Flourishing at Work

0:03Daniel Coyle: This is Eat Sleep Work Repeat. It's a podcast about making work better. Hello, I'm Bruce Taisley. One of the most frequent guests on the show has been the writer Daniel Coyle. A lot of listeners might have read his book, The Culture Code or The Talent Code. He also did The Culture Code playbook a couple of years ago, which helps turn the themes of The Culture Code into sort of practical actions and interventions. It's got a brand new book out called Flourish. It sort of takes some of the themes that he's explored before and sort of has an application for them that transcends the workplace to a large extent.

0:41Daniel Coyle: He sort of talks about really themes of attention, about connection with other people. It's a really compelling read. It goes into the personal, it goes into who brilliantly articulated examples of different firms. And I always find chatting to Dan, especially Daniel. I call him Dan a couple of times in the episode and his name's Daniel. Apologies for that. I said to him at the end, shouldn't I call you Daniel, Daniel? Anyway, he was all right about it. Don't you worry about it. Anyway, but I chat to Daniel. The fact he's got access point to some of these incredible sports teams and organisations, It gives you a really powerful insight, I think, into the practicalities of making cultural interventions work.

1:25Daniel Coyle: It's actually a really powerful discussion. It's a really good discussion where we go into some of the specificity, really, of how you might take the themes of attention that he's talking about and bring them to a contemporary workplace, beset with sort of constant messaging and demand, how you might implement that or how you might sort of think about the idea of group flow and bringing group flow to your own team in your own organisation. Always brilliant to chat to Daniel Coyle. This is my conversation with him about his new book, Flourish. Dan, thank you so much for joining me. I wonder if to kick off, you could just introduce who you are and what you do.

2:03Nick Epley: Yeah, Daniel Coyle. I'm a writer. I've written about, I guess, my gig. I was raised in Alaska. I have four daughters. And my life has been kind of writing about the machinery beneath the magic. Like individuals that look sort of magical, super talented. What's really going on there? Groups that are super talented, great culture. What's the machinery there? And now I've been, with this latest book, turning my lens to kind of a bigger topic, which is sort of what communities, what great communities do. What is the power? What is happening in groups that are creating this thriving growth and joy and meaning, which, of course, brings us to your world, I think, a little bit.

2:43Daniel Coyle: Yeah. It really struck me. I wonder if there was just moments of personal reflection that inspired you to think about these things that sort of transcended just the thing that we spend 40 hours a week on into sort of the whole of our lives. You talked about your parents passing away. You talked about, at the end of the book, you talked about your daughter sort of going to college or moving on beyond that. And I just wonder if your own sort of personal stages in life helped you get that perspective and that reflection.

3:12Nick Epley: I think that's a nice point. I think apparently we get older, Bruce. I was having trouble absorbing this, but apparently it's true. And you can't help but, as you do, kind of take a little bigger lens on things. And I think as a group, we've all learned, we've all seen enough sad success stories. Like people who were very successful by the conventional metrics, and yet when you meet them or when you spend time with them or you hear about their personal lives, they're a train wreck. There's an emptiness and a sadness to them. So I guess my interest kind of went that way along with everybody else's where it's like, yeah, you know what, in the big picture, how do we become our best selves?

3:54Nick Epley: How do we find some success? How do we have fulfillment at work? What's that made of? Is that just kind of those people got lucky who do it? Or is there something going on there that's a little bit deeper? and is there a machinery there that we can kind of understand that is all about kind of flourishing, not just succeeding, right? Not just having the metrics, but actually having this sense of aliveness and growth and possibility that we get to inhabit every day.

4:22Daniel Coyle: Flourishing is where? What? We're thriving?

4:25Nick Epley: Joyful, meaningful growth shared. And the big insight, I think, of my book, I went out there researching places. As I've said, I've spent a lot of my life researching top performers on top of the mountain who had reached the top of the mountain. And this book sent me into the valleys, like places of richness and growth. And, you know, a little town in Vermont that had produced 11 Olympians, most of whom come back there to live afterwards. Or this little deli in Michigan that started out as a one-room deli and now is a$90 million community of businesses rooted in the same place. You know, they're turning down offers from Walt Disney to go to Florida and California.

