, oh, I never would want to do that. Well, you don't know until you try it a little bit. I mean, constantly people are always saying, I wouldn't want to do that.

33:27I don't want to go to that kind of, I wouldn't eat that kind of food. Well, let's try it. And very often people go, I live in Palm Beach. Before I moved here, I would have said, there's no way that I will want to be in Palm Beach or deal with Palm Beach people or deal with Palm Beach. And I was wrong. It's delightful here, you know, sorry. Right. And if I can make one additional point, I think this is a really critical thing. As we studied this, you might think, well, you're going to be a positive disruptor, which means you're going to change and you're going to change and you're going to change and you're going to change.

33:57That's not the game we're setting up here. We're not saying that at all. We're saying you need to be open to change. And there may be times you take that job or move or take on that project at work or have a conversation with someone. There's also times where you might go, you know what, that disruption is out there. I was open to thinking about it, but I'm actually going to double down on stability right now. We already have a good product in the market. The way we go on family vacation is great, whatever it might be. But the point is you're making a conscious decision. And I would argue, Jim and I would argue, that in the face of disruption, if you say no to change, you might be the most disruptive person in the room sometimes because you say, that's not who we are.

34:33We're not going to do that right now. That's huge, huge with companies. We have to expand. We got to do this. We got to do that. I mean, that's destroyed so many companies. They expand and then, oh, what happened to them? Well, they just expanded too many times. They made too many bad decisions. And now that great company is no more or they're half of what they were. They lost the fire inside themselves. They lost the connection to that. Yeah. Right. They strayed too far from the core. And so that's why in the framework that you've created, you know, the fire is anchored by passion, talent, and your inner voice.

35:05But then the foundation underneath that are values. Can you talk about that? A lot of times in organizations, they'll say something like, these are the things we value. Integrity, collaboration, communication, trust, loyalty, have fun doing all these things. You know, that will be sitting on the wall. But the question is, what do you really live out? What does integrity even mean? So when we talk about values, we're saying you need to have values individually. You need to have values teams. You need to have values as an organization. Values ultimately tell you, what will I stand for? And what will I not put up with?

35:34What will I not stand for? And you need to be clear on those things because in moments of disruption, you're actually hitting a moment of choice. And you can choose to move closer in alignment with those values or you can choose not to. And if it's in my family and I'm the parent, my kids see it if I'm living out my values or not. My team at work sees it. My colleagues and friends see it. So the ability to make sure we move out in ways that align with our values are really critical because that's the anchor. You mentioned earlier that relationships can be a source of both headwinds and tailwinds.

36:06sometimes those relationships push you to act in a way that is not in accordance with your values. When that happens, it can be difficult to say, these are my values, because it comes off sounding like unwarranted stubbornness. How would you deal with a situation like that? Well, I would be a little bit different in the way I would phrase it in that I wouldn't say that the relationship pushed me to do it. I would say I chose to do it. I made that choice to do that, and that is a choice. And I don't necessarily think I need to challenge somebody like my values are XYZ because doing that, that becomes confrontational.

36:42I think you just need to realize that relationships do hold you back and relationships do lift you up and you do the same thing to others. So keep that in mind as well. But there's also the reality that there's some relationships where you might be like, this person is a terrible headwind and I've tried to address it. And you know what? I just need to kind of terminate this relationship. That's a doable thing if they're on the way kind of to the periphery or on the outside of really. But what if it's a family member? That's a very different thing. In that case, you make your own choices in life, but you may just say, okay, I got to put some boundaries in place around this and figure out how to make this work a little bit better because I still want to maintain a relationship with that person.

37:18All we're trying to help people think about is we realize that it's like going for a jog. Is the wind behind your back and you all of a sudden feel like you're the next Olympic athlete or is the wound in your face? And we know it when we walk into a meeting somewhere and you're like, oh my gosh, I didn't know this person was going to be in here. And that's a headwind and we need to address it as opposed to just let it sit because not addressing it, it doesn't get better. We have to choose to disrupt it. And with the relationship, that can make the relationship stronger, make it work, addressing them.

