The keys to a flourishing community with Dan Coyle

0:00Dan Coyle: Are you really buying a car online on Autotrader right now? Really? I can get super specific with dealer listings and see cars based on my budget.

0:07Adam: You can really have it delivered.

0:08Dan Coyle: Or pick it up.

0:09Adam: Mommy, look! I think your kid is walking up the slide. Really?

0:12Dan Coyle: Autotrader. Buy your car online. Really?

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1:20Adam: When we talk about flourishing, we tend to think, oh, I need a lot of resources. Oh, I'll flourish once I have all the pieces in place. But in fact, what you find is that there are these communities of meaningful connection. And that meaningful connection is this form of connective energy that you can channel into doing things together.

1:41Dan Coyle: Hey everyone, it's Adam Grant. Welcome back to Rethinking, my podcast with Ted on the science of what makes us tick. I'm an organizational psychologist, and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking.

1:59Dan Coyle: Dan Coyle is a journalist and bestselling author whose work explores how individuals and groups thrive. His previous book, The Culture Code, was named the best business book of the year by multiple outlets, and he's advised organizations like the Navy SEALs, Microsoft, and the Cleveland Guardians. Dan's new book, Flourish, is about how to build community in groups, teams, and workplaces.

2:20Adam: For a visual, you almost think about a group of starlings moving through the sky together, moving through a forest. They're solving problems in real time. They're each having a certain role as they make the turn toward home, but each one also is connected to the larger group. Something Dan first experienced in the community where he

2:38Dan Coyle: grew up.

2:47Dan Coyle: So I thought it'd be fun to start this conversation in Alaska. Yeah. I want to hear about your childhood and the sense of community you had there. And why in the world that existed in one of the coldest places in America?

3:00Adam: Exactly. Well, it exists because it's one of the coldest places in America. Everybody who gets to Alaska is either running from something or running to something. We moved when I was three years old. I'm not sure which my parents were doing. But I grew up there. And you quickly realize you have to make your own family. You have Christmas and Thanksgiving with your friends because no one has extended family there. And then because of the environment, because of the cold, because of the challenges, you end up cooperating a lot, like figuring things out, creating meaningful connection, creating strange things.

3:34Adam: Like I remember as a kid going to this crazy play, this guy put on a play outdoors in Kodiak Island. It was called The Cry of the Wild Ram. And he made the play. He wrote it. He produced it. He did everything. It was just this complete, I don't know, what are the old movies? Andy Rooney movies where they say, let's put on a play. All of Alaska is a little bit like that where it's like, let's build a healthcare system. Let's build a pipeline. Let's do stuff. And so I always grew up with that kind of action oriented community that had to lean on each other to get anything done.

4:07Dan Coyle: So interesting. So is this, is this a case then that shared suffering is key to community?

4:12Adam: Yeah, I think it is. I think it is. Because it creates vulnerability and that creates, you need to reach out. You know you can't do it alone. There's nobody walking around in a suit of armor saying, I've got it all figured out. I'm the smartest one. It's like, wait a minute. We've got to go get a spare tire from our neighbor to make our truck run.

4:30Dan Coyle: I read a paper years ago looking at when sort of communal and cooperative values emerge in cultures and when people take a more selfish, kind of every person for themselves mentality. And extreme weather plus scarce resources was a recipe for the selfish kind of, I've got to be a taker because there's not enough to go around value system. And it sounds like you think if resources aren't too scarce, you can get the opposite from an extreme environment.

5:00Adam: I think that's true. And if you look at some of the other works, some of the more fascinating work around this is like Paradise in Hell, I think is the book that Rebecca Solnit wrote about it. This idea that when there is a disaster and you talk to people afterwards, some of them almost guiltily say, that was the most alive and the most community I've felt ever. They secretly say, I loved it. Because with no power, with no resources, we had to self-organize. We had to figure things out ourselves. The meaning was really clear where we were going. We had to feed everyone. We had to get something done.

5:35Adam: And we typically think of ourselves and all the sort of modern ways we think about ourselves as machines. We think of our own lives almost as we use habits and things like that to automate things. And what we found in flourishing communities and flourishing places is they're not about automation. They're about animation. They're about finding these moments of collective meaning. Maybe it's through a disaster. Maybe it's because you're growing up in Alaska. Maybe it's because you're trying to make your little business work, whatever that might be. But those moments of receptive stillness in which you get meaning, meaning not as information, but as connective energy that you can channel into doing things together.

