George Washington is perhaps the most familiar figure in American history. But most people really only know the image of him they see in marble statues and patriotic paintings. Behind those symbols was a real man: ambitious, self-taught, intensely concerned with honor, and constantly wrestling with the immense responsibilities history placed on his shoulders.

In celebration of America’s 250th birthday, we’re taking an extended look at the life of the man more responsible than anyone else for the nation’s founding. Here to unpack that life for us is H.W. Brands, a historian and the author of a new biography of Washington, American Patriarch. Brands traces Washington’s journey from a young Virginia surveyor to military commander, founding father, and first president. Along the way, we discuss how Washington’s upbringing shaped his character, why he became a surprisingly effective military leader despite losing more battles than he won, how he held together a fragile revolutionary army, how he shaped the presidency through the precedents he set, and whether a leader like Washington could still succeed today.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• H.W.’s previous appearances on the AoM podcast:
  • Episode #696: Theodore Roosevelt, The Last Romantic
  • Episode #908: Would You Have Been a Patriot or a Loyalist?
• AoM Podcast #223: George Washington, Benedict Arnold, and Valiant Ambition
• AoM Podcast #366: Teach Yourself Like George Washington
• AoM Podcast #719: The Surprising Pessimism of America’s Founding Fathers
• AoM Article: George Washington’s Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation

Connect With H.W. Brands

• H.W. on Substack
• H.W.’s faculty page

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This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

The modern idea of retirement was built on a bet that turned out to be wrong. It assumed people would spend most of their lives working and only a relatively short period of time retired. Instead, many Americans now reach 65 healthy, active, and with an entire third of their life ahead of them. Yet we’re still using a retirement model designed for a world in which old age was shorter and fewer people expected decades of life after leaving the workforce.

My guest says that outdated assumption creates some unfortunate unintended consequences. It causes people to stress excessively about money, postpone meaningful experiences with family and friends, and sometimes sacrifice the very things that make life worth living in the first place. He argues that by rethinking retirement — not necessarily eliminating it, but reimagining it — we can enjoy more of our lives now while actually feeling more secure about the future.

His name is Derek Coburn, and he’s a financial advisor and the author of Let’s Retire Retirement. Today on the show, Derek explains why the traditional retirement model came about, why it may no longer make sense for many people, and how working even a few years past 65 can dramatically change the math of retirement planning. We also discuss the surprising psychological challenges many people face after they stop working, why purpose matters more than leisure, and how thinking differently about retirement can free you up to spend more time on what matters most right now — whether that’s traveling, strengthening your marriage, or making the most of the limited summers you have left with your kids.

Connect With Derek Coburn

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

We all want two things that can seem at odds with each other: to be our own person and to belong. We want to stand apart from the crowd, but we also want to be connected to it. When that balance gets out of whack, we either lose ourselves in tribalism or drift into isolation.

My guest today says many of the problems in modern life stem from our inability to hold these two impulses in tension. His name is Luke Burgis, and he’s the author of The One and the 99: Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion. Today on the show, Luke explains how becoming a true individual can give you the strength to be a part of a community. We discuss the difference between a solid self and a pseudo self — and what role families and rites of passage can play in moving us toward one or the other — why modern politics feels like a dysfunctional family, the dangers of performative religion, and much more.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Luke’s previous appearances on the AoM podcast:
  • Episode #714: Why Do We Want What We Want?
  • Episode #910: Thick Desires, Political Atheism, and Living an Anti-Mimetic Life
• The True Believer by Eric Hoffer
• Education of a Wandering Man by Louis L’Amour
• AoM Podcast #1,025: The Life and Legacy of Louis L’Amour
• AoM article with L’Amour’s weekly to-do lists
• AoM article and podcast about C.S. Lewis’ The Abolition of Man and the idea of objective value
• The Courage to Be by Paul Tillich
• The Quest for Community by Robert Nisbet
• AoM Podcast #847: Overdoing Democracy
• AoM Podcast #1,010: How to Resist Group Anxiety and Become a Differentiated Self
• AoM Article: Becoming a Well-Differentiated Leader
• Dying Breed article: A New Kind of Monasticism — The Power of Community to Shape the Soul
• The Rule of St. Benedict

Connect With Luke Burgis

• Luke’s website

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

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Transcript Coming Soon

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Life rarely unfolds according to plan. A relationship implodes. A move or job change doesn’t work out. Or you simply fail in a goal you’ve set for yourself.

My guest has spent almost two decades researching and field-testing how to get back on track when smaller slip-ups and larger upheavals knock you off course. His name is Steve Kamb, and he’s the founder of Nerd Fitness and the author of How to Try Again: An Approachable Guide to Navigating Chaos and Making Change THAT STICKS. Today on the show, Steve shares practical principles for dealing with life’s frustrating and demoralizing setbacks. We discuss why sometimes the best move is to pause rather than push harder, how to accept reality without resigning yourself to it, why treating change as an experiment can help you beat paralysis and take action, why you should treat consistency with your goals the way you do showering, and more.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Steve’s previous appearances on the AoM podcast:
  • Episode #42: Level Up Your Life With Nerd Fitness & Steve Kamb
  • Episode #170: Level Up Your Life
• Steve’s AoM guest posts:
  • Don’t Be That Guy: The Taxonomy of Lousy Male Friends
  • How Superheroes, Movies, and Video Games Taught Me to Conquer Fear
• Nerd Fitness
• Museum of Failure
• Sunday Firesides: Good Times Are Not Around the Corner (And That’s Great News!)
• Sunday Firesides: Treat Life Like an Experiment
• “Lightning Fields” by the Killers

Connect With Steve Kamb

• Steve’s website
• Steve on IG
• Steve on LinkedIn
• Steve on Substack

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

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Transcript 

Brett McKay:

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the AoM podcast. Life rarely unfolds according to plan. A relationship implodes, a move or job change doesn’t work out, or you simply fail in a goal you’ve set for yourself. My guest has spent almost two decades researching and field testing how to get back on track when smaller slip-ups and larger upheavals knock you off course.

His name is Steve Kamb and he’s the founder of Nerd Fitness and the author of How to Try Again: an Approachable Guide to Navigating Chaos and Making Change That Sticks. In today’s show, Steve shares practical principles for dealing with life’s frustrating and demoralizing setbacks. We discuss why sometimes the best move is to pause rather than push harder. How to accept reality without resigning yourself to it. Why treating change as an experiment can help you be paralysis and take action. Why you should treat consistency with your goals the way you do showering and more after the show is over, check out our show notes at a om is slash try again. All right, Steve Kamb, welcome back to the show.

Steve Kamb:

Gosh, Brett, it’s so good to be here. You gave me an opportunity back in, I think it was 2010, to write a guest post for Art of Manliness. And I spent months writing that guest post, and that was the biggest opportunity that had ever come my way when I started Nerd Fitness. So thank you for that opportunity. 16 years later and I’m just honored to be back on the podcast.

Brett McKay:

Well, you’re very welcome and thank you for writing that article. So yeah, Steve, you’re the founder of Nerd Fitness. It started off as a blog, started about the same time we started AoM, back in 2008. Nerd Fitness has since turned into a coaching company. You do fitness coaching and nutrition coaching for people. But yeah, that article “Don’t Be That Guy: The Taxonomy of Lousy Male Friends,” published in 2010. We still reshare that. We reshare articles, so from our archives on our X feed and on Facebook, and every time we reshare that, it still gets a ton of traffic. It’s timeless, it’s evergreen.

Steve Kamb:

That makes me so happy. And also you don’t want to be that guy.

Brett McKay:

You don’t want to be that guy. Yeah. So thank you for sharing that, allowing us to publish that article. And then we’ve had you on the podcast before. You’re one of my early podcasts. 2013 was the last time we had you on episode number 42.

Steve Kamb:

Whoa.

Brett McKay:

So it’s been a long time. 13 years ago you were on the show to talk about your book Level Up Your Life, and you got a new book out and since that time we both have gotten old. We’re in our forties now. And your new book, How to Try Again: An Approachable Guide to Navigating Chaos and Making Change That Sticks is all about how to get back in the saddle when life derails the goals you have for yourself. And this book was born out of your own experience having to get back in the saddle big time because in 2023 you got bucked the heck out of life’s saddle. What happened in 2023?

Steve Kamb:

Yeah, well, so interestingly, I said I started Nerd Fitness at this point 17 years ago, and I had an idea in 2023 like, hey, we’re really good at helping people succeed not with more discipline when they fail or struggle but with more compassion. And we help people get back on track. We help them respond or restart on their fitness journey after a failure. And that was the premise and the idea that I thought I was going to be writing a book around said, I have all this experience. I have an amazing team at Nerd Fitness. I have almost two decades of experience helping busy people navigate a chaotic life. And that was the book I started to write. And then about a year later, my life took a few left turns. It started with a skin cancer diagnosis that kind of shook me and made me realize like, oh, I am in fact mortal…

Brett McKay:

You got the good kind of skin cancer. I mean, no, cancer is good, but it’s the one that you can just cut off at the dermatologist’s office.

Steve Kamb:

Yeah, don’t worry, it’s the good one. Which was interesting. And it was in my scalp, so they did have to scoop it out and then they had to sew my head shut and keep an eye on that wound for a few months I think. So that was step one, step two, like you Brett, we can both relate to this thanks to things like ChatGPT and the way that Google changes us. Content creators and writers kind of ran into, I guess steer to ship into an iceberg unbeknownst to us, which was people don’t click through to websites anymore. And I watched as Nerd Fitness my company, over a handful of months and years, we lost a good 80% of our traffic, not because we did anything differently, but because of just the way that society interacts with websites and large language models hoovering up all of our content and spitting out answers. So that was super fun to try to navigate.

Brett McKay:

We had that same thing happen to us. So yeah, we can commiserate.

Steve Kamb:

And then I went through an amicable but heartbreaking and life-changing divorce and all of a sudden I’m writing this book about how to navigate a chaotic life and how to pick yourself up and how to try again differently, how to try with compassion, how to try with different strategies that will actually help. And then I went through the most tumultuous years of my life and the book evolved. I had to go back to my publisher and say, Hey, kind of going through something, going to need a little bit more time, but I think it’s going to make for a better book that’s going to help more people in different ways. And fortunately, they were very supportive of this, and the book ended up becoming the book that I needed to read myself. So it started as a, Hey, we’re really good at this. We have a team. We have a system and strategies that help real regular busy people navigate chaotic lives. And then it became a much bigger idea and a lot more kind of philosophical about, hey, life is not going to go the way that you expect. Here’s how we can navigate that together.

Brett McKay:

Okay, so let’s talk about how to deal with failure. When you don’t reach a goal or when your life just goes off kilter, it feels bad because it’s a failure. We feel like a failure. But you highlight that this idea of thinking of ourselves as being a failure is relatively new. Walk us through how the meaning of failure has changed over time and how that history can change the way we look at failure.

Steve Kamb:

So very early on in the book, I have a whole chapter dedicated to failure. I thought, Hey, most people are going to pick up a book called How to Try Again after something has gone wrong or they’re not succeeding in the way they want to. And like you said, we feel bad. Failure hurts. And I’m not going to say like, oh, failure is always a blessing in disguise. Sometimes failure just sucks. And when we feel and when we have these experiences where we have failed, we decide that we and our identity, we are now failures. The good news, that’s not actually true. We are humans who failed at something. And I did some research into failure. I spoke to a professor of failure from Stevens University, her name is Dr. Theresa McPhail, which is just the perfect, perfect last name. She literally teaches a class on failure.

And then I took a trip to the Museum of Failure and I studied the origins of the definition of the word failure and something that really jumped out at me through my research way back in the 1820s, I think Noah Webster, Webster’s Dictionary, Noah defined failure as a breaking or becoming insolvent. It was something that happened 30 years later after Webster had passed away, but his dictionary endured. The new definition of failure became something like it’s a weakness in a man’s character. And all of a sudden failure went from something that happened to us to something that we were, and I posit and think we would be much better off if we returned to that original definition or that definition that Webster had in his 1820s dictionary. That failure is something that happens. It’s not the end of the world. It sucks, especially when you’re going through it.

And in those moments, and I’m not going to say like I said, oh, something great will come from this maybe, but at the same time it’s something that happened. There is a lesson that we can learn from it, and we are not failures. We are humans who failed at something. Once we can get wrapper heads around that, then we can start to kind of pick through the rubble and say, alright, that happened. Give yourself a hug and be like, I’m part of the most common club on the planet and humanity. What do we do next?

Brett McKay:

Yeah, because when you identify yourself as a failure, it just makes you feel incapacitated. You feel like why even try? But if you think, well, okay, this thing happened to me, but it’s not the entirety of who I am, then you feel like, okay, okay, there’s something I can do to fix it. You mentioned you visited the Museum of Failure. What did you learn about failure from that visit?

Steve Kamb:

Well, two things. One, it’s a traveling museum by Dr. Samuel West. And I flew up to New York City and then was supposed to go to the museum with a friend, but he bailed. So we actually failed to make it to the Museum of Failure on time. We had to go the next day. So I walked into this museum and it’s full of the best and the most interesting failures and frauds and flops in history. And what surprised me was how many of the world’s most successful companies were well represented there. I mean, Microsoft, Apple, Nintendo, those were all there in addition to some failures that maybe were understandable like Hooters Airline or other inventions that were the hula chair. Okay, maybe this idea wasn’t fully baked. But the thing that really jumped out at me is the final exhibit. As you’re walking out of the Museum of Failure, there is this kaleidoscope of Post-it notes on the wall and they encourage you to write down your failures and place it up on the wall alongside everybody else’s.

And for somebody that is struggling with something, we often, maybe you’re the head of a household and you keep your failure down because you want to come across as the strong. You’re the strong foundation of your family or your business or whatever. There’s a lot of shame and guilt that we feel when we’re failures and we cram it down. And I think we’d be much better off like this wall here when write down your failures and add it to the wall and you see, oh, failed businesses or failed marriages or something deeply personal to somebody that they wrote in that wall, it makes you realize that you’re not actually that unique. And I mean that in the best way possible. Somebody has failed in the way that you have failed that before. You’re not that unique. And also failure makes you part of this never ending list of people who have failed, which has gone back since the beginning of time.

Since humans have had the opportunity to fail, we have failed. So when we add our failure to that wall or we talk about it with others, it kind of removes some of the power it has over us. It took me months, maybe over a year, I think it was at least maybe 18 months before I finally shared my personal struggles with my audience and the support I got in return was mind blowing. And that’s what gave me the confidence to tell my story on page two of my book, it took me 14 drafts I think before I finally added my story to my book because I wanted other people to feel okay sharing their failures and not beating themselves up because something didn’t go the way they expected it to.

Brett McKay:

Okay, so everyone fails. Even the big dogs fail with billions of dollars of funding. They can have big giant flops, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, what was it, Pepsi? Clear, big flop that didn’t work out. So if they can fail New Coke. Yeah, New Coke…

Steve Kamb:

Crystal Pepsi.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, crystal Pepsi. Yeah. Or the Arch Deluxe. Remember the Arch Deluxe?

Steve Kamb:

I think that was in there too. Yep.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. And then the other thing too, it teaches you that with anything you decide to do, failure could be an option and just accept that and as soon as you do things get a little more copacetic. And then the other thing you talk about in reframing failure, I think another reason why people don’t like to fail, and you talk about this in the book, is when you fail, you think, well now I’m going back to square one. You argue like, no, that’s not the case. If you fail at something, you don’t automatically have to start from scratch.

Steve Kamb:

Yeah. The good news is square one doesn’t actually exist. So here’s an example. Let’s say a year ago you signed up to go to the gym and you went to the gym for two weeks and then life happened and you fell off the wagon and every month you’ve been paying your monthly gym membership and you feel like a failure and you’re like, oh gosh, I have to go all the way back to square one the next time I walk into this gym. That feels really daunting. The good news is that you’ve already accomplished so many of the steps between you and exercise. It’s not just I’m at the gym, but rather you already had to find the gym, you had to sign up for the gym, you had to figure out where to park, you had to figure out how the equipment worked, you had to figure out how to navigate the locker room.

You had to figure out which workout you were going to do. So although you might be starting over with regards to how much weight you can lift or how fast you can run, you’ve already taken care of the first 90% of those steps. So when you start over, you get to bring the knowledge of every one of those past failures with you. You get to stand on those shoulders and we actually get to be thankful for the fact that we failed in certain ways in the past. We can learn from all of that and bring it with us for our next attempt. It might allow us to succeed a little bit further or maybe have a dramatic success because we’ve already done so much of the hard work and learned some really tough lessons on what doesn’t work for us in the past.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. Reminds me of a line from a song from my favorite band and everyone knows what I’m about to say because everyone knows what my favorite band is. It’s The Killers. So they got this song called Lightning Fields from their 2020 album, Imploding the Mirage, it’s their best album, my favorite album. And there’s this line that goes, don’t beat yourself up. You’ve laid good ground. I think that captures that idea perfectly.

Steve Kamb:

I love that. I love The Killers too.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, Killers are great. Alright, so let’s talk about this framework you developed that you’ve used with Nerd Fitness clients to handle setbacks and that you used and dealing with your own setbacks. It’s an acronym. It’s packed, PACT, and it stands for pause, accept, change, try. So let’s talk about pause first. Whenever we’re facing a hurdle or a setback, our first inclination is often to do more like, okay, I got to do something to get over this thing, but how can doing more actually make things worse for us?

Steve Kamb:

Y’all know the saying, if at first you don’t succeed, try again maybe. But if you’re trying to succeed at something, that’s the wrong thing. And how are you defining success? If you try again in the same way, you’ll probably just fail again in the same way. So the first step, I think so many of us kind of get on this loop or just keep running around this wheel of, all right, I failed at couch to 5K or going to the gym or journaling each morning, all right, I failed. I’ll try again next month. And then you just do the same thing again except now you are beating yourself up even more because you couldn’t follow through with it. You’re going to end up in the same spot. So the first step I want people to take on this journey is pause. We think when we’re not making progress, we’re falling further behind and that’s bad.

And we humans, we love progress. The problem is the opposite of progress is not stagnation, it’s not staying where we are. The opposite of progress is regress, it’s making things worse. So when we think about things from this perspective, having a pause and saying, wait a second, am I actually doing the right thing? Am I heading down the right path? Am I progressing or am I trying to progress in the way that I’m actually interested in progressing? The good news is there are so many different ways to change, and if you keep trying to do the one that you don’t like, you’re just kind of spinning your wheels, you’re swimming in the wrong direction, you are using so much energy to do something along the wrong path when the next step is actually, instead of just putting your head down and going further or faster in the same direction, it’s pausing, taking a breath, looking at your surroundings and saying, is this working for me? I think a lot of us kind of skip that step.

Brett McKay:

You actually use a story of this guy named Brett Archibald who literally swam in the wrong direction and it made things worse for him. Tell us about this guy.

Steve Kamb:

Yeah, this is one of the craziest stories I’ve ever stumbled across. So I fell in love with this idea of treading water being actually heroic. And again, when the alternatives are drowning or swimming in the wrong direction, treading water is actually a pretty darn good option. Second only to swimming in the right direction. So this story is about this guy. His name’s Brett on a 50th birthday celebration with all of his friends and they are on a boat sailing through the some straits, I think in the Philippines. And he got some food poisoning from eating a bad calzone the day before. So it’s two in the morning. He’s on this boat where they’re getting ready to head out to a specific island, and he’s got so much food poisoning that he runs up to the deck to throw up over the side of the boat.

And the boat was so rough that he literally falls over the side of the boat, falls, I think it’s 15, maybe 20 feet into the water, and it’s two in the morning so nobody sees him and he pops his head up and he tries to yell, but there’s nobody awake. There’s the captain who’s busy driving the boat and everybody else is asleep. So Brett does what anybody thinks they should do in this moment. He’s like, all right, well, I guess I’m going to start swimming. So he starts swimming, pole kick, breathe, pole kick, breathe, and he does this for a handful of hours until the sun comes up and he can finally take a look at his surroundings and he realizes that there’s still nothing in any direction and he takes stock of what’s on him, and he reaches in his pocket and he pulls out the little cardboard key card holder from his hotel stay the night before.

He rips off a tiny corner and he drops it on the top of the water and notices as the current sends it in the exact opposite direction. He was swimming, unbeknownst to Brett, he had been swimming against the current for hours, wasting energy, trying to make things better when the reality was he was actually making things worse. So as soon as he does this, he realizes like, okay, this is not what I need to be doing. I don’t know when I’m going to be rescued if at all. My only plan I have right now is to do the bare minimum and tread water long enough, not because I believe I’ll be rescued, but rather I’m going to tread long enough to keep going. And every hour of treading water reminds me that, Hey, I’ve already done it for this long. I can probably do it for another one. And I don’t want to spoil a story. The good news is he does eventually get rescued, but that story of him trying so hard to do one thing and realizing that he was actually making a lot of things worse has stuck with me ever since.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I mean even in wilderness survival, if you get lost in the woods, the thing they tell you is just stop and stay where you’re at because our natural inclination, I got to get out of here, I got to find my, you’re just going to get more lost that way. And I think it’s applicable to when our goals go sideways because let’s say it’s a fitness goal and it doesn’t shake out well, we think, well, I’m just going to try harder on this thing that I was doing. Instead, what would be helpful is just like pause, stop. Is this the thing I should actually be doing? Is there something else I could be doing? Maybe I hire a coach to get their input. But that pause is what allows you to make those decisions.

Steve Kamb:

Not only that, but I think if we don’t pause, there is some part of us that think there is comfort in just continuing to do the thing that we have been doing, even though we know it’s not working for us. Oh, we sign up for a dating app and we swiped right a hundred times and it didn’t work. It is trying to date with your same cheesy pickup lines. If it’s not working, that’s probably not a good strategy. Maybe having a friend look at your profile and work through like, Hey, what is working and not working here? Same thing with maybe you’re applying for a new job, just firing a hundred more resumes into the void of LinkedIn or whatever. If it’s not working before, it’s probably not going to work this time. You need to pause and take a look at the picture and say, I need to do something different, which is so hard because then we have to admit to ourselves that what we’ve been doing isn’t working.

And we spent all of that time on that when we could have been doing something else. But there’s this great quote from CS Lewis who says something like, once you realize you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing it about face and walking back towards where you came so that you can get on the right road. He says, the next correct step is backwards. I think there’s a step in between there, which is pausing, stop moving forward and turning around and accessing your situation so that you can have the bandwidth and the clarity to say, oh, what I’m doing isn’t working. I know I don’t go back to square one because I get to carry all of these past experiences with me. Cool. I can now adjust my path and try something different, and I might be able to get there slightly faster because of all the changes and challenges I went through in the past.

Brett McKay:

And you also talk about the pause can come in handy if life just throws you a curve ball. Let’s say a loved one gets sick or there’s a death in the family and it just requires you to spend time in that area of your life. Our natural inclination is like, well, I’m going to take care of my family, my sick loved one, and I’m going to keep doing all this stuff and more and more stuff when the better approach because that’s just going to burn you out. The better approach would just be pause and just tell yourself, I’m just going to tread water here for the next couple months, maybe year, and I’m going to take the foot off the gas so I can focus on this one thing. And then you tell yourself like, okay, I’m not going to be making progress I want, but I’ve got all this experience in the past and I can take that with me when I can pick things back up again. But for now, I just got to tread water.

Steve Kamb:

Like I said, treading water can be heroic. I mean, I’m a guy that owns a health and fitness company and I spent the last six years treading water with my own fitness and it was so needed. I’m trying to write this book. I’m navigating a business that is reinventing itself. My personal life has irrevocably changed. All of these things are happening at the same time, I didn’t also need to add onto this, Hey, you’re not doing your prescribed workout. You’re not doing all of the things. I think we have a tendency to beat ourselves up when we can’t juggle all of the chainsaws that we’re trying to juggle and we just keep thinking like, God, if I just had it together a little more, or if I was just more disciplined. And the reality is it’s not a motivation problem, it’s a resources problem. We’re asking so much of ourselves and sometimes strategically half-assing your goals or strategically your workout is like an amazing place to be when the alternative is to give up and drown or again, bring out energy swimming in the wrong direction.

For me it was, I’m going to go to the gym and do one exercise and while I’m traveling, I’m going to have one healthy meal a day. I wasn’t trying to win, I was just trying to not lose. And I knew if I could do that today, it gave me a chance to get to tomorrow. And if I could get to tomorrow, I don’t know how long I’m going to need to tread water, but I can do it for a really, really long time. And for me, only recently after finishing this book and finally having a little bit of a gap in my schedule, did I rejoin a commercial gym? Actually working now with a Matt from Nerd Fitness who is now coaching me to work on my fitness. And the great news is I’m not going, I don’t have to go all the way back to a start. I’m not having to start from zero, even though we know there’s no square one, I have been doing a bare minimum for long enough that I can get right into that gym and get on track moving forward with some progress pretty quickly. And that’s due to the fact that I was able to tread water for a long time.

Brett McKay:

Alright. Let’s talk about A for accept. Instead of accepting problems, you argue that we typically avoid them. What does avoidance often look like?