37:48Or in some cases, you may have to say that this is not workable. But if you're rational about it, I mean, you see a lot of people and you go, oh my God, why are they doing this to each other? You know, once again, it comes down to that fear or not being open. And it's hard for people. And we try to make it a little easier to examine these things in a rational manner and then, you know, hopefully make things better. Or in some cases, you just have to make a difficult decision. You know, I want to go back to, James, when we were talking about some of the ways that you have been disruptive throughout your career, we covered the decision to break the mold of publishing only one book a year and to go all the way up to six books a year.

38:32But then you did something that was also disruptive and quite different, which is you started co-authoring books with a wide variety of different people. And that was really, no pun intended, that was very novel. Can you talk through - Once again, it just seemed like a very logical thing to consider. There's no reason. But if you look around the world, if we're going to actually save our world, it probably means we'll eventually learn how to collaborate. Here's a good thing that works somewhere. Let's try it somewhere else because it works. Sistine Chapel, some amazing painters up there, you know, painting the same and collaborating and making it great.

39:13advertising tends to be collaborative writer art director maybe a producer but getting together and figuring out how to make a relatively short film and how do you make the best film and i knew all this so i always thought it would be kind of a useful thing to do not scary and probably a good thing and obviously not everyone should collaborate on things And I started doing it with a couple of friends. There was one friend in particular, and we said, let's just write this little novel. Both of us were writers, and we tried it, and it was fun. And we were used to it because we both worked in advertising.

39:50We were comfortable with that for a while now, collaborating with famous people like President Clinton. And we've done three novels together. And President Clinton, first of all, he reads everything. He's a massive reader. He reads, reads, reads. He doesn't sleep. He's a vampire. Now he doesn't sleep. And among other things, he likes mystery novels, just doesn't escape every once in a while. So the notion of writing a mystery with him was sort of interesting. And also, especially the books that we wrote, he brings authenticity, which is really useful and important. And it doesn't appear necessarily in most mysteries.

40:29With Dolly Parton, same thing. She brought authenticity. And she's a storyteller. country music more than most rap is this way too weirdly but country music and rap in particular are storytelling forms of music all of her songs are her famous songs are stories because she was fascinating to work with she was a hungry dog for sure i met with dolly down in nashville and we talked for about three hours about we started out maybe we do some kids books and then we started talking about an adult book. And I had a little idea and a quick little outline for the possibility of one. She said, well, leave the outline with me and I'll think about it.

41:11And two days later, she called up, she had some thoughts on the outline and she had already written seven songs to go along with this novel, which was about a country singer in Nashville. That's just her nature to be a hungry dog, to go out and chop wood. And she's still that way.

41:33It's time for Black Friday, Dell Technologies' biggest sale of the year. Enjoy huge savings on select PCs like the Dell 16 Plus featuring Intel Core Ultra processors. And with built-in advanced features, it's the PC that helps you do more faster. Plus, earn Dell rewards and enjoy many other benefits like free shipping, price match guarantee, and expert support. They also have huge deals on accessories that pair perfectly with your Dell PC and make perfect gifts for everyone on your list. Shop now at Dell.com slash deals.

42:12This episode brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Shifting a little money here, a little there, and hoping it all works out? Well, with the Name Your Price tool from Progressive, you can get a better budgeter and potentially lower your insurance bill, too. You tell Progressive what you want to pay for car insurance, and they'll help find you options within your budget. Try it today at Progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. Not available in all states.

42:49It's that time of year again. Everyone knows that the holidays can become overwhelming quickly, so the sooner that you get things done, the better. And for both shoppers and businesses, the best time to score great deals during the holidays is Black Friday Cyber Monday weekend. Whether you are an established business or whether you are someone who's going to experience their first Black Friday Cyber Monday this year, you know that the most important thing you need is a platform that can handle everything that's about to be thrown at you. You don't want to find out that your inventory is off while orders are streaming in, or you don't want to find out that your point of sale system can't keep up with all the requests, many of which are from new customers who are buying your products for the first time.

