How to Flourish: The Art of Building Aliveness and Meaning | Daniel Coyle – EP 728

26:56He looked as broken as a person could be. He was absolutely spent. He'd given everything to this game and they'd lost. The bus pulled up. He stood up, straightened himself up, took a deep breath, and then started warmly greeting everybody as they came in the restaurant, greeting their families, pouring wine for people. People said watching him was like seeing a dad at a wedding. Like he just was absolutely locked into making sure everybody had a great time. And by the end of the night, like they had reconnected, they had processed together. They had turned toward each other in their worst moment.

27:26And that became the foundation for the next few years at San Antonio. They actually kept the unopened champagne bottles and they popped them the next year when they won. It's really cliched. It's so much of this stuff, it sounds like a cliche at first. Oh, adversity, you should stay tough and everything. And it's a cliche partly for a reason that there's like a deep truth to there that those moments do both reveal character, but also give you the opportunity to grow that character together. And the story I see over and over in the places that I visit for the new book is that same instinct, like experiencing adversity and then turning toward that adversity with other people and creating community.

28:09That's what's happening in each of these places. And that's what Papa's doing that night. He was creating community. And that's what we see. That's that deep pattern that we see in flourishing places, people, groups, and businesses is this turning toward and this community that is ready to be unlocked and gets awakened. So given we're in the middle of the Winter Olympics, I want to go into winter sports next. And I want to tie back Barry Schwartz into this. Barry told you about how you need to cultivate your life. I have been doing a tremendous amount of study now on mattering and connectedness, which are actually two different things.

28:54Connectedness is what a lot of people think of when they think of mattering. And it is a relational aspect. But to me, mattering is the solo human operating system on which connectivity sits. So when you think of the communities that we reside in, oftentimes we think we just have to find a community. Whether it's a church or a special operations team or perhaps Toastmasters, we think all of a sudden the community just happens to you. But you actually have to cultivate yourself into it. And where I wanted to go with winter sports is in the Olympics and alpine skiing, which is probably one of my favorite events.

29:38And what you found in the book is that there's this certain city called Norwich here in the United States where they produce more skiers who go on to the Olympics than almost anyone else. Yeah. What did you find about Norwich that redefines these communities? right it's a little town norwich vermont that resembles every other new england town right if you do a picture of your idyllic there's a steeple and there's a town common the only thing that's unusual is that they produced i think 11 olympians over the last 30 or 40 years and what is unique about it is our normal instincts for explaining that is well they must have a set of incredible coaches or some incredible olympic program or something in the water as we like to say there's something in the water.

30:22But what's in the water in Norwich is, and has been, is this incredible clarity about connection and our possibilities and obligations for helping one another out. In Norwich, there was a woman, Karen Krause, who wrote an excellent book about it. And the way she described it was the Norwich Daisy Chain, which is everyone sees every other kid in Norwich as almost an extension of their own kids. You treat them the same and you hope for them the same and you're not competing and you're trying to lift each other up. And when you scroll back history a little bit, why are they this way here and not somewhere else?

30:55Well, it turns out that in Norwich in the 60s, they got a vivid lesson on how not to parent. There was a tiger parent, the perfect tiger parent back in the 60s, raised two Olympic skiers and made both of them miserable in the process. He would put ankle weights around their ankles and send them on pre-dawn runs. And he and controlled every aspect of their diet and their training. And he absolutely taught, and both girls, of course, ended up succeeding and yet spiraling in their personal lives as well. And so the cost of that kind of pressure was immediately apparent to all of Norwich. And as partly as a result, they moved into this other space and it redefined the norms with which they treat each other and they support each other.

31:41And there's a million tiny examples that I talk about in the book, but one of them is when there's a big meet, sometimes the whole town will go and watch the kids compete, say at Placid or somewhere else. And all the other top athletes are looking, they're from other places, they're with their team and their coach and their masseuse or whatever. And the people from Norwich are with all the local folks. And it's just a sense of, again, community. We think of community as a noun, but I think what Norwich helps teach us is that it's actually a verb. It's a set of actions of noticing someone, of looking for where the need is, and of supporting them in some way.

