What's next? This is a question we're all having to ask and answer more frequently. I'm Jenny White, your host of the Pivot Podcast and author of Pivot, the only loop that matters is your next one. For show notes from this episode, visit pivotmethod.com slash podcast.
If change is the only concept, then let's get better at it. Here we go. Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the Pivot Podcast.
I am here live at Good Life Headquarters, which is the home of Jonathan Fields. Jonathan is a longtime friend and New York City dad, husband, award-winning author, teacher, speaker, media producer, and entrepreneur. His book, Uncertainty, Turning Fear and Doubt into Fuel for Brilliance, was one of my favorites and a guiding light for Pivot and was named the top personal development book in 2011 by 800 CEO Reid. Jonathan's current focus, Good Life Project, is a media and education venture and global movement that empowers people to live more meaningful, connected, and vital lives.
Today we're talking about his new book, How to Live a Good Life. Just a little tiny topic that you bit off. Jonathan, welcome to the show. It's awesome to be hanging out with you on my couches.
I know. This is one of those moments where I pinch myself that existed five, six, seven years ago and read Career Renegade asking, how can I do this? So, Jeff, thank you for everything along the way. We're literally in the HQ, my living room, also known as earning our living and having fun.
I know. Lucky us. And we did a podcast for your show, which I will point everyone to in the show notes, too. So, you opened your book by saying, my role has been to live fiercely and study deeply.
That's a really interesting personal mission statement. How did you come to that? I didn't come to it. I just lived it, honestly.
And I think I've been doing a lot of reflection over a period of years and decades. And I'm just kind of trying to understand, what am I doing here on the planet? And a huge amount of just self-discovery. And one of the things I learned about myself is that anytime I take a strength-based thing, and I've known this anyway, is that the number one driver for me is a love of learning.
And also, like, creativity. I love to learn and then turn around and create things. And I'm also, while I read ferociously and I devour knowledge, I'm always also in pursuit of what I would call embodied knowledge. I want to actually do.
I learn through doing. And so, as great as it is to be able to learn from the work of others in a compressed form, I want to go out there and actually, A, test what I've learned and see if it's valid to me. Because I don't actually take much at face value, which is probably part good and part bad. And I also want to live it.
I want to feel it. I want to go out and I want to spend a chunk of time living in the world and also contemplating. And then see what evolves from that. When I read that line, live fiercely and study deeply, I had two reactions.
And the second, I'm curious. One, I thought, me too. And I said, how did you capture that? And then my second thought was, that's allowed?
That can be the driving mission, to live fiercely and study deeply. And this little gremlin pops in saying, but how do you earn a living from that? So I'm wondering how you have translated that to your body of work that you get paid for. Yeah, and it changes on a pretty constant basis.
This year, we've talked about it a little bit. I founded, grown, built, sold a handful of different companies in different spaces. So it's basically the way that you earn a living and anything, the only two ways to earn a living. You're either solving a problem or you're delivering a delight.
If you're lucky and creative, you do both simultaneously. And the truth is, even if you think that you're purely on the delight side of the spectrum, there's always a shadow side of delight, which is resolving pain. If you look at Pokemon Go, you'd be like, well, that's utterly delight-based. Nobody knew that they needed Pokemon Go or Matty Bird before they played it.
So those things are not solving a problem. It's utterly delight, almost a level of addiction to dopamine hits of delight. But if you actually dig a little bit deeper, you find that, well, what's really happening there? Why are people so drawn to that?
It's because there actually is something missing. There's a malaise. There's a lack of awe. There's a lack of novelty.
There's a lack of deep interest. There's a lack of something to strive toward that's there. So there's always that shadow side. So for me, it starts with generally deep fascination or a knowledge quest.
And at the same time, I love creating something for nothing. And if I can take the quest for knowledge, blend it with the quest to create something from nothing, and figure out how to marry those two in a way that's of value to other people, that's where being able to earn a living comes in. It's not always easy. A lot of times, it requires a whole bunch of experimentation.
And sometimes I get it wrong a whole bunch of times before I get it right. Sometimes I never get it right, and I just shut it down and move on. I think a lot of people don't talk about their failures enough, but man, how have I failed. What do you think is your biggest failure?