43:31You need to make sure that your tools and platform are ready for anything that comes your way during the busiest weekend of the year. And that's why you need Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10 % of all e-commerce in the US. from household names to entrepreneurs who will be participating in their first Black Friday Cyber Monday this year. You can stress less knowing that Shopify's award-winning customer support team is on standby 24-7 to help with any issues that arise. And you can attract customers with the ease of a convenient checkout through ShopPay, which is Shopify's expedited checkout, which has been proven to boost conversions.

44:09So if you want to give customers the best possible experience this holiday season, you need Shopify. This Black Friday, join the thousands of new entrepreneurs hearing for the first time with Shopify. Sign up for your free trial today at shopify.com slash paula. That's shopify.com slash paula. Go to shopify.com slash paula and make this Black Friday one to remember.

44:42You've talked about chopping wood. sounds as though the tendency to go out and chop wood, the tendency to just go out and do it is a core component of all of this. It depends on the person. You can make some small gains. I wrote a book, the number one dad book, how to be a better dad in one hour. And it's another one like this, where my objective is to make things easier for people. There are a lot of men out there, especially younger men who are kind of lost and overwhelmed. And you're not going to be the breadwinner anymore. You have to change the way you're thinking about life. You may not find somebody to love.

45:17There are a whole lot of things. And the notion about that book was I knew a lot of men will not sit down and read the 400-page book. So I tried to figure out a way to condense as much as I could. And I did a lot of research. I kind of read everything I could find on that subject and then talked to hundreds of dads about, well, how do you do it? What are your tricks? What have you figured out? And tried to put as much as I could into this book. And my guarantee was, I guarantee you, if you read these 100 pages, this one hour, you will pick up at least a couple of things that will make you a better father.

45:51And that's a pretty good use of an hour. But once again, the spirit of it was, and it's just the way we were brought up, which was to work in the soup kitchen. We do a lot of charities. I've given away$240 million right now. And I don't take credit for it. It's my mother and my grandmother. father. That's the way we were brought up. You give. That's the deal. Don't take any credit for it. Just that's what you're supposed to do. So similarly with the dad book and to some extent with this book, yeah, we have some thoughts that can help people. There's a section in which you talk about the distinction between mission and purpose.

46:29Can you elaborate on that idea? Each of these have distinct meanings. You'll hear like vision, mission, purpose, all these type of things. There is a distinction between them. Like a vision is like, where are we going to go over time? And a mission is what are we going to do and how are we going to get there? And a purpose is why we're doing these type of things. We didn't want to belabor the point as we were talking about it because as we were going through the research, most people just talked about, hey, what are they trying to do? And why does it matter to them? We just kind of kept the conversation at a fairly simple level.

46:58And Jim even talks about his own mission and gives some examples of missions. And we just want people to think that through about why am I here? where am I going type of thing. But we weren't really getting too much into corporations deal with all these different terms because that's just not where people live. Well, it strikes me that there's disruption at the corporate level or at the organizational level, I should say. And then there's disruption at the individual level. And I think at the individual level, a lot of people are looking for a sense of purpose in their life, but many people don't necessarily think about kind of have a mission statement for their own life.

47:34Yeah, I would say that we purposely made a choice early on to talk a bit about purpose and the importance of it, understand the fire inside yourself. But quite frankly, we didn't belabor the point on that. We leaned more into the idea, okay, once you know what this is, how are you going to handle disruptions? And the reason we did that is there's a lot already written and said about sitting back and thinking about your purpose. And in many ways, it's an introspective component that takes a fair amount of time. we show up and say in this project, all right, get clear on your purpose. But now let's talk about how you live that purpose out once you walk out that door and life hits you with the good and the bad.