6:14Dan Coyle: So I'm not alone in wanting to know how we can have more of those moments. No one wants to have to manufacture a disaster. That's right. Most of us don't want to have to pick up and move to Alaska. Sorry, Alaska. Yeah.

6:26Adam: Exactly. How do we get more of them? That was the question that drew me to this. I mean, this book exists because I got kind of, I bumped into a quote, or maybe I should say a quote bumped into me. I was kind of at a time in my life where I was really feeling the speed and emptiness of the world. You know, those moments where you're sort of reckoning with, what's it all about? What am I doing here? For me, that came after my parents passed away. And around that time, I found this quote by the psychologist Barry Schwartz. And the quote was this, people mistakenly think life is a treasure hunt. And it's not a treasure hunt.

7:01Adam: It's treasure creation. and that like kind of knocked me down you know i'd spent my years my my career like a lot of people you know working hard focused on family um sort of climbing the career mountain and i'd actually written books about a lot of people who were at high performance kind of climbing the career mountain and that quote treasure creation treasure creation not treasure hunting um really got me thinking like we know what's up on the mountaintop we know enough of those stories we know what happens when you climb and get to be successful. The question is really what's going on in the valleys?

7:36Adam: Like what is happening down there? These places of growth and connection and ecosystems of meaning. And it got me interested in visiting these places. And so that's what I did. I spent those years, five years visiting places, businesses, nonprofits, communities, places that created treasure.

7:51Dan Coyle: Well, the irony of this is you had to go on a treasure hunt to find the people That's right. Who are making the treasure. So one of the things I've always admired about your work is you have a nose for what is the most interesting place to observe the dynamic that for most people is out of reach. And I think, you know, I see you consistently going to sports teams and to military units. And originally, I think you did that because you wanted to understand how to unlock talent in the talent code. And then you did it because you wanted to look at great group cultures in the culture code. and now in Flourish, you find extraordinary community in some of those same places.

8:32Dan Coyle: I'd love to hear about some of the most remarkable communities that you visited and what you learned from studying them.

8:37Adam: Yeah. Well, they kind of get inside you. And it happened to me at Zingerman's. I think you might've been there in your Michigan days. Zingerman's is a little - Many times. A little deli in Ann Arbor. Started in one room. It ended up, it's grown into a$90 million community of businesses in this just marvelous organic way, operating at an extremely high level, kind of a magical place. And I started spending a little bit of time there and Ari Weinsweig, who was the CEO, the way that he built that place, it's kind of like a great example of attentional architecture. When they train people at Zingerman's, they have these things called recipes where you're supposed to say, here's the recipe for customer service.

9:18Adam: Well, those recipes are really interesting because they don't actually have any information in them. Like the recipe for customer service is this, find out what the customer wants, get it for them and then go the extra mile. Like it's literally no information in there, but what it does is it helps guide the person to say, here's what's important right now. Find out what the person wants, be present to that, then be present to get it to them and then be present to going the extra mile. When I went to an orientation there one time, it was so funny because it was actually the opposite of every orientation I've ever been to.

9:50Adam: I think there were 11 people in the room. They're all ready to be oriented. Like, tell me what to do. Tell me what to do. And Ari gets up there and he just says, tell me your stories. How did you get here? How did life get you here? And then he shared his story of how life got him there. And then he had them get in small groups and talk about what they wanted to create together. And by the end of it, one woman was actually in tears. She had to leave the room to compose herself because she said, this is just so different than every way I've been treated before.

10:18Dan Coyle: You know, this reminds me of some research that my colleague Dan Cable led. They do an experiment with new hires in a multinational company. I mean, the gist of the experiment is you think the best way to onboard somebody to make them feel like they're part of a community at a new organization is to kind of tell them about the culture and help them soak it up so they can fit in. But that is not the most effective approach. What works better is giving them a chance to stand out. Where at that new hire orientation, instead of just learning about the company, they get to come up with a personal highlight reel and say, here is me at my best.

10:54Dan Coyle: And six months later, they're performing better and they're about half as likely to quit. And it sounds like that's what Ari was doing at the Zingerman orientation is he's asking, what is your story? As opposed to saying, here's who we are. Exactly right.