And do you even believe in the term failure? I don't view it as a failure, but when you're in it, it sucks big time, and it feels like a failure, especially if it's public. But in my world, the only way that you fail is if you move on from an experience that had an outcome that was negative in a way that you didn't want to have it, and you move on without actually doing a post-mortem and understanding and learning everything you can, extracting the knowledge from it, and then applying it moving forward. If you do that, in my mind, it's not a failure.
If you don't do that, yeah, it's a failure. If you ignore the astonishing lessons that just came out of that, and you move on blind, that's failure to me. One of my big, I mean, there are a lot to list, but one that just jumped into my head was I ran for seven years a large-sized yoga center in New York City, but part of my early vision for that was to see if we could actually create the first national franchise. And so I literally went through the entire franchising process.
We hired lawyers and went through and created these filing documents and filed in different states and then did two test franchises, and what I learned was that I actually didn't want to be in the yoga franchise business. It's just really, really, really hard. It's a very difficult space to try and standardize on that level. And while I could have pushed forward with it, and I think we would have done okay, I realized it actually wasn't the business that I wanted to be in.
But I had already invested a lot of money in making it happen. We were public with this, and so it meant a big hit to my ego. It meant a big hit to my bank account. And as sometimes happens with entrepreneurs, the core business, because I spent so much time on scaling, I hadn't given the core business what it needed.
So it was still succeeding, but not nearly on the level of flourishing that it could have been. So I made the decision that I was going to shut it all down. So we wound it down. It took a whole bunch of stuff to wind it down.
And then I just focused all – basically, I asked questions. I said, okay, what did I just learn here? And then I said, I need to now repair. I need to bring the core business back up to the level that I can operate at.
So it's been another – the next probably two years, you know, bringing – coming back first to baseline and then back to, you know, flourishing on a really high level. But I don't – while it was brutal going through it, you know, I look at that and I'm, man, I learned so much in that process, you know, so much about business process, so much about scaling, why to scale, why not to scale, so much about systems and management and program development and just the franchising process also, which is kind of fascinating and how so many people do it wrong. And so it was hugely valuable as I looked forward and then, you know, decided that I wanted to build other businesses because it gave me just a body knowledge I didn't have before. Hard-earned and painful for sure.
But valuable nonetheless once I was able to sort of come back from it. What I find so interesting about your career is that first you were a lawyer. So to pivot from lawyer to starting and running a yoga studio and experimenting with franchising it. But then take me to that moment of deciding that even running the yoga studio was no longer for you.
How did you answer that question of what's next in that moment and coming off the heels of what felt like a failure? Yeah, and so we brought the core business back to a great place and we're doing really well. You know, we were consistently ranked in some of the top studios in the city. And so it wasn't the moment that I decided to sell it, not really the moment, but the process, wasn't about, you know, like things not working.
It was actually working really well. But it was about me personally being ready to move on. And there were a couple of awakenings. One is it was a community-based business.
It still is. It's still there and thriving, you know. And any community needs a deeply invested leader. And I had started to check out and I realized it wasn't fair to the community.
And when nobody said anything to me, I'm pretty confident that the people closest to me sensed it. I had pulled back to a point where at one point I had a teaching schedule and we were training tons of teachers. And I pulled back to the point where I knew we had great management staff. And I was literally working probably five hours a week and teaching one class a week.
And, you know, the students, the community, the teachers, people had to have been wondering. And it just wasn't fair, you know. A community needs a shepherd and who really cares and was invested. And I had checked out and I needed to own that.
And simultaneously with me, I was getting more and more interested in other stuff, you know. I was getting really deeply interested in writing and speaking and in the digital world and in producing media and just serving in a different way. And so I started to explore that and started to do Test the Waters a little bit. And I actually was able to sell my first book.
What year was this? This was sold the book in 2007, I think. And you were still with Sonny? Yeah, yeah.
I sold the yoga center in the end of 2008. Yeah, my last day. It was like December 2008. It was about a year.