32:23It makes me think of one more quick example. There was a young snowboarder who needed money to travel, and her parents, her name was Hannah Carney, her parents, I think she was about 14, said, well, we don't have any money. Why don't you go around town and see if you can get any businesses to sponsor you? And so Hannah wrote up a little resume for herself, started going door to businesses. And sure enough, somebody agreed to sponsor her. And the condition was just one condition. I'd love to see your grades every year. I don't care how you do in the meets. I don't care how you do in your sports life, but I want to see your grades.

32:53I want to make sure you keep up your grades. So that kind of, everyone is playing a role of an uncle, a caring uncle. As Karen Krause, who wrote the book on Norwich, put it, everywhere it's normal to care about your kids. But in Norwich, you care about other people's kids more than you care, as much as you care about your own kids. So it's just, it's simple, but I think what the story kind of illustrates is that it's those kinds of ecosystems, as with the SEALs, they're not fixed. They depend on this living participation and these sets of norms that people create together so that they can behave in this way.

33:29It's interesting, Dan. I have a really good friend I went to the Naval Academy with. Turned out he became the chief astronaut. Chris was originally a Navy SEAL, and he ended up taking the concepts that he learned from going through BUDS and spending over a decade with the teams to the astronaut program. And this really paved the way for when he was up on the International Space Station, how the team behaved. Because when they were up there, they cultivated this community that we've been talking about throughout the episode, and really created this ecosystem of trust between the different astronauts.

34:05I thought this was a really good example because he did this famous spacewalk with this Italian astronaut, Lucia Paratimo, where everything went horribly wrong. It was probably the most dangerous or one of the most dangerous spacewalks there's ever been. Lucia's helmet started to collect water in it. And at first they thought it was just a sweat, but then it turns out it was a mechanical failure and he was tasting cooling fluid that was going into his mask. And what ends up happening when you're up there in space is that these molecules need to go someplace, but they don't move. And so they're accumulating around his face.

34:51And my point here is that Chris used the trust that he had built up with Lucia and that community to guide him. Because there was a point as he was doing this that Lucia was pretty much blind. He couldn't see. And so Chris had to guide him back to the safety lock. and then once they got in the safety lock, he had to calm him down enough for the 10, 15, 20 minutes while they're in there that he would stay calm. I express this because they were way above our gravity and it shows you the magnitude of what successful communities can build. Where I'm going with this is we talked about mountaintops and alpine skiing and we've talked about outer space now.

35:39I now want to switch to underneath the ground because that same bond that Chris Cassidy demonstrated was also found in the Chilean mine rescue from a number of years ago. And if people haven't studied this, I'd encourage you to look at this through the lens of Amy Edmondson, the Harvard professor who pioneered psychological safety. Not sure if you've read it, Dan, but her white paper on this is phenomenal. yeah yeah and she's focused if i remember right largely on what's happening outside the mine as they come together to build this incredible talk about a space shot right they're going 2 000 feet into the granite to rescue these people most of us remember the big outlines of the story 33 33 miners there's a cave at san jose mine there's 100 million tons of rock on them the hope for escape is pretty minimal at first because nobody's ever escaped from that far down before And they're trapped in what's called a refugio, a little room, which had a cabinet with some old cans of tuna and some cookies and some sour milk.

36:42And for 16 days, they were there in the dark. Then when they're finally contacted, they're thinking what typically happens in these things is there's severe mental health risks, injuries get infected. There's all kinds of horror stories of what happened when you have a group of roughneck miners in a small space with no certainty of rescue at all, like probably not going to be rescued. And then they finally contact them and they drop a phone down the hole and say, how are you guys doing? And they say, we're doing great. But our first question is what happened to the bus driver who was near us when the cave-in happened?

37:13First thing they do is ask about somebody else. They didn't say, oh my God, when are you going to come and get us? We're dying down here. They said, what about that other guy? And then they go on. The conversation was very normal. And then they sang a song together. They sang the Chilean anthem together. And what became clear is that they had created in atmosphere that were very close to hellish, an extraordinary community. And then where it gets more interesting, and I think where it connects back to our other conversation, is that the moments in which that community was created weren't moments of action and decision and information.