48:13Right. So AI is the new frontier of the ultimate disruption. How should people be thinking about the way the AI is going to disrupt every facet of our lives? And how do we incorporate this into this conversation? The first step, I think, is don't spend time being fearful because it's not useful. President Clinton and I talk all the time about if something happens today, as it so often does, it's disturbing. If we can't do something about it, we're not going to let it, try not to let it ruin our day. And if we can do something, we do it. So with respect to artificial intelligence, let's not spend a lot of time worrying about it because it's not useful.

49:00It's not helping anything to sit there and worry about it. And if there are things that you can do, you know, like in your work, if it's already like Patrick, you were talking to somebody who had an experience. Yeah, absolutely. So there was a gentleman I was talking to who was talking about AI. He was concerned about AI. So it wasn't just an abstract concept or something he saw on the is it was like really happening in his life where he said, I'm a writer at work. I get paid to write. And my CEO just read a presentation or gave a speech that was completely written by AI. And he's like, I'm concerned.

49:33Am I going to lose my job? Talk about a disruption, right? Not the abstract disruption of AI, but the real one in his life. And I just started asking him some questions to think through. And then one of them was, do you see a world where with the existence of AI, you could actually be more valuable and not less valuable to your company? And he thought about it. He said, yeah, I think I can. And I said, okay, well, in our research in this project, we identified five roles that people take on in the moment of disruption. Which of these make sense? And he picked one. And I said, great. Let's talk about what your strengths are, your behaviors.

50:03And he labeled some. And all of a sudden, he walked out. He goes, oh, I kind of have a vision of what can happen. And I can see how I can change my behavior in a way that'll add so much more value. So in that type of situation, it took the AI is changing the world and it's disruptive to what's it mean to you and what can you do about it? When we talk often about technology, there's an expression out there that says we overestimate the impact it's going to have in the short term and underestimate it in the long term. So right now, AI to many people is the savior and other people is the devil. And the question becomes, all right, what's it mean to you specifically?

50:35Let's really get our hands wrapped around it because that's where we live. Which one of those roles did he choose? He chose to be a trailblazer, which folks listening, that means he's going to go toward change and move out independently, which meant he's going to learn as much as he can about AI. And he's going to take that over and take on the role of then of torchbearer, which means he's going to lead a movement in the organization to help educate and help people understand how to use AI. The positives and the negatives, because we know there's a lot of investment going on in organizations around AI.

51:04And there's also a lot of chatter going on right now saying, we're not getting the return on investment we thought we'd get from it. Or AI is doing things we didn't expect it to do. It hallucinates constantly. So him understanding that as well as how to use his tools, all of a sudden made him a person who's possibly on the line to get crossed off at some point if there's cuts, just suddenly being the guy that people are going to. So he didn't just choose one role, he chose one, and then he moved over to another one at the right time, which is what we find is that, because it's not a fixed personality thing, we find that people move from one role to the other as the situation evolves.

51:35So essentially, he made himself indispensable by being the go-to guy when you've got a question about AI. It's the difference between saying disruption is going to destroy everything to disruption is fertile ground to do something cool. Right. Are there any other things that people should be thinking about as we approach the AI future? Not just in terms of work, but in terms of how it'll affect family, how it'll affect relationships, how it will affect every element of life. I think part of it is just get real about, is it going to affect you and get perspective from you rather than this worldly and especially fear just being afraid of things it's not useful it's just not i mean is it going to have any effect on you in terms of what you do insofar as you can see and if not i mean it's not that you can't talk about it and have interesting talk about it but the amount of time that's being wasted in terms of people talking about ai that doesn't go anywhere it's just not helpful if it's going to affect you or if you can see it affecting you in the near future or whatever, then it probably behoves you to spend some time with it, talking about it.

52:40But don't waste a lot of time. The same thing happened early on with the internet. And we had some of the same fears. This is, I think, a more intense than the internet change was, but it will be. And just an incredible amount of time wasted. At Thompson, what I said is nobody knows where it's going. We're going to sell tours on the internet for people, for our clients. We will take them on tours in terms of what exists right now. Here's the internet, here's what's happening, and we will get you to pay for it. So that was the positive use of the internet for right now. Yes, you're going to know more than you knew about it.