11:08Adam: Exactly right. And then knitting that all into a larger story of telling the story of here's how Zingerman started. The Underground Railroad was in Ann Arbor and the first Catholic mass was celebrated across the street. And he sees his job primarily as a storyteller. And I think that a lot of leaders could kind of look at their jobs through those lenses too.

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13:31Dan Coyle: And you just put in your info and boom, car's in your budget. Mom needs a second, honey.

13:36Adam: You can really have it delivered?

13:37Dan Coyle: Really. Or I can pick it up at the dealership.

13:40Adam: One sec, sweetie.

13:42Dan Coyle: Mommy's buying a car.

13:43Adam: Uh, I think your kid is walking up the slide. Kyle, again? Really?

13:48Dan Coyle: Auto Trader, buy your car online. Really?

13:55Dan Coyle: You know, as I was reading Flourish, I was struck by the fact that you seem to have landed somewhere that I also stumbled, which is every time I come back from Europe, and it doesn't seem to matter that much which country it is in Europe, I come back with a sense that Europeans understand how to build community in ways that Americans are struggling with. Yeah. And you also, you ended up in, I would say, a large number of European communities when you were researching the book. Was this intentional? Was it accidental? I'd love to hear some of the things you learned and kind of why you were drawn so much to Europe.

14:31Adam: Yeah, it ended up being kind of accidental. But the place that characterized it most for me was a place that started out most like America. It was a little neighborhood called Petit Mont Rouge in Paris, kind of snobbish, middle class, upper middle class. And there was a journalist there named Patrick Bernard, who he was always kind of a shy, introverted guy. When people would come to borrow sugar, he would sometimes tell his wife that he wasn't home just to avoid the interaction. He was a newspaper man. And when he retired, he started to get a little lonely. And so he started to do this social experiment.

15:02Adam: And the experiment had two parts. The first part was he rented 80 tables, 88-foot tables, and put them down the middle of the street with 700 chairs and put out a little message on the community board saying, we're going to have a dinner, all of us. Come for the longest meal in Paris. And people did. And there was this incredible celebration in the street. And then -

15:23Dan Coyle: Wait, are we talking longest in terms of table or time?

15:26Adam: Longest in terms of table. Longest table. Longest table in Paris.

15:29Dan Coyle: I'm picturing this 19-hour dinner thinking, get me out of here.

15:34Adam: No, it was a great celebration. And so these groups started to form. One group was a group to talk about books. Another group was a book to talk about pets. Another group was a bike repair group. Another group was a memories group where their older people talk about their younger lives. Another group was about the museum. And these groups each self-organized and started gathering. And over the course of that, those months and now years that this has been going on, they call themselves the super neighbors, hyper voisins. And over the course of that, it has turned this sort of snobbish neighborhood into something much more like a village to hear their voices about, oh, an older woman saying I broke my wrist and about 20 people came to see if they could help me.

16:17Adam: And I'm never lacking for someone to hang out with. And community is a word we use a lot. And that word actually means shared gifts. Shared gifts. It's not something that you sort of passively receive. It's something that you participate in. We always use the phrase building community, but actually what they're doing is awakening community. It was there all along waiting for someone to create group flow, waiting for someone to design a mess. That's the thing that happens actually in these places. like this neighborhood in Paris, where it's, nobody's really in charge. It's pretty messy, but they're self-organizing toward a horizon.

16:59Adam: And that messiness is the aliveness. That messiness is the vitality. It's vulnerable. And that mess isn't actually a problem. The messiness is kind of the doorway. It's a new system being created. You cannot create a new way of being together without a great amount of disorder.

17:18Dan Coyle: So interesting. First of all, I love the image of community as shared gifts. And I also find your description of awakening community as opposed to building it so compelling. Because you're right, it was the motivation and the skills were just dormant waiting to be activated. Yeah.

17:36Adam: We have this natural love of deep connection. We have the ability, the capacity. What we're lacking is the conditions to do it. What we're lacking is the person to say, here's the table. Here's the invitation. Come on Tuesday at noon. What we're lacking is the person to say, here's the constraints for the small groups. You must gather around a joy device. Those are extraordinary leadership actions because they're unlocking this sense of togetherness and meaningful exploration that we're all really craving. Okay.

18:09Dan Coyle: That makes me think we need to talk about Norwich. Yeah.