Steve Kamb:

I think when I see and deal with avoidance personally and when we see it with coaching clients and community members at Nerd Fitness, we do one of two things. One is we kick the can down the road and we love the word until or we kind of drown it out and let’s talk about that first one. So I’ll share an example. There is this amazing podcast called Chasing Scratch, and it’s about these two guys named Mike and Eli who are college buddies trying to get to scratch golf, which is shooting even par or better on average, which is a really challenging goal. And I’ve known them for years. They’ve been working with Matt from Nerd Fitness and Mike kept coming to Matt and saying, oh, I’m so sorry I couldn’t get to my workout today. My kid got sick or I couldn’t make it because this work meeting went long, but next week things should get back to normal and the next week something else would happen.

And he kept saying, but then I’ll get back to normal. And Matt finally had a conversation with Mike and said, Mike, I’m worried there is this normal that you think is just around the corner. That normal’s not coming back. In Mike’s mind, normal was predictable, normal was routine, and Mike’s normal was anything. But the podcast had become an unexpected success. His co-host Eli ended up having to have a hip surgery. His kid was growing up, he was taking on extra work so that he could focus on the podcast and leave his corporate job. So there was nothing normal about his life. Normal had left the building. And once he accepted this of like, Hey, I keep trying to expect something is going to be different in the future, I’m avoiding my actual reality today in all of its messiness. And the sooner I accept the fact that I can’t do it all, that my life is messy, only then could they finally start to do something about it.

Instead of a structured workout plan three days per week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, it was, Mike, what do we have time for today? Great, let’s do that first thing in the morning before your kid wakes up. It might be 15 minutes. Cool, those 15 minutes are better than the perfect workout routine that Mike was hoping to be able to do next week. So I think a lot of us avoid the reality of our current situation because this reality is kind of scary. The fact that we can’t do it all or that there is some aspect of our life that isn’t going the way that we want it to, it’s really easy to just kind of cram that down and not deal with it. And the sooner we can accept that this is actually what’s happening, this is the situation I find myself in, these are the struggles and pain points, the sooner I can have that uncomfortable conversation with my spouse or my boss about how I’m struggling, the sooner we can have those things, then we can finally start to make smarter decisions about what we’re actually going to prioritize, where we need boundaries, how to navigate whatever that next step might look like for us.

Brett McKay:

And I think the way you described acceptance there, it’s not resignation because I think a lot of guys in the here acceptance, it means, well, I just got to resign myself to this situation. There’s nothing I can do. It’s like, no, what acceptance is just looking at the bare bones reality facts. And once you see how crappy things are, then you can start doing something about it. It’s like Apollo 13, they had to accept the fact we’re in this little tin can thousands of miles from earth with these limited supplies, and we got to make a filter out of it, and they had to accept that fact and then work with those constraints.

Steve Kamb:

We’re not doing ourselves any favor when we think or feel badly that life is anything other than what it is right now. And all dog eating too much grass and throwing up in the carpet, kid getting sick, navigating fertility issues, whatever it may be, these are things that are so real and honest. And the sooner we can look at those with clear eyes, the more likely we can then say like, Hey, we’re trying, but also this is our reality. What can we do about it?

Brett McKay:

And even when people accept there are problems in their life, they sometimes just kind of do it passively instead of as a step toward action. They’re just thinking, I’m just going to hope for the best. Things will just turn out better, just magically. Well, maybe that might happen, but probably not.

Steve Kamb:

Yeah, there’s some researcher, I think her name is Dr. Keta Weingarten, who refers to this as unreasonable hope. And it’s just this concept that, oh, things should get better because I want them to get better. They should, and I’ll just wait for them to get better. And that’s not how this works. They might not get better or they might require very specific action for things to get better. So the sooner we can accept and look at the absurdity of our life and say, yep, this is happening and it’s not cool, and I’m really unhappy about this and here’s what I can do about it.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. Alright, so that’s accept. Let’s move to change. So we’ve paused, taken a break from what we’re doing to assess things. We’ve accepted our situation, now we got to figure out, okay, what can we change to prevent the failure in the future or to overcome it? How do you figure out what you need to change when trying to overcome a setback?

Steve Kamb:

I think that the step one is to picture your favorite literary detective. It could be Sherlock Holmes, Nancy Drew. For me growing up, it was Encyclopedia Brown. Oh man.

Brett McKay:

Encyclopedia Brown. Yeah. Yeah.

Steve Kamb:

He would solve mysteries in his neighborhood for I think it was like 25 cents, 25 cents a case. And then he would come home from school or on summer break and sit down at the dinner table and his dad, who was the chief police of Ida, would then spill his guts about whatever case he couldn’t solve. And by the end of dinner or later on, Encyclopedia Brown, this young kid would have solved it. So I dunno what that says about the dad that he couldn’t handle this and was just telling all of the details to his son. But I think there’s something interesting and fun about looking at life and looking at our past attempts like a curious detective, and you can picture the board game clue as well, like, oh, that’s really interesting. Oh, you think you’re a failure because you couldn’t stick with your workout.

It’s like, oh, that’s really interesting. I missed my workout this morning. Not because I’m a failure, but because I was up super late last night scrolling on my phone because I just felt like I had to disassociate from a really stressful day. Okay, why was the day stressful? Oh, I actually don’t like my job and I had to go pick up my kid from school. There was behavioral issues and then I had to forgot to take the food out of the freezer in time to defrost it, so then I couldn’t cook dinner, whatever it may be. So many times, as I said earlier, what we think is a motivation problem is often a resources problem. So if we can look with curiosity and not judgment, imagine we are detectives and we see the chalk outline of our past attempts to try to make a specific change. We can look at that and say like, oh, okay. Turns out it was for these specific reasons, actually two steps removed from I’m not motivated. It’s actually so much deeper than that. Once we can finally start to put those pieces in place and solve that crime, we can then decide, okay, now that we’ve paused and accepted our reality and we know why we failed in the past, we can change something this time and do something differently.

Brett McKay:

And when you do make a change, it doesn’t have to be a wholesale change of the whole entire thing. It could just be one small variable.

Steve Kamb:

Yeah, there’s that great quote from Charlie Munger. It’s show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome. I think when we’re deciding what to change, we can think about this scientists, we’ve been running experiments with our clients for, I’d say we’ve been doing this program for eight years now, nine years. And it’s been really liberating for our clients to be able to say, Hey, I know this is not how you’ve done things in the past, but you came to us because you want things to be different. And if you want different outcomes you need, we need to try something differently. Let’s try this as an experiment. And when you look at things this way, it adds some lightness to it. It removes this pressure of, gosh, I have to do this for the rest of my life. What if it doesn’t work? Whatever. We can look at it like curious scientists, we take all of the data that we learned from our detective work and say, interesting.

Okay, I have a hypothesis that if I were to follow this new workout program or try join this hiking club, I will be more interested in exercise by the end of it. Or I’ve been trying toxic dieting, I’ve been trying to cut out carbs for the past decade off and on, and it turns out I love carbs. Maybe there is a different experiment I can conduct where I still get to eat carbs and try to have success in a different way. So as we call it, the zoom in, zoom out method. So you zoom out and set the experiment and then you zoom in and just focus on conducting the experiment. You don’t worry about the end goal, you don’t worry about whether or not it’s giving you the results you want. We are simply conducting the experiment and at the end of those 30 days or six weeks, we can then zoom out and say, one, did we get the result that we expected?

It might be what we expected or not, but neither one is good or bad. It’s an experiment. And then we can decide, did we enjoy the experiment? Would we like to keep doing it or do we need to make a change or adjust a variable and create a different experiment and make that change and kind of rerun that process. But when we think about things in this experimental mindset, it removes so much of the judgment that we put on the plate and the expectations we kind of put in our shoulders to suddenly have it all figured out.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I’ve done that in my own life with my own training. One experiment I ran and I still continue today, I wanted to get more steps in because I sit down a lot for my work. And so I decided when I wake up early, I started waking up early in my forties, like five o’clock. Not on purpose, it just happened. I decided, you know what? I’m just going to take a walk around the block during that time, and I think you and I, we’ve actually had a phone call on one of my early morning walks and it started out as an experiment and I was like, I’ll just do this for a month and see how it goes. And turns out I really like it and I’ve been doing it now for years. Every morning, go for a walk at 5:30, 6 o’clock in the morning and it worked.

But there’s other things I’ve tried. I’m like, I’m not going to do that anymore. Didn’t work out for me. So yeah, I like that idea. Just any change you make, you don’t have to make a full hearted commitment. Just approach it like an experiment and see how it goes for a few weeks. And if it works, great, if it doesn’t, no harm, no foul in getting rid of it. Let’s talk about the T for try. So you’ve come up with something that you want to change in your life that you want to make an improvement on, but a lot of people still don’t actually try the thing they came up with. What’s holding people back from trying things?

Steve Kamb:

I think first of all, you’re in good company. If you’re like, I need the perfect plan. I should do some more research. I got to do more research to make sure I have the perfect plan or the most optimized diet that I have to follow, and I just need to keep working on this. I tell a few fun stories in the book. One is about George Lucas and him trying to write the screenplay for Star Wars and just how terrible early drafts of it were. And I think it was Francis Ford Coppola got a chance to read an early draft and said, I think the term he used was, this is gobbledygook. I don’t know what this is and it’s a disaster. But he needed to get something down on the page. And then I also tell the story of Winston Churchill. We know him as the Prime Minister and as a war correspondent back in the earlier days, and then as a soldier in World War I, I believe, and in between World War I and World War II, he decides he wants to become a painter.

And he tells this funny story about how he was terrified of where to put his first brushstroke on his canvas. He called it the towering canvas. And he was afraid with a silent veto because what if he put it in the wrong spot? Fortunately, his wife invited over a neighbor who was a painter, and she just walked up to him and said, give me the big brush. And she just grabbed it and just started throwing paint up on the canvas. And this is when Churchill realized like, oh, the canvas couldn’t hit back, it couldn’t fight back, and suddenly the spell had been broken. Oh, I can just do this imperfectly, and that’s okay. The term that I thought up was start ugly. I’m like, oh, this idea of starting ugly gives you permission to get out of your own way and just get started. And then I stumbled across a book called Start Ugly by David. I believe that’s his name. But we’re so afraid often that we’re going to do it incorrectly, that we never start at all. And I think we need to instead give ourselves permission or rather challenge ourselves to start incorrectly and to do things imperfectly and to start ugly because only then can we finally get good at it.

Brett McKay:

So that idea that things have to be perfect, that holds it back a lot of people, but just kind of like, you know what? The first one’s going to suck. Richard Grier, he’s one of the CEOs at Huckberry, he’s got this saying, you always throw out the first pancake whenever you’re making pancakes. It’s like the first one’s always the worst. You always throw it out. So yeah, just do something and accept that it’s probably going to be bad. And then with time as you do it more and more, you’re going to get better and better and better at it.

Steve Kamb:

Yeah, well, not just that, but there is a specific way that you can get better. And I think about this from a ready, fire, aim sequence of things. And in the book I talk about standup comedians specifically and what we see on stage or what we see on Netflix, what we see at a comedy special, we see the finished product and we think like, oh, that was really funny. What we don’t realize is the hundreds of sets that that comedian has performed slowly tinkering with that specific joke, that pause, that funny aside that they just thought up. All of that has been tested like scientists in a laboratory on Tuesday nights and small clubs around the world. The way I think of this as comedians don’t tell jokes because they’re funny, they tell a joke until it becomes funny. And writers don’t write when they have an idea. Professional writers write until they find a good idea. So much of this is, I am going to try this thing and start ugly, and then based on the feedback that the world is giving me or the audience is giving me, or my readers are giving me and how I’m feeling about this, I can make this project slightly better over time and create this pretty amazing thing at the end. But it’s going to come with a bunch of tiny adjustments along the way based on feedback that we’re getting throughout the process.

Brett McKay:

And another thing you talk about that holds people back from trying the thing that they’ve decided they’re going to do to initiate some change in their life, they might think, well, this isn’t how you’re supposed to do it, or This isn’t the most optimized way to do it, and it’s not what the guru says I should be doing. And you say, that doesn’t matter. Just do what works for you. And if it seems kind of silly or okay. And then also it’s okay to not try things that everyone’s saying you should do because you’re just like, you know what? I don’t like doing that. I’m not going to do that. So when it comes to fitness, if someone says, man, bro, you got to do CrossFit. That’s the best thing. Well, if you don’t like that, don’t do CrossFit. It’s better for you to be physically active doing something you enjoy. You’re more likely to stick with doing that thing.

Steve Kamb:

And nothing makes my heart hurt more than seeing somebody that is like, okay, I’m finally working up the courage to exercise. And they go to a bootcamp class with their super fit friends, and this class is full of really fit people and the instructor is yelling motivational platitudes, and this person finishes that class and thinks, gosh, if that’s what it takes to get healthy, man, I’m out. I do not want to do that. This is not for me. The reality is there are so many different ways to get healthy. There are so many different paths to success. The best workout is the one that you actually do the best diet is the one that you can actually follow most of the time. In the book I talk about, Neil Stevenson is the author of Snow Crash and a bunch of other unbelievable science fiction books.

And he talks about how he’s a terrible correspondent because he needs four hours of uninterrupted time to write his books. And if he had two hour blocks, it is not nearly the same as one four hour uninterrupted block. Somebody might read that and think, gosh, I don’t have, there’s no way. I have a young kid, I work from home. I’m in calls. There’s no way I could ever write or succeed the way that he is, therefore I’m just never going to be a writer. But then you hear about Agatha Christie who wrote 60 plus detective novels and has sold billions of literally over a billion copies of her books and short stories. And she tells a story in her autobiography about how her friends never knew when she wrote because she would just steal away for bits and spurts like a dog with a bone, I think she said.

And she would write for 20 minutes here or there. She didn’t have a dedicated writing room, and that’s how she wrote her books. So both of those paths worked, but they worked for the right person because they found what worked for them. And I think that’s the step that a lot of us miss. We see the celebrity, we see the Instagram influencer telling us about the perfect morning protocol, and we forget to ask the question one, do I want that two, does this fit into my reality and what am I not accepting about my current situation? And once I do those things, then you can finally decide like, Hey, this is the path that I want to try and the things I want to do for myself.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I think those influencers can be helpful if you just approach them as like a buffet. It’s like, well, that thing looks interesting. I’m going to try that. And you don’t have to do it exactly the way they do it, but you try it out and see if it works for you. But yeah, if you just decide, I got to do exactly what this person does, that’s not going to work out. Alright, so that’s packed. So pause, accept, change, try. Let’s talk about some of the things that get in the way. So if we do experience failure, some of the mental roadblocks that prevent us from getting back in the saddle and makes things harder for herself, and one of these things is the doom loop. What’s the doom loop and how does that get in the way of us trying? Again,

Steve Kamb:

The doom loop is the most common pitfall I see people falling into when they’re, they’re trying to make some sort of behavior change. It generally starts with step one is feeling less than step two is identifying, we see something on Instagram, we see, we read an inspiring biography, we watch a documentary or whatever, and we then get irrationally excited and think this is the thing that is going to solve all of my problems, and then I will finally feel enough. And then we go all in on that thing. Everybody does it on January 1st, new year, new me, I’m all in. I’m changing everything about myself, let alone set aside the fact that we’ve never been able to, as the Twitter quote, it was something like, all of my future plans require me to display a level of discipline I’ve never once exhibited in my entire life.

The challenge here is when we go all in on something, the reality is like all or nothing generally is all then nothing. You go all in, life happens and then you say, oh, that didn’t work. Okay, I have to stop because life is too busy right now. I will try again a year from now. So we go back around the loop back to the beginning where we are again, not enough, except we now heap on some more failure and struggle and guilt because we couldn’t follow through with it until we find that next thing again. That gets us irrationally excited. Maybe this will be the thing. And we either go around that loop or we just kind of give up and say like, oh, change is not for me.

Brett McKay:

So how do you escape that doom loop?

Steve Kamb:

There’s a few tactics. I think one step one is when it comes to feeling not enough, we’ve all tried tough love repeatedly. I think we have enough of that in our lives, and I spent a lot of this book and a lot of the years writing this book, diving really deeply into self-compassion. Specifically Kristen Neff’s work on self-compassion and realizing a tough love you think is what kind of got you here. That’s probably not the case. And beating yourself up is not a great strategy for getting yourself out of this loop. Let’s try self-compassion instead. And that means allowing ourselves to have the thoughts that we have and not beating ourselves because we have them. Our thoughts are thinking themselves. It’s not generally not under our control, which thoughts pop in, but we can start to put some distance between us and those thoughts. We can notice a name, those thoughts or those patterns as they’re starting to happen.

We can give a name to that voice in our heads. For those of us like myself that feel like they have that inner monologue. When you add some distance, maybe some humor to that voice and realize that you are not your thoughts, it kind of gives you some of that ability to move back through that pact loop again, which is pause maybe, is this thought helping me? Is it true? What am I not accepting about? The situation? Change would be, Hey, do I want to turn up the volume on this thought or turn the volume down on the thought? And then to try based on what is happening in these loops and these thoughts, what would I like to try to do differently moving forward? So there is, like I said, you’re going to put some distance between you and those thoughts we’re going to practice.

And then before we even get on the loop again, I like to think of that scene from the fellowship of the ring where they’re at the prancing pony and Aragorn is talking to Frodo and Aragorn says, are you frightened? And he’s asking Frodo about the ring wraiths that are chasing after them. And Frodo says, yeah, I’m frightened. And Aragorn says, not nearly enough. I know what hunts you. And I think about that line a lot. When people join our coaching program, we ask them right up front like, what are you worried about? And more often than not, they’re saying, Hey, I have a hunch that a few weeks from now when the motivation wears off, I’m going to fall back into this doom loop. I’m going to fall back into all or nothing thinking I’m going to retreat to old patterns. And when we can identify those things upfront, it might make us change the expectation we have.

It might change the type of exercise we’re interested in trying. It might change how many changes we’re willing to make, and we can start to accept and predict, Hey, we’re at that moment. We’re three weeks in. I know that voice in your head is telling you to stick your head in the sand and ghost. What if we tried something differently? What if we did the bare minimum today and we counted that as a win? What if we shifted into tread water, whatever it may be, we are just essentially looking for tiny tactics to have a better relationship and conversation with that voice in our heads or that little person that sits on our shoulder that tells us to give up or to quit or to stop doing what we’re doing.

Brett McKay:

I want to talk about in this talking about my favorite chapter in the book, and it was how to keep doing the thing. And what you do is you provide all these tried and true tactics to successfully keep plotting along with whatever thing you’re doing. So you decide to make this change in your life. How do you keep with it so you don’t … the saddle as frequently? What are some of your favorite ones? There’s like eight of them. What are some of your favorite ones from those? How to keep doing the thing? Tactics?

Steve Kamb:

Yeah, so this chapter is built around Albert Bandura’s research into self-efficacy, which is essentially just belief in yourself that you’re able to make change and do things differently. Yeah, I think it’s eight might be 10 tactics in there. There are a few that I love more than others. I think the one that honestly has changed my life more than anything is being willing to half-ass the thing. I don’t know what the thing is that you’ve picked. It might be training or trying to write your first novel or read a large novel, whatever it may be. And I think being willing to strategically half-ass, that thing is one of the greatest, most important life skills you can develop. And it can be done with a simple question change. Instead of asking, do I have time for my workout today? It’s reframing it as what workout do I have time for?

And that might be five minutes in the morning before you pick up your newborn from his or her crib. It might be going for a walk after work with your spouse and saying, that was my workout for today. I checked the box that was good enough and accepting that, yeah, it might not be the full blown, I did the full workout. I went to the gym for an hour and a half. But man, it is so much better to strategically be able to say, Hey, I did what I was capable of doing today. And that’s a huge win. The other one, this one is going to sound so simple, and yet it’s one of the best predictors we’ve seen or I’ve seen over 17 years of writing for nerd fitness, and I think I call it the shower theory or the shower principle. Let’s say you wake up in the morning and normally every day after your morning walk, Brett, you take a shower and you get ready to go to work, but this morning you woke up late because the alarm didn’t go off and your kid threw up in the middle of the night, so you have to navigate that.

Now the dog’s eating the throw up and all of a sudden your morning is just completely blown out and you splash some water on your face and you drag. You bring the kid to the doctor and based on that, you failed at taking your morning shower. Do you have to start downloading shower podcasts? Do you need to start studying the shower habits of celebrities? Do you need to write in your shower journal about how you failed? Are you going to try again showering next month? No, you just missed your shower this morning because of life. Cool. Just take your shower the next day and move on. When we find that people are willing to allow themselves to miss a day and then just do it the next day, that is one of the best predictors we’ve seen for success compared to people who miss that day of their workout or diet, and then they feel so badly that they stick their head in the sand or they go off the rails and then they don’t want to talk to their coach, or they beat themselves up so much that they then crave eating more of the thing that they’re beating themselves up for having eaten.

So much of this is essentially just negotiating with our own brains and saying, how do we do this thing slightly more often than not for a long enough time that we can see change and stick with it for a long enough period of time?

Brett McKay:

Those two are my favorites too. I use those all the time with my fitness in particular, if I’m having my day’s busy and I don’t have time for a full 45 minute workout, it’s like, what can I do to half-ass this thing and get in a 15 minute workout? And that usually means just like, I’m not going to do this accessory work and I’m just going to do one hard set of each of the main lifts, and then if I miss a day, say, I can’t even get a workout in. I remember early on in my fitness journey, if I missed a day, I was like, oh, geez, I’m a failure. Why am I even going to try? It’s like, ah, whatever. It’s okay. I’ll just get it in the next time. Nothing’s not much. Change is going to happen in a workout or even if you mess up on your nutrition, you just pick out on the weekend, you’re not going to gain any fat from a single day of bad eating. You’ll look heavier. You have a lot of water and glycogen. It’s not fat, so just like the next day it’s like, all right, I’ll just get back on the saddle. It’s going to be fine.

Steve Kamb:

Yeah, it’s never the one missed day. It’s always that missed day that turns into a week or a month of self-loathing and making more unhealthy choices that send you down the wrong path because you beat yourself up from missing that one day.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. But yeah, like you said, there’s a lot more in there. Some of them are just get a quick win is a good one. Make things fun, actually enjoy the thing you’re doing, make it necessary, and you go into detail on how to do that. My favorite chapter, I really love that a lot. I use a lot of those tactics in my own life. Well, Steve, this has been a great conversation. There’s a lot more we could talk about. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Steve Kamb:

Yeah, it’s super simple. The book is called How to Try Again, so you can go to howtotryagain.com, and then I’m on every platform, Steve Kamb, S-T-E-V-E-K-A-M-B, stevekamb.com for my newsletter. I’m on the various social platforms @SteveKamb, so pretty easy to find. I’m so proud of this book. It took a lot out of me and I lived a lifetime while writing it, so I hope you consider checking it out. It’s probably the thing I’m most proud of. It took a lot to get it across the finish line, but I’m really glad I did. 

Brett McKay:

Alright. Well, Steve Kamb, thanks so much for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Steve Kamb:

Thanks for the opportunity.

Brett McKay:

My guest today was Steve Kamb. He’s the author of the book How to Try Again. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but to put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Walking is one of the most powerful health tools we have. It improves cardiovascular fitness, boosts mood, sharpens cognition, and can even be a predictor of how well you’ll age. But all those benefits depend on something we rarely think about until it starts hurting: our feet.

For many of us, walking is so automatic that we never consider the mechanics that make it possible. Yet the way we move, the shoes we wear, and the strength of the muscles in our feet can have a profound impact on how comfortably and efficiently we walk. When something goes wrong at our physical foundation, the effects can ripple upward, leading to pain not just in the feet, but in the knees, hips, and back.

My guest today is Dr. Milica McDowell, a physical therapist and the co-author of the new book Walk. Today on the show, Milica explains why walking speed may be a hidden vital sign, what gives you your signature walking style, and how to spot and address injury-inducing inefficiencies in your gait. We then talk about feet: whether you should worry about pronation, how to rehab plantar fasciitis — and no, it’s not stretching — the best kind of shoes to wear, and much more.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM Article: Solvitur Ambulando — It Is Solved By Walking
• AoM podcast episode with Manoush Zomorodi
• AoM Article: I Started Taking a Walk Every Morning. Here’s What Happened to My Health
• AoM Article: 20 Rules for Walking
• AoM podcast episode with Matt Fitzgerald
• Altra shoes
• Vivobarefoot
• Lems shoes (this is the pair Brett wears)
• Tyr weightlifting shoe
• Injinji toe socks
• Toe spacer
• Study on calf raise standards

Connect With Milica McDowell

• Milica’s website
• Milica on IG

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Transcript 

Brett McKay:

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the AoM podcast. Walking is one of the most powerful health tools we have. It improves cardiovascular fitness, boosts mood, sharpens cognition, and can even be a predictor of how well you’ll age. But all those benefits depend on something we rarely think about until it starts hurting our feet. For many of us, walking is so automatic that we never consider the mechanics that make it possible, yet the way we move, the shoes we wear and the strength of the muscles in our feet can have a profound impact on how comfortably and efficiently we walk.

When something goes wrong at our physical foundation, the effects can ripple upward leading to pain, not just in the feet, but in the knees, hips, and back. My guest today is Dr. Milica McDowell, a physical therapist and the co-author of the new book Walk. Today on the show, Milica explains why walking speed may be a hidden vital sign, what gives you your signature walking style and how to spot and address injury-inducing inefficiencies in your gait. We then talk about feet, whether you should worry about pronation, how to rehab plantar fasciitis, and no, it’s not stretching the best kind of shoes to wear and much more. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at AoM.is/walk. All right, Milica McDowell, welcome to the show.