53:19We'll bring you up to date as much as we can, and we will get paid for it. Yeah. When we think about the internet, obviously a big disruption and it's here to stay. Y2K bug was going to crash everything, didn't quite happen. You think about these internet of things was something we all talked about for a while. It went away. AI, I think it's different. It's going to be here forever. It's already, it's going to be here for the rest of my life. It's going to continue to be more generative. You can't get away from it. Teaching in a classroom. Think about how you deal with AI in the classroom. What do you give writing assignments that students can just hand over to an AI device or something, an AI that's going to generate the homework for them and you can't really tell who did it because you can't.

53:55So what do you do there? You have to disrupt the way you teach. All of a sudden you're doing more things in the classroom. You've seen the blue books come out and people are writing the actual essays in the classroom. Or you use it as a tool and say, all right, I'm actually going to use this thing to create the prompts that we talk about in class. And students will throw ideas in them, we'll go from there. So I think it's a tool, right? So like any tool, you can use it for its intended purpose, even as that evolves. You can use it as a crutch. These are all the reasons I can't do things because of this thing.

54:20You can use it as a weapon and hit people over the head with it. And I just think it's a tool. And you just have to say, okay, what can we do with it? And one of the best things you can do is you get smarter about how it's impacting your world. And that's pretty much all you can do. And in Patrick's case, or in anybody teaching in college or even high school or anywhere right now, it's a real issue and it's an everyday issue. Right. You know, you mentioned Thompson in your last answer. And another thing struck me, which is you became the CEO at the age of 36. There were, I would assume, people who had been there longer, people who were older.

54:55and who had been there longer. Yes, there were older people, by golly. No more, though. Who did not ascend to that position. You did something very special when you were in your 20s and 30s. There was something about you that was different in your performance that led you to become the CEO by the age of 36. And then you repeated that performance. It made a whole career switch, but also did something very special that made you stand out amongst authors. What is it that's so different? Well, I think part of it, I just recognized a real skill that I had that one, I enjoyed it, which is the skill to communicate.

55:40And in terms of advertising, it is that skill. And in terms of books, obviously, it is that same skill, that ability to collaborate in a lot of different ways. And in the book world, I've written mysteries. I've written nonfiction, most recently the Idaho murders. I wrote the first big book on Jeffrey Epstein back in 2016, children's books, because Jack, our Jack was a kid. He's a very smart kid. He wasn't a big reader. I started writing a lot of kids' books. But I just recognized, one, I love to do it, you know, communicate, tell stories. And I had a skill set there. But once again, just in terms of solving problems, when I took over the New York offices, I said to people that know how to work there.

56:25And what I did, I just looked around. I said, well, here are the people that I think can really help me right now and make this company a whole lot better, this office a whole lot better. And I chose two women. One was 28, one was 29, and a 74-year-old guy. And they become the three big people in the company, in that office. Why? Because they really know what they're doing. The end. I don't care that Linda Kaplan has only been in the business for four years. She's great at it. I don't care that this other guy is 74 years old. I don't care. It's irrelevant. No dumb rules. What I'm hearing is decision-making that was formed in large part by trusting your instincts.

57:08Yeah. Yeah. There's actually, in the research on this project, we found 16 behaviors. These or disruptive behaviors. We didn't find anybody who maxed all of these things. And when I'm listening to Jim talk right now, I'm like, okay, one of the behaviors is trust your instincts. And some people have that nailed, other people, not so much. I was actually talking to an audience about a year and a half ago or two years ago during the research, we'd go out and talk to audiences. And I was talking to this big group that was at a hotel that had a casino. And I said to them, how many of you believe that everybody has instincts worth trusting?

57:39and a lot of hands went up. I'm like, seriously, you all think that? And they're like, well, I don't know. I said, go to that casino at 2 a.m. and tell me if people have good instincts. Jim has good instincts, which is one of the - You know my instinct about gambling? I don't. Yeah, guaranteed not to lose. So trust your instincts is one that people have. Some people who are positive disruptors don't have great instincts. Maybe they don't have an experience or whatever it might be. Then they surround themselves with somebody who does have a good gut. Jim also has the ability to say smart things.