37:48It wasn't moments of a leader taking charge and saying, here's what we need to do. It was moments where they all stopped, where they circled up and they said, who are we? They didn't have answers. They explored questions. Who do we want to be? And at one of those moments, the boss, this very stern man, his name was Luis Urzua, steps to the center of the circle, takes off his white helmet and says, there are no bosses and there are no employees anymore. And whoa, that changes things, right? So they're switching out of this kind of fix it, solve it mentality that we're always in. It's an attentional style, really, is what it is.

38:27It's an attentional mode that we're in where we're paying attention. We're seeing the world as a problem that can be solved. And then what they're doing in that moment is surrendering to the situation and saying they're widening their attention. They're not trying to fix anything. And they're connecting to something bigger than themselves. And it's a pause. Like nothing seems to happen. And yet it's where everything important happens. It's probably a moment like that where your astronaut friend in the Italian created a bond, right? Those relational moments of responsive connectedness where you stop and you stop seeing the other person as something you can control or some situation you need to fix.

39:05And you genuinely inhabit the mystery of what are we doing here? What value do I see? What value can we add to each other? Where do we want to go? What do we want this to look like? How do we want to be together? Those are really simple, powerful questions. And that's what you find at the core of all flourishing groups, because those are moments when relationships get born, when communities stops being a noun and starts being a verb. What happened in the mind was that after they circled up like that, they started self-organizing around big, obvious problems. Like, where are we going to sleep? Let's get a sleeping area organized.

39:42What should we do with this food? How are we going to divide that up? They started working on that. They developed these rituals at each meal. They developed these habits of being guardian angels for each other. One would sleep, the other one would keep an eye on them. They'd pair up, basically, safety buddy. And they developed little games they would play down there. And so it's not to say it was easy at all. It was an incredible amount of suffering. But it was those bonds of community that allowed them, those bonds formed in moments when they stopped. Not in moments when they did something. They formed in moments when they stopped, they let go of control, and they really inhabited this mystery of where do we want to go together?

40:20And that's the pattern I saw in all of these places. They weren't on autopilot. Like we think of the, when you said autopilot in the modern world, I really think that's deeply true. And our world teaches us to build a lot of habits and to stay in this narrow mode of attention all the time and to automate our lives. But what these places show, what the flourishing groups and people show is that it's not about automation. It's about animation. It's about creating moments where you stop and really see what is happening in life around you and connects to it. And there's some fascinating, it all sounds very woo-woo in a way, but there's some, what I found in the course of writing the book is there's a ton of super fascinating studies and research and point of view about how our attention operates that really shows the mechanism beneath these moments.

41:08They're not just magical moments of groovy connection that we know each other now. It's like in our brains, we're actually switching from one narrow attention system to a relational attention system. And those two attention systems are between our ears all the time. And our challenge is to balance them and turn them on when they're appropriate and create moments of meaningful connection through activating our relational attention. And the argument that I make in the book is that it's not magic. it can be done if you learn how to use like awakening cues, if you learn how to manage the balance of how your attention functions and sense when you're in one mode and sense when you're another mode and create spaces that activate this broader, warmer, healthier relational attention.

41:55I love it. And I'm sitting here smiling the whole time you're saying this because whether you knew her or not, you're just describing mattering to a precise T. And I loved how you brought up the awakened sense because it reminds me of Lisa Miller's work on the awakened brain, which is someone, if the audience hasn't heard of her, you can go back to an interview I did, search for it in the archives where we discussed that. But what you were really describing in that cave was each man's attention, their voice and action were seen and heard and valued. And it was materially consequential to the group's survival.

42:36So given that, I want to look at the opposite side of this, which is in systems or communities where people feel interchangeable, managed, or unseen. What does that erosion look like? It looks incredibly common, A, right? It's very easy. It's a modern experience, I think, to feel like you're just a cog in a machine, to feel like you're not mattering. And we've got to, I don't know, I find it to be a little almost near dystopian extent, normalized, that kind of thing, where we talk about people and treat people as if they're simply computational beings and simply machines. But what it looks like is isolation.