Dr. Milica McDowell:

Hi Brett, thanks for having me.

Brett McKay:

So you are a physical therapist and you’ve recently co-authored a book all about the benefits of walking. Why is a physical therapist so into walking?

Dr. Milica McDowell:

Well, it’s one of the things that we spend a lot of time in our careers helping people restore. When you’ve had an injury, a surgery, an unexpected accident, walking is one of the things that we push immediately. You have a baby, guess what we do? We take you for a walk right afterwards; you have a total knee replacement, some physical therapist is going to come popping into your hospital room and say, “Hey, let’s get you sorted out. Let’s take you for a walk.” So walking is really one of our fundamental movements that demonstrates balance. It demonstrates coordination, it demonstrates can you follow directions. And so it is really one of those things that is a vital sign for your human existence.

Brett McKay:

It’s something we take for granted until we have those moments in our lives where walking becomes painful and then you become painfully aware that, oh man, I got to think more about this. I can’t take this for granted anymore.

Dr. Milica McDowell:

Absolutely. I mean, you can not get up and make yourself a cup of coffee or use the washroom easily if walking is limited. And for me, that was an experience I had in high school. I had a sports injury that was misdiagnosed. I spent almost a year out of sports, six months not walking, and it was absolutely eye-opening as a 16-year-old who was hoping to play sports in college, that having a foot injury and not being able to walk just completely changed my entire paradigm.

Brett McKay:

So we’re going to talk about some of the things that prevent us from walking effectively, injuries, how to prevent those, how to rehab injuries. But before we do, let’s just talk about the benefits of walking. We had Manoush Zomorodi on the podcast a little while ago who talked about the benefits of walking even in short bouts. But let’s do a little refresher. Why is walking so good for both our bodies and our minds?

Dr. Milica McDowell:

If you don’t walk, it’s kind of similar to sleeping like trash or breathing poorly. So if you aren’t getting enough walking in your daily life, you aren’t accumulating that rhythmic movement. Your health from a physical side and a mental side can just absolutely go down the drain. And so we really want to emphasize and remind everybody that this is just at your fingertips. A little bit goes a long way. So when we think about the physiological health benefits, if you even go for a five minute walk, so we call that a micro walk, usually that’s about 500 steps for most individuals. We’re strengthening your bones, we’re contracting your muscles, we’re reducing your blood pressure. We can help with blood sugar. It helps with mood. And so as we think about our ability to take control of our health, walking is just so readily available. It’s at our fingertips at all times.

And then on the mental health side, when we think about the psychological and cognitive benefits of walking, as soon as you go for a walk, it boosts your cerebral blood flow. So you’re getting all sorts of healthy oxygen and hormones and temperature change to your brain that not only helps reduce your cortisol, it boosts your dopamine and serotonin. So it’s like kicking in those happy hormones that we’re all looking for, and it actually promotes something we call neurogenesis, which is activating neurological growth factor in your brain. So walking strengthens and improves the health of your brain. It improves the function as well.

Brett McKay:

Typically, when we think about walking for health, a lot of people focus on the number of steps we should get in a day. And I think people probably heard it by this time, it’s like it’s not 10,000 steps. That was a marketing thing by some pedometer company. A Japanese company said, oh yeah, you should get 10,000 steps. But it’s like if you get 7,000 to 8,000 steps, you’re probably good. But I thought it was interesting, you guys in this book talk about a walking metric that seems to tell us more about our overall health and robustness more than the number of steps we walk in a day and that’s walking speed. Tell us about this research. I thought that was really interesting.

Dr. Milica McDowell:

Yeah, so walking speed was identified more than 10 years ago as the sixth vital sign. And when we think about vital signs, if you go to the doctor today, they’re going to poke you, and they’re going to take your heart rate, they’re going to take your blood pressure, they’re going to look at your respiration rate, we might take your blood oxygen. So we have a series of vital signs that are predictive. They tell us if you’ve got an elevated heart rate and you’ve got elevated blood pressure as a healthcare provider, I need to dig deeper. And it was almost 15 years ago now actually that walking speed was characterized as another vital sign, meaning it has high predictability for problems down the road. The slower you walk, the higher your risk of dying. And it sounds dramatic, but it is one of those things that then when you start to connect the dots and think, okay, do I have a friend or family member or an elder or someone I know who, gosh, they do walk really slowly, why is that?

Are they afraid of falling? Do they have a balance issue? Are they starting to have a neurocognitive issue where it’s hard for them to coordinate the movement? Do they have musculoskeletal problem? Do they have a systemic disease? What the heck is going on? And so when we think of vital signs, this is one that should be held in high regard. And it is definitely something that when you go to a rehab pro, a PT, a chiropractor, some of the general practice physicians are kind of in on this secret. This is definitely something that we want to pay attention to.

Brett McKay:

Do we know what an optimal walking speed is?

Dr. Milica McDowell:

So we like to say that about a hundred steps a minute is pretty typical, and between 120 and 130 is what we consider to be brisk. So if you and I are in an airport and we are not late for a flight, we’re probably going to be walking around a hundred steps a minute. But if we’re like, oh, I think they’re boarding, let’s go, most people can kick it up to that 120 to 130. And a good way to test that is if you have access to a treadmill is hop on and just do a step count. So you’re counting each strike right, left, right, left, right, left. And you want to just sort of see what feels comfortable to you. Most normal sized adults, so if you’re not like six foot 10 or four foot 10, most of us that are kind of in that normal center of the bell curve are going to be walking at about three and a half to just under four miles per hour if we’re walking at that 120 to 130. So if you’ve ever walked on a treadmill at that pace, you’re kind of cooking a little bit.

Brett McKay:

Gotcha. Alright, so walking speed. I love that. So that’s the sixth vital metric that we should focus on. Correct. This was interesting. You had this whole section. I thought this was really a lot of fun about us having a signature walking style or signature walking pattern. I didn’t think about that, but it’s true. I think everyone has their own unique way of walking. I mean, one of the things that I can do with my family, if we’re at the airport for example, or out in a crowd, I can recognize people or recognize the people in my family by the way they walk. So how do we develop this signature walking style that we have?

Dr. Milica McDowell:

Well, it’s a culmination of our good habits and our bad habits. And so I love a good airport. I travel a ton for work, and I am an absolute creeper. I watch people walk, I judge anyone wearing a stiletto. If you’re wearing a stiletto in an airport, I’ve got my eyes on you and I’m just going to say it here and now. I know this audience is mostly guys, but maybe you can influence your gals in your life. Stilettos are the new smoking. They’re terrible for your health. They are absolutely something that you should not buy the women you love. Stilettos, please, and thank you. 

Brett McKay:

Who’s wearing Stilettos at the airport?

Dr. Milica McDowell:

Oh my gosh. The next time you’re there, you just take a look my friend and you will be as appalled as I am. Wow. Because what happens if you need to go 120 to 130 steps a minute because they’re boarding, you’re going to miss your flight girl. But at any rate, I love being in an airport. I love observing other humans as a physical therapist. That’s just a big part of my curiosity as a human. And so yes, people have signature walking patterns and they are a culmination of all the good things and all the bad things and all the old injuries and everything that kind of brings you to waking up this morning, all that accumulation of your life. Think about this. If I’m your boss and you come into my office and I give you a raise and I give you another 20% bonus, how are you going to walk out of my office head held high confident, probably brisk a little bit of a spring in your step.

Not quite Connor McGregor walking into the octagon, but you’re going to have a pep in your step. But if you come into my office and I say, look Brett, this isn’t going well. I’m really disappointed in your performance and you’re missing your KPIs, and I’ve got really significant concerns about your future at this company. When you walk out of my office, things are going to look very different. Your posture will look different, your speed might look different, pace is going to be different. And so walking tells us a lot about what happened to you in the past and it tells us a lot about how you’re doing today. Another part of walking signature is it kind of tells us a little bit about your health history. So if you’ve had a leg fracture, if you’ve sprained your ankles 77 times, if you’ve got a leg that’s shorter or longer than the other, if you’ve got low back pain or a limitation in how your pelvis moves, I mean a physical therapist can certainly tell that’s what we’re trained in. But if you’re a lay person, an average Joe, and you’re in the airport and you see someone walk by and you’re like, huh, that doesn’t quite look right. You’re not necessarily able to diagnose or pinpoint the problem like I could. But what you are seeing is a lack of efficiency. And when you see somebody that maybe swings an arm a little differently or they’re wobbling side to side, or you can hear one foot scuffing differently, oftentimes what that means is there’s something imbalanced and an imbalance typically belies an inefficient gait.

Brett McKay:

I want to talk more about having an efficient versus inefficient gait, but one more thing about walking style. So I was listening to Pandora the other day and the Frankie Vallie and The Four Seasons song came up, “Walk Like a Man” – this is the Art of Manliness podcast. We got to talk about this. Do men and women walk differently?

Dr. Milica McDowell:

Absolutely. Absolutely. Men and women, if I saw a skeleton, I’d be able to tell you if it was a man or a woman. And we have significant anatomical differences. And those differences then influence our movement patterns, our postures. And so absolutely. I think too, especially in the US, men tend to be taller, men tend to be heavier, men tend to have more muscle. And so you’re moving a different machine than a woman is. And so yes, the gait pattern, an efficient gait. So an ideal gait is going to be similar regardless of gender, age, height, weight, you name it. But overarchingly, you could probably de-identify a person for me and most clinicians, and we’d be able to tell you roughly height, weight, and gender just by watching their walking pattern.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. One thing I’ve read is that men tend to move their shoulders more while walking than women do.

Dr. Milica McDowell:

Yeah. So when you think about what’s sort of acceptable posture wise in America, and if you lined up a group of guys and gals, most people are going to lift up their shoulders and kind of get tall and suck in their belly because of some sort of arbitrary beauty standard. And what you’ll tend to notice is women tend to minimize some of that sway. We tend to really suck in that belly to try to look snatched if you will and the guys are like, I’m just trying to get from point A to point B, and I’m trying to do it with some level of style. And so when you see more shoulder movement in a guy or in a gal, what’s happening is they’re creating more rotation. Rotation makes you more efficient. And so a man typically is going to walk a little faster than a gal. A man’s typically going to have a longer stride length and less, he’s significantly shorter than a comparable woman. And so men are generating more force and more momentum partially because of the anatomy, partially because of muscle and partially because of culture as well.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, that’s interesting. Culture, the way we think about sex and gender and a culture can influence even the way we walk, which is interesting. 

Dr. Milica McDowell:

Absolutely. 

Brett McKay:

I want to talk more about this efficient and inefficient walking. So you mentioned there’s some things you can look at when someone’s walking to figure out whether or not they’re walking efficiently or inefficiently. If you’re seeing arm movement kind of off, maybe they’re not moving one arm, that could be a sign. What are some other signs of inefficient walking?

Dr. Milica McDowell:

The best place to assess this is if you have access to a treadmill. And what’s kind of fun about walking on a treadmill is you can not only hear the walking pattern, you can see the walking pattern and inefficiencies come in about a billion different ways. I had a good friend who I was training for a marathon with and he kept complaining of shoulder pain. And this guy was like an All-American track athlete, total stud. He’s jacked, he’s fit, he’s smart. He’s one of those people that’s like an ideal patient. They do anything you ask him to do. I’ve got this shoulder pain, it’s killing me. It’s killing me. So I was like, all right, you’re this stud athlete. Let’s bring you into the office and see what’s going on. So I put this guy on a treadmill and he’s a marathoner. He is an all American, he’s a total stud when it comes to running.

I get him walking on the treadmill and I’m standing behind him. And if you have a physical therapist in your life, we’re always watching you with love, but we are. And so I put this friend of mine on the treadmill and I’m standing behind him and I whip out my camera. I start videotaping him. All he is doing is walking and I take him up to running speed and then I take him off the treadmill and I’m like, well, how do you feel? Well, my shoulder hurts. I go, all right, well look at this video. Oh, you were taping me? I’m like, yeah, of course. I’m a physical therapist. So I show him the video and I say, what do you see? And he’s like, well, I, I’m not swinging my arm. And this guy was a 400 meter runner in track, right? He’s not a long distance guy.

He is a track runner, runs around in circles, indoor track, 200 meter track, outdoor track, 400 meter track. I was like, bro, you are carrying a purse in your left arm, right arm, super duper, huge arm swing, torso rotation, hip rotation. It’s like unlocking his foot. He’s doing amazing on the right side of his body. And it looked like he was carrying a lady’s handbag on the left. And I was like, whatcha doing? And he’s like, I don’t know. Putting people in an environment where they don’t know they’re being observed, where you can control speed and you can get some video is sort of the ideal place to assess. Efficient walking or running a treadmill is a perfect spot. And if you have somebody that can set up a camera, then you can sort of look at your own pattern. You can sort of be your own detective.

I love that kind of stuff. You don’t have to go to a, like a PT, personal trainer, chiropractor, whomever, to do some assessment. And so the first thing you’re looking for is does anything look off? Do you see a wobble? Are you dipping side to side? Do you see your hip dropping, your shoulder dropping? Does it look like you’re limping? Most of us, even if you don’t have formal training, can identify those sorts of things. And then the other thing I love about putting someone on a treadmill is you can hear the pattern, you can hear if they scuff, you can hear if one foot lands harder than the other, an efficient walking gait should sound like this.

And any efficient walking gait will sound like . . . or you hear like a scuff. And so pattern is huge. And these are the types of things that those of you that are listening to the podcast today, go be your own detective. You can play with this stuff. You’re like, man, I’ve got this nagging Achilles thing and I haven’t been to a pro. Help me. Well go get on a treadmill and have somebody hold a phone and see if you can tell, right? A treadmill is a great place to look for inefficiencies. The other place that you can find inefficiency two today, you don’t even have to go anywhere, is go pick up your walking shoes or your running shoes and flip ’em over. Look at the sole of the shoe. Now if you have brand new shoes, this isn’t as effective. So the dirtier, the older the shoes, the better.

The more mileage you have in the shoes, the better. Because what will happen is the shoes are going to tell you a story of what your pattern looks like. Do you have more wear on the heel? Do you have more wear on the toe? Is the wear different on your right versus your left? If you look at your shoe from the top, does it look twisted? These are the things that clinicians will do if you come into our office. But this is the kind of stuff that anybody can do at home to start thinking about, am I efficient when I’m walking? Or if you’re a runner, when you’re running.

Brett McKay:

Some of the things you recommend to develop a more efficient walking pattern, walk faster. We naturally start walking more efficiently when we have to walk a bit faster instead of just puttering around. Walk taller, have good posture when you walk, that improves your walking efficiency swing your arms. You talked about that. And then you talked about you have this great diagram in the book that shows a foot and how a foot should land on the ground for an efficient walk. What does that look like?

Dr. Milica McDowell:

Yes. So traditional gait mechanics start at lateral heel, so pinky toe side of your foot. And then as you move your body forward, you’re going to load through the middle of the foot, you load the outside of the pinky toe, the ball of the foot, and then your final part of contact is pushing off the big toe. So it essentially goes from the back to the front and from the outside to the inside. And that’s an ideal pattern. There’s all sorts of reasons people have inefficiencies or they can’t achieve that pattern or it’s difficult or what have you. But in a perfect world, if we were trying to get you to an ideal efficient gait pattern, it’s outside of the heel and then you push off with the inside of big toe.

Brett McKay:

And let’s say you have a patient, you’re looking at them like, okay, someone’s off here. We need to focus on improving your foot strike. How do you do that? How do you rehab that? Because someone might’ve been walking inefficiently where they’re maybe walking on the inside of their foot first for their entire life. So how do you train somebody to be like, okay, you’re going to walk, start on the outside of your heel and then kind of rotate on your foot to the big toe,

Dr. Milica McDowell:

Right? Yeah. I listened to when you interviewed Matt Fitzgerald, and I thought it was really interesting in his episode with you how he talked about being a pro runner and having coaches who didn’t try to mess with his gait mechanics, right? So it’s a slippery slope for sure, and it is definitely something where I always have said in my career, 20 plus years as a PT, if you don’t have pain, if you aren’t having problems, I’m not messing with your mechanics. It’s clearly working for you. And if you’re somebody who has some sort of an anatomical difference or you’ve had an injury or surgery, I had an injury in high school, I still have screws in my foot from when I was 16, that changes my loading mechanics for sure. But I’ve done 13 Ironman triathlons, a 50 KI ultra run. I have no mechanical issues, but I’ve got hardware in there.

And there’s a lot of people who do, right? So if you don’t have any problems, don’t mess with it. But if you’re somebody who’s like, I have a chronic plantar fascia problem, I’ve got chronic heel pain, I’ve got a chronic Achilles thing, I’ve got this bite in my hip, I’ve got achiness in my low back, that’s definitely sort of your body trying to tell you, hello, is there something going on down below at your foot? Now, couple that if you are a guy who wears dress shoes, if you have to be kind of fancily dressed for work, if you wear shoes that are perhaps not the right size, over 60% of adults in the US are wearing the wrong sized shoe, wrong length. There’s a lot of factors that can contribute to that. But to answer your question, if somebody has interest in assessing their mechanics and identifying if their pattern is optimal, you can play with it with some very basic drills.

You can play with it with drills. If you’ve got access to a gym that has a mirror, walking toward a mirror, barefoot can tell you a lot. Again, video analysis is priceless. And so even just throwing your iPhone on the ground and videotaping yourself, walking toward and walking away, you can start to get that idea of how do you land if you feel like you aren’t landing lateral and then pushing off big toe medial. You can play with just that strike pattern and standing. So if you go up to standing and almost stand like you’re going to go into a lunge and then you load the lateral foot roll through, push off the big toe and just see how your body feels when you do that, that can sometimes be a good indicator if you don’t have the range of motion to do that or you’ve got a mobility restriction, or like I said, you’ve got old screws in your foot or have had old fracture injury, whatever, it might be a good time to ping a pro, get ahold of your local PT chiropractor foot person and be like, Hey, can you take a look at me?

Because you don’t want to mess with gait mechanics unless you have issues. But if you do have issues, it is a low hanging fruit to try to correct. So

Brett McKay:

We talked about things that can cause issues in your walking gait or gait mechanics. Injuries are a big one, just your life history. What about your anatomy? What if your ankles or your feet naturally cave in or turn in? Can that mess things up for you down the line?

Dr. Milica McDowell:

So this is one of those things we definitely myth bust in the book. You alluded to the 10,000 steps a day. That is definitely a myth. You’re correct. It’s a leftover from a Japanese pedometer company’s marketing campaign in the 1960s. Another thing we myth bust in the foot, people are terrified of pronation. Pronation become this bad word in gait mechanics and shoe advertisements and people who have flat feet often are told, oh, you need an orthotic. Oh, you need this. Oh, you need surgery. And interestingly, there’s a lot of science that says a flat or arch is within normal limits. There’s a lot of data that looks at different populations who have flatter feet compared to those who have higher arches and overarchingly. There isn’t a significant difference in pretty large population studies for stress fracture risk or tendonitis risk and those sorts of things.

And so it is a little bit about dated thinking that pronation is bad or flat feet or bad. Pronation is a normal range of motion. And so if you’ve heard that term before and you don’t know what it means, that’s okay. Most of you listening are probably not clinicians. Pronation is a normal movement. When your load goes from the outside of the foot to the big toe side, your middle of your foot needs to pronate. So it’s just like flexion or extension. It’s a biomechanical term for the movement we’re going through. Pronation is getting the big toe down. And so you have to pronate in order to be able to load the big toe and push off, you’re pushing off your big toes, you’re gas pedaling, gait mechanics. So someone who has a flatter anatomy, it used to be this idea that, oh, you’re going to be really sloppy and you’re not going to be able to generate force and you’re going to end up with itis and fractures and all this other stuff.

And the science has really rebutted that in probably the last almost 20 years. So the good news is as all of us want to learn more and be better stewards of our bodies, pronation isn’t a bad thing. And very small percentage of the population, let’s say I think it’s under 5%, it might be maybe like 3%, actually truly have what we call flatfoot deformity, which is medical condition where you’re super, super, super flat and all your bones are sitting on the ground. I actually took care of a patient a couple years ago who had that problem and ended up having a surgery to reconstruct his arch because he did fit into that tiny little part of the population. But for most individuals, a flat, flat or arch or a more pronated foot isn’t problematic if you back it up with good strength around the area. And so a lot of times people have a flatter arch and then their foot is terribly weak and that can start to cause problems. Alright,

Brett McKay:

Maybe we can talk about ways you can strengthen that. Okay, so we can’t use flat feet to get out of the draft anymore. You’re not going to get that rejection.

Dr. Milica McDowell:

That’s right.

Brett McKay:

Okay. And I think you also highlight they did research they’ve looked at, we’re always looking at hunter gatherers to figure out what does a human body look like without all these industrial trappings around us. A lot of those hunter gatherer people, they have pretty flat feet. They walk around barefoot and their feet. You look at their print like there’s no arch hardly. And they’re fine. They climb trees, they walk miles a day and they’re okay.

Dr. Milica McDowell:

Yeah, a foot that is unobstructed by a shoe gets strong. And there’s this fabulous researcher, her name’s Sarah Ridge, and she is a really smart woman and she researches minimal shoes. So shoes that allow you to behave in a more barefoot manner. So not a shoe with a ton of cushion, not a shoe with a carbon fiber plate, not a shoe with a ton of stack, all that sort of stuff. So a shoe that truly is zero drop, so meaning flat from the heel to the toe, minimal cushion with a wide toe box. And her research has demonstrated that the more time you spend barefoot, the more time you spend in minimal shoes, the larger cross-sectional area you get in the internal muscles in your feet. Now the stronger the muscles in your feet, the bigger the muscles in your feet, guess what happens? Those feet get wider and flatter because just like if my bicep gets bigger, the anatomy is going to change.

And so these itty bitty little muscles that are in between the long bones of your feet, when their cross-sectional area gets bigger, it gives you an appearance of a wider flatter foot. Guess what? Those feet are super duper, duper strong. If you’ve ever seen somebody with a deformed foot, horrible bunion toes are smashed together, hammer toes, it’s all like claw, like it looks terrible. That is a weak, weak, weak foot. That person is going to have absolutely no control of the intrinsic muscles. They’re going to have super weak toe flexors. Those are very problematic for walking and fall risk and balance. When you see somebody with a wide, flat, thick foot, that foot is strong and that foot has a lot of capacity because it has been, as you said, a barefoot hunter gatherer, people who live in beach communities, people that are more often not in a very structured shoe, they have stronger feet.

Brett McKay:

So one thing that can prevent people from walking efficiently or walking comfortably, and I know a lot of maybe runners have experienced this, but this can pop up in anybody. It’s plantar fasciitis. What causes plantar fasciitis?

Dr. Milica McDowell:

It is a bugger. I’ve struggled with it myself. So the plantar fascia is a connective tissue that runs from your heel to the ball of your foot essentially. And its job is just helping to transmit force. It’s an inert tissue. It’s not muscle, it’s not a ligament. It’s similar to tendon from a structural standpoint. It’s kind of in that connective tissue category. So it has a poor blood supply, it has a ton of nerve. It’s one of those structures that when it gets pissed, it’s pissed for a while. So your plantar fascia’s job is supporting the muscular structure of your foot. So guess what? If your foot is weak, who ends up doing more of the work plantar fascia? And there’s a lot of ways to make it angry. You can make it angry by ramping up your volume too quickly. You can make it angry by having weak feet.

You can make it angry by wearing the wrong shoes. You can make it angry by having bad gait mechanics. There’s all sorts of ways to make this thing really cranky. And when it gets upset, it takes a lot of work to calm it down because resolution typically involves some pretty heavy lifting. We have to figure out why is this tissue staying inflamed? Because tissues want to be in homeostasis. Your body’s not happy when something is chronically inflamed. And so when somebody has chronic heal pain or chronic plantar fascia problems, it’s often because another link in that biomechanical chain is not doing its job.

Brett McKay:

So that could be caused by shoes that you’re wearing. It’s just you’re not giving your foot the opportunity to strengthen the muscles to support the foot. And so the plantar facia has to take up the slack.

Dr. Milica McDowell:

Yeah. So we talk about, in the book, we have a thing we call the 24 hour shoe clock. And it’s assessing your day or 24 hours by the type of footwear you’re wearing. So let’s say you’re sleeping and you’re barefoot for eight hours, and then you’re at home for a couple hours. And are you someone who wears slippers? Are you someone who wears inside shoes? Are you someone who pads around the house barefoot? Do you wear socks? And then when you go outside the house, what do you put on your feet? Are you somebody that we interviewed a flight attendant for the book and for men and women, they are required to wear specific uniform shoes. In all the major Delta, United American, they all have a uniform shoe requirement. That uniform shoe does not allow optimal biomechanics of the foot. And that’s a problem.

So if I was a flight attendant and I’m spending eight hours a day sleeping, and then I’m spending two or three hours at home barefoot, but then I’m going into a shift of let’s say 10 or 12 hours in a shoe that has an elevated heel, that has a narrow toe box and is stiff, my foot musculature is being compromised while I’m in that shoe, my biomechanics are compromised, my mobility is compromised. And so when you run into individuals who have chronic inflammatory problems, foot, toe, heel, achilles tendon plantar fascia, we use that 24 hour shoe concept to assess, all right, well how much time of the day are you spending in shoes that are maybe not a healthy choice?