58:06And that's one of the 16 behaviors. So as I'm listening to him talk right now, I'm ticking off the ones in my mind that these are the ones that he has nailed. And sorry, Jim, you don't have all of them nailed, but nobody did. There's all these really cool combinations of people who do amazing things. The point being is we learned in the project and in the research is like, you've got some strengths. Lean into them. But another piece of it is also to recognize some of the things you don't do as well and accept it. Yeah. Walking in your own shoes. And I don't do certain things well at all. I can't fix my...

58:36There's a lot of things I can't do very well. That's okay. That's fine. I think a lot of guys are not great at accepting things that they don't do as well, or they let it overwhelm them. They let it defeat them. I'll meet people and go, they apologize because they don't read a lot. You don't have to apologize. It's okay. What do you do? Oh, you think a lot or you don't. Are you raising your family well or whatever the heck it is? Let's talk about the stuff that you, it doesn't matter. You don't read my book. So what? Good for you. And some people are really good. And I've been with all types, either actors or directors or whatever.

59:15And some people really, Ron Howard is wonderful at accepting that and realizing how lucky he is. And when people, we've been out to eat a few times. And always people will come up and very frequently they say, we loved you on the Andy Griffith show when he was Opie. And he's such a gentleman. He's like, oh, thank you so much. It's really wonderful. I have won a couple of Academy Awards, but don't worry about that. And part of it, I mean, people come up in restaurants or whatever, and I always try to be, you know, yeah, well, this is great. And thank you so much for, you know, sharing. After all these years, does it feel real?

59:53Yeah, it is real. You know, one of the things about raising Jack, our son, is the notion of my dad writes a lot of books, so what? or my dad writes too many books or what hopefully he's okay with it but that's the end of it there's that's not a big deal and you know he he's gone to good schools and and run into some people who have famous parents and whatever and most of his friends are pretty cool about it i didn't do it yeah i'm a kennedy but but i'm not the kennedy so what and that's a good attitude about insofar as you can do it uh and same thing here i write a lot of books and i you know it's not a big thing It's fine.

1:00:30It's okay. I'm lucky. And Patrick, from your side, how is that experience for you? Like the two of you partnering on this project that you both clearly very deeply believe in, but coming from such vastly different backgrounds. Can you describe that? Yeah. Jim mentioned different partnerships, right? Sistine Chapel. Sometimes I'll mention Lennon and McCarthy. Whenever you're partnering with somebody, there's a bit of a dance and you have to figure out how it's going to work out. And I just felt that once we started down this road, not only was whatever I would have produced on my own been substandard to this, but also I'm going to learn a lot in the process.

1:01:09I mean, we spent nine months on the outline of the project that we were working on when it became a book. We spent a few years working on this over the course of time. And actually the entire time we never even talked about like, what's this deal going to look like if we ever strike it somewhere until we got to the very end. And we just said, Jim asked me, what do you think is reasonable? I told him what I thought. He said, that sounds good. Let's go forward. It really was a partnership. If you look at the book we wrote, you wouldn't know who wrote what. Other than some lines jump out at me sometimes.

1:01:40I'm like, yeah, I wrote that line. There's other times where I'm like, that was really good. I wish I could write more like him. I don't think if somebody would read the project, they'd even know. That's part of a partnership. In terms of the partnership, I don't love to research. I should do more even with the novels. Patrick, is much more skilled. Also, because, and I think this relates sometimes to professional athletes, why some of them don't become very good coaches for other people, because some of this stuff just comes to them rather naturally, and they can't explain it. They can't, they just, well, you just do this.

1:02:15And, you know, and Patrick is much better at explaining some of these things so that people who necessarily don't have the instincts, Okay, I can follow this. And a lot of the toolkits and things like that, that I would never be able to do those in a million years. It's not me. And it's recognizing what I can't do and what I can do. And Patrick recognizing what he can do and he can't do as well. Yeah. And so what I hear is that a lot of, you know, finding, you talk about strength. So there's that element of finding people with complementary skill sets. But what's interesting to me about this is that there's the recognition of playing to your strengths is not in conflict with also having a growth mindset.