43:14What it looks like is loneliness. What it looks like is anxiety and depression, I think, in the end, when we are social animals, we are animals made of meaning, without meaningful connection, without mattering, to use the language, without mattering, we're hollowed out. It is a core need of us to be in community, in and growing. And the litmus test that I use informally is like two questions. Who do you feel most alive with? Where do you feel most alive? And what are you growing with someone? What project are you working on that's creating something new in the world that maybe wasn't there before?

43:52And if you can answer those questions and say, I feel alive here and here, and these are the projects I'm working on, then that's beautiful. That's a very human thing to be feeling that. But if there isn't a part or a relationship in which you feel alive, or if there isn't a project in which you feel like you're growing something meaningful that matters, I think that's what our world sometimes can create. I think it creates a profound hollowness that I think we all, to one extent or another, feel. And the deeper challenge of it is that there's a trillion-dollar economy of really smart people that are trying to pull us into that world that really only make money if people are isolated and a little ticked off.

44:33Community, neighborhood, meaningful connection is not what pays the bills for those guys. They would much rather have people typing angry things to each other. And I think we're learning that. It feels, and maybe your podcast is part of it, but it feels like, and it might be me because I'm writing about this topic. So it's like when you buy a Toyota Corolla, you just see a lot of Corollas on the road. So I may be totally biased here, but it feels like there's a bit of a humanist revival that people now are understanding what's happening in the algorithmic world, right? You can live in the algorithmic world where the algorithm will drive your choices and tell you what to do.

45:09And you can be treated as a set of machine-like preferences. And there's a humanist world. There's a bit of a humanist revival or community world. So it feels like the community is having a bit of a comeback. I hope that it is. I love that. And I was recently interviewing Rebecca Neuberger Goldstein, whose episode was two days ago, in fact, who wrote another great book that has recently come out called The Mattering Instinct. The things that you were describing, she refers to as mattering projects. And she was saying when people don't have that mattering project, that's when they typically tune out.

45:50And I also liked your definition that you gave for these communities where this stuff is absent, because that's where this whole concept of anti-mattering that Gordon Flett came up with really takes hold. When people in these communities experience anti-mattering or what's happening to presence at the neurological and social level, they do self-reliance, they perform competence, and they psychologically withdraw. And that's what's happening to so many communities around us. It's the self-silencing. I mean, the psychological withdrawal that we're seeing, which then leads to other things that you were talking about.

46:31Loneliness, people feeling burned out, the disengagement that we're seeing across companies, helplessness, and all the other things that we think are just symptoms. We're treating them as independent epidemics. However, I believe they're all interrelated. What you and I are both talking about here. I like that. But I think the thing that I'm taking away too, just to connect those two worlds a bit, is how close they actually are. Like experiment after experiment shows, and I think part of it is rooted in these attentional mode switches, that we have both systems inside ourselves, this kind of rugged individual, selfish, controlling, focused system, and this broad, warm relational system.

47:12Because over and over in the book, I end up encountering the same story, which is, well, everybody was feeling disconnected. And then we did these two, three events and that really flipped it. It wasn't like they had to start from zero and come up. this we are pre-wired for community the place that captured most vividly for me was this neighborhood in paris called petit mont rouge and it was disconnected it was people in their phones pretty typical middle class neighborhood and there was a retired journalist named patrick bernard and he decided to do this experiment which is i'm going to put a i'm going to rent a ton of tables It's like cables you get at Costco, right?

47:51Right down the 100 of them and have a dinner for 800 people, lunch, the whole neighborhood, come to the neighborhood, longest table in Paris. And then he set up a bunch of interest groups, let people to self-organize in interest groups. I mean, the only rule he had was no politics. Don't talk about politics. You must gather around a joy device of food or wine. But other than that, no politics, be around a joy device. And it's completely revitalized the neighborhood. It didn't take years. It didn't take bottom-up thinking. It took experiences. And when people experience community and experience the power of that, of knowing their neighbor and feeling connected, there was a woman there, older woman, who broke her wrist.