And so that whole year I knew I was on my way out. I was negotiating to sell the company and stuff like that. But nobody from the outside knew exactly what was happening. I remember to this day teaching my last class.
And nobody in that class knew that was my last class until the end. So it was like full one-time class and a nine-minute class. And at the end, you know, I just brought everyone down to Shavasana, which if you're not exposed to yoga, sort of final relaxation, we're just kind of lying there with our eyes closed for about four or five minutes. And I was just sitting on the mat, you know, in a little half-lotus position.
And the room was quiet. And nobody knew that this was the last class that I would ever teach. And I just looked around and I was trying to hold it together because I was looking at this room and here are these, like, beautiful souls, many of whom had been with me for years as students and ostensibly the truth, you know, as my teachers just as much as their students. And I was about to walk away.
And I knew that when they opened their eyes, I was going to have to tell them that. And it was a moment where I had a lot of trouble talking. And, you know, I asked them to open their eyes, come sit up, that this was actually the last class that I would be teaching there. And people were kind of like, what?
And I made the decision not to say anything before, not to sort of announce it, because I just, I wanted to just kind of step aside and let the community continue, you know. And what was interesting is that that moment was really hard for me. But the day that I literally walked out and handed over the keys, I never looked back. You know, I was complete.
I was good. It was ready. Yeah. It's amazing.
Sometimes making the decision is tough, so is communicating it. I'm like two separate things. Were you at all worried at the time about how you would support yourself in this new direction primarily as an author before you had created the rest of your digital empire? I'm trying to put myself back there.
Yes and no. So just from a pure nuts and bolts standpoint, I just sold the company. So I was okay for a while. I had a new book with a major publisher that was coming out.
And I figured, you know, this is the perfect setup. I bought myself a nice chunk of time to just invest in this next career. You know, I've got a book. I'm writing it with a major publisher.
Who should get behind it? And everything was looking great. And then the end of 2008 hit. And the economy collapsed.
And I was coming out with a book where the fundamental message was, hey, think about leaving your job and doing something deeply meaningful to you and unconventional. And that was not what most people wanted to hear. My publisher went black for two weeks immediately before the book came out because nobody knew if publishing was going to exist. Wow.
Yeah. How did you handle that? So this book is coming out. It seems ill-time.
It was, there was a lot of anxiety, a lot of cat dancing. But what I still believed was that the fundamental message was still really powerful and timely. But we needed to change the conversation around it. So rather than, you know, everything that the media was saying was doom and gloomy sky is falling.
If you have a job, dear God, hold on to it for life. And I wanted to say, listen, I'm not going to deny the pain. This is a really bad time for a lot of people. A lot of people are losing jobs.
And the companies and the jobs and positions don't exist anymore. It's not like you could find it again. They're gone for life. But for so many people, you hated that.
The thing that you've been doing has been a case that you felt locked into for years, if not decades. And the only thing that's kept you locked there is because you felt like if you walked away from it, whether it's retraining for another company or starting your own thing, you would have been completely outcast and judged by those who were looking to you to be secure and stable. And now, you can't be judged anymore because you don't have anything to go back to. So why not take this as a window, as an opportunity?
And it was like, rather than running around with an umbrella trying to protect you from the sky falling, why not run around with a bucket and gather up the possibility that's draining from the clouds? What a great metaphor. I love, too, how this turned into The Message of Uncertainty, which came out in 2011. And I reference this book of yours all the time, which is essentially how to turn fear into fuel for brilliance, fear and unsecurity.
And you talk about how uncertainty is actually fundamental to creating meaningful work, even though we grapple with it so much and we resist it and we feel sick to our stomachs about it. You know, you even write in your book that you said living perpetually in the question often gutted me. And yet, you could say you were born to create something from nothing. How have you learned to cope with this?
I don't even know if it's a paradox, but does this notion of uncertainty as the fuel for creativity even though it continues to be uncomfortable? Yeah, it's funny. As soon as we start talking about creativity, the sirens in the background, it's like, well, I don't know. Morning, morning.
We're going down to the territory. Welcome to New York City. Your brain is on fire. Right.