18:13Adam: What a place, right? When you start looking around for athletes and Olympians, there's a lot of places that produce Olympians, right? And a lot of them are names you know. It's like, oh, a lot of winter Olympians are from Vail or Aspen. And it turns out that a lot of them are also from Norwich, Vermont. And they've produced, I think, 11 Olympians now. I think it's one in every 322 citizens is an Olympian. And when you normally look to try to explain that, normally you think, well, they must have great resources. Well, it turns out they really don't have many great resources. They're not home to a great training center.

18:48Adam: They don't have a ton of super qualified coaches. but what they have is is this thing called the norwich daisy chain which is an informal norm of helping other children as if they were your own as if they were your own and that sort of evolved norwich had a great gift happened to it in the 1960s which is they got a perfect case study on how not to raise an athlete there was a man named al snyte who raised both of his daughters Betsy and Sonny, to be skiers. He was an imperious taskmaster. He had them do morning runs with leg weights. He handled all their ski tuning. He was the nightmare of a tiger athlete parent, an absolute nightmare.

19:30Adam: Both of them were successful skiers. Both of them fell out of the sport immediately afterwards. No one mistook their story for a happy story in Norwich. They saw vividly what I think St. Augustine called the via negativa, the way not to go. the way not to go. Very powerful to know that, right? That's your boundary. That's your constraint. And as a result, when kids started training for the Olympics in Norwich, they started treating each other differently. They started combining efforts. They'd show up at meets and they'd have busfuls of people, their friends, coming along to watch them. And they'd see athletes from other places and the athletes would look at them funny, like, why are all your friends here?

20:09Adam: And they realized, oh, these other athletes are just with their coaches. That's all who they go with. So it has evolved into this extraordinary kind of nursery and ecosystem, really, where people can help each other train and help each other get better and self-organize toward a horizon.

20:29Dan Coyle: I mean, that sounds like just the very foundation of community is the norms are communal. That's right. Right. We help other people who are part of that community with no strings attached. Yeah, I mean, you're describing a culture of giving, not taking.

20:43Adam: That's it.

20:43Dan Coyle: In essence. Actually, it reminds me a lot of what I saw in the Norwegian Alpine team. You know, storied Olympic skiers. It's, you know, convenient to be from Norway if you want to be an Olympic skier. But one of the things that's really striking to people is now they've started to ascend in the summer Olympics, too, where they don't have the advantages that they do in winter. And I think one of their secret sauces is they train their athletes from very young to support each other, even in what seems like an individual sport. So, you know, you have Olympic medalists who will finish their race when the stakes are high and then radio up with notes about the course to their teammates.

21:21Dan Coyle: Oh, my God. Even though it might cost you a gold to give, you know, to give that little bit of extra help to your teammate, it's a gold for Norway. And, you know, ultimately, I think they all get better because of that support.

21:34Adam: Why is that so rare? It's really rooted in, I think, the two words that we get wrong all the time, complicated and complex. We use the words interchangeably, but in fact, they're really, really different. Complicated things are linked up the same every time. I can write on a sheet of paper how to build a Ferrari. And if you have all the right tools and ingredients, if you follow that instruction on the paper, you'll get a Ferrari every time. You won't get a platypus. You'll get a Ferrari. Complex things are really different. Every time you engage with it, the system changes. It senses you and responds to you.

22:08Adam: And the best way to kind of understand the distinction is to say, is this problem more like building a Ferrari or is it more like raising a teen? Raising a teen is complex. Everything you do, there's no list of instructions I can give you. So the best way to raise a teen is to try things, see what happens, and then respond. and you're on this much curvier route, but you're always sort of self-organizing and navigating it. And I think the Norwegian team is an example of realizing, and Norwich and these other places, they're realizing the titanic complexity of what they're engaged in. And they realize one person can't do it alone.

22:45Adam: We have to be a group brain here. We have to combine our efforts to see if we can be better together. And that's a pattern I see in a lot of successful organization.

22:55Dan Coyle: I really like that distinction. It's extremely helpful. I think it also dispels a myth that's too easy to subscribe to when you talk about community, which is you hear about a place like Norwich or about your childhood in Alaska, and you think, well, I just need to find one of those and then pick up and move there, and I'll have what I'm looking for. And I think what you're unlocking is a bunch of ways that we can actually try to unearth or awaken community wherever we are. I'm just thinking about your via negativa comment. And I'm wondering, what else do people do that undermines community? What did you see that backfired or that people expected to work but didn't?