5:03Nick Epley: They love where they're at. They're joyful. They're thriving. They're creating meaning. And when I started out, I thought I'd find places that had, you know, sort of tidy answers. They had figured it out. But what I found was that these places were really good at kind of living into the question, at creating meaningful connection that connects us. And so that was kind of the surprise. I kept seeing the same pattern over and over again of the framework is they're able to sort of pause and create meaning and open up their attention. And then the second thing they're able to do is create conditions for collective leadership, design conditions where people can get into group flow and move toward a horizon together.

5:45Nick Epley: and it really comes down to the power of community like all these places whether it was at a workplace whether it was in an actual community were sort of functioning as a community and so the big insight was you can't do it alone like we kind of have a reflective reflexive answer that oh we flourish as individuals but in truth that's a huge mistake you know we evolved to live and thrive in community And these places are functioning in such a way that they're pushing away some of the speed and fragmentation of the modern world. And they're able to kind of operate in an old mode, an older mode where they're slowing down, they're connecting, and they're able to kind of group flow their way toward these obstacles in ways, through obstacles toward a horizon, in ways that sort of make them come alive.

6:37Nick Epley: And I think we've all, like, one way to think about this is to kind of think about times in your life where you felt kind of connected to a vibrant community, where you felt like yourself, you know, growing and changing and experiencing joy on the daily. Those kind of moments are what these places are really good at creating. So, you know, flourishing is kind of a synonym for great community, right? Flourishing, you can't do it alone. we require others to create the best version of ourselves.

7:10Daniel Coyle: But tell me this, I feel like I'm going to skip forward to touch here because the example of the deli really provoked in me something, which is something that we frequently don't ask, but often comes from common experiences when I see businesses that are doing especially well. It's a reflection of a question of business models that, you know, you've not really said it there, but one thing that comes out in the deli story is that they turned down the chance to take, you mentioned it just, but they turned down the chance to go to Disney or to Disneyland or to take up a lucrative offer. And the business model, which is the pursuit of relentless growth and capitalism and profitability, would strongly advise them not to do that.

7:53Daniel Coyle: Quite often when I see businesses that are doing well, they're not owned by VCs, for example. They're not owned by private equity. They have got some degree of an ownership structure, which is structuring things in such a way that they are slightly removed from the excesses of greed and capitalism. You know, I think most of us would recognize that capitalism is the system that we've got. But some of your examples and the reflection on community might suggest that there's this richness in life when we take a step back from the excesses of financial richness. It's a touch of an existential question, but what's your take on that one?

8:44Nick Epley: Yeah, no, it's true. As the co-founder of Zingerman's, this deli, says, unlimited growth is the model of the cancer cell. And they have created a business where there's a real value in that. And I think that the fundamental disconnect, the fundamental error we make over and over again is that we think great businesses are machines. We think of great workplaces like a machine. And there's an area in which that's true. There's an area in which that's true. But deep down, great teams, great workplaces, great experience, they're not, in fact, machines. Machines are designed to create a predictable, reliable output, right?

9:21Nick Epley: And they're owned by an owner of the machine that pushes the button that makes things happen. But in fact, great workplaces, they're alive, right? They're more like a flock of birds moving through a set of obstacles towards some horizon. There's a sense of connection. There's a sense of surprise. all the elements of good culture, of belonging, of vulnerability, of having a purpose. And there's a sense of aliveness that they create. And so the places like Zingerman's that are able to do this, and it's not just Zingerman's. They're not a one-off. You know, I've worked with a major league baseball team that also creates this sense of continual aliveness.

9:56Nick Epley: They're choosing another mode to be, you know, in an age when information is as cheap as tap water, knowledge and strategy are as cheap as tap water. these places are realizing that we cannot information our way to success and fulfillment but we can relationship our way there we can relationship our way there we can community our way there and so communities and living things and relationships have a very different set of rules they're not about optimizing maximizing every single thing with the maximum information they're actually built around relationship and when you're built around relationship, you're built around moments.

10:34Nick Epley: You're built around meaning. And so what they're doing is designing their spaces in such a way that they're creating moments. That sounds terribly abstract. So let me give you an example. A major league baseball team has a very low budget. They happen to be the Cleveland Guardians that I've worked with for the last dozen years. And they realize they cannot just simply buy talent like other teams. They have to grow it. They have to grow it. They have a minor league system where they take young players and bring them in. And at first they decide, well, we just need to bring in expert coaches to tell our coaches how to coach.