I know the podcasts are filmed in private places in small towns. It's like all you hear is lush silence. Maybe a bird's chirping or two. Ours, probably, when people are listening, they're walking down the street.
There's a siren. No, it's just near your bus. Yeah. So the question was, how do I deal with that?
Yeah, how have you learned both from writing a book and doing all the research and even the years since? Yeah. So my practice, my daily practice is essential and being able to stay in that place where I don't know where things are going to end or how they're going to end and for me to be able to stay in that space of not knowing, of the unknown, of uncertainty long enough for the really good stuff to emerge, practice, mindfulness, practice, meditation, movement, is part of it. So it's a big part of it and that creates a persistent ability to breathe through it and to know that this is actually a valuable and necessary place to be if you want to actually go a level deeper and I do.
And the other part of it is experience. I've probably been through this. I'm 50, which freaks my friends out in the online world. Like, dude, you're so old.
There's a certain truth to that. But at the same time, there's a certain amount of wisdom. There's a certain amount of iterations through highs and lows and successes and failures and through trying and through wading into that space so many times now and knowing how uncomfortable it can be and wanting to run through it or run back out of it. finding some way to stay in it long enough for really juicy stuff to merge and knowing that that is in fact the process and that there is an end.
You know, that if you stay in it long enough, if you equip yourself with the skills and practices to be there and you do the work while you're there rather than just wallowing and waiting, that good stuff happens. Why is it that the end is usually farther out than we want it to be? Yeah. Because it seems like it's never going to end.
Yeah. And the truth is, you know, it is never going to end. This is true. You know, it is.
It ends when you choose to stop growing. Or you choose to stop seeing the unknowing problem. Yeah. Yeah.
And, you know, if you look at, so I'm wired to pursue possibility. And there is no possibility without uncertainty. You know, the moment that you close the door on uncertainty, the moment you move from uncertainty to certainty, you close the door on possibility, on opportunity, on growth. And I don't want to live in that place.
You know, so I choose to continually wade into that place where I don't know what's coming next because that is the place where possibility takes root. And I don't want to live without having that part of my life. You mentioned your daily practice. And in the book, too, keeping your channel open.
Unpack it for us. What does it look like exactly? Yeah. So it's a really simple morning practice.
And it's kind of fun. We're actually building a whole sort of practice guidebook around this book, too. But for me, it's pretty simple in the morning. It's a 25-minute mindfulness practice.
It starts with, actually, about three minutes of yoga breathing, and then it moves into a very traditional, very simple mindfulness practice. So I wake up really early in the morning without a monoclop before anybody else. It's very quiet in the house with my eyes semi-closed. And in a hazy state, I kind of feel my way into the kitchen where the coffee machine is basically set.
So I just have to hit one button to, like, grind some fresh beans, put it in, and hit a second button where it just starts to percolate in the background. I come back and I sit and I do my breathing and my meditation, knowing that by the time I'm done, the aroma will be wafting and then I'll go and have my cup of coffee. And then I usually sit and try and spend a few hours doing, really trying to do the most meaningful work of the day, the stuff that is most important, which is not always the stuff that I'm most looking forward to, to be honest with you. But it's generally the most generative, creative stuff, so that I can have that done.
So very often by the time mid-morning comes, I have a good day. What do you most look forward to? It depends on the day, you know, from a work standpoint or a life standpoint. You know, I know how it's due when we put the big priorities up at the top and use your best creative energy windows, but I'm curious because there's certain stuff I love procrastinating with.
I'm curious what that is for you. The procrastination for me is anything involving process and instructional design. It is my wall of suck in a huge, huge way, which is funny because we've built these big courses and all sorts of stuff. Seriously, you don't like dealing with the probably stuff?
No, the stuff that you love, I hate. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. We love making a little laugh and automation.
We're like, yeah, yeah, yeah. That for me is pure evil. I know there are people like you and I thank God that I know them because they're on my team and they're my friends and I can run this stuff by them. But at the same time, I know that I have to be involved in a certain amount of that with some of the work that we do.