1:02:58Because I think, Patrick, you alluded to that earlier when you said, hey, it's not a fixed mindset thing. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it is definitely not limiting yourself. It's definitely the world is exciting. You mentioned AI. What can I learn about it? I mean, there's that constant yearning to learn something new. And one of the behaviors we found is this idea that things can get better. One person we interviewed, she started a company back in the 70s, a fashion line called Notori. She still runs it today. She's about 80 years old. Every month she travels to the Philippines where she owns a plant, visits with the people who are producing the garments, and then sits down with her 100-year-old mother and talks about the bookkeeping.

1:03:37I mean, that's somebody who's constantly learning, producing a new line of clothing every fall, every spring. And the idea of realizing things can get better is really an important mindset. And I think one thing we found is that what holds you back from being a positive disruptor isn't your yearning to be a negative disruptor, to be difficult or curmudgeon. What holds you back from being a positive disruptor is a relentless pursuit of comfort to try to go back and maintain these things. And positive disruptors, by definition, are learners. They're constantly moving forward. And your roles may change.

1:04:14I mean, your role in the company, your role at home or whatever, it may change over time. This year, maybe you have to be this in the team, and next year, it's something else. Eventually, you may run the team, which you run the company. But that's part of it. There are different things where, as time goes by, your role can change radically. Sometimes learning to do one of the lower roles or lower roles, one of the different roles, is useful in terms of moving forward, moving up, if you want to move up. Right. It rounds out your skill set and makes you appreciate that area better. But you mentioned, Patrick, you mentioned comfort.

1:04:52And it seems as though the big antithesis of what we're talking about, the antithesis of the positive disruption that we've been discussing, it's comfort, it's a false sense of security, it's stubbornly clinging to what is, to the illusion of what is. And comfort might not even be the best word because there's nothing wrong per se with comfort. You can be on a successful team and be very comfortable with the success. But there is something about the negative, the laziness sometimes. There are some really bad things about just burying your head in the sand. You know, this used to be a great, we used to make a lot of batteries here and da da da da.

1:05:32And it went away and there's nothing we can do anymore. and just to be angry. And it's human nature, but it's not useful. That's the best way to move forward in life. James, your hat says unreliable narrator. What does that mean to you? A nice way of saying you're a liar. No, there are certain kinds of novels, and I've written a couple where the narrator is totally unreliable. You're listening to them, it's first person. So you just assume that they're telling you the truth and you find out as it moves on that they're not telling you the truth. So a friend of mine gave it to me, Mike Lupica, one of my best friends.

1:06:06He's a co-writer. And so, yeah, I think it's humorous. I like humor. Humor is great. Humor gets you through stuff. Do you prefer co-writing projects? You seem to be doing mostly co-writing projects these days. No, I do one or two of my own every year. But what I love is at the end of the project, and it doesn't always happen. You hope it will, that you go, I'm really happy that I did that. That really worked out well. And it doesn't always happen. Sometimes you get to the end of the novel, it's like, I don't know why it didn't click the way I hoped it would, but it didn't. Or you make a movie, which are complicated because you have so many people involved and so many egos.

1:06:46And a lot of times the way Hollywood is structured now, it's not just the person in the movie, it's all of their people, which really gets it out of hand. And it's not useful for the project usually. There's a piece of language. which it's not mine, I don't know where it came from, but I think about it. It's guided me for the last couple of years, like doing the novel with Viola Davis. What it is, is my time here is short. What can I do most beautifully? What strikes me is that what often is good advice for an organization is also good advice for an individual. Exactly. We have one life. And one thing is if we try to compartmentalize things too much, I think we cause problems for ourselves.