11:09Nick Epley: Let's give them best practices. And it sounds good, but it actually doesn't work. What turns out to work is asking the coaches, flipping it on its head and saying, hey coaches, we'd like you to get into small groups and discuss a question. And the question we'd like you to discuss is who was the best coach you ever saw? What did they do? Describe them in detail. And these coaches create these small group conversations that are hugely electric, energized. The coaches have gone from being in a defensive crouch, feeling the expertise pushed on them, being part of a machine, to feeling alive, to feeling, oh, curious.

11:47Nick Epley: What's the best coach I ever met? What did they do? How did they connect with me? How did they bring knowledge to those interactions. And from that, we built at the Guardian something called the model of excellence, model of excellent coaching. And that kind of action where we take, we have the knowledge, we're going to act like a machine to wait a minute. No, we're going to act like a living set of relationships. We're going to relationship our way forward toward a clear horizon with guardrails. That's the move that I see in these places all the time. When they see something they don't look outside for answers but they turn toward each other and they have a conversation that brings people alive a real conversation um so we can't information our way there but we can relationship our way there and the the ps there is that over the last 12 years the guardians have won as many games as the new york yankees and spent 1.5 billion dollars less money because they are accessing the human potential that they have

12:45Daniel Coyle: you talk through these themes the idea of presence i i was really taken with because like you know one of the interesting things about presence is probably the way that we would in a work context we'd have talked about presence five years ago would have been the fact that you're present in the office five days a week and and yeah right you know the i think so the juxtaposition of that where presence is very much about attention. It's about are you gifting your full attention to people is a really interesting, timely reflection on the moment we're in right now. And the book, for me, is all about the themes of attention and connection.

13:25Daniel Coyle: Like, you know, group flow is the way that you talk about connection. And those two things are how we gift those things just felt very timely and very relevant to the world of work, especially because the scarcity of attention, the scarcity of presence, is probably the thing that from school educators through to workplaces, we see the consequence of the lack of it, but we don't necessarily have the answers right in front of us. When you look at the modern world of work, how do you think that we should bring more presence to the way that we operate? I love that. What choices should we be making?

14:09Nick Epley: Well, I think the first thing, I mean, I think we can all agree that we're in kind of an attentional crisis, right? We all feel sped up and flattened out and the world seems thin and too busy and there's too much information coming at us. And we've seen it with kids, this, this sense of an attentional crisis, but what we're lacking kind of amazingly is what we don't have a model of attentional health, right? It's like we're in a nutrition crisis. Everyone realizes we're eating too much sugar, but we don't have a model for what a good diet looks like. We don't have a food pyramid, whatever you want to call that.

14:41Nick Epley: And the interesting moment we're in right now is that we're realizing that and we're seeing what that pyramid might look like. And a good model for attentional health balances the two types of attention. We don't have one type of attention. We have two, as you're saying. We have narrow task attention, which is built to sort of find and get things done and control things. It It really thrives on a feeling of control and pieces and parts put together in the right way. And that's what we're in all the time. But that's very thin. It's very unfulfilling. It's very frenetic. It bounces from one thing to the next.

15:15Nick Epley: But there's another type of attention. This is sort of like sugars and proteins in a diet, right? The protein part of attention is, as you're saying, relational attention. Relational, connective attention. Which is much broader and much quieter. and it's warmer and it seeks to connect. And so it's really, our brains are built to flip constantly between these two. Those two forms connect. And from an evolutionary point of view, it's kind of interesting because you sort of can picture our ancestors. They've got to find food. They've got to focus on it, grab it, control it. That's task attention.

15:48Nick Epley: But they also have to pay attention to the sky and to their social group and the world around them. And that's relational attention. That's connective attention. So what I see right now, this crisis that we're in, is we're all in narrow task attention all the time, and our world is built for it. And it works very well with capitalism and consumerism, like to get people to focus on narrow things and to assume that there's some silver bullet thing that will fix everything. That's very task attention. But what great groups do, and I keep encountering this same model, this same type of leadership, is task attention hunts for answers.