And, you know, so translating ideas and fundamental frameworks and patterns and awakenings and like the real, the creative work and the theoretical stuff into stuff, which is, you know, program-based and iterative and has a really intelligent instructional design behind it, I know is super valuable, but it comes so hard to me. So that's not the stuff that I love doing, the stuff I love doing. What if you play hooky with? Yeah, like where you just steal away to go do it.
So I steal away just to steal away. I mean, seriously, like you put me in nature, you put me by the water, that's where I touch stone. I don't need to be doing anything. I just need to be being there.
Those are big resets for me. Working with my hands is something that I'm trying to do a lot more. We're sitting in my living room and there are two mic stands in front of us and the mic stands are attached to a table that I built, you know, and it's built from plywood and a whole bunch of torn out pages from 1950s Farchies comics with resin poured over it. And, you know, the other part of the room is a living room table, which I built also.
And that's poured concrete built on these like steel legs. So I haven't been doing that nearly as much over the last year or so. And it's killing me. I'm really looking forward to getting back to creating with my hands, which I did for a lot of my life.
And my next big project, I've been talking about for years now, but it's going to happen soon, I hope, is that I want to learn Luther, which is building guitars. So that's something that I'm really into. And also, I was a painter as a kid. I love creating stuff, but also writing.
So I like, I really enjoy not just the information in writing, but I love, I obsess over language, over the craft of language, which is not something that was an earlier part of my life, actually. One in particular that you mentioned in the book is with Elizabeth Gilbert. And you say, you describe it as being magical and that it seemed like space suspended for those moments you were talking to her. And what a joyful experience to have had.
And I did go and listen a second time after reading your book to just hear that moment as you had described it. What do you think, what are the ingredients to those magical moments when they happen? Are they just, do they just fall from the sky? Or is there something that you do or that we can do to really tap into that flow, either with people or with our work?
That's such a good question. I don't know if I have any universal answer to it, but I can try and maybe deconstruct a little bit of if I think about when it's happened in my life or in some of the conversations that I've been so blessed to have over the years. Um, and I think it generally happens when you have, when you're in a space where through some combination of reasons, there's an experience of safety. Like we can drop the facade.
We can be who we are. We can be dorky, funny, vulnerable, stupid, you know, like brilliant, you know, like whatever it is that you feel like is the true, you know, probably confused or stupid, right? None of us are stupid. Sometimes we feel, um, but just being utterly you.
And when you drop the weight of everything and everyone that you're trying to be, there's a truth and a joy and a lightness that emerges. And if you have, if you have people doing that in a space together, and then you're either engaged in an activity or exploring ideas and constructs, concepts, stories that where in some people, both people are genuinely interested, like the, like the, whatever the topic is or the activity is, it's a true spark for both people, um, that there's something that happens. There's just something really powerful that happens. It's, there's a lot of us that have heard the term flow.
Um, and it's the state where you're, you become, you know, like eight characteristics of flow where you become absorbed and there are all these things. And it's that, you know, we may call it being in the zone where you just lose time fugues and you become this activity. And most of us have had moments of that less explored, but, but actually researched is something which, um, like popularly you would call group flow. And there's, I'm trying to remember the, the, uh, scientific terminology, I think it's auto-letic or auto, I can't remember exactly what it is, but you can actually have groups of people who enter that state together.
And you see this very often in, um, athletic teams competing at a really high level who've been playing together for a long time where they just, they know each other so deeply and so intuitively. You're like, you know, like if somebody's playing basketball and one person doesn't even have to look, they throw the ball up in one direction and they know that that other person, you know, the woman they've been playing with for the last eight years will be in the air at that exact moment in time, 19 inches from the hoop with her hand ready to just slam it in. You know, there's something stunning about that. And, um, and it happens with groups and with individuals.
And so I think part of it is about everyone just being utterly real and completely there in the moment. And part of it also is about the nature of the activity where it's the thing that everybody is just stalked by. It chills as you were describing that. That's so cool.
It's, um, I, I also have been kind of looking at this concept of people flow that I think we hear so much about flow in our work. And like you said, when we feel in the zone, what I find really interesting is when people start, we click into some flow around people, who we meet, when we meet them, how the conversations go, like with you and Liz Gilbert. So there's, there's also probably something else, which is where you probably get a little woo-woo with this, which is there's sometimes you meet somebody and there's just a knowing that this person is your person. Yes, I call this soul travelers.