23:36Adam: Yeah, a sense of control. I mean, I can speak to that personally where it's like, I want my family to flourish. But man, when we are doing Thanksgiving dinner, I kind of have my agenda, right? It's really hard to have the level of patience to tolerate the mess. The mess. Like if people were really going to self-organize around this, we have to tolerate the mess. One of the leaders I saw who was really good at it was Ed Catmull at Pixar. He would be so patient with his team. He would give them problems and they'd struggle with it for a long time. And he'd be waiting, waiting, waiting for them to show some level of animation, some level of energy.

24:14Adam: And he would, there was one time where there was a team working on, I forget which movie it was, maybe Brave. but the team ended up pitching a tent together. You know, Pixar loves to kind of bring things to life and they ended up pitching a tent and like camping out somewhere on the campus. And when he saw that, he said, okay, it finally happened. Like they finally came together in some way and the patience it takes for him to kind of let that unfold at its own pace, I think gets in the way a lot. And I think we're just trained to be impatient, trained to control. And I think we valorize and idealize automation as opposed to animation.

24:53Dan Coyle: Okay, so two things here. The first one is, I think you're on track to set a record for the most past rethinking guests referenced in one rethinking conversation. By my count, you've name-checked three in the past 30 minutes. Well done. Thank you. Secondly, I think what you're describing, the willingness to let go of control, is one of the most pivotal transformations in my teaching career, where I used to think my job was to impart knowledge. And that led me to over-prepare and over-structure class. And I would see hands go up and I would try to give the kind of rapid fire expert answer and then move on.

25:29Dan Coyle: And a few years in, I think I gained the confidence that if I let the class take over a little bit, I could still guide, I could guide the discussion in a useful direction. So I think I got more comfortable as a choreographer and a conductor. But I also realized that my role was kind of misdefined, that I wasn't just there to impart knowledge. I was there to build a community. And in a community, people have shared ownership over the dialogue, over the activity, over the pursuit of whatever their goals are. And that just opened up a whole new world of teaching, where all of a sudden I was able to say to students, you know what?

26:12Dan Coyle: It's up to you to design a class session. I'm going to leave one open. You're in charge. Make your pitches. It has to have pedagogical value. So I'm going to rule out anything that just sounds fun, but we're not going to learn anything. Fia negativo. Exactly. But lo and behold, they end up coming up with ideas that I never would have considered. And many of those have become staples of my class now. And I guess looking back, it never would have occurred to me that to grow as a teacher, giving up control was the answer. Because I thought that master choreography was the job. And I think that this is the problem that a lot of leaders run into.

26:48Dan Coyle: And it's, I didn't have a language for it until you started talking and it hit me. Oh, these leaders that you see screw up community. They're making the same mistake that I made as a teacher, which is they're unwilling to let go of the reins because they're afraid that they might have a runaway horse.

27:03Adam: It's exactly right. That's exactly, that's a lesson over and over and over. And those four words you said, It's up to you. I think those are probably the most quoted words or used words in any good community, right? It's up to you. And this goes back to the complexity conversation. Like, why is the natural world so powerful? It's because it's a complex system. And when you put constraints on it, like it has to have pedagogical value and set them loose, you are not just giving instructions or providing directions. You're actually unlocking. unlocking them because you're creating conditions for group flow.

27:41Adam: You're giving them what it needs, which is autonomy, ownership, and belonging in a horizon. When you have those things, you get energy. It's like a pickup basketball game. There's the basket. This is what we're going. You can carry the ball wherever you want. I don't care. It's the ball. You go wherever you want, cooperate however you want. That's why sports, I think in some ways, captures the beauty of that flow. And that's when we're, when we are at our best at an organization or a classroom, it's, it's that feeling of unlocking. And then you get this wonderful surprise. That's the signature of flourishing.

28:13Adam: I think, especially with community is you didn't know it was going to happen. You couldn't have planned it. And so letting go of that as a leader, here's the other little secret of this. It's nicer because it lets you be lazy. You know, it lets you actually pay attention to things that you might want to pay attention to instead of over-preparing and subscribing to the myth that you can somehow control everything that unfolds in your space. But actually laying back and letting other people do it is better for you, and it's way better for them.