16:26Nick Epley: Relational attention explores mysteries and questions. And so what I see in good groups are exactly what we saw in the guardians. Asking deep questions ends up being the best way to activate that broader form of attention, that presence. What we did in the guardians at that time was to ask who's the best coach you ever saw. Well, there's no quick answer to that, right? That ignites a whole new type of way of paying attention. And then we say, get in conversation with each other. Well, that's a whole new type of attention, right? That's also broad relational attention. So the key, I think, in work is to make task attention the servant of relational attention.

17:05Nick Epley: Make the big, activate, make the big lantern of big attention, of relational attention turn on. And so we see with these leaders all the time, they're always the ones who, they're not providing the answer. they're always kind of creating space for this quiet responsiveness. That's where meaning really happens is in these quiet moments. And there's, there's phrases that they use to, to kind of do that. I see, I see, you know, a lot of good leaders say things like, now it's up to you. I'm not going to give you the answer. That phrase, now it's up to you. Another thing they say all the time is they kind of admit they screwed things up.

17:50Nick Epley: You know, that also activates that broader form of attention. Those leaders aren't in the stance of always providing the answer and direction and seeking answers. They're always kind of on the lookout for what's missing. And they're always quick to say, hey, I think I made a mistake there. That activates a real openness, right? They're always trying to create that kind of openness. The other thing they do all the time, and they literally are allergic to providing answers. I talked to somebody who worked at Zingerman's for 25 years, and they talked about the leader at Zingerman's they worked with.

18:23Nick Epley: And they said, he has never given me an answer in 25 years. There was a strategy meeting they were having. And this woman, she's the head of the bakery at this$90 million community of businesses. And she was saying, I think we need to do this with the bakery. I think we need to do this strategy, that strategy. And the leader, whose name is Ari, stopped her and said, I don't care about any of that stuff. What do you want to do? What kind of bakery do you really want to have? Right? And that's the kind of question they're asking. It's relational. It's deep. It's mysterious. And they're constantly kind of exploring into those questions.

19:01Nick Epley: And that's what creates that sense of aliveness. And now that woman at the bakery is no longer obeying, she actually has to stop. She actually has to create space and think and create this sense of presence where it's like, that's a great question. What kind of bakery do I want to create?

19:17Daniel Coyle: right it's it's really interesting because what you're describing there is you know creating the architecture for people to have autonomy to have agency to feel like they're they're getting stuff done i guess you know and a really sort of mundane practical level one of the barriers to us doing that in knowledge jobs is just our calendars back to back with these things that superficially feel important or urgent and so creating a space for presence you use the phrase there creating space for quiet responsiveness and to some extent there's sort of the architecture of our jobs right now feels like there's no space it feels like and and that um that sort of construction of urgency and busyness all the time is actually preventing us having that presence that sense of asking deep questions we're sort of locked in this melee of phase of transaction as we're going through the day it sort of requires a degree of system thinking that i think most organizations feel reluctant to do i i did some work with one organization a couple years ago and right up to the level of european leaders south american leaders these people were like regional leaders of this huge firm none of them felt like they had the permission to change this overwhelm of work it's just really interesting that you know the things you articulate there are so evident and powerful and obvious, but people just struggle to actually build work around them.

20:52Nick Epley: It's a structural problem. You're absolutely right. It is very, and the people I've seen who've done it well have done it almost as an act of subterfuge in a way, right? Like they'll do something that sort of sounds very organized, right? It sounds, but in fact, they're secretly creating a little bit of space. One of the ways to do that is flight checks. you know if you're on a project they'll have a meeting at the beginning middle and end and it's like a check-in but the actual purpose of the check-in is to see how the team is doing and what they're energized by so the check-in is like what excites you about this project okay that are you still excited by that like are you still getting it and and so there's a there's a there's kind of an architecture that looks transactional but in fact in it you're creating a space another way people do that is through a 30-70 meeting, which is a typical meeting, but you spend the first 30 % kind of defining the problem and the last 70 % like just loosely exploring the problem.

21:53Nick Epley: There's a lot of, because there is a lot of firmness in this. There is a lot of structure in creating the conditions for group flow. You need to really clearly define the shared horizon, right? You need to really clear, what do we want the outcome to look like? What direction are we going here? Let's spend a lot of time on that, exploring that. And then what are the guardrails? What do we definitely not want to do on this project? And then it becomes a question of agency. How do we get agency going? But you can sort of do that in a little, it's a little sneaky, right? But another way to do that would be in a feedback conversation.