Yeah, where you're just like, yeah, we're kind of meant to be here, like doing this thing and talking about this stuff right now. And we may actually slid and never talk to each other again. But at this time, in this moment, these people, there's like, there's, there's a knowing, like you know each other on some level, which transcends this particular moment. And I don't usually get all that metaphysical, but the older I get, the more open to experiences that I just can't explain through research like that become.
How do you think this idea of group flow relates to, you know, you run your own business, and of course you have support, and you have a team, and your wife, Stephanie, is so wonderful. Can we experience group flow even when we're working independently? And do you have a sense for that in your business? Yeah, that's an interesting question.
Working independently or working remotely? Well, running your own business. There's not, you're not on a team like the basketball team. I mean, of course you have your team of people under you, let's say.
Oh, trust me, in my team, everybody's over me. I'm really good at doing what I'm told to do. You're on the top of the football? Yeah, that's good.
Can you have that in sort of a distributed team or even another team, but just like a group of people? I don't know. I think you can move in and out of it. You know, there are certainly people that have been, like small groups of people that have been, you know, become very close friends with where we're all kind of, it's more like when you got a kid in the very early days.
Kids don't actually play together. They play next to each other. They call it parallel play. And it's almost like that.
We're all creating our own stuff, but we're sort of following a similar paradigm and a similar ethos. And I think you can have that because we've created that in some of the experiences that we've done in the past. It's on hiatus this year, but for years we ran something called the Immersion Project. And we bring together people from all over the world for a solid chunk of months, a better part of a year.
And everyone's working on their own thing. But we created the container. We basically brought together people who shared values and aspirations and then moved them through a process of self-discovery and connection and sort of progressive revelation and vulnerability. So I felt deeply connected.
And the level of the depth of relationship that's sustained with each one of those groups has been really astonishing to watch. It's a real gift to kind of have been able to participate in and then continue on, you know, just independently. And I would probably think that a lot of that is pretty close to the experience of what we're talking about. I love your relating it to the concept of parallel play.
Yeah. That's a nice way to think about it. You also mentioned the idea of metaphysical concepts. In the book, you debunk, or at least you share your thoughts on manifesting.
This is something that I've grappled with over the years because I have what I call in my brain the personal development police. If I ever think anything is at all out of my control, I start robbing on my brain. Like, you just have to think of good thoughts. Anything is possible.
And yet, on the other hand, there's the concept of surrender. Tell us, what are your thoughts on the concept of manifesting? What does it actually mean to you? What do you call that juxtaposition?
I have an interesting relationship with the word. So my wiring tends to be, if there's a scientific explanation for something, if there's a phenomenon that happens and there's a clear scientific explanation for it, I'm going to default to that because that lets my rational brain take action. And also because if I'm sharing that with other people, I want their rational brains to have, you know, like some place to hang the hook for action. If there isn't, then, but I can still see the phenomenon is clearly happening.
I'm certain I'm open to something that I can't explain being behind it. So when I look at manifesting, which to me, my brain kind of puts the filter on and says, well, this is, it's, it's, it's, it's, I don't want to say metaphysical or spiritual, it is, it's a non-scientific overlay on goal achievement. Yes. You know, so, right.
So essentially what you're saying is I want this to happen. Right. I want this to happen in my life, which is, this is a goal, but the difference being manifesting within it, but don't make it a goal, just, you know, like allow it to happen. And there's actually, so the thing is, if that was the process, if it was 100% about just that, about seeing it happen, giving it permission to happen, asking for it to happen, then waiting for it to happen, which tends to be a lot of what the general manifesting process is in relation to that.