48:32Because this neighborhood now feels like a village. This older woman broke her wrist and she had 15 offers from people who wanted to help her get her groceries. It's what we're built for. We're built for community. and although the fact that our economy we live in is very individualized, the people on the other end here aren't probably gathered around a speaker listening to the podcast as a group. They're probably listening through headphones or pods or listening alone. Our economy is built around individuals and it sells to individuals and it caters to individuals and it isolates everybody as individuals and measures us as individuals, but we're built for community.

49:05And so these places over and over again. Show us how quick it can be. And there's another one that I'm just glabbing here, but there's one that just came to mind because the Patriots, of course, are going to the Super Bowl. And they did a little exercise that they're all talking about now. They're saying, what brought us together as a team? Well, how are we so trusting? And there's obviously a million factors you could point to. But one of the things they did at the beginning of this preseason was called the four H's. They circled up, got in small groups and said, all right, talk about your hero.

49:36talk about your heartbreak talk about your history where you're from and talk about your hopes for the year open up you know let's really have a minute and figure out meaningful connection let's have a meaningful connection here and they really grounded their whole season in that moment of meaning and now they've obviously a million other things have happened and they've obviously had a lot of other factors working in their way but now that they're on the threshold of this great accomplishment, they're all talking and thinking about that little exercise that took half an hour. So these moments of it, so they were able to, because they understood how community actually works, like they could have used that half hour to practice harder, right?

50:17It seemed inefficient. Why would we sit around and talk? Come on, let's go practice because this is how communities actually work. You have to circle up, create that moment of genuine, risky, vulnerable, meaningful connection to create community. And we're pre-wired to do it. If we do it, it clicks on. Speaking of the Patriots, I just have to digress here just for a second. I was completely blown away that Bill Belichick didn't get into the Hall of Fame on the first ballot. That to me was, wow, crazy, right? Crazy, right? Crazy. Maybe he wasn't that good. My theory would be he's not that good at forming community with Hall of Fame voters.

50:57He should have had a 4-H exercise with him before the ballot. That stuff absolutely does matter, doesn't it? I live here in Tampa Bay, Florida. And in St. Petersburg, if anyone's ever been there, there's this great older hotel called the Vinoy that sits right on the water basin. And I don't know, five or six years ago, they started to do the longest table here. It probably goes close to a football field. It's really long. And what I have felt experiencing it is that the table doesn't work only because people feel welcome. I think it works because it makes each person's presence relevant to the experience.

51:36It's like mutual contribution that they're all having. Did you find that to be the case when you looked at the Parisian example? Absolutely. And there's a welcoming and an imperfection. There's so many parts of our life that sort of perfection is expected, I think, in some ways and the way we keep our lawns and the way we dress when we leave the house. And this is just hospitality and everybody's showing up. I don't know how it was in St. Pete, but here it was a potluck. So what'd you bring, right? Everybody's literally bringing a gift. And so I'm sharing mine with you and you're sharing mine with me.

52:09When you actually look into the word origin of community, it means sharing services and gifts. Like that is what it is. And so this idea that everyone, it's one of those sort of simple things, but this idea of orienting around gifts, because in every group, there are hidden gifts and creating conditions where those gifts can show themselves, whether that's in a conversation at work, where we're trying to explore something new and you've got some hidden expertise that's connected to that or some experience in the Navy that's connected to that. I think flourishing groups are continually, and that's why they're often built around questions rather than answers, but they're continually creating questions, continue creating space where gifts can come forward.

52:53Because a gift is a double whammy. You get not just the experience. If mattering is about being valued and adding value, and I think that's one way to understand it. It's like, I am valued and I'm adding value. Mattering is a relationship. Community is a relationship. Focus on gifts is just such a beautiful shortcut to finding that, right? And also permitting the imperfections. It's not perfect. It's messy. Your table in St. Pete was messy and it wasn't like there was a perfect waiter pouring just a month or the right amount of cool water in your glass. People are self-organizing and they've turned from this stance of being a consumer to being a participant and being a citizen.