28:42Dan Coyle: Well, sometimes there's a fine line between empowering and laissez-faire leadership. But I think this actually goes back to your point about shared gifts, because when you give up a little bit of control, you basically let people bring what they have to contribute to the potluck and people feel valued when they can add value that way yeah yeah it's so true and you know if

29:08Adam: we go back to what is the quality of life about well it's about the quality of our relationships well what's the quality of our relationships that's really the quality of our conversations right and then what's the quality of our conversations that's the quality of our questions. So this idea that leaders should constantly be kind of working down that cascade, if they want to have quality relationships, they've got to have better conversations, which means they have to ask better questions. And those questions of what gift could you bring to this? Or what if we tried this? Or what if you took charge of that?

29:40Adam: Are just really, really powerful questions. And then the other value that pops up all the time is courage. the courage it takes for both them to kind of take that role and for you to let them have that role and so over and over in these in these in these flourishing communities i kept seeing those values of curiosity and courage next to each other curiosity and courage in a way it kind of reflects the same qualities of any healthy ecosystem any healthy ecosystem that's going to grow and be interdependent and connect and you know that's what nature does nature is really curious and nature is really courageous.

30:16Adam: And so being able to kind of almost mimic those values is what helps drive flourishing.

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32:56Dan Coyle: Okay, let us go to a lightning round where I'm going to try to ask some good questions. What is the worst advice you think people give about building community?

33:04Adam: Think it through. I think thinking about these things and overplanning them, I think they can easily get overplanned. There's a bias for action in a lot of these communities where Patrick Bernard, who did the long table in Paris, he didn't overthink it. He tried it. He tried it. The learning by doing is very, very high because we're terrible at predicting the future. So don't think through that community action. Don't overthink it. Experiment into the space.

33:33Dan Coyle: okay what is a hot take that you're eager to defend um i think words are

33:43Adam: what would the kids say sus i'm sort of i find myself in all of this study of flourishing it's like language is is often our friend language is often our friend especially when it's used as a bridge but language is not our friend in a lot of these situations especially when we're looking at screens and typing to each other. I'm reminded of Aronson's work of silently staring into somebody else's eyes is the best way to build a relationship. And we live in this word-happy culture, this category-happy culture. And so my unpopular take, I think, is stop using so many words, people. Go do stuff with each other.

34:19Adam: And don't worry about the language. And don't worry about describing it in detail. Just do things together.

34:26Dan Coyle: Well, I love the way that you're updating your point that relationships are about conversations, because I think you just said relationships even more so are about activities.

34:34Adam: Yeah, I think they are.

34:36Dan Coyle: I also have to note that you're basically raining on my word parade here, Dan. Words are my life.

34:41Adam: Well, it's not the words. It's the receptive stillness that your words create, right? People are out there listening, and they're like, oh, wait a minute. What was that? And I think that's where the value is, right?

34:51Dan Coyle: Oh, that's interesting. Okay, I could get behind that. Shorter podcasts. Yes, that's right. Except for this. But longer form books. Okay. If you're designing your dream dinner party, who are you putting at the table for maximum community building?

35:08Adam: George Saunders and Abe Lincoln. And they're going to sit next to each other, I think, because George wrote a great book about Abe Lincoln. Lincoln and the Bardo. That'll be tension. There'll be a little tension there. I think you've got it.

35:17Dan Coyle: You're up to four rethinking guests now. Oh, no.

35:20Adam: Is that right? Oh.

35:21Dan Coyle: Yeah, we had Abe Lincoln a few weeks ago. No.

35:26Adam: Oh, that's wonderful. I think I'd have to have some music there, right? I think I'd have to have Bruce Springsteen, and I think I'd maybe have to, if my daughters are also there, we'd have to bring in Taylor Swift. All right, what's the question you have for me? When in your life did you flourish the most? Did you feel connected to a vibrant community and feel most alive?

35:50Dan Coyle: I think for me, it's less when than with whom. I feel it a ton on family vacations. That's a big one. And I think that one of the things that's great about a family vacation is you have the shared purpose, but you also are letting go of control and trying to decide as a group, what do we want to do now? Where do we want to go? I love that. And I think those are sources of some of my favorite memories. I think, I don't know, first semester of college for me was a really strong one. I felt this tremendous sense of freedom starting over in a new place halfway across the country with completely new people.