1:07:28So the idea of recognizing, boy, if I can get good at this with the relationships at work, that'll probably help me around the dinner table if I even have one anymore. So the ability to say this is applicable everywhere because it's based on some really good thinking and some really good practices that other people are using. If it was just one person's narrative story about how they lived a great life, it might be useful to you. You might be able to apply it, but this is the voices of many. And when you get to a certain number of many, you start to realize there's some real wisdom here. Right.

1:08:00Right. Well, thank you for spending this time with us. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Where can people find you if they would like to learn more? We're pretty easy. He's jamespatterson.com and I'm patrickleddon.com. Beautiful. Thank you to James Patterson and Dr. Patrick Leddon. What are three key takeaways that we got from this conversation? Key takeaway number one, your disruptive edge comes from doing the things that others won't. James Patterson didn't just submit one portfolio in order to land his first job. He submitted four consecutive portfolios over four weeks, and that completely disrupted the normal hiring process.

1:08:40And that kind of relentless approach became his signature throughout his career, constantly questioning the status quo and saying, you know what? Why can't I go above and beyond that? I just look, Angela, where is the rule written that you can only do one book a year, one book every two years? What is that rule? I'm sorry, this doesn't make sense to me. So I challenged it. That's the first key takeaway. Key takeaway number two, fear is expensive. If you're stuck in a job or a situation that's just not working, fear keeps you from making the move that could ultimately transform your income. And maybe there would be short-term pain, but there would be long-term growth.

1:09:21James Patterson was a PhD candidate. That's a lot of sunk cost at the time that he left Vanderbilt. He then became a successful CEO. That's a job that most people would want to keep, especially at 36, but he knew that he was in the wrong lane. And so he took a huge gamble becoming an author. A lot of people identify with this idea that authors and artists, that necessarily equates to being broke, especially fiction authors, right? But he He became a fiction author and then decided that he was going to publish at a wildly prolific volume and over time amassed 425 million book sales. And sometimes it's a case of trying to help people get past their fears, their large fears, which is really important.

1:10:11And pretty much all of us have those fears. Okay, I'm not sure if this will work. I'm not sure if I really want to change. I'm not sure if I can do this. I'm not sure. So helping people to get comfortable. Don't be afraid of it. You don't have to make the move necessarily, but let's figure it out. Fear is expensive, particularly when it comes to opportunity cost. That is the second key takeaway. Finally, key takeaway number three. The story that you tell yourself determines your salary ceiling. Sometimes you need to leave a job because you're still seen as the kid, even after six years of proving yourself.

1:10:49If you're in an organization or in an environment, maybe you're in a social environment where your environment around you is telling you a limiting story about yourself, or if you inside of your own head are telling yourself a limiting story about yourself, well, changing that narrative is your key to getting a higher income and better opportunities. Sometimes you go in, it's your first job, and you're already still the kid there. And six years later, you're still the kid. And you can't get past it, and you have to leave because you're not the kid. Those are three key takeaways from this conversation with James Patterson and Dr.

1:11:27Patrick Ledden. Thank you so much for being part of the Afford Anything community. If you enjoyed today's episode, please do three things. First, subscribe to our newsletter, affordanything.com slash newsletter, where today, in fact, we are sending out a newsletter all about the 50-year mortgage, about things that are happening right now. So we talk in our newsletter about stuff that we don't cover here on the podcast. So please subscribe to our newsletter. It's absolutely free. Affordanything.com slash newsletter. Second, please share this episode with the people in your life. Share it with anyone you know who's a fan of James Patterson's books.

1:12:08or a fan of reading mysteries, share it with fans of Dolly Parton, or fans of the fiction writing of President Clinton. They co-authored three books together. Share it with all of those people and more, because that is the single most important way that you spread the message of FIRE. Finally, please open up your favorite podcast playing app and leave us up to a five-star review and write a few words about what you enjoy about the show. Those reviews are incredibly meaningful and they allow us to go out and book incredible guests. So thank you in advance for doing that. And thank you for being part of the Afford Anything community.

1:12:48I'm Paula Pant. This is the Afford Anything podcast, and I'll meet you in the next episode.