22:28Nick Epley: Typically, you're going to give me feedback on my work. It'd be tempting for you to give me all the answers. it'd be tempting for you to give me all your opinions on how I've been doing. But what I see good groups doing is you'd ask me two questions. You would ask, what do you want to do more of, Dan? Like, what do you want to do more of? Well, that's a different kind of question, isn't it? Another question you'd ask might be, what do you think you should do differently? And that's it. So you're doing less. You're putting it on me as you should. And it ends up being the coaching moments. Like every coaching moments are not about delivering answers.

23:06Nick Epley: They're about framing questions that allow people to self-organize into them. So I've got to organize myself to answer those questions, right? And I have to think about in a deep way, what really energizes me? What do I think I'm doing well now? What do I want to do differently? That's a deep question, actually. So I think you're right that this, I love you say transactional fizz. That's actually what it feels like. We're bouncing around in this carbonation. But smart groups see what you and I are seeing, and smart leaders see it too. And so they're finding ways to kind of smuggle presence and get these things into the water of the organization where you can create these.

23:50Nick Epley: Because that's actually the beautiful advantage of thinking relationally. Because relationships aren't machines. They happen in moments. And that moment in conversation where you say, what do you think you should do differently? That's a moment. Like that changes the relationship. And so that's, I guess the, if there isn't, I know the world of work can feel like a dystopia because it kind of is. But I think the optimistic story and the hope lies in the fact that relationships aren't machines, that moments can change things, that good questions can change things, even when they're embedded in a structure that seems kind of inhuman at times?

24:32Daniel Coyle: Well, the things that I've been researching something myself, and I love the work of Nick Epley. And so when I saw that you drew on his work, I was really taken with hearing what you said. And I guess, you know, when we are talking about connection and relationships, quite often, we might imagine the experience of these things from the outset. And so Nick Epley's work was really helpful for, I think, challenging some of our priors on these things. Do you want to just talk through Nick Epley's work and what it can teach us about connecting with others and how we might anticipate it before we're actually experiencing it?

25:20Nick Epley: Oh, I love that. I love that you're digging into that. I mean, if you think about the world of the office, it very much resembles the train cars and the buses that Nick Heppley does his research on, right? We're all kind of together here. We're all typically on our phones. Well, Nick got obsessed with a question, which is sort of, why is my ride to work so quiet? Everyone's not, no one's talking to each other on this. Everybody's kind of immersed in their little world. So he did an experiment by himself. He chatted with the person next to him. She had a red hat on. And he said, hey, I like your hat.

25:53Nick Epley: And she responded and they had this lovely conversation. And then he expanded that experiment. He works at the University of Chicago. He expanded this experiment to sort of say, give people two jobs as they go to work, two groups. One group was asked to sort of keep to themselves. The other group was asked to chat with their neighbor, get to know a member of your community. Just by the end of the ride, get to know them. And when those people predicted how they would feel, the first group to keep to yourselves predicted it would be great. They predicted, oh, this will feel really good to prepare for my day.

26:22Nick Epley: The second group predicted, ah, I don't want to talk with a random person. That seems terrible. And then he measured their happiness afterwards and it flipped. The first group was kind of de-energized, keeping themselves. The second group, it was the highlight of their day chatting. It turned out they were terrible at predicting what that would feel like. And what he's taken away, what he's built a real body of work around is how bad we are at predicting what those interactions make us feel like. We think they're going to de-energize us. We think it's going to be scary. But what is revealing is the fact that we are pre-wired for community.

26:58Nick Epley: We are pre-wired to switch. And I guess we can conceive of it as those two attention systems flipping on and off. You know, our task attention looks at that and says, Ooh, that'll be scary. It doesn't fit. I don't like it. And, but then when we actually engage with our relational attention, it ends up being incredibly uplifting. You know, we need other people. So when we step through that uncertainty, when we step through that seeming annoyance, we end up getting this sort of electric fence that keeps us away from other people, right? When we step through that, we end up having these really enriching, powerfully connective community experiences.