If, if there was no science behind any of this stuff, and we saw that that particular thing works consistently over time, I'd be like, okay, I'm open to that. Well, turns out there is science, and there's very little reproducible outcomes around sort of like the popular approach to manifesting, that people love to cherry pick the successes and, and prove them, you know, prove the rule by the outliers. But in fact, there's, you know, Gabrielle, I always put her last name, Aiton, I'm sure I'm not saying it right, you know, did a lot of research and actually said that, you know, one of the big things in sort of the world of manifesting is don't ever focus on the negative or the obstacles. And in fact, it turns out that if you deliberately anticipate the obstacles, especially the internal obstacles, and open to the possibility and say, okay, this is an obstacle, I'm only, I'm thinking about it, I'm identifying it.
And if this happens, now I'm actually creating a plan for how I will respond to that if and that has. So if you actually, not only don't ignore it, but bring it into the conversation and your thought process and even build a plan around it, your likelihood of getting that thing that you want increases dramatically. So when you have something where there's science around it, and it's validated and tested, especially, you know, peer reviewed, I'm going to default to that, you know? So that's kind of where I am with this whole thing.
So just over, I love her work, her book, Outreach is Openness and Changing Prayers. She says that a lot of manifesting these days is like giving a grocery list to God. I want this and this and this and this. How do you approach having goals?
Your book is coming out. For example, having goals of how you want it to do versus just surrendering and saying, well, let the book take the path it's meant to. Yeah. So I'm also not entirely against the idea of surrender, but here's the missing piece of this puzzle.
Most of the people that I've known that point to surrender as the most immediate path to generating something that you want to happen in your life don't actually also include the step that happens before surrender as a critical part, as a critical precursor to the process. And that is almost without fail. The thing that happens before surrender is that somebody works their asses off until they can barely work any harder. And then at some point they're like, oh, screw it.
That's it. I've done everything I can do. I'm done. I surrender.
I give up. Universe, just do what you need to do. That's actually a really important part of the process. It's not the fact that they've just said, woken up one day without having done any work and said, universe, give me something.
It's the fact that they have worked furiously to define what this thing is and built a series of practices and actions and worked really, really, really, really hard and then surrendered and then almost invariably planted so many seeds of possibility in the days, months, or years leading up to it that those seeds very often flourish. And then when we pause, when we give them room to breathe and to get some sunshine. But the process that happens before that is really important. Living a life of complete and utter surrender all the time without alternating that, without effort and practice and focus, yeah, it's not.
I just don't buy that that's the way to actually move through life and experience the things you want to experience. I'm also not a hugely bully or a dick person. I'm a practice-only and a dick person. I think it's important to identify what matters to you and what's meaningful to you and what are the relationships and activities that fill you up.
And every day, make sure that you build a practice of interacting with those things every day. And then have those pictures. But there's another big problem with the goal side of things very often that I've seen, which is that most goals are not based on a level of self-knowledge that would... allow them to reflect what we really want even when we get them and that's why so many people who get exactly what they strive for get there and they're like oh damn this isn't what i thought it would be um so to me the bigger part is that you spend a lot more time developing practices that allow you to know yourself better and then from those practices things truly worthy of pursuing on a more focused way tend to emerge mechanically i love how you describe it in the book that they pull you forward then at the start of our conversation you laid out a really interesting framework for honing in on this which is solving problems and delivering delight and solving problems seems like there's a lot of literature out there and we can kind of unpack problem solving frameworks but delivering delight how do you do that it's not easy like i said like nobody knew that you like you couldn't live without pokemon go before that right that's why it's so delight-based businesses or solutions or experiences are in mind it's been my experience working with a lot of people and just in what we've created they are um they're exponentially harder to create and but when you do the impact is exponentially greater and they grow exponentially faster you know and the reason is because if you ask somebody if i was going to ask you like what's bugging you right now you might not be able to tell me everything but you probably give me a short list you know like here's the problem like what are your top three problems that you have right now and what are the pains associated with this almost anyone can answer that question right and if i said to you you know what are the delights that are missing from your life right now people be like huh right so you might be able to tap into something that was really delightful in your past that you're not experiencing right now you'd really love to but to a certain extent you know if you hadn't experienced it yet you don't yet know that it's