53:35And that's what I saw in these places. It's a change in energy, which sounds woo, but it's where we go from being receiving something to actually saying, no, I'm not outside that ecosystem. I'm not outside that relationship. I'm in relationship with it and it lights us up. So one core difference between the Paris example and the St. Pete example, I think I like the Paris example better is in the St. Pete example, it costs a lot of money. They bring in five or six of the higher end restaurants in town to cater it. I think the cheapest one you can do is like$75, but it goes all the way up to$200 a person, depending on what experience you want to get.

54:17I like the idea better that if you bring community meals that each one partakes in, because it brings more of that contribution to bear. It's true, right? We like to be needed. We need to be wanted. We've all got gifts, right? Share them. you mentioned Cleveland Dan and I grew up for part of my life as a child in Bay Village which is not too far from Cleveland my family are diehard Michigan fans my parents grandparents everyone went to the University of Michigan so if you're a Michigan fan you ultimately have gone to Zingerman's because it's a legend in Ann Arbor and you chose to talk about Zingerman's as well in the book.

55:00Why would you focus on a deli as an example of this community that you saw so rich that they had created? The short answer is that they are, I think, measurably one of the most remarkable business stories in America. I think there should be MBA classes led and taught out there. What they've done is quite remarkable. The short answer is I'd been there a few times and I'd felt the energy and I'd read a bit about them and I knew just enough to have them be a mystery to me. Started as a one building deli, 1982. Started by people who had very little experience. One was a dishwasher. One was, I think, a manager of a restaurant, maybe.

55:40Their goal was to build a great Jewish deli in Ann Arbor, one that was so good that you bit into the Reuben and the juice ran down your arm. That was the vision. I'm picturing it right here in my mind. Yeah, right. Exactly. Good vision. And they did. 10 years go by, and pretty soon, as in every business, people start copying them, right? People start copying the typeface. People start copying the menu. It's easy. That's business, right? Then, so the two partners sit down and they say, what do we want to be? That same conversation that Chilean miners had, that same conversation the New England Patriots had, that same awkward, vulnerable, difficult, whoa, we got to let go of control here and see what this is all about.

56:17And so they had that conversation and they developed this vision of a community of businesses that were all rooted in Ann Arbor, connected by the Zingerman's ethos, not outside Ann Arbor at all, all in Ann Arbor. And sure enough, that's what they built, working with partners, developing this very communal structure. But now there's a coffee shop, there's a bakery, there's a roadhouse restaurant, there's a wedding planning outfit, there's a travel business, there's a huge catalog business. It's now a$90 million, completely organic, soulful community of businesses that is, by some measures, some of the people that I met with who worked there, they had Harvard MBAs.

57:00They had worked at the Ritz-Carlton in Paris, and they decided to come back to Ann Arbor because it is such a fulfilling, meaningful community, Zingerman says. And when you dig into that and ask, how are they doing this? How exactly are they doing this? The answer is that they're really skilled at creating what I call in the book, awakening cues, which is little moments that connect us to meaning in the average everyday course of things. things. And I got to sit in on an orientation class, which was led by Ari Weinswag, who's the co-CEO, co-founder of Zingerman's. And there's new employees. The scene is simple classroom setting.

57:43There's about nine or 10 new employees are there. The CEO walks in and they're all sitting expectantly. They got their pencils in their hand. They're ready to take notes. It's orientation. I'm going to learn. They're going to orient me. I'm going to be given information and I'm going to be given the secrets of how to succeed here. So I'm ready to learn. And Ari walks in, he flips it. He's like, what's your story? How'd you get here? Oh, wow. Cool. What's your story? How did you get here? And they walk around and share their stories. And then Ari shares some stories about Zingerman's evolution, how they came from, what their philosophy is.