Brett McKay:

Yeah, we’ll get more into shoes here in a minute. And changing your shoe type can help not just plantar fasciitis, but other issues as well. But what else can you do to rehab? Plantar fasciitis? I know there’s a lot of devices out there, training protocols that people use that these involve stretching programs that you can do what actually works for rehabbing plantar fasciitis.

Dr. Milica McDowell:

So similar to a couple of the other myths we busted today, stretching is not typically the solution for plantar fascia problems. Generally speaking, we need to get people strong. And there’s two areas of culprit when you have a plantar fascia problem. A lot of people have weak foot and a lot of people have weak calves. And oftentimes, and this is sort of where the science points us for sure, there’s tons of research right now that’s like in the last probably five years, that’s really trying to drive clinicians away from thinking that plantar fascia problems are a mobility problem and trying to help educate us so we can do a better job taking care of you guys saying it’s not a stretching problem, it’s a strengthening problem. And so if you’re somebody who’s struggling with plantar fascia issues, I would say there’s two things I would immediately tell you to do. The first is assess your shoes because you’re probably wearing the wrong length, and B, something with a narrow toe box. And then the second thing I would suggest you do is assess your foot intrinsic strength and assess your ability to do a single leg calf raise.

Brett McKay:

Okay? And then if your calf raise is not good, maybe add some more calf raises in your strength training program.

Dr. Milica McDowell:

So what’s interesting about single leg calf raise is it is normalized for gender and age, and there are very clear thresholds that you should be able to do. This is something that you can try at home to assess if you have a calf imbalance right side to left, or if you are weaker than your age matched peers. So for guys, if you’re between 30 and 40, you should be able to, and this is real science, we can put in the show notes if we need to. You should be able to do 32 single leg calf raises with just fingertips on the wall. So not holding onto a counter full excursion. And full excursion means going through all the full range of motion. And that’s like with a cadence. That’s not like one, take a rest, two, take a rest three, check your email. It’s 1, 2, 3. So if you’re between 30 and 40, 32, if you’re between 40 and 50, 28, if you’re 50 to 60 23, if you’re 60 to 70, 19, 70 to 80 14, this is demonstrating your single leg propulsion endurance. And so if you aren’t even close to that, or if you have one side where you aren’t close to those metrics, what that’s telling us is you are overloading other tissues. And if plantar fascia is the problem, most likely that’s who because your calf isn’t doing its part of the job.

Brett McKay:

And then another thing I thought was interesting that you can do to rehab is maybe one run a week if you’re a runner or you can do this if you just walk too, make sure you’re doing it barefoot on grass.

Dr. Milica McDowell:

Yeah, the data on that is really fun. And if you don’t have access to safe grass, barefoot on a treadmill is fantastic. But yeah, that’s one that I think a lot of people are very surprised by that because generally when people have plantar fascia pain or they have heel pain, they go, oh, I should get into a huge cushion shoe. All that’s going to do is make things worse. So that’s actually counterproductive. If you have arch pain or heel pain, cushion shoe is not the solution. Less shoe is more a solution. And think about it like this, if I’m in less shoe, am I going to land harder or softer? You’re going to land softer because you don’t want to bang your foot into the surface. If I’m in a super cushioned shoe, it actually makes us strike the ground harder because there’s so much cushion.

We’re not getting that sensory input into the hundreds of thousands of receptors in the bottom of your foot. You have to land harder to get that information to your brain. So it’s counterintuitive, but one of the recommendations you’re exactly right, is barefoot on grass or if you don’t have access to safe grass barefoot on treadmill. And then the other strengthening piece that I would highly recommend if you’re somebody that’s struggling with this type of problem is assessing the intrinsic muscle endurance and muscle performance in your foot. And so in order to do that, and we demonstrate this, this is a drill we call the movement snacks in the book. And this is something we teach in the book. In our book, we have a whole assessment chapter so you can kind of see where you’re at. And my co-author, Courtney Conley of Gait Happens. She’s a chiropractor.

I’m a physical therapist. If you come to see either one of us, the first thing we do is assess you. So in our book we’re saying, Hey, assess yourself here. We’re giving you the tools, do this at home. So if you want to assess the internal strength of your foot after you’ve done that calf assessment, you take off your sock, you put your foot on the floor, and the first thing you do is you try to lift up big toe without lifting up everybody else and without clawing the ground of toes, four or 5, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, you’re just going to try to lift up big toe. Then you put big toe down and relax it, and you try to lift up toes 2, 3, 4, 5. And this is an assessment of your intrinsic foot strength. Another way you can look at this is called lift, spread and reach. And this is actually one of the exercises we recommend.

Where you are sitting in a chair foot is barefoot, heels on the ground, toes are on the ground. You start by lifting up all your toes and big toe as high as you can get ’em, and your arch, so your ball of your foot is off the ground. So your heels is the only thing contacting. Then you spread out all your toes like little frog. So you have space between every single toe, and then you try to reach ’em out like you’re some sort of a gecko. So you lift the foot up, spread out the toes, reach out like a gecko, and that activates all those little bitty foot muscles, the intrinsic muscles in between your long bones, if that is hard for you, if your foot cramps, if you can’t do that, it’s telling you those guys are weak. And guess what? If they’re weak and your calf is weak, who’s doing all the work? Your planner fascia. So the three of those structures are a team, and if one or two of the team members are not holding up their end of the job, not doing their work, that’s when plantar fascia has to do more work and it gets grumpy.

Brett McKay:

And then I think something to point out, if you’re rehabbing plantar fasciitis, this could take a while. It could take once a long time. It does. That’s the same thing with other foot injuries. I’m sure as a physical therapist, one of the hardest things you have to deal with is managing people’s expectations on recovery. It could take a while, but you just got to keep going on with it and keep doing the protocol, stick with it because the rehab will work eventually. And I think you’d say too, get going on that rehab as soon as possible. If something’s hurting, don’t just ignore it.

Dr. Milica McDowell:

That’s correct. I will speak for the entire community of medical professionals everywhere. It is easier for us to solve your problem more recently to when you were injured then three months, six months, a year down the road. So please, please make it easier on us. And if you tweak something and it doesn’t get better in a week and a half, go grab a professional to help you. It will make us getting you better faster. It will reduce how much compensation you start to create in your life to be gimping and limping around something that’s acute. The longer you wait, the more compensation, the more bad habits, the more that inflammation gets to hang around. And the harder it is for our teams to help support you on that journey, getting back to what you love to do. So yes, don’t let it hang out there because some of these types of problems really do require professional to help you.

And I think that goes back to the shoe conversation. If you’re wearing a shoe that isn’t the correct length or has a narrow toe box or is a pronation control shoe, and you actually don’t need that, it’s helpful to get a professional’s eyeball on there. It’s like, I don’t work for a shoe company. I have no skin in the game to tell you what shoe to go wear, right? But I am a professional who can say, gosh, Brett, that shoe seems like it’s not helping you. Here’s some video analysis. That shoe has a wear pattern. I think it’s a problem. Let’s actually measure your damn foot. 60% of adults are wearing the wrong length of shoe. That’s a big deal. And that contributes to these types of problems.

Brett McKay:

Well, let’s talk about shoes because we’ve been talking about it throughout this conversation because shoes can cause a lot of foot problems that can affect your foot health. I feel like 15 years ago, barefoot running was all the rage. They even had these shoes, the Vibram five fingers. It’s like a thin piece of rubber under your foot and a place for each toe that was big. But then I feel like in the past five years or so, all the running shoes are, they look like these space, age, moon shoes with lots of cushioning. But it sounds like you’re saying those types of shoes might not be good for our feet. So what is the ideal shoe for foot health, not just for running, but for everyday wear, for walking?

Dr. Milica McDowell:

Yes. Unpopular opinion. I was in London recently, and there was a Hoka store, right?

Brett McKay:

Yeah. The Hokas

Dr. Milica McDowell:

Next. It was right next to the Breitling store. And I was like, wow, Hokas got quite a budget for where they’re putting these stores with their real estate, my friends. Yeah, it is interesting. And you’re correct, there was the, Chris McDougall wrote the book, Born to Run. He’s a friend of Courtney and mine and his conversation changed how people looked at footwear. There was this tribe that was able to run at high performance and super long distances, barefoot. And then the five finger shoe came out and everyone said, oh my gosh, let’s all get those and go run long distances. And what happened there was an epidemic of bone stress, injury, stress, fracture, plantar fascia pain, whatever, because people hadn’t earned the right to wear a minimal shoe. So here’s how I like to characterize shoes, and a lot of this is the work from Courtney and her research over the years.

So there’s three categories of shoes, traditional shoe, which is what most of you’re probably wearing. That’s where I would put a Hoka, a Brooks, a Nike, and Adidas, a dress shoe, a high heel shoe, you name it, a wingtip, whatever. Then there’s a functional shoe. And a functional shoe is a shoe that has the following criteria, wide toe box, low heel to toe drop. So that’s the difference between how much foam is under your heel versus ball of the foot and lower cushion. And you’re correct, Brett, in that most shoes nowadays look like a moon shoe. There’s cushion everywhere. The heels are stacked up super high. And that is a big shift in the pendulum of shoe technology. So we’ve got our traditional shoes, which are normal shoes, like your New Balance, that would be a traditional shoe. Then you have a functional shoe, and then you have that five fingers category, minimal shoes, and not all the minimal shoes have the articulating toes like a five Fingers does.

A minimal shoe is going to be classified as a shoe that has a wide toe box, zero heel to toe drop. So that means your heel is not stacked up above ball of foot and then minimal to no cushion. So if I was going to tell you a brand that meets the criteria for functional, a brand I use personally is called Altra running. So they have wide toe box, they do have cushion shoes, but there are a lot of shoes in their spectrum that are in that functional category for us, which is less than six millimeters of heel to toe drop and then lower cushion. So when their company was created, and I think they’re about 2009, maybe 2013, somewhere in there is when they were launched, their first feature was Our shoe is shaped like a foot. And if you look down at your foot, the widest part of your foot should be your toes.

But because most of us wear traditional shoes or we’ve had to wear uniform shoe, we’ve gotten trapped in wearing dress shoes or whatever, a lot of times the ball of the foot is the widest part and the toes are pinched together. But like you mentioned earlier, people that spend more time barefoot, our ancestors, the widest part of the foot was the toes. And so what Ultra did is they said, it’s for us. Our shoes are going to be foot shaped. They’re going to respect the anatomy. Courtney says that all the time. I love when she says that, respect the anatomy with your shoe choices. So if you look at Ultra’s website or kind of check out their shoes, they’ve got things from that more minimal shoe, right? So very low cushion, zero heel to toe drop. And then they have more introductory shoes that do have a little bit of stack height and a little more cushion.

And then a shoe company that does good job in the minimal space is vivo barefoot. And if you’ve ever picked up a vivo barefoot, it’s minimal. There is very little cushion. Your heel and toe are on the exact same plane. It has a wide toe box. But here’s the thing, with minimal shoes, you have to earn the right, if you just go buy a vibrant five fingers, you go buy a vivo barefoot, and you’ve been in a traditional shoe and you haven’t gained the mobility or the strength, it’s like going to the gym and trying to throw a 300 pound snatch above your head. It’s like going to the gym and trying to bench press your body weight. If you haven’t done that, it’s like going to the gym and trying to do a hundred pull-ups. If you’re not conditioned to do it, you haven’t earned the right.

And so the challenge with shoes is this, because there are gigantic marketing budgets and everyone’s got fancy features and they’ve got pro athletes wearing X, Y, Z shoe. As a consumer, it’s super hard to understand where you fit along that spectrum. So here’s my takeaway. Most of you are in traditional shoes. I would encourage you to consider a shoe with functional criteria. And if you want to go even further, you could consider a minimal shoe. But you have to think about that comparison of can you go in and bench press your body weight? Can you go in and snatch 300 pounds? You have to earn the right to get into that minimal shoe, or you can cause problems.

Brett McKay:

For my everyday shoe, which I do all my walks in, I wear Lems. 

Dr. Milica McDowell:

Oh yeah, I think that’s a great brand. 

Brett McKay: 

Yeah, zero drop. But I love them. I wear them out. I mean, I go through two pairs a year. I walk in them all the time. I wear them all the time. And I’ve been a big advocate for looking for more opportunities to make sure I get shoes that respect the anatomy of my foot. I’m a powerlifter weightlifter. A lot of the weightlifting shoes, very narrow toe box. It’s almost like ballerina shoes. They just kind of scrunch your toes together. Whenever I squat, you got 400 pounds on your back and you’re trying to squat and you’re like, man, my feet just feel all scrunched up. But thankfully, there’s a weightlifting shoe brand that came out, Tyr, that has a wide toe box. It’s improved my lifting experience, it’s so much better. 

And then Lems does make a wide tow box, zero drop dress shoe. They look kind of goofy though. I’m not ready to go to wearing those when I’m wearing a suit. And you guys talk about this, it’s okay to wear if you’re a guy, wears some Oxford’s for a couple hours, but don’t wear them all the time. And most of the time just stay in that functional shoe. 

Let’s talk about the shoe size. I thought it was interesting you said 60% of adults are wearing the wrong size shoe. What’s going on there? Why are people walking around with the wrong size shoe? I imagine it’s because probably the last time they measured their foot was when they were in high school buying new shoes with their mom at JC Penney.

Dr. Milica McDowell:

It’s so true. I mean, how many of us have our high school body weight on our driver’s license? Let’s be honest. So you’re correct. Most people have the misconception that when you stop growing vertically, and I’m almost six feet tall, right? I’ve been six feet tall since I was in high school, so I’m done. I’ve been a size 10 forever. I’m a size 10 in shoes. And another misconception is I wear a 10 in every single brand. So there’s research that came out in 2018, so we’re pushing 10 years that this study has not been refuted. And it was a big scale study looking at adults, and it was, hey Brett, what size shoe are you? So what size shoe do you wear your daily shoe?

Brett McKay:

Size 10.

Dr. Milica McDowell:

Size 10, okay. How long have you been a 10?

Brett McKay:

I’d say since high school. 

Dr. Milica McDowell:

Okay, since high school. So when we think about that, and I’m not saying you’re wrong, but I would challenge you to measure that foot, my friend – feet change length for a variety of reasons. Muscle gain, muscle loss, weight gain, weight loss, volume, change, hormones, medications. Most of us have a preconceived idea that when we stopped getting taller, our feet stopped growing. And it’s just simply not the case. So one of the ways to solve that is – do you know the name of that device that they have at every shoe store?

Brett McKay:

I know it’s named after some guy who invented it.

Dr. Milica McDowell:

It is. It’s called a Brannick device. And it is a hundred years old this year. It has never been changed. The features are the exact same. It was innovated in the US. It’s from New York, and that device is still kind of a gold standard of foot measurement. Now, you could go to a clinic and get some fancy foot scan or that sort of thing. And there are some companies, vivo barefoot actually is starting to do a custom flip flop where they scan your foot and they only fit you, which is fascinating, right? It accounts for right versus left differences, those sorts of things. But I would encourage everybody listening, if you take nothing else away, please go measure your foot in a proper shoe store. Because if you thought you were a 10 since high school, you may or may not still be. Your feet are not symmetrical, neither is the rest of you. And so you may have a foot that’s creeping toward a 10 and a half, but if you’re always buying a 10, you’re doing that foot. That’s a little larger a disservice. Another thing to think about is shoe brands are all made on different molds. And so a Nike at Adidas, a Hoka, a new balance, whatever, a 10 is not a 10 is not a 10. And so with that, when you’re switching brands, it’s very important to recognize that you aren’t probably the same size in different brands.

Brett McKay:

So we talked about the ideal shoe is a wide toe box, minimal drop heel to toe drop because you want your foot to just your toes, particularly to splay out as much as possible how they naturally want to be. What do you do if your toes are scrunched together, even when your shoes are off, due to years of wearing constraining shoes? Can you get them splaying out again?

Dr. Milica McDowell:

You can. There is hope. If you take your socks off and you look down and you’ve got a crowded elevator in that anatomy. So there’s a lot of ways to improve your toe splay. One is being barefoot at home and just spending more time barefoot if you have the availability to do that. The second is a device that’s going to cost you 15 bucks. You can get ’em on Amazon, you can get ’em at gait happens. You can get ’em from all sorts of different brands. It’s called a toe Spacer. An important note with these, they are based on your shoe size, so make sure that you are ordering the right size. If you order a toe spacer because if you just order a generic one that’s not small, medium, large, it will not fit your foot and it’s silicone that you wear that goes in between your little toes and it starts to work on restoring space.

Now, to my folks who are high fashion shoe aficionados out there that are wearing suits and wingtips and everything else, you’re not going to be able to put these on and wear them for a long period of time. If your toes were meshed together. Since you’ve been an undergrad at Penn State, this is something you may need to wear for five or 10 minutes and then take off. My husband is a retired professional, big mountain skier, and those in the ski industry know you wear ski boots that are really tight, so you have good awareness and you feel really locked in when you’re doing dangerous things. And he’s got some toe issues from it. And so when we give him toe spacers, he can wear ’em for five to seven minutes. He’s got to take ’em off. But over time, there is hope. You can wear these, wear ’em at home, wear ’em. If you have a wide toe box shoe, you can wear them in your shoes. You can restore anatomical position over time. Now, there are some people who have serious deformities and they’ve got bone spurs and all sorts of issues that may not resolve, but for the majority of us who just have some sins of bad shoes in the past, wearing toe spacers is a phenomenal solution.

Brett McKay:

Gotcha. My wife’s a big fan. The socks she wears when she runs these in ninja socks, they’re like toe socks. She likes them. I don’t have the patience to get my toes in each little holes, but I think it can. Also, putting it on is too much, but I think that it does help your toes splay out. It’s just keeping things separated. And then you also talk about toe flossing. I’ve been doing that. It’s basically you stick your fingers between your toes, creating a toe spacer with your fingers and kind of massaging it and working your foot. That’s something else you can do when you’re watching the Great British Baking Show.

Dr. Milica McDowell:

Yeah, it’s a great way to restore mobility. It’s also a great way to work on creating space. If you can get your fingers in between those toes, kind of like you’re holding hands with your foot. I mean, that just is reminding them what their neutral position was. And if we were able to be barefoot more and we were constrained by shoes less over time, those toes are going to want to go back to that natural state. You made such a good example when you talked about squatting heavy and wearing a narrow toe box lifting shoe. You’re not able to recruit muscles who can help you push into the floor to get out of that hole. If you’re in a narrow toe box shoe, when you go to a wider toe box lifting shoe, you get a performance boost. The science is there. It’s just plain true.

And so that’s not a condemnation of shoes that have a narrow toe box, but if you’ve got the ability to consider something with a wider toe box, you’ve got the budget to try a couple different pairs of shoes. It is definitely something where people see a performance boost and they have better balance. You’re more engaged with the floor. My favorite pet peeve, my husband and I owned a gym for a long time, and one of my favorite pet peeves is having people come in for, we had a CrossFit and we had a functional gym come in for CrossFit and a Hoka or a cushioned running shoe, a Brooks, and I’m just like, this is the wrong tool for a job. You’re bringing a gun to a knife fight or whatever. So you want to select the right tool for the job. And if you’re trying to lift heavy in a super cushioned shoe, you might as well be standing on a pillow.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, you’re going to just waste a lot of energy. Yeah. I noticed when I switched to the Tyr lifting shoe with the wider toe box, I was having some knee pain behind my knee, my right knee when I was squatting, when I switched the Tyr that cleared up. Yeah, I mean, it’s amazing. So the thing the toe play does, it’s going to contribute to that more efficient walking gait, which can help clear up foot pain, knee pain, hip pain, all those downstream effects. That all starts with your foot and having that proper toe display. Let’s talk about one last thing. Something else that might keep people from walking or make walking a comfortable are things like bunions, hammer, toes, calluses. What causes those and what can we do to mitigate those types of injuries?

Dr. Milica McDowell:

So one of the things we offer up in the book when we encourage people to do a little self-assessment is to start with visual inspection. Take off your socks, look at your feet, and do you have deformities? Do you have differences right to left? Are you seeing a big bunion on your left and nothing on your right. Callouses also tell a story, right? Callouses tell us where we’re loading The weightbearing tissue of the foot hammer toes are often from wearing shoes that are too short or from having internal foot weakness where your toes start to claw the ground for purchase. So if you do that visual foot inspection and you’re seeing things that don’t look neutral, again, bunion, hammer, toe, calluses, corns, which are the bumps on the top of the foot, what that’s telling us is that your footwear is affecting the shape of your foot.

Babies don’t have bunions. And there is a hot topic of debate about whether bunions are genetic or not. And I’m happy to myth bust that for those listening, there is a very small genetic component and some people are more predisposed, but years of wearing narrow toe boxes, shoes that are too short or too tight, definitely accelerates the process of that big toe drift. And once you start going down that path without counteracting it, by changing your footwear, by wearing toe spacers, by getting your feet strong, it can be a very slippery slope. So if you’re somebody who just took your shoes and socks off and you’re looking down there and you’re like, I definitely have a bunion, or I have one that’s bigger on one side than the other, it just becomes this opportunity for you to say, all right, well, what’s the, why do I wear a dress shoe to work every day?

Do I wear a narrow? Those Adidas trainers that are back and so popular right now are so narrow, and I see them everywhere. I was just in New York City for a week, and it’s like everywhere I go, people are wearing the samba or they’re wearing the tigers, or they’re wearing that Asics that’s so popular right now. And those are not a foot shaped shoe by any means. And if you’re walking super long distances in those, or spending a lot of hours in them without counteracting it in some way, it can take you down a path of those deformities getting worse.

Brett McKay:

So it all goes back to shoes. Get that functional shoe, and if you’re ready for it, a minimal shoe,

Dr. Milica McDowell:

And get strong and get strong. So it’s functional shoe calf and foot strength. And then if you want to keep going, start working your way into minimal. And the trick with minimal is you kind of dip back and forth. So as I said, just was in New York City recently. I took a pair of minimal shoes. I took a pair of functional shoes, and I can walk around the city in minimal shoes. I can’t do it all day. I can’t go take 12,000 steps or something, but I can do four or 5,000 steps in a pair of minimal shoes, which for me, with a history of foot surgery and some running injuries and those sorts of things is really saying a lot. I’m pretty proud of that, that I’ve gotten enough mobility and gotten enough strength that I can tolerate that.

Brett McKay:

Well, Milica, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book in your work?

Dr. Milica McDowell:

So our book is called I, and it is available everywhere by books, Amazon, Target, Barnes and Noble, Walmart. We are doing some live events around the US and around London in order to meet the people and get to share our message. My website is milicamcdowell.com. You can find me on Instagram at DrMilicaMcDowelldpt. And yeah, I look forward to meeting people in person. It’s one of those things, if you ever see me in an airport watching people walk, come tap me on the shoulder and say hello.

Brett McKay:

Fantastic. Well, Milica McDowell, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Dr. Milica McDowell:

Thanks, Brett.

Brett McKay:

My guest here is Dr. Milica McDowell. She’s the co-author of the book Walk: Rediscover the Most Natural Way to Boost Your Health and Longevity One Step at a Time. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about her work at our website, Milicamcdowell.com. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but to put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Note: This is a rebroadcast.

A lot of young men today struggle in finding their footing in adulthood. They feel lost, directionless, and unsure of who they are and how to confidently and competently navigate the world.

Part of the reason for this is that most young men today lack something which was once a part of nearly every culture in the world, but has now almost entirely disappeared: a rite of passage.

My guest today didn’t want his son to flounder on the way to maturity, nor to miss out on having an initiation into manhood, so he set out to create a 6-year journey for him that would help him move from boy to man. His name is Jon Tyson, and he’s the author of The Intentional Father: A Practical Guide to Raise Sons of Courage and Character. Today on the show, Jon unpacks the components of the years-long journey into manhood he created for his son, beginning with how he brainstormed those components by doing “The Day Your Son Leaves Home” exercise. We then discuss how old Jon’s son was when he started his rite of passage and why it began with him having a “severing dinner” with his mom. We get into what his rite of passage consisted of, from the kickoff ceremony to the challenges, experiences, trips, and daily rituals Jon used to impart values and teach his son the “5 Shifts of Manhood.” Jon shares how moving his son’s focus from being a good man, to being good at being a man, helped him get remotivated to continue the process, why his rite of passage included a gap year after high school, and how Jon celebrated the end of his son’s journey into becoming a man. We also discuss whether Jon did something similar with his daughter. We end our conversation with some key principles any dad can use to start intentionally helping their kids become well-rounded individuals who can confidently step out on their own and into the world.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM Article: The Importance of Fathers
• AoM Article: The Importance of Male Rites of Passage
• AoM Article: Male Rites of Passage From Around the World
• AoM Article & Podcast: Man’s Need for Ritual
• AoM Series on the origins, elements, and future of manhood
• AoM Article: The 7 Habits — Begin With the End in Mind
• AoM Article: The 3 Families Every Young Man Needs to Grow Up Well
• James Hollis
• AoM Article: Carry the Fire
• Art of Manliness’ Carry the Fire Zippo Lighter
• AoM Article: What Is Manliness?
• AoM Podcast #527 With Richard Rohr
• The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact by Chip and Dan Heath
• The Way of Men by Jack Donovan
• AoM Podcast #49 With Jack Donovan
• AoM Series on the Four Archetypes of the Mature Masculine
• AoM Article: 100 Skills Every Man Should Know
• AoM Article: 80+ Quotes on Men & Manhood

Connect With Jon Tyson

• Primal Path
• Jon on Twitter
• Jon on IG

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Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. A lot of young men today struggle in finding their footing in adulthood. If you’re lost, directionless and unsure of who they are and how to confidently and competently navigate the world. Part of the reason for this is that most young men today lack something which was once part of nearly every culture in the world, but has now almost entirely disappeared: A rite of passage. My guest today didn’t want his son to flounder on the way to maturity nor miss out on having an initiation into manhood, so he set out to create a six-year journey for him that would help him move from boy to man. His name is Jon Tyson, and he’s the author of The Intentional Father: A Practical Guide to Raise Sons of Courage and Character. Today on the show, Jon impacts the components of the years-long journey into manhood he created for his son, beginning with how he brainstormed these components by doing the day-your-son-leaves-home exercise.