27:40And the other big insight he had is that it's not about intensity of those experiences.

27:47Nick Epley: It's about frequency. So a bunch of small interactions add up in a huge way more than one interaction might. I'm reminded, there's a story that I think of often as kind of the one envelope rule. And it's a story about the writer Kurt Vonnegut. And he was walking to the local drugstore. This is a very Epley sort of story. He was walking to the local drugstore and he bought one envelope. And it got sold. next day he came back and he bought one more envelope. And the woman behind the counter said, I've got a whole box. I can sell you 50. And he said, I don't want 50. Because when I walk here, I get the chance to pat the dogs on the street and I get to make funny faces at the babies in the stroller.

28:34Nick Epley: And I give a thumbs up to the fire engine as it goes by. And that's why I'm here. I'm not here for the envelope. And so in a world where friction is always seen as a negative, where we sort of see anything that gets between us and our goal, our outcome, our instrumentalized target as being negative, I think what Epley and Vonnegut are teaching us is like, hey, the one envelope, you just to embrace those little moments, step through the uncertainty, step through the friction. And you end up with a much, it's relationship. You end up with relationship. You don't end up with, you know, life is not about goals.

29:18Nick Epley: Life, goals are part of life. But in the end, it's about relationships. And Epley and Vonnegut are relationship athletes. They're showing us what that move looks like.

29:30Daniel Coyle: Inconvenience is the price of community, as they say. But one of the interesting things about that is that there's a writer called Derek Thompson who variously writes for The Atlantic or for his own substack. But he talked last year about this rising phenomenon, and he referenced Eppley, Nick Eppley's research, this rising phenomenon of elective isolation, that people are spending more time alone, spending 100 minutes a day more alone time than there were six years ago. People are seemingly being told by their brains that actually spending time alone will be more rewarding than the inconvenient price of community.

30:11Daniel Coyle: And I think we're particularly observing that in the context of the workplace. You know, people not turning up to social things or perceiving that worker colleagues are no longer friends in the way that they might have been before. The rates of friendship are lower than they've ever been before. How can we incentivise people to get through that? What are the things? You speak so compellingly, I think, about this. the benefit to all of us of getting into group flow, the benefit to all of us of making the journey and finding the richness of this connection. But before people embark upon that journey, they often, like in Nick Epley's research, they don't perceive the value it's going to have for them.

30:56Daniel Coyle: Is there any way organisationally or as leaders we can help people on that journey, persuading them that there's going to be richness here?

31:06Nick Epley: Yeah, what a great question. I think they ultimately, I think it makes me think of two things. One is that people sort of need, I think Thompson's work is especially powerful. The knowledge in this conversation we're having now, really people need to understand in the same way that they understand physical fitness or nutrition, that there is a model, that there is actually, you know, a healthy social fitness is an absolute necessity. And I think we're starting to realize that. I think we're starting to, that model is beginning, especially with attentional work, with the work of Jonathan Hay, we're getting a sense that there is actually a model there that matters.

31:50Nick Epley: And the second thing it makes me think about is structure. how we structure our days how we structure our neighborhoods how we structure our work um you know there is at the same time as this is happening and it is happening there's more isolation there's this also parallel move uh where i see where you look at the attendance at music festivals you look at the rates of gen z doing dinner parties and and friend gatherings and there is this, you look at something as silly as, well, silly, but also deep as, like, the attendance at Burning Man, this new appreciation for doing kind of big community festival things together.

32:36Nick Epley: That is the other piece of that, I think. So when we look at it as a whole, I think it is a complex picture where there's more isolation in some ways, but there's also a new awareness of how these events can connect and liven our lives. But in terms of what do we do now, I think it's a hard thing to persuade someone to do. They have to live it. And so leaders modeling this sort of behavior and structuring their environments in ways that make it possible and convenient. And then, you know, I see a lot of workplaces going back to in-person Tuesday to Thursday. I think that's an encouraging sign.

33:21Nick Epley: It's not, there is some constraint there. There is some structure. You're kind of creating a channel to give people that connection, that agency. But I think you're right to say it's a critical problem and kind of shedding light on it and also creating structures where people can have that. That kind of interaction ends up being sort of the paths forward. Because ultimately, like anything, they've got to make their own choice, right? People have to feel how good it feels to talk to other people on the train. And they also have to realize that there's an entire trillion dollar economy based on keeping people isolated and a little angry and on edge.