58:14There was a, I don't know if he told that story that time or not, but there was a time where Walt Disney came in and offered him$50 million to partner because they wanted the best deli in America in their park. And Zingerman's took about 15 minutes to think about it and said, no, thanks. And Walt Disney is like, you don't understand. You don't get it. And ultimately Zingerman said, well, I don't think you guys get it. We're not about that. We're about this place. We have this deep, rich, thriving set of relationships. And if we go all over the place, we're going to lose that. This is what is valuable to us.

58:47They said, if you ever open Walt Disney World in Ann Arbor. We'll partner with you, right? So they keep walking through this orientation. It's a set of stories and connections. And they have got all of these, in addition to all of that, at the end of the orientation, he says, get into small groups and talk about what you want to build in your lives. What are your dreams? Talk about those and then share those out. It was like a reverse orientation, right? It wasn't a typical transmit of here's all the information you need. It was, let's create a meaningful moment together so that we can get to know each other.

59:20And then we'll learn the information. That stuff's not hard. What's hard is like creating relationships. And that's what Zingerman's is incredible at. And one other thing that comes to mind, I was asking Ari, like, why did you say no to Walt Disney? This is an example of a good awakening cue that he gave me. I said, why did you say no to Walt Disney? And he answered not with logic or information. He pointed to my wedding ring and he said, do you take every opportunity that comes along? I'm like, oh yeah, that kind of puts it in a clear light. Commitment is where the good stuff is. And Zingerman's understands that in a very deep level.

59:59And it's helped them continue to thrive because they're built on the values of community, of sharing those gifts? Something I'm going to have to look into is my brother is an executive at Chick-fil-A. And what people don't understand, if they don't understand the mechanism of Chick-fil-A, is that they don't call their individual owners franchisees. They call them operators. But their whole ecosystem is built on that operator community. And that is exactly the community that they want to cultivate inside each of their restaurants. And then more importantly, the community that they want to build outside in the community around it.

1:00:42They take that very seriously and how they design everything they do in their stores. It would be such an interesting project to take what Zingerman's has done and what Chick-fil-A has done and see how much they overlap. Great call. All right, all you business students, get busy. Dan, if there was one thing that a person listening here today or watching you hoped would take away from our conversation, what would it be? I think it would be yellow doors. Yellow doors. This is actually an idea that you mentioned Lisa Miller earlier. This is from her work. But it has been, I saw it all the time at the flourishing places I visited, and it ended up impacting my own life a lot.

1:01:27And the idea is we mostly go through life looking for clear signals to go or stop. Green doors that are go, open, do this. Red doors that are stop, don't do this. And life gets immeasurably richer and more interesting if you slow down a little bit, widen your aperture, like turn off your controlling attention that goes through the world looking like through a tube of paper towels and widen out your attention and start attuning to the yellow doors, which are opportunities that appear out of the corner of your eye that you aren't immediately drawn to. The coffee with a neighbor who didn't seem nice at first, or the meeting with a colleague who invites you as an observer that you're not really connected with a project, or a chance conversation on the bus when you could be on your phone.

1:02:14Opening up to that, it's ended up having a big impact. I guess the way it impacted my life the most, it's been a daily practice, right? One yellow door a day is a nice way to think about it. And not so long ago, I had a friend who wanted to get together to do the regular Wednesday thing with some guys and he wanted to go indoor climbing. And I don't like indoor climbing. I've done it a couple of times. The shoes are really stupid and tiny and it hurt your feet. And I wasn't interested, but I thought yellow door, I gave it a try. And as I write in the book, those guys have turned into some of my best friends now.

1:02:47A few years later, we go climbing, we go skiing, we take trips together, our families are friends, we play music together, we go to concerts. It's been like this incredible source of fellowship and fun that I was craving in my life. And if I hadn't been alert to yellow doors, I don't think I would have them in my life right now. Not to say that every yellow door leads to something like that. Tons of them don't. But that's the point. Like life is not, to go back to where we started, life ain't a game. It's literally not a game. If anybody listening takes a piece of paper and a pen and starts sketching out the shape of their life, what direction did you go?