We then discuss how old Jon’s son was when he started his rite of passage and why it began with him having a severing dinner with his mom. We get into what his rite of passage consisted of, from the kick-off ceremony to the challenges, experiences, trips and daily rituals Jon used to impart values, teach his son the five shifts of manhood. Jon shares how moving his son’s focus from being a good man to being good at being a man helped him get re-motivated to continue the process, why his rite of passage included a gap year after high school and how Jon celebrated the end of his son’s journey into becoming a man. We also discuss whether Jon did something similar with his daughter. We end our conversation with some key principles any dad can use to start intentionally helping their kids become well-rounded individuals who can confidently step out on their own and into the world. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/passage.

And away we go. Alright, Jon Tyson, welcome to the show.

Jon Tyson: Good day, mate. How are you? Thanks for having me on.

Brett McKay: So you got a book out called The Intentional Father: A Practical Guide to Raise Sons of Courage and Character. And in this book, you walk readers through on how you developed and carried out a years-long rite of passage into manhood for your son. So let’s talk about this. When did you first get the idea of doing this sort of… This was involved. This started… This was years long, right? Started when he became a teenager, went through… Till he left the house. When did you come up with this idea?

Jon Tyson: I think the first moment it really hit me was driving back from the doctor when they told me, “Hey, do you wanna know if your son’s a boy or a girl?” And I said, obviously, “It’s a boy.” And I just had this profound sense of being overwhelmed that I personally did not have what it took to help my son become a man. I got married young and faced all the challenges of my own inadequacy, dealing with the complications of life, and I thought, “I have got to do better for my son.” And that’s where the idea was born. So I think another key moment, I was meeting with a local faith leader, and he was talking about the way their community helped young men move from adolescence to manhood, and I thought, “I don’t have anything like that, and I have got to build something like that.” Yeah, so very, very early on, and I spent about a decade reading, trying to figure out how to do it.

Brett McKay: Did you have something like that in your own life when you were a boy transitioning to manhood? Did you get a rite of passage?

Jon Tyson: I had absolutely nothing. I mean, zero. So I was working from a pretty big deficit, and I think a lot of dads are. A lot of folks out there sort of feel there’s a hole in their life, and they’re trying to figure out how to catch up, fill that and then do something better for their own kids.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I think a lot of men are like that. They didn’t have that experience but they want it for their own sons, so they’re trying to give their sons the experience that they didn’t have.

Jon Tyson: Yeah, totally.

Brett McKay: And something you start off in the book talking about is the research. You’ve done a lot of research about what happens when boys don’t have fathers, don’t have involved fathers. What does the research say as to what happens to boys when they lack a strong father figure?

Jon Tyson: Well, it’s actually very, very clear. Sort of the go-to research most people reference is from fatherhood.org, but it’s basically what you think. Kids are four times more likely to live in poverty, more likely to suffer emotional behavioral problems, higher levels of risky and aggressive behavior, two times the risk of infant mortality which is crazy, more likely to go to prison, only one in five inmates grew up in a home where their father was present, twice as likely to be involved in early sexual activity. So the presence of a dad in a home makes an incredible difference. With all of our conversations about justice in the world today, I don’t know why this one doesn’t get more attention, because one of the greatest cultural advantages that someone could have in life is a present, loving father figure. So yeah, the impact is massive.

Brett McKay: Well, and besides, you’re trying to move beyond just having a present, involved dad. Your ideal of a good dad is an intentional father, where a father intentionally thinks about walking their sons through an initiation process. What do you think men lack when they transition into adulthood without having almost like a ritual to carry them into manhood?

Jon Tyson: Well, I think there’s some kind of deep, internal inadequacy. There’s some sense of a desire to bless, pass on, and help, but they don’t have a source to get it from. So I think there’s a lot of confusion. I think there’s a lot of pain. Our culture has gotten rid of most of the sort of life passages other than formal education, and so there’s a lot of people walking around really wondering, “Am I even a man?” When are you a man? When you lose your virginity? The first time you drink alcohol? When you get your first paycheck? When you leave home? No one seems to know when manhood is conferred on them, and then how they distribute it to other people. So yeah, I think there’s a hole in the soul of most men and they’re seeking and striving to catch up with it.

Brett McKay: And something you talk about in the book, one way men often fill that hole is they create self-initiations for themselves.

Jon Tyson: Yeah. You see this… Young people… I mean, you obviously remember this. When you hit puberty, the whole world changes. Your body is filled with testosterone, you got chemicals pumping, you got all of this energy. And the number one thing you’re trying to figure out what to do with it is, how do you channel this in a life-giving rather than destructive way? And that’s what these rites of passage historically were designed to do, to create guard rails, so the gift of male energy could be channeled for the good of the community and the man. Without those guard rails, you see all the damage we see in our world today. Without initiation, young men will seek to do something with their energy that confers a sense of confidence and blessing.

So, whether it’s risky behavior, whether it’s underaged drinking, whether it is sexual behavior or whatever, you’ve basically got young men saying, “Help me figure out what to do with this energy.” And when you look at some of the other rites of passage that other cultures have had, they are… Some of ’em are harrowing. And we would probably take kids away from parents who did some of these ancient rites of passage. They can sound kind of barbaric. But when you look at the levels of anxiety with our young people today, depression with young men, the challenges that teenage boys face, our lack of initiation at scale is more damaging than the initiation cultures, no matter how intense they were, of other societies. So, yeah, I’m a big believer that we have to reclaim rites of passage, create guard rails, so that male energy can be channeled for the good of society. And that’s definitely what I’m trying to address in the book.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I like that… The idea of… This is… The idea is to channel male energy or masculine energy. And it’s one of the analogies I’ve used throughout the years when I’ve tried to explain difference between masculinity and manliness. Masculinity is just that energy and vigor that’s borne through testosterone, right?

Jon Tyson: Yes.

Brett McKay: And then manliness is a culture that you use to direct that energy, or manhood is a culture that you direct that energy. So it’s kind of like electricity. Masculinity is electricity. You create a culture of manliness or manhood to funnel that energy. But if you don’t have any wires that’s directing that masculine energy, it becomes dangerous.

Jon Tyson: Yeah, definitely. Totally agree. Yeah.

Brett McKay: Okay. So let’s talk about… You had this idea, your son was born, you’re like, “Okay, I’m gonna… I wanna create an initiation for him, to give him things that I didn’t have. And so when you started this planning process, you went through this exercise you call, the-day-your-son-leaves-home exercise. Walk us through that. What kinda questions are you asking yourself as you guide yourself through this thought process?

Jon Tyson: Yeah. I got the idea from Stephen Covey’s book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, where it talks about, Begin with the end in mind. And it has that exercise where you pretend it’s your funeral, and then you go back and sort of ask yourself the question, “What sort of life and legacy do I wanna leave?” And I thought, that’s a great framework to apply to a ton of different areas of life. And I thought, I’m gonna apply this to the day where I send my son off to either college or some sort of gap year or whatever. And I did… I thought about this when he was really young. And I basically just worked my way backwards, try to keep that day very, very vivid and real in my heart, and then ask a series of questions to design this pathway for him. The first one was like, What do I want my son to know? I want him to be a man of wisdom. I want him to be able to navigate the complexities of life. Number two, Who do I want my son to be? And this was about his moral, ethical and character formation. Then, What do I want my son to be able to do? And this is sort of skill acquisition. A man should be able to do stuff, step in a room and add value through skill acquisition. And then, What experiences do I need to design to make this happen? With all the best intentions in the world, without a conscious pathway and designing experiences where these things are developed, it’s never gonna be there.

So, yeah, I basically worked backwards. And just like you do with a college degree, sort of you say, “Hey, in order to get a degree, you’re gonna have to do X amount of classes, and it’s gonna have to either be a two-year associates or a four-year or a graduate degree.” I just worked backwards, starting at around age 13 when he was hitting puberty, and then worked it out till he was 18, and then created a pathway around knowledge and character and skill development and the experiences to help him do that. And then one of the things I did was to basically ask the question, Who can help me with this? I’m a big believer that dads are fundamental in a young man’s formation. But we’re living in a world where a lot of people don’t have dads or step dads or they’re asking the question about mentoring. And so I sort of came up with this idea of building a tribe or a cohort of fathers who do this together, and then coming up, with those dads, with an asset map. And sort of everybody puts in the middle of the room, What assets do you have available in your life? Someone may say, “Hey, we have a lake house.” Someone may say, “I got a second car, and I’m willing to let the boys learn to drive in it.” Someone may say, “Hey, I’ve got a series of key relationships in my industry, and I can… ” Or that, “I’ve got access to some cool sporting events.” And then you sort of start dreaming from there.

So it was like a big white board exercise. And then I worked my way backwards, and that was how I basically designed what I call the Primal Path, which is the sort of six-year journey I came up with.

Brett McKay: No, the-day-your-son-leaves-home exercise is really powerful. I went through it through my head and trying to imagine what my son… He’s 11 right now, and imagine when he’s 18, and he’s leaving the roost. It’s just… It really gets you…

Jon Tyson: It’s heavy. Yeah.

Brett McKay: It’s a gut punch. You’re just like… And you wanna know, like, What is he gonna be like? What do I want him to be like?

Jon Tyson: Yeah, totally.

Brett McKay: And I like this idea of developing an asset map. So it’s… You get the idea of what… The things that you want your son to know, understand, be able to do. But then try to figure out, Okay, what do I have at my disposal to make that happen? And not just things, but, Who are the other people in my life that can help me make this happen? I think that was… I loved how you focused on that in making this a community project. Oftentimes, when I think… When I hear dads talk about, “I wanna do a rite of passage for my son,” it’s just him and their son. That’s fine. But I think something… There’s a power when you bring other men into the process as well.

Jon Tyson:Yeah. If you put too much pressure on a dad… No dad is gonna be a perfect father. And so to put all that psychic pressure on a dad can be overwhelming, but to distribute that through a community of men where a father or a mentor plays a primary role, but is surrounded by this cast of other sort of like wise, passionate, helpful men, I think that is a real gift. And I think it’s actually something that young men ache for. Why is there such devotion to teams, team sports, having coaches around? It’s ’cause we need that sense of community and belonging as we grow and develop. So it was very important for me, not just to be, my son and I, but it was like my son and I and a cohort of other guys walking through this.

Brett McKay: Well, I think too, part of the… What you’re trying to do in an initiation or rite of passage is help the boy cut themselves off in a way from their family. So if it’s just the dad, that’s a problem. That’s gonna be hard to do. ‘Cause if you’re always there in the process, it’s hard to cut yourself off away from your father. But if you have another man there, you can have those periods where you can experience that. And I’ve noticed in my own life, I look back in my own life, my dad was always there and he taught me a lot of important things. But I remember, it really… Like a lot of times, oftentimes, the things that he told me or he modeled hit home when there was another man that wasn’t my father…

Jon Tyson: Yeah, totally agree.

Brett McKay: Showing me that. Okay. So you came with this idea what you wanted your son to be like, then you did… You started off an initial ceremony, but it was with your wife. It was mom that kick-started this thing off. What’s… That’s… I think that a lot of guys think, what’s going on there? Why’d you do that?

Jon Tyson: Well, that was interestingly enough, the most controversial piece of this period. And this is the place I get the most feedback. Just to take a little half step back, James Hollis who was I think the president of the Jungian society, he’s written a ton of books on midlife, on pathways, on stage development and theory. He basically said all societies have a six-step process of walking boys through adolescence into manhood, and one of those stages is what he calls the death of childhood thinking.

And it’s an environment where you’ve gotta be cut off from the primary influences of childhood in order to enter liminal space. And one of the things that a lot of societies did was consciously severed an overemphasized bond between mother and child, so that he could learn to be formed by the community of men. So I did what I called a severing dinner, which the publisher reduced down to a directional dinner, which sounded less threatening. And it was basically, I talked my wife into doing this, and my wife’s an absolute legend. She’s an incredible woman. And I said,” Hey, look, I need Nate not to shrink back to you for comfort, but I need you to push him back to me for formation and for challenge.” And so she took him out for a dinner to his favorite restaurant. Even though I’m from Australia, she took him to Outback. It’s a cliche, but it is what it is. [chuckle] And he’s at Outback steakhouse and then she gave him a series of gifts.

And then, I come from a faith background, so she prayed a prayer of blessing over him, sort of like an important marking moment. And then she said to him, “Hey, I’m your mother. I love you. I’ll always be here for you and I’ll care for you, but you need to be handed to your father to learn how to become a man. This is gonna be hard. It’s gonna be a challenge, and you’re gonna want to come back to me to ease and find comfort for the discomfort and challenges you’re facing. And I want you to know I’m gonna push you back to your dad and I’m not gonna nurture your immaturity.” And that was a really powerful moment. Now, to fast forward several years, when I was with my son closing out our journey together, I said to him, “Hey, Nate, I’m getting quite a bit of pushback on the dinner that you did with mom.” And he said, “No, no, no, no, you have to include that.” He said, “I cannot put into words how psychologically powerful that was for me, to realize I was entering this journey primarily being formed by men.” And he was like, “That jump-started this whole thing in my heart that I was actually entering into a different stage together.” So, yeah, it began with my wife and then sort of moved to a formal initiation ceremony on a beach off the coast of New York City.

Brett McKay: And what did that ceremony look like? Who was there and what did you do?

Jon Tyson: So I basically got three other dads together. I’ve been in New York city for the last 17 years. So, it was a few other dads who were my son’s closest friends, and basically cast this vision for him about building this pathway from adolescence into manhood. And then we designed an initiation ceremony. So we hyped it up for a few months, so they’d be a little nervous and also excited. And then when the day came, when all the boys had turned 13, this is late summer, we took them out to the beach and sat them in the sand and gathered around, told them a series of stories, shared some of our own personal lessons and learning. And then sort of tried to put… To say it in a good way, sort of inspire them and paint a picture of what was coming, and put the fear of God in them about how hard this was gonna be.

So there was sort of like that anticipatory terror. And then they ran into the water sort of like a religious baptism into this journey, dying to their old ways of childhood. And then, rising into this journey. And then we took them to Coney Island where they played a bunch of games together. And that was the kickoff. I then gave my son some gifts. I’m a big believer in the power of artifacts. And there’s something potent of one generation passing on something to the next generation that they can handle and know that they’re in a part of a continuing story. So I gave my son a really strong leather journal, I gave him a really nice pen. And then along the way, a whole series of gifts to sort of like mark it out and get along. I had this vision before I started where I wanted my son to start on the coast of New York. And I wanted his journey to end on the coast of Spain. And there’s a little town called Finisterre, and it’s a place where pilgrims, after they do this long hike, leave behind something at the end of their pilgrimage. And I had planned to sort of like go into the ocean in New York and go into the ocean in Spain. And so I had it planned to bookend and so that’s why it was done at the beach, and that’s why water was an important part of that.

Brett McKay: You were thinking way… You were thinking with the end in mind, again going back to Stephen Covey.

Jon Tyson: Yeah. That’s exactly right. Yeah. And when he leaves home, I really just… And this is one thing I would encourage dads or mentors to do. A lot of times men get into the workplace and they have…

They’re casting vision. They’re thinking abut sales or strategy or how to build things out, how to take ground, and they’ve got a ton of energy and gifts of vision casting, and that sort of stuff. But when it comes to their own kids we don’t apply any of the skills we have in our jobs to our parenting. And, if you were to put me on like a strength finder test, strategic would be number two for me. So I was like, “Hey, I’m a pretty strategic person. Why not apply this to fatherhood and then build this out?” So yeah, I had thought through this journey and tried to figure out the core components of it, and that certainly took away a lot of the panic and fear, even though there still was a ton of that being a dad.

Brett McKay: So when do you think a son should start the rite of passage? Like how do you know that they’re ready?

Jon Tyson: I think, universally through history, it’s sort of around the age of 13 or so. And I don’t know if that is… I don’t know if there’s anything culturally specific around that. Certainly not in our world anymore. Turning 13, I guess you’re a teenager, but that’s not that big a deal. I think it’s more connected to puberty. It’s when your body’s beginning to change. It’s when testosterones coming in. It’s when you start to think about sexuality. It’s when you start to think about your strength. It’s when competition really sets in. That’s when you start thinking about even a sense of vocation. You stop wanting to be the things you say when you’re four or five, and you’ve got a bit more of a realistic sense of where it is. You’re getting into sports or into academics in a new way. And so I think, again, it’s about that male energy. You’re trying to figure out “What do I do with this?” It can be very, very confusing and disorienting energy too. So right around the time this is happening within you, you want a community of men to come around you and to tell you the energy is good. It’s a gift. It must be channeled the right way and here is the path. So yeah. Universally, it seems to be sort around 13, around the age of puberty.

Brett McKay: Okay. So your son does the ceremony with his mom. You have the initiation ceremony with his friends and some other dads at the beach. The first part of this initiation, year’s long initiation process, was you actually took your son back home where you grew up. Why did you do that? What was the point of this?

Jon Tyson: Well, I mean, if I could sum up modern culture in one phrase, it would be this, project self. Project self. We live in a world that’s telling you all the time, “You are the center of everything.” Narcissism is at epidemic proportions in our world today. And particularly when you’re a teenager, you can be pretty inwardly focused. It is a confusing time. And you can think that there’s nothing outside of yourself and that there’s nothing that mattered before you showed up. And I wanted my son to have a bigger picture of life. I wanted my son to realize what shaped me, what was gonna be shaping him, and I wanted him to step into sort of a family narrative. Various family traditions, some ethnic, some religious, record family trees for different reasons. I happen to have a cousin who was a history buff, and has got a PhD in history, and he traced our family line back to the 10th century. And so he presented me like this hundreds of pages of book of our family story. And, I mean the whole thing, family crest, family mottos, it was amazing. And so, I presented that to my son, “Hey, you’re a part of a long line of Tyson men and this is what it means.” And then I wanted him to see where I grew up and what it was like for me to develop my own values.

So I took him back to Australia where I grew up, I’m from a city called Adelaide, and basically had him go through the places that formed the values of my life so that when I talked about something, he’d knew where it was. I wanted him to have a context for the story that he was stepping into. And I think without… Alastair McIntyre said this, “We can only ask the question, what am I to do if I can answer the previous question, what stories am I a part of? Or what story or stories am I a part of?” And so if you’re gonna figure out your role you’ve gotta figure out the story that you’re in, and I really felt it was important to give my son the sense of continuity and history so he could understand the story that he was extending.

Brett McKay: Now, I think that’s important. I think another way you could sum up modern life is lack of context. A lot of people were just… You’re kind of thrown into this milieu where it’s just, you’re getting bombarded by all these different stories, and you don’t have a story that you’re embedded in. And so, you’re disoriented. And I think telling your kid like, “Hey, this is… You’re part of this story. This is our family story. This is what you’re part of,” gives them some context. Now, I think this is important because it can give them, one, they could step into that and lean into it. But even if they decide not to, by giving them that story, they’re able to know like, “Oh, how can I make myself different?” It gives them something to push back against if that makes sense.

Jon Tyson: Yeah. Yeah, totally.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I think a lot of young people, they’re just kind of flapping their arms. They don’t know what they’re doing.

Jon Tyson: And I think there’s a… I think it’s important too to tell the family story in a compelling way and an honest way. The whole idea of a family reunion where it’s like a bunch of people you don’t really like wearing weird t-shirts, I wasn’t trying to do that with my son. I was trying to let him know, “Hey man, our family has an incredible history. It’s a history of people who have taken big risks. It’s a history of people who’ve sacrificed. It’s a history of people who’ve paid a real price for you to be where you are in the world today. And I want you to know you come from good stock. To be a Tyson, Tyson means fire brand, like carry the fire.” I have the Carry the Fire lighters from Art of Manliness.

But like that whole concept man, this you are born into a legacy and you don’t get to invent a universe from nothing. And there’s good things I want you to have. There’s bad things I wanna warn you about that could flow into your life because of the things we’ve been through, and then I wanna figure out how to help you carry this forward through your calling and your personality. And that was actually a really, really amazing time. I’ve had a pretty wild life. I dropped outta high school, worked in a meat factory, bought a house when I was 19, immigrated to another country. I’ve had pretty wild teenage years, and I wanted my son to sort of like see that and feel the weight of that so he could understand the context that I was parenting out of. So he really enjoyed that time even though I was heartbroken that he came back saying, “Dad, American food is better than Australian food.” But what can you do?

Brett McKay: And what I like about what you did too is you would take him to places where you made really big decisions in your own life.

Jon Tyson: Yeah.

Brett McKay: And I think that’s a really great idea cause it allows your son… It gives him a pattern to follow, when he’s making his own big decisions.

Jon Tyson: Yeah. My values were vision, passion, discipline and risk. When I go back through history, I’ve always valued visionary men. They look beyond the horizons of what is possible, and they dream bigger dreams for themselves and for the culture. I’ve always loved men of passion. I’ve respected men of discipline, who have channeled again their energy to something redemptive and something good. And then if you’re good at those things, if you’ve got vision and passion in your discipline, you’re gonna get opportunities that’s gonna require risk. So, I took him to the four places I learned those values. And again, I totally agree, when something emerges in your life, in order for it to be internalized and to become a sacred part of your story, you go to market. The power of ritual and recognition, so our life is not just a blur of ordinary days. So yeah. And I see my son doing that now. My son will take time and say, “This place matters to me. This is an important part of my story. Those sorts of things.” So yeah. He learned that by seeing it on that trip.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. So one of your big goals through this whole entire process was to teach your son values, family values, to help him develop his own personal values, but you also had this idea like, “I wanna inculcate masculine values into my son.” What were those values and why do you think that was important?

Jon Tyson: It is a confusing time in our culture to ask the question, “What is a man? What does it mean to be a man?” There’s a lot of stereotypes out there. There’s a lot of negative press in there. One of the things I try to emphasize to sort of get away from the controversy, and there is a lot of controversy, was the power of classical virtues. So the four classical versus: Justice, wisdom, courage, and self-restraint. I felt like the men we need in our world today are embodied in these values. We need just men in a world of tyrants. We need restrained men in a world of excess. We need wise men in a world of fools. And we need courageous men in a world of fear. Again, as someone from a faith tradition, the most important values according to St. Paul are faith, hope and love. And so to extend that I’m like, “We need faithful men in a world of compromise. We need hopeful men in a time of despair. We need loving men in a world of hate.”

So, I try to take these noble historically proven virtues and make those the baseline. And, particularly in Greco-Roman culture, these were masculine values. These were values that were associated with men. And so rather than just sort of pluck from thin air, choose random cultural values, I tried to find something that was a little more timeless and rooted.

Brett McKay: And one way you passed on these values or taught your son these values, you did this, you’d take him on trips and you’d of you’d just show it. I think that’s a very… I think that’s probably the most powerful way. But then you’d have these… Every morning you’d sit down with him and you’d have these little talks, and you’d also assign him books to read. Tell us about that.

Jon Tyson: Yeah. Well, again, I think I got the vision of just college or high school, which is, “What do you need to cover in order to graduate? How do you graduate into manhood? What do you need to have passed?” And again, getting back to know be and do as the sort of core tenants there. So yeah. I got a calendar and I worked back through a series of months, and I just said, “Here’s the content I wanna cover in this time,” and then I just broke it up into little chunks and then we just talked through it. So yeah. I just wanted to have this point every day where I was connecting. When you ask the question, “How does somebody grow? How does somebody change? How are they really shaped or formed?” It’s normally two things. It’s big, powerful, catalytic defining moments, and then it’s like the ordinary everyday habitual repetitive stuff we do in our lives. And so, that’s what I was doing in the daily little check-ins. Sometimes they were 15 minutes, sometimes they were 40 minutes, depending on what we were talking about. But it was just getting up early before school and then picking the theme we were working on, whether it was like one of the archetypes or one of the shifts.

And then I’d just come up with content and we’d just talk it through. So, I think just sowing those small seeds every day over the course of years produces a massive kind of fruit. So, I asked my son like, “What are some of the takeaways that you got from that?” And a lot of it were like pithy little phrases. My son said the number one thing that I’ve taken away from all of these years of content was this idea, “You are who you are when no one’s looking. That’s your true self. When you’re accountable as your own man in the world before your creator, that’s who you really are, without people pushing you.” And that was just something like I winged one morning. It was just like, “Okay, let me just throw that in. You know?” So again, you never know by sowing those seeds what’s gonna stick and what’s really gonna like impact and help.

Brett McKay: And then also throughout the process, you’d read books together or you’d even watch movies. So if you were talking about courage, you would watch Band of Brothers, for example.