33:59and I think we're starting to realize,

34:02Nick Epley: we're starting to see the connections of what that economy has done to us and starting to kind of heal that. And that's, I think, an encouraging step.

34:15Daniel Coyle: One of the things that I guess is common through what we've been talking about so far is that sometimes we're not always great at predicting the pleasure that we would get from things that happen. In the spirit of that, I really liked your yellow door metaphor. And actually the personal testimonies of how you've benefited from that. Could you tell us the yellow door metaphor and just the richness it's added to your own life?

34:47Nick Epley: Yeah, no, it's been powerful. It's an idea I learned from Lisa Miller, who I talked to in the book. She's a psychologist at Columbia. And the point is, we often go through life, and to think of our narrow attention system here, we often go through life looking for the green doors that are open and the red doors that are closed. Clear paths, clear signals, go here, don't go there. But life becomes different when you start attuning to yellow doors. And yellow doors are neither green nor red, and they are a mixed signal of a possibility, a pathway a relationship a skill you might want to build or maybe a place you might want to go or a relationship you might want to nurture um and so after learning that i started kind of keeping an eye out for him and i got a call it was about five years ago from four years ago when i first started working on this book um from a friend his name was jeff and he had recently gotten divorced and he said, I want to go indoor climbing.

35:45Nick Epley: I want to get a group of guys to go indoor climbing. And my response was, I'm afraid of heights and I think indoor climbing is silly. It's you wearing that silly shoes, those elf shoes and it's painful. So my first response was, that's clearly a red door. Like, I don't want to do that. But then I stopped and I thought, oh, this yellow door idea, so I'll do it. So I showed up, I wore my harness backwards. I was in a lot of, it hurts, it was no fun, but it kind of was fun too. And I liked being around these guys. And they were funny. They were funny dudes. And so we ended up hanging out together, going every Wednesday.

36:18Nick Epley: And long story short, those relationships have grown into going to concerts together, taking ski trips together, getting the families together, playing music together. They've grown into some of my best friends in the world. And as a guy whose kids have gotten older, having friends like that has been incredibly meaningful and really rich. And it continues to just really be an important part of life. And it was all because of that yellow door. I mean, if I had walked past that, I wouldn't have it. I wouldn't have any idea what I was missing. So we're terrible. I think yellow doors is powerful because we're so bad.

36:58Nick Epley: Because think of our narrow attention. We'd say positive, negative, look very quantitatively at it. But life isn't quantitative. You can't predict. We think it's all straight lines, but it's not. If you take a pencil and draw your life on a piece of paper, it's a bunch of curves. And in those curves are these yellow doors that are opening new pathways. And so tuning into that ends up being just a way to make life more alive. Love it.

37:29Daniel Coyle: Love it. And Dan, obviously, you know, you've written a couple of sort of huge books before that have had a huge impact on people. As you've sort of put this together, which is a got applications for both work and life, is there a project that you think you're going to tackle next? Or how do you think about this? You said this has taken you four years. What would you think about doing next?

37:54Nick Epley: I don't know. Each project has a way. I started with individual talent, which led to groups, which has led to kind of flourish and thriving. So I need to – each book kind of opens the door to the next mystery in a way. So I don't know what that mystery is. I'm waiting for the yellow door. So if you see one, Bruce, you have to put a spotlight on it for me.

38:15Daniel Coyle: Daniel, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today and for putting more content out there. I think that is going to be stimulating for leaders, for people in organizations as they try and wrestle with the themes that they're dealing with right now. So a strong recommend on the book. I loved it.

38:32Nick Epley: It's great to see you again, Bruce. Thanks for making the time. And thanks for what you do. I think you have a big impact on people. It's just cool to be part of it.

38:42Daniel Coyle: Thank you to Daniel. I appreciate him taking the time to talk to me. And the book is pretty much out now. If you order it now, it'll arrive on your doorstep in the next week. So brilliant discussion with him. If you're interested in this or anything like it, best place to go is check out the newsletter. And the newsletter, the link to that is in the show notes. I've been Bruce Taisley. Thank you for listening. See you next time.