1:03:25Where did it take you? They're not drawing straight lines. They're drawing these squiggles with a ton of dead ends and then a turn and then a movement and then a breakthrough and then another failure. And there are these squiggly paths. And yellow doors are the kind of inflection points on that path where we can say, hey, that's interesting. I don't know if it's good or bad. Let me try it out. Let me live into it, live into the question. And we can't think our way through them. We can't predict our way through them or logic our way through them. You have to live your way through them to really, really inhabit them and explore them.

1:04:01And that feels good when you fill up the athletic move to say, I'm going to push through that. And all the fact that it's a little painful, a little uncertain is just the price of good things. It's not a downside that it's a little painful. It should be a little painful. A lot of stuff is, and that's okay. You're not going to grow without some form of stressing who you are now to lead toward that growth. That's how growth works. That's how the garden has grown, I guess you might say. Great closure for the episode right there. What I love about what you just said about the yellow doors mimics what you were saying about the cues earlier.

1:04:38It mimics what I was saying about the transition points. They're all the analogy or metaphor of the same thing, but these are the moments that we need to pay more attention to because that's where true connection happens. And that's where our life gets shaped, I think, for the better, or if you don't pay attention to them, for the worst. I couldn't agree more. Final question for you, Dan, is this. I always ask this for the guests. For you, what does it mean to live a passion struck life? Wow. I think it means that you're always tapping into some core, some depth. For me, it's like you're always tapping into some depth.

1:05:26You're doing things because they resonate like a guitar string inside you. And it's not logical entirely, though you can use logic to serve those feelings. You can use logic to help you cultivate that passion. And I almost think of it as part passion and part like fascination too, where it's like stuff you find endlessly interesting, where that flame gets reignited all the time and you get that energy is renewed. For me, it's like you're in touch with these sources and maybe they're activities, maybe they're relationships, maybe they're projects that kind of pluck that guitar string inside you that's, ooh, I like that.

1:06:03And you can't help but pursue it. It doesn't feel like work. It feels like fascination. I love it because that's what it means to me as well. You're in a mattering moment, mattering project that your passion struck about. Dan, it was such an honor to have you on the show. For listeners who want to learn more about you, where is the best place for them to go? Yeah, danielcoyle.com is a link to contact me or whatever people want to do. Awesome. Thank you so much for joining us here on PassionStruck. Thanks, John. It was a delight. Thanks for having me. That brings us to the close of today's conversation with Daniel Coyle.

1:06:40If this episode stayed with you, it's likely because it illuminated something you felt before, the difference between being included and being needed. Here are three reflections you might carry forward. First, flourishing begins with presence. Second, group flow emerges from trust. And lastly, mattering is structural. It shows up in how roles are designed, how voices shape action, and whether individuals experience themselves as necessary to the whole. Daniel's work reminds us that flourishing doesn't require perfection or constant happiness. It grows where human significance is continually reinforced through participation and shared responsibility.

1:07:20If this conversation resonated, consider sharing it with someone who's building a team, leading a community or quietly wondering why energy keeps draining from spaces that look successful on paper. To continue the work, visit theignitedlife.net, our substack for episode reflections. Watch the full conversation on YouTube at John R. Miles or Passion Struck Clips. Explore intention-driven apparel at startmattering.com. Next, we continue the You Matter series with Harry Reese and Sonia Lieber-Mirsky, exploring how happiness, connection, and relational significance intersect and where they meaningfully diverge.

1:07:56People will pursue the goals of being famous, of making a lot of money, of being the most beautiful person on the planet, that sort of thing. When you pursue those extrinsic goals and other people admire you for that, it isn't experienced as the real self. You can never have enough money because there's always somebody who makes more money. There's a wonderful study that showed that something like two-thirds of the millionaires in America feel like they don't make enough money. Because there's always someone more beautiful. There's always someone more powerful. There's always someone with higher status.

1:08:30There's always someone who's won more awards than you. And so when you're pursuing those more and more, it's not the real self that's coming through. Until then, remember, you matter because your presence shapes what unfolds around you. You matter because participation changes outcomes and flourishing grows wherever people are treated as indispensable. I'm John Miles, and you've been PassionStruck.