Jon Tyson: Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean we just churned through the movies. If you’re a busy dad, I can tell you, come up with a few discussion questions, watch a movie, make him thoughtful, and you can have a great night together. Yeah, the Band of Brothers and barbecue was a very, very strong season that we did. So we would just like talk about… Watch an episode, talk about what we learned in the characters, and then we’d go out and eat meat. And we sort of went through the… Because I used to be a butcher, we would go to different barbecue restaurants, and we honestly sort of ate our way around New York City as a reward for doing these nights together. So that was a lot of fun. Build your traditions. With my daughter, we did it with cookies. She didn’t wanna eat brisket every week, so…

Brett McKay: Yeah, I wanna talk about something, what you do with your daughter, in a bit here. Okay, so one of the things you did with this right of passage process is you used the work, or looked at the work of Richard Rohr. We’ve had him on the podcast before. Franciscan Monk, who’s thought and does a lot about male initiation. And you took this idea that Rohr has, of the five rules of manhood that every boy needs to learn in order to become a man, and then you modified it to… And you called them the shifts of manhood. So what are the five shifts of manhood?

Jon Tyson: Yeah, I mean, Rohr is obviously a sage. He spent half a lifetime thinking about this stuff and has some very, very strong works on that. But I felt like, I mean how do you say to a 13-year-old kid, “You are gonna die. You’re not that important. Life is not about you.” And then how do you help him see that he’s making progress on that? And so, I sort of converted him into these shifts. Yeah, so the shifts are from ease to difficulty. Boys embrace ease men embrace difficulty, from self to others. Boys are about themselves, men are about others. From the whole to a part, boys are all about themselves, men realize they’re only a part of a greater story. From control to surrender, boys think they can maintain control, men understand the mysterious power of surrender. And then, from the temporary to the eternal, boys only think about what matters right now, but men think out of a larger picture. And then, yeah. I designed these units to help him really learn these lessons.

And so, to be able to say, “Hey, boys are about ease themselves, the whole thing, control and temporary things, and men are about difficulty, others, humility, surrender, thinking big picture.” So yeah. I would take a couple of months on each of these, have a little daily talk about it, do this weekly thing that we call man school, and then at the end of it we would do a challenge.

So from ease to difficulty, for example, my son’s terrified of heights. So I took him in Australia to the highest ropes course and Mike, this thing was… I hate heights too. This was horrific but I wanted him to see, “Hey man, if you do this, you’ve passed like you have now embraced difficulty. Like you’re ready to move on to the next unit.” And so it was a real joy seeing him do an actual challenge that kind of scared him a bit where he had to overcome something. But it was just a way of showing progress. I think there’s nothing more demoralizing for men than working hard and seeing no progress from your labor. And so I wanted to build in this sense of “I am taking ground. I am moving down the path. I am heading down the road from adolescence into manhood” and this was something that, particularly with my son, was very, very effective.

Brett McKay: No. And I love one for the shift for temporary to the eternal like you took him to a graveyard and that was really impactful. That was one of those other things that really stuck with your son when you asked him, “What was some of the things that stuck?” And he was like, “This pithy off-the-cuff remark about “You look at a gravestone and you see the date someone’s born, then a dash and then the date they die.” And you said, “That dash, that was their life. And what’s gonna be what’s gonna be your dash?”

Jon Tyson: Yeah. What’s your dash? That was actually a really meaningful moment. And my son, anytime we go past a graveyard would to this day be like, “What’s your dash, dad? Make it count.” And it is kind of amazing to think there’s that person, their life is over. They’d do anything to get a second chance at it. Gosh. Don’t squander your life man. Time is a gift. Time is the most important commodity. And so, think properly and steward your time. And I think to this day, my son is very time-conscious as a result of that moment.

Brett McKay: Okay, so these five shifts, you would spend a few months and would you revisit like, say if you did… From whole story to part of the story, a year before, would you revisit it and say, “Hey, we’re gonna talk about this and more?”

Jon Tyson: Yeah. I’m always just… When we talk about how memory works, we forget in a week 75% of what we’ve heard a week earlier. And so you’ve got to do what they call deep encoding. And that primarily comes through spaced repetition. And we all know that you can cram overnight and pass a test and learn nothing, or you can study, which means like every couple of days you’re like loading it back into your mind, and yeah. I was constantly trying to reinforce the core ideas. And I did that over the course of several years. So yeah. Spaced repetition is really important. Keep hitting the same things again and again and again, and I think all people that educate well get this just like refocusing, putting the emphasis on these things, so they go from external into an internal component where they can carry with them for the rest of their lives.

Brett McKay: Another thing that I really, I like that you talked about in the book is this idea of preparing for moments that your adolescent’s gonna face as they go through puberty right into adulthood. And I think these moments are often, if you don’t have a conscious, intentional rite of passage, these moments often become the rite of passage.

Jon Tyson: Yeah.

Brett McKay: But what you’re trying to do with this idea of preparing for moments is making these moments part of a larger rite of passage. And so these are things like, first shave, when your kid gets their first cell phone, when they get a driver’s license. And you thought about like, “What can I do to make these… Make my son see, these moments are part of a bigger picture?”

Jon Tyson: Yeah. I’m a big believer that the book, The Power of Moments by Chip and Dan Heath, that was just a masterclass. As a leader… As a person, your life is really a series of defining moments that have shaped you. If you were to sort of map out your story, you’re basically gonna pull out some disproportionately impactful moments, either of pain or of wounding. And I was like, okay, so these moments like we’re gonna be shaped by these moments. Is there a way to consciously cultivate them, to prepare in advance when the young men ones happen, but then sort of have a framework on how to do it? And so I was very, very aware. And I think scientists tell us as well, like the memories we form in our late teens and early 20s tend to be the strongest memories we carry our whole life, because we’re going through so many firsts and they find their way into our long term memory, they’re converted into long term memory by the potency and novelty of the event.

So, yeah, I was trying to figure out how to do those things and how to and how to build them up. A classic, my son got his driver’s license. He passed his test in New York City, and you wanna talk about a harrowing adventure, taking your driving test in New York City. And when he comes back, he didn’t even know if he passed or not. The lady just said to him, “You need to work on your three-point turns.” And then hands him a sheet. And I was like, “Did you pass or not?” He was like, “I don’t know.” I thought, “What a missed opportunity.” She could have said to him, “Young man, congratulations. You now can drive to California if you want. The car is yours, the roads are yours. Welcome to freedom.” She could have built this into a thing, and he would remember that forever. Instead, he had a terrible moment and he barely remembers it. So I had to mark that moment for him.

So, how do you make these moments and use them in ways that bring healing and blessing to our kids rather than our wounds? One of the big ideas they say in the book that I love is “Beware the soul-sucking voice of reasonableness.” And you can blow a moment out into a lifetime memory by adding 15% or 20% more energy to it. So just by adding a few more little details to it, you can change the whole experience. So I’ll give you a practical example. I had some dads who read my book, who flew in from Colorado to have a cigar and talk with me about the book. So here’s what I could have done, I could have sat them down and I could have said, “Hey, thanks for coming fellows.” But that’s not what I did. I went and brought a couple of bottles of very, very exquisite beverages to pair with the cigars. I got them a box of these Melanio cigars. I had this elaborate presentation and when they sat down, they were kind of dumbfounded. “Who’s this for?” I’m like, “This is for you. You came all of this way, I wanted to create a great experience for you.” And at the end of the night, I let him keep the glasses so that every time they use that glass they can remember the story, and it’s like those guys will remember that for a very, very long time because a normal moment was turned into a powerful moment.

And so I wanted to get a black belt in creating moments that shape people. And so I encourage dads that to be intentional, to think about these in advance, to have a plan. What are you gonna do if you find out your kid’s looking at porn, which statistically almost 90% of kids at some point will look at porn. How are you gonna respond to that? Are you gonna create a culture of shame or are you gonna help them understand sexuality and who women are? Yeah, so I just went through those moments and I’ve got a list of them in a book. Some of the big ones that you can think through and begin to plan around, but to me, getting those moments right is a huge, huge part of helping our son move through the world with blessing rather than wounds.

Brett McKay: So as you went through this process, I’m sure your kid was really excited at the beginning, ’cause beginnings are always exciting and new ’cause you’re doing new things.

Jon Tyson: Yeah.

Brett McKay: But then your son hit wall with this process.

Jon Tyson: Yes.

Brett McKay: He kinda started to lose interest, he’s like, “Ah, jeez. Dad, do we really have to do these morning talks?”

Jon Tyson: Yes.

Brett McKay: But this is hard part in any endeavor, this is the part where whether you’re starting a business, you’re doing a fitness routine, start training, start a fitness routine, this is the wall.

Jon Tyson: Yeah.

Brett McKay: You made a shift at this point to make the process not just about becoming a good man. So here’s what your trying to do. You’re trying to help your son harness his masculine energy to be… For the good of the community, but then you shifted it to about becoming good at being a man. What’s the difference and why did that shift reignite the fire in your son?

Jon Tyson: Yeah, you’ve had Jack Donovan on before. In his book The Way of Men, and he’s a somewhat controversial figure, I wanna note. But he had a core concept and I think really, really shook me, and his concept was he talked about Christian men’s movements, and that’s a part of the tradition that I come from, and he talked about a vision of good men in our society today looks typically like an overwhelmed suburban dad struggling to get his life together, and that’s basically it. It’s an overwhelmed, somewhat bored dad driven by obligation, trying to get his life together, and that’s what we think a good man is. He’s defined by what he doesn’t do. He’s not cheating on his wife, he’s not out there wasting his money, and it’s actually a pretty kind of time vision. It’s not super compelling at all, and he says, “What men actually want is to be good at being a man.” Which means when a man walks in the room, he should have a sense of confidence that he’s adding value. And so when you’re good at being a man, which means like, “I am good at understanding how women work. I am good at understanding what money is. I am good at practical skills around the home.” Obviously which your website is a…

You are a part of our central curriculum. There’s thousands of articles on practical stuff. And so I said to my son, “Hey, why do you think we’re doing this?” And he says, “You want me to be a good man.” And I said, “I do not want you to be a good man.” And he was kind of like, “What?” I was like, “No, I want you to be good at being a man” I was like, “Do you wanna walk into a room and understand how women think and not be intimidated?” And he’s like, “Yes.” I said, “Do you wanna be able to get through your high school years and have social skills where you can navigate bullies and build friends?” He’s like, “Yes.” So just like I’m trying to do the Winston Churchill which is like, get them saying yes or no. And I said, “Well, that’s what we’re here for. Man, I am here to help you be good at being a man, not to be some opaque kind of good man.” And that’s when it really kicked in, and that’s when I sort of unleashed the archetype content which is about like how to understand women and be a lover. How to understand and influence and be a leader, how to get in the fight, or how to have a cause and be a warrior, how to be a friend. What does it mean to be a brother, how do you be a sage in the world of fools, that sort of a thing.

And so when I sort of rolled out that those components, his motivation was so high, setting his own alarm, disciplining his life to get involved with it. So yeah, I kind of bland feeble morality with the stereotypical roles that has no passion, no teeth, no consequence, I’m not interested in that. And I think a lot of people today are sort of living half their lives because they’ve been shoved into these passionless scripts, and they think that this is what it is to be a man. I wanted to turn him loose, give him a bit of, as they say, fire in the belly. And that just had a massive impact on him. So it went from me trying to get him up to him voluntarily getting up. It was a real breakthrough.

Brett McKay: How old was he when this happened?

Jon Tyson: Oh gosh, he was 15.

Brett McKay: Okay, so you…

Jon Tyson: 15, so a couple of years in.

Brett McKay: And I liked how you took this idea of being good at being a man and tied it into these different roles that you started talking about. As a man, these are the roles you’re gonna have to fulfill as an adult. How can you be good at fulfilling that role? And I think that gives some direction for that, again, that masculine energy that teenage boys are starting to turn on.

Jon Tyson: Yeah, I totally agree. If you don’t… There’s nothing worse than standing in a room and feeling awkward. I don’t know how to talk to people, I don’t feel like I’m good at anything, and I don’t know why I’m here. If you’re projecting that sort of emotional field, it’s not gonna go well, for you, and that’s gonna lead… That’s gonna spiral into unhealthy places, so to begin to logically, sequentially, strategically break down the elements of how to be a man in the world and tell him, “You can do this, you can do this, man. And I’m gonna train you to be able to do those things.” That produces a ton of confidence, and I said… And then here’s what you do when you don’t know. You don’t fake it, you ask people who are better than you, and then you compliment them, and then they feel confident in themselves because they’re teaching you and they’re endeared to you, so… Now we did so much stuff on all the practical sort of like archetype stuff of how to be in the world.

When I asked my son today, he turns 22 this next week, I said, “Okay man, we’re a couple of years out for this. You’re a junior in college now. What’s your number one takeaway?” And he said, “The number one takeaway is the mental framework that I can figure out and handle anything.” And I was like, “Touch down, mate, that’s it.” If you can get that kind of internal confidence in a young man’s heart where he feels like he can face the challenges of life, that just felt like such a win for me.

Brett McKay: Oh, so just… You’d mentioned some of these roles. You had lover, so you talk about, okay, how can I be… How can I get along with women? How can I attract a mate? I think a lot of boys, they’re interested in that ’cause they just feel awkward. A leader, you had that.

Jon Tyson: Yep.

Brett McKay: I guess if you’re going back to union archetypes, to be the king, that would be the…

Jon Tyson: Yeah totally. Yes.

Brett McKay: Go ahead.

Jon Tyson: Yeah, the leader, the warrior, the brother, the wise man. There’s probably a few more you can put in there, but these… I try to sort of put these in things I felt my son from my tradition needed. And so one of it was a faith one, which is being a disciple, one was understanding women, one was about how to have the influence in the world through leadership, how to get the fire, there’s so much. In many ways, we’re driven by two forces, hope and hate, we’re driven by what we want to happen, and the thing that’s stopping it, the threat against the thing that’s stopping it. That’s what the warrior energy is, it’s like going after the thing you want, and then fighting off the thing that’s a threat to that. Then the power of friendships. Male friendships are so awkward, particularly that age, social media has definitely complicated it. But how do you be a faithful brother to somebody else, how do you stay the course, how do you build long-term friendships?

And I’m so grateful for that. My son did a gap year and in that gap year, he just got a crew, and because of some of the stuff we’ve talked about, they now do an annual reunion, so they’re three years removed, a couple of them have gone on and gotten married, but every year they’ve got this little tribe that gets together to mark the milestones of their life and just talk about the joys and sorrows they have been through the previous year. So it’s been a real joy to see him build a little brotherhood. And then how do you be a wise man? And the world’s filled with fools, it’s filled with pain, regret, lack of certainty, confusion, and how do you navigate some of the complexities of life? So we spent a lot of time talking about what is wisdom, what is the wisdom tradition? And how do you learn to grow in wisdom? The book of Proverbs talks about five kinds of fools, and there’s five ways of being foolish in the world and there’s five kinds of wisdom to overcome the five fools. So we spend time talking through that, that sort of stuff.

Brett McKay: One idea that I really liked and I’m gonna swipe from you, I’m gonna use it with my own kids is the life arc interview.

Jon Tyson: Yeah.

Brett McKay: What is that? And what did your son get out of them?

Jon Tyson: Well, the life arc interview is basically saying life is a series of seasons, it’s a series of stages, and without a sense of knowing what stage you’re in, what season you’re in, life can just feel very long and very painful and very, very confusing. But if you realize that hey, there’s certain things you gotta get right, certain things to look out for, certain things to avoid at these various stages, you’re gonna go in with your eyes wide open. And so it’s sort of a stage orientation. When you’re a freshman at college, they do a campus orientation, they do a freshman orientation and they’re basically trying to say to you, open your eyes, and here is how to navigate this well. So I wanted my son to go through life and figure out what to do with each decade or each stage of life. So to sit down with someone and basically ask, hey, what did you most enjoy about this stage and why? What are three or four of your favorite memories from this stage, what are the biggest regrets you had in this particular stage of your life? If you could do it again, what would you do differently? What do I have to get right? What do I… What must I absolutely avoid?

And then you begin to get a bit of an arc of what life is, and so one of the great challenges with young people today is they want the lifestyle in their 20s that their parents worked for in their 40s. And so if you say, hey man your 20s are not for wealth accumulation, as much as they are about vocational experimentation and understanding yourself, you’re gonna put some relief valves from the pressure of success and confusion. And then hopefully they’ve gotta have their own chronology, their friends got their own journey to walk, their own challenges and their own pace that they have to navigate, but then at least get some sense about like, “Here’s the territory,” if you go on any journey, at some point, you’re gonna break the journey down into stages. Hey, there’s a mountainous stage, there’s a flat stage, there’s a hot stage, there’s a stop here, see this. We do this on all trips in life, why don’t we do it for life itself? So that was my vision to sort of break that down and send him out talking to people older than him who have navigated this with some measure of skill, so he can get their accumulated wisdom and have an idea of where to go from there.

Brett McKay: Yeah, when I read that, I was thinking, man, I need to do this for my kid, like get… Or find an 18-year-old or a 20-year-old who’s just on it, who was a great kid, had a great teenage part of their life, and to be also to have my son just talked to him, what did you do? I was… I’m thinking when… If when I was a kid, when I was like 12, 13 and I got to rub shoulders with some really cool 18 year old that has a big impact.

Jon Tyson: 100%. And, you know, it’s amazing you’re actually helping form that 18 year old because you’re gonna make him sort of like codify what he’s learned. He’s gonna realize, hey, “I’m 18, but I’ve learned a lot.” So that’s gonna be a gift to him as well. And that’ll be something they could pass on to someone else, people… You do the best… You learn your lessons best when you teach it to other people. So yeah, I’m definitely grateful to be a part of a community that is multigenerational and living in the middle of New York City. My son’s growing up in Manhattan for 17 years before he left home. And… So for him, you know, he was surrounded by some like very, very accomplished people, but also people with a lot of pain, like, you know, unhealthy ambition and lack of focus. And so like, yeah, that being surrounded by a multigenerational community was a real gift. I encourage everybody to try and find that… This I think is… This sort of multigenerational long term thinking doesn’t happen in our world at large. And this is definitely something that I think kids will appreciate.

Brett McKay: So you mentioned your son took a Gap Year. Was this part of the initiation process?

Jon Tyson: 100%. 100%. All of these traditions, like when James Hollis talks about this, he says that all traditions have this thing called the ordeal. And the ordeal was to send the young man out into the world to see whether or not he has internalized and taken on the lessons that have been given to him from the community. And again, various traditions have done this. Some communities have a mission that they go on, they send people off. I grew up in Australia very, very common to do a Gap Year which is basically debaucherous hitchhiking across parts of Europe. Here’s what my vision was. I was like, “Okay, I’ve put a lot of content and a lot of experiences in my son, and college is such a formative experience.” I mean, it just swallows you whole. And I was like, I need to give him a little bit of space before he just rushes headlong into college to sort of see the kind of man he has become away from me where he could test it in the real world. So I also had a goal I wanna know, like I’m surrounded by a lot of wealth in Manhattan where he grew up and a lot of privilege. And I was like, “I wanna irreparably break my son’s heart for the global poor.” I want him to see that the privilege is growing in the disparity in the world. I want him to feel the pain of that gap, and I want him to be exposed to other places in other cultures.

So he’s not just like, “An American only in terms of his worldview and his thinking”. So he did a nine month trip. He went to a Swaziland, he went to Guatemala. He went all over the place and has since traveled all over the place. And he came back. And I gotta tell you, he was a different kid. He was like being being with a few friends. Like I said, “He built this little brotherhood, this little tribe and stuff that like so… ” The biggest example my son and I don’t say this to to sort of put him down. He’s actually a remarkable young man. But like he was a whiner. He would just complain. He just would just complain. And it was like such an unattractive quality to just complain. And, you know, I’d have my wife’s daughters come over and talk like how attractive… Like a little panel. So, like, here’s five women and here’s my son interviewing these five women on the panel. And I’d say, like, you know, do you think… What do you think about men who complain? They’re like, oh, it’s so unattractive. But even that these like attractive young women in their twenties on this little panel that my wife had formed, not none of that worked. But he comes back from this trip. My son is like, Yes, sir on it, sir kinda kid. And I’m like, “Where did this come from?” He said, “Dad, two weeks in, I realized I was a whiny, complaining child and I had a mirror amongst my peers of how unattractive it was.”

And I was like, “I do not want to be that guy.” And to this day, my son just like owns it and solves it. That that never would have happened with all of my years of effort, I couldn’t get that done. He gets in the world, sees the world, that sort of stuff is formed in him. He also just came back from… He just did another three month trip that he went on and he was in Turkey for that trip. And again he came back and I was like, “The maturity that was developed by getting out of his regular life in context was massive.” So I’m a big believer, you know, one bad year of college can undo 18 years of good parenting. And so I think there’s a lot of wisdom in having a liminal space where they can go through the world and sort of figure it out. So, yeah, that’s… That Was the vision for that. And he was willing to do it, interestingly enough, like my daughter did not want to do that. So that was something I had to sort of cast some vision for, for my son. He was worried like, hey, “All my friends are going to college, I’m gonna get left behind.” And we processed that. And eventually he came over and realized, “Hey, this probably be good for me.”

Brett McKay: So part of this Gap Year, we’re getting to the end, right? This is the ordeal.

Jon Tyson: Yes. Six years.

Brett McKay: Six years. He goes through his ordeal, he passes it changes him. This mission accomplished. You have this capstone ceremony. How did you cap this journey off into manhood with your son?

Jon Tyson: Well, one of the things I realized by talking… So, I said, “There’s quite a few sort of different groups and different organizations that will facilitate a Gap Year.” I think it’s becoming more and more popular. And one of the things in my research about sort of the comedown from the high of the Gap Year is that they didn’t debrief him too well.

So I said, “I’m gonna to do the Camino de Santiago.” Which is a 500 mile hike across Spain. And it took us 33 days to do it. I said, “We’re just gonna walk 500 miles.” There’s nothing to do but talk and we’re just gonna debrief this journey together. We’re gonna debrief the Gap Year. What happened in him? What did he learn? We’re gonna debrief all the content we went through. So I did like a series of questions every day. So to recap, in the six year journey, just trying to again, deep in coding reinforcement and then we just had a ton of fun.

And at the end of the 33 days, you come to the city, and there’s this big cathedral, it’s actually like, it’s overwhelming. You weep, if you talk about it, it’s such a profound experience, and you come into this cathedral of the city, and then it’s another 80 kilometer walk or so where you end in this village called Finisterre.

And you know the idea of a pilgrimage was you’re leaving something behind. And our idea for this pilgrimage was his leaving his childhood behind, so we end up in the city called… This little town Finisterre, and we go to this cove on a beach, and I’ve got all these letters from these men who’ve been journeying with him spoken into his life, men he respects, and I take him down on this beach and I’m like, “May I wanna tell you right now, man, this is well done, you have passed every test, you have earned this for the rest of your life, you need to know in your heart you are a man. You’re a blessed man.” In the Christian tradition, there’s a scene in the life of Jesus where he is baptized at the start of the gospels, and a voice from Heaven says, “This is my beloved son, who I love, in him I’m well pleased.” And because Jesus knew He was beloved at the start of his ministry, he had the courage and security in His identity to heal the sick, confront hypocrisy, fight off evil forces in his confrontation with the devil, so he was blessed to…

His sense of identity enabled him to overcome, and I wanted to say to my son, “You have my blessing, you are moving through the world, a blessed man, and you can overcome anything because you have what it takes within you.” So anyway, so he runs into the ocean like he did when he was 13, but now he’s 19. And he comes out and I do this big booming voice, like my god voice or whatever, and I’m just like, “Who is this man emerging from the ocean? Behold this is my son.” And then he comes out and we just cry, it’s a super, super powerful and emotional moment, and it was just. It was a blessing ceremony, and we both have a tattoo on our arms, the only tattoo I have, he’s got a few more, but it’s of our journey together to my inner arm, it’s the route of that Camino that ends in this little bay, this little cove where we did this journey, and that’s it. He left his childhood behind. So if you were to ask my son, how do you know you’re a man? He will say, “I died to childhood psychology, I went on a journey, I’ve learned the archetypes, I’ve made the shifts, I’ve done the ordeal. I’ve been blessed by my Father, I know I’m a man because I’ve earned it.” Bingo what a gift. So that was such a definitive moment that was six years in the making. So it wasn’t just the moment itself, it was marking a journey that he had been through that we had sort of done together, and a really, really significant a real gift to be a part of.

Brett McKay: That’s really powerful. See you have a daughter?

Jon Tyson: Yes, yes, I have a daughter, 19. She’s in… Studying Nursing in university.

Brett McKay: Well, have you and your wife done anything similar with her?

Jon Tyson: We did. It’s a little different, my wife played sort of the primary role in the formation of my daughter, so she’s got a whole thing she did, you know starting when she hit puberty and walked her through her teenage years. In her senior year, she came to me and she said, “Dad like I want you to just give me a year of your best development into adulthood.” So I did a thing with her that I just, I’m a bit of a branding guy, I’m a bit of a program guy so I created this thing for her called 50 pieces of my heart, 50 key deposits every dad has to make in his daughter’s life before she leaves home. So I did 50 weeks, and it was like a little daily check-in, and then one dinner a week where we talked about like the 50 most important things I wanted her to know about life and… Yeah, so we did that for a year. Sadly, her senior year was in COVID, and my daughter loves beauty, like my son loved the challenge, so on the Camino, when we’re walking 500 miles, it’s a heat wave, we’ve got blisters that are almost down to the bone, we lost 20 pounds, it was like a wild ordeal, my daughter loves beauty.