36:30Dan Coyle: And I think the sense of possibility was what really stood out, that it was almost like I could become anyone and I could discover anything that I wanted to learn. And I felt like I woke up every morning with something to look forward to. That's wonderful. So one thing we haven't talked about yet, leaving the lightning round behind, is one of the things I love about your work, Dan, is what a great storyteller you are. And I know you've spent a lot of time studying and thinking about that craft. Can you talk to me a little bit about the art of storytelling and how you decide something is worth writing about, but then also the crafting and shaping of it?

37:08Dan Coyle: Right.

37:09Adam: Well, I'd say the finding thing, there is really a trust your instincts. when you start tuning into the moments where you can't stop thinking about something, or you keep imagining yourself in a certain place, to be tuned into when your body lights up, when it reads a story, or when you hear a snatch of something, or you hear a certain sentence, it's almost like a musical thing. I think we respond to the energy of those stories and tuning into your own response is the best way to find them. Because I think sometimes there's a lot of little ones that just float past, right? They are everywhere.

37:40Adam: There are good stories everywhere. When it comes to the crafting it, I used to think it was all about me as the smart storyteller. I'm going to be the wordsmith and I'm going to craft some real pretty language. I've gradually realized that that is just horribly wrong. When people try to do that, we don't like it as listeners. What really works is, I think something that, I'm going to name check George Saunders again. I think this deep connection to the struggles of other people. If you can write about something in ways that activates someone's awareness of, oh, I've dealt with that too. I know what it's like to have an aging parent.

38:20Adam: I know what it's like to feel like life is empty. I know what it's like. Those little moments of connection where you're not exalting the story up on high, you're actually doing the opposite. it, you're really bringing it down to the same grounded level. And you're trying to make that guitar string in the other person vibrate a little bit. That's what you sort of are thinking about.

38:42Dan Coyle: That is such a compelling metaphor. I love the idea of making the guitar strings vibrate. Yes. More of that. Please. All right, Dan. So I want to bring us full circle here. You go back to Alaska every summer? Yep. How do you awaken community there?

39:00Adam: Well, the first step is to spend 15 years living there full time and you raise your kid with other people. And when we have four daughters and when you raise people in a small town in Alaska, you've basically you're all sharing clothing. There's bags of clothing that get dropped off as kids get older. And so our kids have got other kids names stitched into the back of all their clothes. That's a good metaphor for being kind of embedded in this place. And the way we do it is we basically have a kind of a long table. On the 4th of July, we roast a pig. We invite everybody we know, and people come and play music and sing songs.

39:37Adam: There's an egg toss. There is some kayak races sometimes. There's some other games that get played every year that's been going on for, I think, this is the 50th year that we've had this cabin. So that event, I think we're kind of embodying this bias for action and this idea of just start something and see what happens. And good things happen.

39:58Dan Coyle: Well, I look forward to experiencing it one day. I think I've been to 40 states, and Alaska is on the list of the ones I haven't visited yet.

40:07Adam: Come for the fourth, Adam. We'd love to have you.

40:10Dan Coyle: I'm accidentally inviting myself here.

40:15Adam: You're heartily invited.

40:16Dan Coyle: Thank you. That would be a lot of fun to do. And in the meantime, appreciate you helping us rethink how to build a flourishing community.

40:23Adam: Thanks, Adam. It's been so fun talking with you.

40:28Dan Coyle: Rethinking is hosted by me, Adam Grant. The show is produced by Ted with Cosmic Standard. Our producer is Jessica Glazer. Our editor is Alejandra Salazar. Our engineer is Asia Pillar Simpson. Our technical director is Jacob Winnick. And our fact checker is Paul Durbin. Our team includes Eliza Smith, Roxanne Hilash, Van Ben Chang, Julia Dickerson, Tansika Sung Manivong, and Whitney Pennington Rogers. Original music by Hans Dale Su and Alison Leighton-Bratt.

40:58Dan Coyle: Well, I aspire to flourish, so I'm all in on that.

41:03Adam: Well, see, we have to do it mutually, as you know. So all flourishing is mutual. Damn it. Yeah, we'll do it together.

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41:20Adam: You can really have it delivered.

41:22Dan Coyle: Or pick it up. Mommy, look!

41:23Adam: I think your kid is walking up the slide. Really?

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