missing from your life that it's actually something that you would deeply value in your experience so it's very hard to create around something that people don't yet know that they need so it revolves very often it involves like a lot of a lot of faith a lot of having your finger on the pulse of what you think will really matter um i'm deeply fascinated by the um by the concept of awe right now and which you're since you have the research it does show that awe is a very powerful emotion yeah i mean it really does some powerful things to you and it is increasingly um devoid in our everyday experience you know i i my theory is that um the reason that filters exist on images in social media is because we're trying to put the awe back in the images that capture our everyday lives with like butterflies at the crown and also just like you know the things that amplify color and amplify contrast you know we want more color we want more contrast we want more vividness in our everyday experience because we feel like and we don't even know this is what we're doing you know when you look at a picture and you're like that's not popping enough like are you actually saying my life is not popping enough the things that i'm surrounding myself and interacting with are not popping enough because i'm not popping enough and how do i how do i light that up within myself again fascinating yeah right yes that's like that's what gets really deep yeah i'm putting a photo filter i'm probably about to explore i focus a lot of it in the keynote i recently gave it a design um uh conference you've been in this incarnation of your business for eight or nine years almost a decade now what is the biggest lesson you've learned either personally or professionally or both um biggest lesson probably um be intentional um yeah the the moment we define ourselves and the things that we commit ourselves to by reacting to what other people determine is important uh we've already lost you know there's a phrase that i've heard in the book reactive life syndrome and it really represents a basket of symptoms that define most people's lives very sadly which is you wake up in the morning you feel like you're already behind and then you're maniacally busy all day long and you check off the kind of list at the end of the day and then you lay your head down the pillow and you're like that was crazy busy and you feel like you're actually more behind than you were when you open your eyes in the morning and when you think about all the things that you've just checked off your list very few of them actually matter to you they matter to other people and to their agendas and we move through life reacting to other people's demands um for who they want us to be and what they want us to value and how they want us to spend our time and our attention and our love and our energy and it's tragic i really think it's tragic i mean a lot of what this book is about a lot of what my work is about what good life project is about is about awakening from that state is about you know sort of reclaiming a life of intention and awareness is the precursor to everything and then living by choice not by default it's almost like being a life renegade there's dots connecting again exactly they just came all the way around i love there's something really powerful you just said at the start of that which is also not fixing our own identity and we talked for your podcast that just because something has worked or got us here doesn't necessarily mean it's the best fit to take us forward and i think that's really hard to shed that let's say like a snake shedding its skin and then to stand there naked saying well i'm not that person anymore i'm not into those ideas and creative pursuits anymore but the next thing isn't here yet yeah you found that beautifully i trust me from that looking at it beautifully but from the inside looking at it quite fitful um i would love to say that there's just grace and ease that pervades everything that i do and all the transitions and future language the pivots um and sometimes there is you know but i'm human i'm i'm i'm in the weeds just like everybody else for a lot of time i'm a student constantly and just exploring i mean a lot of what i do is just um you know i'm looking for embodied teachers teachers who embody not just talk about or write about but actually live some of the answers that i'm looking for and um and i don't have all of them yet you know whatever i have i hope i've been able to sort of convey and share in some way that's meaningful but i'm very much still on the road and that's a good news yeah totally jonathan thank you so much where can people find you if they want to keep in touch they can find me at goodlifeproject.com awesome and jonathan's book how to live a good life launches this week so go grab your copy jonathan thank you so much for your mentorship friendship and for being on this podcast uh it's my pleasure thanks for inviting me all right that wraps up this episode of the pivot podcast i hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as i did and pivot is officially out so grab your copy wherever books are sold even better tell a friend and leave a review on amazon reviews help other readers decide whether to purchase a copy and it helps build a lot of momentum in these early days of the launch thank you all so much in advance i couldn't do this without you thanks so much for listening to this episode of the pivot podcast make sure you don't miss an episode or my insider tips and templates by signing up for pivot list a curated twice monthly newsletter where i share the inside scoop on what i'm reading watching listening to and the latest tools i'm keeping out on sign up at pivotmessage.com slash pivot list get shown us from this episode at pivotmessage.com slash podcast and connect with me on twitter at jenny underscore blake remember build first then your courage will follow hasn't it always you