So one of the only countries that was open in COVID was Iceland, and so we did a ring road together, we rented a car and we drove around the country of Iceland, and I sort of created this experience for her recapping these important things and just like filling her heart with beauty. It was framed by a Frederick Buechner quote. Buechner ‘s obviously a very, very prolific, gifted author. And the quote says, “Here is the world, beautiful and terrible things will happen. Do not be afraid.” And so our whole year was based around beauty and terror, like the terror of life and the beauty of life, and not being afraid to enter into it, and so that Iceland trip was an immersion in beauty and again, that was like a really powerful time, so very very different relationship with her. My daughter is a very feminine in the traditional sense, and wonderful, wonderful young woman, she’s a helper, very kind studying Nursing and so. But my wife will have to write the book of what she did with her, I was just intentional in my relationship with her, but really did a strong year with her to sort of close out her adolescence and not to send her off.

I tell you a very, very, very, very moving moment about the importance of seizing time, I was the last person to drop her at college, my wife left the day before and I had one bone to stay with her, and after 18 years of meeting with her, every week this really intense year. We spent an hour together every day for a year, and at the end of it, we had our final dinner, and I’m walking back to my car and she’s walking to her dorm so we have this one last hug, and she hugs me and she will not let go. And she says, “Dad, I need more time. I need more time with you, I don’t have the wisdom, I don’t have everything, I need you, I need more time.” And I was like, “Sweet girl, you’ve got what it takes. This is in you. You’re gonna be fine. I’m still with you. And I walked off in tears. But I was like, Oh, those words, I need more time. I was like, that was the thing. I was like, “Gosh, our kids had gone before we know it,” and so a lot of times people say, “Jon, this sounds pretty intense,” and listen man, I am a busy man in the middle of New York City, I got a lot on my plate, lot of responsibilities, lot of stuff I handle, so it was a real sacrifice to take the time to do this for my kids, but now that they’re both gone…

If I had my time again, I’d go harder, I’d sacrifice more. Those days like I just entrusted into the hands of God and say, “Hey, I did what I could, I did this with love, I did my best and I’m gonna have to trust Him and them.” But I tell you, I’d go harder again. So it probably yeah, maybe someone’s listening to this and they’re like, “Oh my gosh, this sounds like a lot.” Yeah, it is a lot, but it’s worth it. Absolutely worth it.

Brett McKay: Well, let’s say you guys listening to this is like, “Well, maybe I just… I can’t do everything. This is awesome, what you do is awesome.” Then maybe some guys just don’t have the bandwidth, creativity, etcetera. What would you say? Okay, just to get the ball rolling, ’cause I think oftentimes once you get the ball rolling, you pick up steam and you start adding to it. What are a few practices that you would think could help that?

Jon Tyson: I would say this, consistency is more important than intensity. I would say, it’s like if you wanna lose weight, yeah, you can do a liquid fast for 30 days and then intermittent fast and then eat one meal a day. And you’ll probably do that for six weeks and put all the weight back on. Or you can cut out soda for three months, and then you can cut out soda, and then you can cut out dessert. It’s just like it’s what can you do consistently? That’s what has the formative power. You gotta find like every kid that is different, you’ve gotta find that tension of like, is this actually making a difference in their life or not, and how much does each kid need in what season after that? I would say this, let me give you a larger principle rather than a specific because that’s so personal. I think the number one goal is to build and maintain an emotional bond, that is the whole thing.

Because if that bond is there in the relationship, you can pass anything through that bond. That bond can handle any teenage rebellion, that bond can handle any hard conversation, but if that bond is not there, it is very, very hard to reinsert yourself because it just sounds like moralizing or lecturing. To me it would be like whatever it takes to build that bond. You might do something as simple as I know on your website you’ve got a list of quotes, you might just do something as simple of like sit down and create a ritual where you read one quote a day about a thing. Or maybe it’s like one night a week. But whatever it is that keeps that bond alive that’s the most important factor, and then play the long game, put a date on your calendar and work backwards and just say, “Okay, here’s what I’m gonna do from now till then. And then I’ll also say two other thoughts.

Number one, something is better than nothing. Do what you can do, don’t be overwhelmed by what you can’t do. Something is better than nothing. And then secondly, if your kids are gone and maybe you’re sitting here with a sense of regret, I would just say to you, it’s never too late. You just don’t know the power of a father or a mentor’s heart moving towards a kid with repentance and with hope. They just like I’ve got so many stories. Part of what I do is I lead the faith community in New York, and over the past almost 20 years, thousands and thousands of stories of impossible relational reconciliations. When you’re willing to move with forgiveness and humility. So don’t give up hope, set your heart and move towards your kids slowly in love and you just… You’d be amazed at the blessing they ache for, the relationship they ache for, and the power of restoration if you do it with humility and consistency.

Brett McKay: Well, Jon, this has been a fantastic conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Jon Tyson: I’ve got a course on this, it’s at primalpath.co. That’s dot C-O. And on there there’s a link for a weekly email. Every week I send out like a short thought for dads and men about how to navigate the complexity of being a man in the modern world. You can sign up for that, absolutely free. And then if you go to Amazon and just look at The Intentional Father, you’ll see that that book is there available in all formats.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Jon Tyson, thanks for your time, it’s been a pleasure.

Jon Tyson: Okay, cheers mate, thank you.

Brett McKay: My guest here was Jon Tyson. He’s the author of the book, The Intentional Father. It’s available on amazon.com. You can find more information about his work at primalpath.co. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/passage where you can find links to resources where we delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you find our podcast archives as well as thousands of articles written over the years about pretty much anything you’d think of. And if you’d like to enjoy ad free episodes of the AOM podcast, you can do so on Stitcher premium. Head over to stitcherpremium.com, sign up, use code manliness and check out for a free month trial. Once you’re signed up, download the Stitcher app on Android or iOS and you can start enjoying ad free episodes of the AOM podcast. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify, it helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think would get something out. As always, thank you for the continued support.

Until next time, this is Brett McKay. Reminding you all listening to the podcast to put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

With the Old Breed is widely considered one of the greatest war memoirs ever written. Penned by Eugene Sledge, a Marine who fought with the 1st Division — the old breed — in the Pacific campaigns of Peleliu and Okinawa, the book is unflinching, deeply human, and so vividly written that you can practically feel the heat, mud, exhaustion, and terror coming off the page.

But Sledge wasn’t a professional writer. He was a biology professor who started jotting notes on scraps of paper tucked inside the New Testament he carried in his breast pocket. He wrote the book decades later, partly to process his own trauma, partly to leave a record for his sons.

One of those sons is my guest today. Henry Sledge has spent years carrying his father’s legacy forward, and he’s written his own book — The Old Breed: The Complete Story Revealed — that pairs his father’s combat experience with previously unpublished material and his own perspective as Eugene’s son. Today on the show, Henry and I talk about why his dad wrote With the Old Breed, what made fighting in the Pacific uniquely hellish, and how Eugene managed to come home and live a full, honorable life despite carrying the war with him for the rest of his days.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• China Marine: An Infantryman’s Life After World War II by E.B. Sledge
• HBO series The Pacific
• Ken Burns’ The War
• AoM Article: Eugene B. Sledge Puts Your Problems Into Perspective
• AoM Article: Are You Missing the Forbidden City?

Connect With Henry Sledge

• Henry on IG
• Henry on FB

Thanks to this Episode’s Sponsor!

• Take your personal data back with Incogni! Use code MANLINESS at the link below and get 60% off an annual plan: https://incogni.com/MANLINESS

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

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Transcript 

Brett McKay:

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the AoM podcast. With the Old Breed is widely considered one of the greatest war memoirs ever written. Penned by Eugene Sludge, a Marine who fought with the first division, the old breed, in the Pacific campaigns of Peleliu in Okinawa. The book is unflinching, deeply human, and so vividly written that you can practically feel the heat, mud, exhaustion, and terror coming off the page.

But Sledge wasn’t a professional writer. He was a biology professor who started jotting notes on scraps of paper tucked inside the New Testament he carried in his breast pocket. He wrote the book decades later, partly to process his own trauma, partly to leave a record for his sons. One of those sons is my guest today. Henry Sledge has spent years carrying his father’s legacy forward, and he’s written his own book, The Old Breed, The Complete Story Revealed that pairs his father’s combat experience with previously unpublished material and his own perspective as Eugene’s son. Today on the show, Henry and I talked about why his dad wrote With the Old Breed, what made fighting the Pacific uniquely hellish and how Eugene managed to come home and live a full honorable life despite carrying the war with him for the rest of his days. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/OldBreed. All right, Henry Sledge, welcome to the show.

Henry Sledge:

Thank you. Great to be here, Brett. I appreciate that.

Brett McKay:

So your father was Eugene “Sledgehammer” Sledge, who was a marine infantryman who fought in the Pacific campaign of World War II. He’s also the author of what many consider one of the greatest war memoirs ever written, and it’s called With the Old Breed. I’m sure a lot of our listeners have read this. Why did your dad write the book originally? Was this something he had planned right after the war? 

Henry Sledge:

There really was no orchestrated plan to write a book. I think it began as a cathartic process on his part to deal with some of the PTSD, the emotional trauma, just the trying to assimilate to civilian life as he began to put the war behind him. I think that was part of it. And the other component to it was I think there was a desire on his part to have a written record of his experience for my brother and me. I remember him telling me that.

Brett McKay:

And the thing too is he had extensive notes to write this thing. Where did those notes come from? How did he keep them when he was fighting?

Henry Sledge:

Well, so the Marines were not allowed to keep diaries for obvious security reasons. If you saw The Pacific miniseries…?

Brett McKay:

I did.

Henry Sledge:

Yeah. So Rami Malik playing Snafu has that classic line, gives the Japs valuable intel, they find it, but that really was the crux of it. I mean, Marines were not supposed to keep diaries for security reasons, and he began to keep surreptitious notes on little pieces of paper that he kept tucked into his pocket New Testament Bible that he carried in the breast pocket of his jacket. And he also wrote some cursory notes in the first few pages of that Bible just on weather conditions and basic outline of where they were and that kind of thing. But most of the note taking was going to be on pieces of paper that he kept tucked into the Bible. And then when he got home, he took those pieces of paper and wrote down on a piece of legal paper, an outline, fleshing everything out, and then from there began to write on his legal pads with his pencil

Brett McKay:

When he started to write. How long after did it take for him to finish it?

Henry Sledge:

He started writing, I would say early seventies. I mean, my earliest memories of it are just when I was just a few years old and that process, and probably a few years after he began that he asked my mother to begin typing the manuscript. So she started typing it. He would write at night and then she would type in the days that followed. I mean, that went on through most of the mid to late seventies. It probably wasn’t until the late seventies that she talked him into like, “Hey, this is a pretty powerful story. We should look at trying to get this published.” And I think that process, and I remember it really well. I mean, I remember the day that we got the letter from Presidio saying that they would publish it, and that was around 1980 because it actually came out in 1981.

Brett McKay:

So yeah, it was about a 10-year process.

Henry Sledge:

And the thing is, Brett, I mean, he would work on it furiously for several days at a time at night, and then he’d take a break and may not touch it for a month or two months. And I mean, as my brother and I got older and as a family, we’re doing things because at that time, he’s in his early fifties or mid to late forties and just life gets in the way of everything. So I mean, he’s being a husband, being a dad, he was very involved in our lives on a day-to-day basis. We had a close relationship. And so we would hit stretches where he wouldn’t even work on it for months at a time and then pick it back up and dive back into it.

Brett McKay:

Your dad’s writing is really good, it’s really compelling. But he wasn’t a professional writer. He was a biology professor, and his writing wasn’t flowery. It was more matter of fact. How would you describe your dad’s writing style?

Henry Sledge:

Yeah, I would agree. I mean, his writing, I would term it like this. He was a scientist. He had PhD biology, biochemistry. He wrote like a scientist, no flowery, elegant prose, nothing pedantic. I mean, it was straight ahead, unblinking factual.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, you can tell that he’s got this scientific biological mind when he writes, because the way he describes things, it’s almost like you’re reading a field report from a field biologist. I mean, there was one, here’s a quote he’s talking about. He’s just seen the dead bodies on Peleliu. Yeah, he said this, “it was gruesome to see the stages of decay proceed from just killed to bloated, to maggot infested rotting to partially exposed bones like some biological clock marking the inexorable passage of time.” And then he’d also, when he described dead bodies, he would compare them. Well, it looks like the intestines of a squirrel that I would hunt as a boy.

Henry Sledge:

Yes, that’s exactly right. And I literally turned as you were reading that, I mean, I know that book so intimately. Well, I got pretty much right here to the part where you were reading from. But not only that, he talks about cans of C rations and K ration boxes open and unopened, lay around our gun pit along with discarded grenade and mortar shell canisters scattered about the area or discarded us helmets, packs, ponchos, jackets, web cartridge belts, leggings, boondockers ammo, boxes of every type and crates the discarded articles of clothing and the inevitable bottle of blood plasma bore mute testimony that a marine had been hit there. And what I was saying about that was that writing is just knowing my father. . . . he’s not just seeing this and observing these things. He feels the anguish of seeing the blood of fellow Marines.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, that’s one thing I noticed throughout the book is he doesn’t flinch away from the brutality of war. And he describes it in great detail, but at the same time, he brings his humanity to it and he talks about the moral and spiritual damage that it’s doing to the men who are in these battles.

Henry Sledge:

Yeah, always. There was always that angle of it to him because I mean, look, that was one of the extraordinary things about the kind of guy that my father was. I mean, honestly, he was a very peaceable guy who wanted to enjoy his life and go to college and do the things that a young man would be doing. And fighting on some more torn island in the middle of the Pacific was not what he wanted to be doing, but he wanted to enlist in the Marine Corps. He wanted to be a part of that. He knew that everybody was going to have to go fight somewhere, and he wanted to be with what he thought was the finest outfit out there, which was the Marines and all of those things. Just that bear testimony to his character,

Brett McKay:

And as you said, the process of writing this book, it seemed like it helped him process that trauma that a lot of soldiers came home with.

Henry Sledge:

I do think it was a cathartic process for him. I really do. I remember when With the Old Breed came out and we got our first copies, and I remember reading it, of course, I had read some of the typewritten pages that my mother had typed in the years leading up to its publication, but I remember really well, I remember reading where in the introduction, I think it was in the introduction or some of the early parts of it, he said, the nightmares no longer wake me in the middle of the night with a pounding heart and in a cold sweat. But I’ll tell you this, I recall very well when my brother and I were young, my mother sat us down and she said, listen, if you boys need us in the middle of the night, come to my side of the bed. Don’t go to your father’s side of the bed and whatever you do, don’t touch him.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, because he was still dealing with it.

Henry Sledge:

Yeah. I mean, he was still dealing with it. I mean, look, man, that’s heavy stuff. I mean, this is a guy we’re talking in the mid 1970s here. This is a guy who’s in his fifties at this point with a couple of boys and being a husband and a dad and trying to put all this behind him.

Brett McKay:

And his war experience had happened in his early twenties.

Henry Sledge:

Yeah, well, I mean, he was 20 years old in Peleliu. He turned 21 on Peleliu. And he was 22 in Okinawa.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. There was another antidote you put in your book about your experience with your dad’s dealing with that trauma, that PTSD of the war. I think you were a kid and you got a toy Tommy gun.

Henry Sledge:

Oh yeah, the plastic Tommy gun. I know right where you were going. Growing up in the seventies, my brother and I would go down to the dime store and we’d get the little plastic army helmets, and I was fascinated by the Thompson sub machine gun. I just loved that weapon as a kid when I would see it on movies and things like that. And I remember buying one just the cheap little plastic Tommy gun, and it had the little clacker in it. When you pull the trigger, it would clack like that, man. I would run around with that thing out in the woods and pretend I’d watch Hogan’s Heroes in the afternoon and then run around with that thing after that. Pretend like we were playing World War II or something. I mean, I was just a kid, and I think I was like eight or nine, maybe 10 years old, and I got the not so bright idea to hide in our cupboard in the kitchen. 

We had a pantry cupboard. It was really tall. It was about five feet tall and eight, nine years old, I was a really small kid, and I got the idea to get in that thing and hide and close the door and jump out and scare him when he walked in the kitchen. And so I did one night and I heard him coming down the hall kind of whistling to himself. He always did. And he walked through the kitchen and as he did, I pushed open the door and jumped out at that thing and was squeezing a little trigger on it. And he spun around and I don’t know that he ever said a word. He did not lose his temper. He did not lose his cool. But he spun around and looked at me like he’d never looked at me before.

And he picked me up as the Marines used to say, grab me by the stack and swivel, which is where you grab somebody by the collar. And he grabbed me and my dad was not a big man, 5’ 9”, 155 pounds or so. But he grabbed me and he picked me up and pushed me against that cupboard door. And then he let me down and he took me into the bedroom and took his belt off and gave me a whipping. And people would be horrified at that now. But I mean, that was not an uncommon thing for those of us growing up back in those days. But the interesting thing about it was like he did not lose control. He did not lose his cool. That was a very calculated response to what I had done, and he was trying to instill in me, don’t ever do that to a combat veteran.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. And what’s interesting though, besides being startled at night and being freaked out by his 8-year-old son who jumps out with a toy Tommy gun, you describe your dad. You never got the impression, you say this, that you were living with someone who was mentally ill or just disturbed. He was like you said, a very controlled, calm guy.

Henry Sledge:

Absolutely. I mean, he would stress out about things. You could see that. But look, this goes to the heart of, I mean, this is a great point you bring up, Brett, because a big part of why I do what I do is people who’ve read With the Old Breed, people who’ve seen The Pacific, people who maybe saw the Ken Burns The War in 2007. You watch those things and you see this young man come home from this crucible of savagery, which was his experience on Peleliu and Okinawa, and you see this guy come home and you see him have the nightmares, and you get a sense of him struggling to assimilate back into civilian life. One thing I felt like they did not, the war was excellent by Ken Burns, but my mother and I talked about it afterward. And one thing that they didn’t do there, and they didn’t do it in the Pacific either, because there just wasn’t time.

They really didn’t convey the point adequately that okay, yeah, he struggled when he came home, but he struggled successfully. And so I feel like I can bear testimony to the fact that he was a classic All-American father. He would never forget the Marines he served with. He would never forget his time in the Marine Corps. He would never forget his pride in the Marine Corps or his pride in our country for that matter. But at the same time, he deplored the idea of sending young men into combat, but he waged whatever struggles he had internally, he waged them successfully because I mean, look, he and my mother had, they were married almost 50 years by the time he passed away, and they had a fantastic marriage. Not to say that it was perfect, no marriage is, but they had a very strong, we had a great family life.

It wasn’t perfect, nothing is, but I never felt like, well, I’ll say it like this. My father did a great job of compartmentalizing the angst, and he was determined to be a productive, cheerful member of society. And he was, I’ve got to know many of his students in later years, some of whom were young Marines and soldiers coming home from Vietnam. And I mean, his students called him Uncle Eugene. I mean, so he was a very light, he had a fantastic sense of humor, a very lively sense of humor. And he was very highly thought of professionally, very highly thought of in Montevallo in our town growing up where I grew up. And so yeah, Sledgehammer may have had his struggles, but he did it right.

Brett McKay:

Well, let’s talk more about your dad and his history and how he ended up as a Marine. So your dad’s family had a military tradition. His father served in World War I when the war broke out. Your father was at a military school? Military institute. Was it Marion Military Institute?

Henry Sledge:

Yes, Marion Military Institute.

Brett McKay:

And so, I mean, he was on track. He could have been an officer. His family was nudging him to be an officer, but your dad decided not to do that. Can you tell us the story of why he chose to intentionally flunk out of the officer candidate program and enlist as a private in the Marines?

Henry Sledge:

Yeah, I mean, I can answer the question very easily. The impetuousness of youth, he and a very large portion of the detachment in his officer training and the V12 program that he was enrolled in at Georgia Tech after the war broke out. They were scared that the war was going to be over before they got into it. And he didn’t want to live with that feeling of, I almost got there, but I just didn’t quite get there and do what I was meant to do. And you know what bears pointing out? I mean, this is a really powerful thing. I think it’s a very significant thing about when you talk about Eugene Sledge and the kind of guy that he was. I mean, look, my grandfather was a very influential man in mobile back in the 1930s. He was very well thought of, and he had a certain amount of influence.

And other marines that my dad served with pointed this out to me. I mean, a lot of these guys came from hard scrabble backgrounds. They came from, I mean, I’m just going to say dirt poor backgrounds, lacking a lot of formal education. I mean, that was a fact with a lot of those guys back then. And that wasn’t the case with my father. I mean, he actually had some college behind him, and he came from a family that you could say in certain ways was well to do and to absolutely purposefully insert himself into the world. He inserted himself in the Marine Corps. I think it’s a powerful thing. And I mean, one of his fellow marines told me, I went to visit this guy years ago, and he said, that was one thing I always admired about your dad. We all knew he probably could have escaped the path that he chose, but there he was shoulder to shoulder with us and he was a damn good Marine. He did everything he was ever asked or told to do.

Brett McKay:

So you’d say it was just useful impetuosity, just sort of that thumos that drive to see action.

Henry Sledge:

Yeah, absolutely. And as he said, I mean, if we only knew what I mean, he talks about in the troop train, clacking along the rails to headed to San Diego because he actually went through basic in San Diego, not at Paris Island, which was not the usual thing for a young man east of the Mississippi. But he did go to San Diego and he talks about how all these guys are on the troop train headed west, and they’re all singing songs and jousting with each other and cutting up. And he said, we were like boys headed off to a summer camp. And he said, God, if we had only known what lay ahead, I’m reminded of All Quiet on the Western Front because that young man, this young German kid and his school buddies, I mean, they can’t wait to enlist and get into the fight. And then you see well into the book, what a horrible thing it is. And they understand that then.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, your dad in the beginning of the book, spends a good deal of time talking about his bootcamp training as an infantryman. What was that like?

Henry Sledge:

Well, the training, he felt like the instructors were all very thorough and professional and did a good job and tried to do the best they could to prepare these guys for what lay ahead now to speak on a more personal level. The training was rigorous. It was hard. Nothing about it was easy. Their drill instructor was Corporal Dougherty, and Corporal Dougherty was not a big man. My father described him as probably five 10, not an ounce of fat on him, absolute rock, hard physique, and phenomenal shape, just these mean green eyes, the way he would look at you, very intimidating guy, even though he wasn’t that big. But the man obviously was a professional at what he did, and that was taking these guys and stealing them into guys who were going to take positions and rifle companies across the Pacific. And I think that my father had a really mature attitude about the training they were going through because he understood.

Well, he really reflected on, and it was some great material that got edited out with the old breed that I was so thankful to be able to use in my book, because he talked about when they got back on Pavuvu after Peleliu, he reflected, he had some brilliant writing about the very thing you asked about and talking about how the Marine Corps training was tough. It was brutal, but it had to be because what they were going to experience was brutal. And he had just come off that at Peleliu, and he understood that he probably could not have survived that experience had it not been for their training.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I thought that was interesting, those unpublished parts of the manuscript that you put in your book where he talked about that a lot. He was grateful for the training. A lot of the Marines, they carped about it, but he realized no part of the reason why I’m still alive when luck is a big part of it. But the training was also a big part.

Henry Sledge:

And I mean, he writes that very articulately and no small wonder that the Marine Corps views his book with such high regard.

Brett McKay:

Let’s talk about your dad’s combat experience in the Pacific. His first assignment we’ve been talking about this was to help secure the island of Peleliu. I imagine a lot of people listening right now have probably never heard of this island. They might’ve heard about Iwo Jima or Midway. Why is Peleliu often overlooked by Americans?

Henry Sledge:

Well, Peleliu was a tiny, tiny little aol, two miles by six miles on the western edge of the Pacific. And the short answer to your question, why is it overlooked? Is because it could have been bypassed. And at the time, MacArthur was proceeding along a southwesterly axis to get back to the Philippines, and then Chester Nimitz and the US Navy and Marines were driving through the Central Pacific. So we had this two tiered approach in subjugating Japanese forces. It was determined originally that Peleliu was needed to neutralize the airfield there so that Japanese air assets, Japanese air power could not threaten MacArthur’s, right? Flank is he proceeded towards the Philippines. As it turned out, they didn’t need to do that because all Japanese air power had been knocked out by US Navy carrier Task force raids in early 1944, and Peleliu wasn’t invaded until September, 1944.

Now, Admiral Halsey had a foretelling of this because as his task force pilots are coming back, as those Hellcat pilots are coming back from their strikes throughout the Palau Islands, his pilots are telling him, look, we’re not encountering any aerial opposition. It’s all been done away with, and we’re destroying a lot of airplanes on the ground. And so he sat down and thought about it. He met with other officers, and he went to Nimitz and said, I fear another Toro. I don’t think that we need to hit Lou. My guys are not seeing any aerial resistance, and I think this is going to be a lot worse than we think it could be. Chester Nimitz, for reasons he never really disclosed because he passed away in 1965, chose to not stop the invasion armada and to proceed with invading Peleliu. But the short answer to your question, why is it overlooked us?

Because it could have been bypassed. And that was such a tragedy because going into it, general Puris, who was the first marine division commander, had this inexplicably optimistic view of the coming battle that, look, it’s going to be rough but fast. It’s going to be like Tarawa three days, maybe four. It might only take two. Every time I think about that, it just makes my blood run cold because you realize what they got into with the challenging topography, not to mention the heat and humidity. I mean, that was going to be part of every battle in the Pacific. But the absolute meat grinder that it turned into that they did not originally think it would be. I mean, a lot of the news correspondents didn’t even go ashore at Peal Lu because they thought, well, there’s no point. I mean, it’s going to be over in a day and a half or two days or three. And so you only had a handful of correspondents who actually won ashore. So it was an amalgamation of several things as to why Pew wasn’t so well known. That caused a lot of bitterness for my father and a lot of the guys who were there and lost good buddies there. I remember in the 1970s, pew was frequently referred to as the forgotten battle. I will say this, I don’t think Peleliu is quite so forgotten anymore.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. So I think thanks to movies like Saving Private Ryan Band of Brothers, I think a lot of people are familiar with what fighting was like in Europe. All wars, brutal. We’ve had Alex Kershaw on the podcast, the World War II historian. Yeah, absolutely. He talked about, he says, the battles in Europe or the war in Europe, it was brutal, but there was a certain romanticism about it because soldiers are fighting amongst these old cathedrals in rural European farms with stone fences fighting the Pacific was not like that at all. And your father did an excellent job capturing the hellishness of war fighting in the Pacific. What was Peleliu like? Give us a look into what it was like fighting there.

Henry Sledge:

Well, Peleliu, the northern part of the island was called the . . . known colloquially to the Marines who had to fight there as bloody nose ridge. And in fact, it was a series of ridges. The coral high ground was obfuscated by vegetation before it had all been blasted off by our pre landing naval and aerial bombardment, but it was very topographically challenging terrain. You had a complex system of ridges and ravines and box canyons and blind canyons, and all of that was pockmarked with caves. I mean, I’ve seen the number of 500 caves that pockmarked like Swiss cheese. The Japanese were absolute masters of using every aspect of their terrain to their advantage as a force multiplier, if you will. And Peleliu offered some tragic opportunities for that. But the parts of the island that weren’t just complete coral were jungle scrub growth, but it was terribly hot seven degrees off the equator on D-Day. It was 115 degrees in the shade. And so you had that aspect of it. 

Brett McKay:

I want to talk about the coral, cause I think a lot of people think, oh, Pacific Islands, it’s going to be like Tahiti with these edenic beaches, but these beaches were just mostly coral. What made fighting on coral so brutal?

Henry Sledge:

Well, the northern landing beach, and I’ve walked that entire landing beach at Peal Loop where my father went as shore on Orange Beach too, which was a southern sector of the approximately 2200 yard long beach. It actually was pretty flat and sandy, it had a gentle slope to it, but once you got inland, you were in the scrub growth. But then they quickly got into the coral now up on what they call White Beach, which was where the first marine regimen, my father was in the Fifth Marine regimen, but the first marine regiment landed on White Beach, which was a little bit north of where my father landed. I walked to that area, and I’ve never seen anything like it in my life, Brett. It was sharp coral outcroppings all the way out into the water. There is no sandy beach on White Beach. And so for the first Marines, the first marine regiment, when I say first Marines, I’m referring to them as soon as they debarked from their landing craft, as soon as they got out of their amphibious tractors, they’re immediately getting cut by this coral if they have to die for cover, which they did because the Japanese had heavily impregnated that or heavily fortified that part of the landing beach.

But I remember my dad telling me they had entrenching tools, but he said it almost felt like there was no point in it because really on Peleliu, you really couldn’t dig in unquote dig in and dig a nice deep hole in soft earth like you could on Okinawa in 1945 plu. He said, there were so many times on PLU we couldn’t dig in. I mean, we might could take shelter in a shell crater, but half the time you just pile logs and rocks around you for any kind of protection, any sort of protection from flying fragments. But digging in was just almost an impossibility because of that hard coral.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. And then your dad talks about the coral, it made fighting hard and it made digging foxholes hard, but it also made field sanitation pretty much impossible.

Henry Sledge:

Correct, because he talked about when a man had to defecate, usually he just did it in like an ammo can or a C ration can. There was nowhere to bury it, so they just threw it off into some underbrush or something like that. And imagine after 15, 20, 30 days of that, not to mention the dead and rotting enemy bodies, and of course the marines tried to pull their guys out and get ’em back to a secure area as quickly as they could, but still, you had this unbelievable proliferation of human waste. I mean, it’s disgusting to talk about, but look, these were things that my dad wrote about and talked about so much because to him, you have to understand this, and this is a lot of what drove him to write with the old breeded. He wanted people to understand. You’ve seen war movies and you think combat is something glorious and something romantic. And he said there’s nothing romantic or glorious about it. It’s dealing with blowflies that have become engorged on human blood. It’s dealing with rotting corpses. It’s the smell of unburied human waste. I mean, that’s what a battlefield was to him.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. I mean, the environment was just completely so. It was hot, humid, he talked about it just smelled all the time. That was a challenge dealing with that. You’re dealing with not only the blowflies, there’s maggots, and he describes the maggots and the festering bodies. The land crabs were another thing you had to deal with all the time.

Henry Sledge:

Absolutely. I mean, he talked about how at night you could just hear the land crabs crawling around in the undergrowth. Of course, it sounded like Japanese soldiers crawling around, which they did. They infiltrated their lines at night to great effect. They did it every night and they were really good at it. And of course, in addition to everything that you just said, you deal with the fact of lack of clean drinking water and the inability to get a good night’s sleep because the Japanese were infiltrating every night to purposefully keep the Marines awake and the soldiers, because the army was there too, of course, to purposefully keep these guys awake, to keep them from getting any sleep. And of course, that just compounds everything to an exponential degree.

Brett McKay:

Okay. I mean, the environment itself, that was an enemy. It was a brutal enemy, but we haven’t talked about the human enemy or not that much, that your father and the other Marines were sent to fight on Peleliu, and that was the Japanese. What were the Japanese like to fight?

Henry Sledge:

Well, the Japanese were fiercely brave, dedicated and horrifically effective and brutal soldiers. They were absolute masters at exploiting their terrain. As I’ve already said, at a place like Peleliu, they had untold opportunities to do that. My father always thought it was ironic, I would say funny, but he didn’t think it was funny. But I remember in the seventies, people had this perception that anything made in Japan was cheap. I remember him telling me that. He said, we didn’t think of their weapons as cheap. They felt pretty effective to us. Their 70 mountain, 70 millimeter fuel gun that they used was horrifically effective. Their mortars were horrifically effective, and the Japanese exercised superb fire discipline. They would purposefully wait for a marine to be wounded. They employed snipers to horrific effect. A sniper might fire around to wound a marine knowing full well that two other Marines are going to come out and try to drag him back in, and then they would open fire on those guys.

I remember my father saying, I can hear him say it. I’m going to say Japanese. That’s not the way he put it, but he said The Japanese opened up on stretcher teams absolutely without mercy, and that was something that he said it would just make you weep in fury to see a wounded marine and four of his buddies going out, or two of his buddies going out to try to bring him back in. And then those guys getting cut down, and he said It would make you absolutely weep to see that and make you hate your enemy. And so you had this fierce preternatural hatred between the Americans and the Japanese just as much on their part as our part. It was completely mutual, but they were certainly a skilled enemy and an enemy to be feared.

Brett McKay:

How did fighting the Japanese compare to fighting the Germans?

Henry Sledge:

I remember my father telling me in the seventies and eighties as I was growing up, and we would have our conversations about all this, the Germans were very professional, and he said, I would’ve hated to fight ’em. But most of the time they would bed down at night and get their sleep. He said the Japanese would not do that. They would attack all day and fight all night through infiltration. And then the other angle to this is there were many cases where the Germans surrendered when they realized that they had to the Japanese, I’m not going to say that they never surrendered because obviously by the time Okinawa rolled around, it did happen. But very rarely, it was very rare that the Japanese would surrender. And on Peleliu they had to fight to the last man pretty much Okinawa. They did begin to surrender, but even that was not a codified course of action that was going to be a more piecemeal ad hoc type situation where individual Japanese has realized that the jig is up. There’s no point in continuing this, and they would give themselves up. But even then, that was rare. And so you have this human conflict that is just the absolute depths of human savagery, and it just was an absolute war of bitter hatred. And my father spoke of it. He thought of it, he wrote of it because to him it was just such a component of what they were dealing with.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. I mean, let’s talk about that. I mean, what sorts of savagery did your father see and write about?

Henry Sledge:

Well, I mean, so he saw many cases where the Japanese had defiled marine corpses, and I won’t say how, I don’t want to put the listeners through the grotesque descriptions that you can read it in his book. There was a good bit of that. And so of course, Marines always tried to remove their dead because they knew the Japanese would just do terrible things to the bodies, and even worse to a man if they captured him, they knew that to be captured was absolutely not an option. On Guadal Canal, you had an incident called the Get Gee patrol, which is where a couple of Japanese were taken prisoner by the Marines in the early stages of the battle. And these guys said that some of their buddies were down the river and wanted to surrender, and that if the Marines would go out and send out a rescue party, they would surrender.

And so our intelligence officers always wanted to pick up surrender Japanese if that was an option, because it was a source of intel. It was a source of knowledge and factual data. And so the Marines sent out a patrol under the command of Colonel Frank gge to bring these guys in, and they ended up being ambushed and killed to the last minute. I can’t remember. I’m not a Gua Canal expert. I’ve read a lot about it, but I have buddies who that’s their area of specialty, but the get gee patrol was slaughtered. Well, I think one guy survived and he was able to swim back along the beach and get out of there and get back to the marine lines. But when he came back and began to get the word back to his guys of what happened, then we began to understand this is going to be a different kind war.

This is not a war where you can hold your hands up and surrender and say, that’s it. I’m done. Not to mention, we haven’t even talked about the Philippines. We haven’t even talked about what was going on to our army, to the soldiers in the Army divisions who’d surrendered in the Philippines being marched north via the Batan death march up to Camp O’Donnell and the starvation and the torture that they were encountering. And so these were things that we were not prepared to deal with, but we learned very quickly that they were going to be things that we had to face. And when my father was going through his initial training on Pavuvu, when he first got out to the Pacific Theater, he talks about how he was on a working party one day loading coconuts, and he and the buddies he’s working with, and the guys he was working with had been at Cape Gloucester.

They were combat veterans, and they had not just gotten out into the theater of war like he had, and they come across another Marine who was working in an area close to them, and they start talking. And this guy was the survivor of the Get Gee patrol. And the guy says goodbye to his buddies, and he walks off, and my dad’s like, who was that guy? And his buddies tell him, he’s a lucky son of a bitch. That’s what he is. He was on that Get Gee patrol. And they proceed to tell my father the story of it. And news travels fast, man. People talk. And I mean, these marines were speaking to each other and getting the word out that, look, you cannot surrender. That is not an option.

Brett McKay:

And what’s interesting, your father describes how when these marines were seeing the brutality with which the Japanese soldiers were treating the corpses of the Marines, there was this temptation from the Marines to do the same to retaliate and do the same thing. And your father even describes, he had moments where he was like, yeah, I want to maybe do something to this Japanese dead body. I’m just so angry at them. But he didn’t, he was able to kind of resist that pull. How do you think your father was able to do that and other marines?

Henry Sledge:

Yeah, so one of the things you’re referring to is a lot of Japanese soldiers in World War II had gold teeth, and it became a practice among a lot of Marines to, if they saw a Japanese corpse that had gold teeth, they would take those gold teeth. And it was commonly done. Of course, the Japanese were doing even worse things to the bodies of our guys when they could get to ’em. But yeah, that actually is a pretty powerful passage where he starts to do that one day. And Doc Caswell, who’s the corpsman and K company of my dad’s unit, puts his hand on my dad’s shoulder and says, sledgehammer, what are you doing? What are you getting ready to do? And my dad says, well, I just saw this J’s got gold teeth. I thought I might try to take one or two of ’em.

And Doc, because I always call the corpsman doc, he says, you don’t want to do that, don’t do that. And my father says, well, okay. I mean why? And Doc says, well, think of the germs. Think of the germs. What would your old man think about that? My dad said, well, my old man’s a doctor. He might think it’s kind of interesting, but Doc Cael says, you don’t want to do that. And so my father said, okay, well, how about I just cut off his collar insignia instead? And so he did that. But my dad was a very intelligent young man, and he reflected on it, and he said, I realized Doc Cael was not concerned about me being exposed to germs. He just didn’t want to see me lose that last vestige of civility.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, lose that last part of his humanity. I mean, for some Marines, it even got worse. Your father described, I mean, there’s one story. One guy took a hand from a dead.

Henry Sledge:

Yeah, that was at the end of Peleliu. And that guy was almost ostracized by the other Marines because their NC was like, get rid of that thing. I’m going to write you. I’ll put you on report if you don’t.

Brett McKay:

But it just goes to show this type of fighting they were doing, the environment they were in, I mean, it could cause significant spiritual and emotional damage to these guys.

Henry Sledge:

It causes this complete degradation and breakdown of decency. And that was something that my father wanted to make people understand is that the guys doing this, these are nice young, these are nice kids.

Brett McKay:

And they were kids. Some of them were literally kids. They were 17 years old,

Henry Sledge:

17, 18. These are nice kids, but they have been dehumanized. And if I can find it, Brett, man, they’re such a powerful passage. Basically, it’s a paragraph where he just really sums up the awfulness of an experience like Peleliu. In the last line in that paragraph, he says, Peleliu eroded the veneer of civilization and made savages of us all. And that is such a powerful line right there.

Brett McKay:

And your dad did such a great job describing that while on Peleliu, I mean, just complete brutality, harsh fighting conditions. But your dad and a lot of the other Marines lost a mentor, captain AK Haldane on Peleliu, and this really hit your dad hard, and it was sort of a turning point for him in his well experience. How did AK die and how did his loss of leadership change the way your father viewed the rest of the war?

Henry Sledge:

Well, yeah. Captain Halane, his codename, ak, they called him ak. He was such a well thought of officer. He was their company commander. He was K company’s commander. He was killed on October 7th, 1944 by a sniper on Hill one 40 on Pew. And my father said it was the worst grief I suffered during the entire war. AK Captain Halane represented stability and security in a world gone mad. I mean, that’s exactly the way he says it, because even though Captain Halane was like 27 years old, he had been at Guac Canal, he’d been at Cape Gloucester. He was incredibly well thought of and just a very cool headed, excellent company commander. And his men loved him and would’ve done anything for him. And the thought of him that he would be killed like that, my father wrote about how that never occurred to us that we could lose him. And it enraged them all that he was killed by a sniper, but that is how he died. And yeah, captain Halane was just so well thought of, and to lose him, it just was he represented, like I said, stability and security, and they never conceived that he would be killed.

Brett McKay:

Did it change what your dad thought his chances of survival were? It’s like, well, if this guy could go, I could go just as easily.

Henry Sledge:

Absolutely. And I mean, certainly by the time they get to Okinawa, he’s seen so many good Marines get hit or killed. And he said, the arithmetic of chance, I mean, you felt like every day you were running out of even more luck if you had any left at all.

Brett McKay:

So even though the brass thought Peleliu could be taken in a few days, the first Marine Division fought on the island for about a month, a little over a month. They suffered over 6,500 casualties, including 1000 deaths. And as you mentioned, Peleliu could have been bypassed. Correct. Which your father had some bitterness about. After Peleliu, he fought on Okinawa for 82 days, on and off the front lines, mostly on the front lines. And Okinawa had its own nightmares conditions, constant rain, mud, maggots, everything was moldering. He called it Hell’s own cesspool. Sledge, despite being in the thick of two of the worst battles in history, never received a high level valor award like the Silver Star. Why is that? And what was the culture in his battalion regarding medals? Well,

Henry Sledge:

I remember him telling me about a conversation that he had with Captain Stanley many years after, because he and Stumpy got to know each other well and had many conversations when he was riding with the old breed in the late seventies before it got published in 1981. And he asked Stuy that. He asked Captain Stanley that he’s like, why is it that you never recommended anybody for a valor award, bronze star, silver star? And he said that Stumpy told him, he said, because sledgehammer, I didn’t want to pick one guy out and recommend him for a bronze star or silver star, a medal of honor because I felt like every one of you guys deserve something.

Brett McKay:

And then your dad recast the story where he had a fellow Marine just tell him, Hey, you know what sledge you did? And that to him represented the highest honor that he could get.

Henry Sledge:

Yeah. So that was when it’s after Peleliu, they’ve gotten back to Pavuvu, which is where they were in the Russell Islands where the first Marine Division rested, refitted and trained and staged out for both Peleliu and later Okinawa. And he describes this scene where it’s late one afternoon, kind of twilight, and he and his bunkmates, he and his tent mates, I should say, are in their tent. One guy’s over in the corner and on his rack, snoozing away very softly, can hear him snoozing after the day’s training. And my dad’s lying there in the twilight, and he is starting to get sleepy, and he is resting his head on his arm on the pillow of his rack. And then he hears the other Marine say, you know something sledgehammer, my dad says what? And he says, I really had my eye on you coming into the unit before pew.

I had my doubts about you being a doctor’s kid and coming from a rich family and having been to college and all that. And he said, I got to tell you, man, I kept my eye on you on pew, and you did okay by God. You did okay. And my dad wrote about how his chest literally burst with pride, he said, and he said, many men were awarded silver stars and bronze stars deservedly, but he said those words from a veteran who had been at Cape Gloucester and Guadalcanal, those words meant more to me. That seal of approval from a fellow Marine meant more to him than any medal he could have ever been awarded.

Brett McKay:

When Eugene returned home in 1946, he like hundreds of thousands of American men, brought the abyss of war home with him. What was his transition to civilian life like?

Henry Sledge:

Well, it was a painful process. He writes about that in great detail in his second book, China Marine. I explore it quite a bit from, obviously I wasn’t born until 20 years later, 19 years later. But I know from having talked to my mother and hearing family stories, it was a slow process. He dealt with a lot of nightmares he dealt with. I remember asking him when I was a kid, I said, dad, when you came home from World War ii after surviving that, I would think you would’ve just felt like you could conquer anything. And he said, to be honest with you, I did a lot of sitting around staring at the wall, just trying to mentally put my head back together. My grandfather was, and I write about this in my forthcoming second book. I talk about my grandfather a little bit, and what an intelligent, sensitive, thoughtful man that he was.

And my father credited my grandfather with really being a bridge back to sanity because he said, pop. That was what everybody in the family called my grandfather. He said, pop was an incredibly well thought of one of the finest physicians in the state of Alabama and professionally very well thought of and accomplished. But he just understood because he had treated shellshock victims in World War I, and he understood what these young men had been through, and he was a shield for my dad because my grandmother didn’t understand it. And she would come in, they show this in the last episode of the Pacific. They show it really well when they show the kid play on my dad sitting under a tree and the lady playing, my grandmother comes out and says, oh, Eugene, you look like a gangster with those glasses on. And she hands ’em a glass of iced tea and then starts talking about, Eugene, you have to get a plan for the future.

You need to be doing something. And they film that scene exactly the way we told them. Those conversations went. And my father said in those instances to my grandmother, my plan is to do nothing for a while. And then my grandfather would come out and just like he did in the Pacific in that last episode, and he comes out and he says, Mary Frank, what are you doing? Leave the boy alone. You have no idea what men like him have been through. Go on, leave him alone. And that is exactly the way that happened. And I remember us talking to the producers about that and how my grandfather would do that and shoo her away, and she’d start grumbling and mumbling and muttering and walk away in a huff. And then my grandfather would just tell my father, you have nothing to prove to anybody in this world.

Brett McKay:

When someone reads your dad’s book, what lessons do you hope they walk away with? When they’re finished,

Henry Sledge:

They learn something about what it really means to send young men into combat. I mean, look, I’ve always said this, Brett. I mean, I’m passionate about World War II history, and so I enjoy reading about everything concerning every battle across the Pacific. And not only that, but in Europe as well. And I enjoy reading about the tanks, the weapons, the airplanes, all of those things, the hardware, the logistics, all of it, the strategic planning, all of those things interest me greatly. But to really understand what it’s all about, you have to go beneath the rim of the helmet, and you have to understand what goes through a young man’s head when he is under heavy fire and experiencing prolonged close combat and the emotional toll that that takes on a human being. And with my Father’s book, it helps you understand that. It helps you understand that beneath the rim of the helmet perspective, and I mean, my book explores that as well. I mean, because it has not only my perspective of seeing how as a father, and of course, I was born in 1965, so I’m growing up in the 1970s and eighties, how his marine experience, how his World War II experience informed the choices he made as a husband to my mom and then as a father to my brother and me.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. What do you think people listening to this show can learn from how your father carried himself after the war?

Henry Sledge:

Well, the last thing he says in With the Old Breed, the last thing he says, if the country is good enough to live in it’s worth fighting for, is the troops used to say with privilege goes responsibility. Certainly, he delved deeply into the whole matter of Peleliu was tragic, unrelenting, horror and suffering and waste, unnecessary waste. Okinawa was its own hell. He saw so many good friends maimed and killed. Everybody suffered in their own way. Even the ones who came home physically intact as he did suffered, they bore that cost for the rest of their lives. But he regarded having been a Marine and having served the way he did as a great honor, and he carried that with him, I think, for the rest of his life. I mean, I remember the leather belt that he wore every day, okay. With his ll being corduroys, if he was wearing blue jeans, he wore the same damn leather belt every day. It had an EGA on it, which of course is the Marine Eagle Globe and Anchor. It was a really small, it was one of his collar EGAs, and he had that through one of the holes in his belt.

Brett McKay:

One of the lessons I took away after reading your dad’s book is just gratitude for the comfort and privilege that I have. I mean, he talks about when he is in Okinawa, he had marched two straight weeks with sore slimy feet trapped in wet socks. Then when he finally had a chance to dry out, remove them, pieces of dead skin were peeling off with his socks. And he says it was the kind of experience that would make a man sincerely grateful for the rest of his life, for clean dry socks, a simple condition as dry socks seemed a luxury. And he talked about too, that he hopes people in America who read this book would be grateful for the things they have. And he talked about he struggled to comprehend people who griped because America wasn’t perfect or their coffee wasn’t hot enough. Or they had to stand in line and wait for a train or a bus. And I’m living here in the 2026 and I can get things delivered to my doorstep from Amazon the next day, and I get upset because, oh, I asked for next day delivery and it’s going to be two days. It’s just like, man, when I’m thinking of that, I got to think about Eugene’s Sledge and just how lucky I am and quit complaining about all the inconveniences. So it’s just gratitude. And I’m wondering if we can end this. If you can read a passage in the preface of the book where he talks about why he published With the Old Breed.

Henry Sledge:

“In writing. I’m fulfilling an obligation. I have long felt to my comrades in the first Marine Division, all of whom suffered so much for our country, none came out unscathed. Many gave their lives many of their health and sown their sanity. All who survived will long remember the horror. They would rather forget, but they suffered and they did their duty. So a sheltered homeland can enjoy the peace that was purchased at such a high cost. We owe those Marines a profound debt of gratitude.”

Brett McKay:

Yeah. When I finished this book, I felt that gratitude.

Henry Sledge:

Exactly. I mean, as he said to me, Brett, I, and I heard that when I was a kid, I complained, of course I did like every kid, and he would say, I’m just happy I got dry socks. But he also, when we would have deeper conversations about all this, and we did that many times, he said to me, he said, people who have not been under shell fire cannot imagine what that is like.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. Well, Henry, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about your father, his book and your book and the work you’re doing around your dad’s legacy?

Henry Sledge:

Well, I speak a lot about my dad. I go to a lot of historical events. I don’t have a website. I’m on Facebook, William Henry Sledge. I’m on Instagram, I think I’m at HSledgehammer on Instagram. I don’t do a lot of posting on there. Both his book With the Old Breed and then my book, The Old Breed: The Complete Story Revealed in the subtitle of my book as a father, a son, and how World War II and the Pacific shaped their lives. Both of those books are on Amazon, and of course any bookstore is going to have his book and my book, his second book was called China Marine. It was about his time in China and then coming home, it dealt with that. And then I’m working on, my second book will release in November and it’s going to be called The Things That Remain: The Artifacts of Eugene B Sledge, and it will be a coffee table photo book of a lot of the artifacts of uniform items and things like that of my dad’s that I have.

And some of those things are in museums as well. His Bible that he kept notes in that form the basis of his book with Reed, that Bible, it’s currently at the World War II Museum in New Orleans, but it is going to be in the Library of Congress in Washington DC. They have asked for it, so it will be there. But I do everything I can to perpetuate my father’s legacy. I mean, I just feel a passion for, it’s not just that I feel a passionate interest in World War II history, but it’s, I know how people Marines especially, but really combat veterans of all stripes. I know what my dad’s writing has meant to them because I’ve met so many of them who’ve told me that. And that just drives me forward to do what I do. I mean, look, I’ve been to my dad’s gravestone in Mobile, Alabama.

Brett and my wife and I were just down there back in March and a local veterans unit did a 25th anniversary or commemoration of his passing. And his gravestone is forever covered with challenge coins and tokens of respect. And I mean, Marines have gone and left their medals there. I’ve seen little toy airplanes left by children there. I mean, the tokens of respect, it’s overwhelming really to stand there and look at that. And when I see that, I mean, here’s a guy who died in 2001 and people from all over the world traveled to pay their respects to his growth. I mean, I look at that and that just tells me there’s a guy who did it. 

Brett McKay:

Well, Henry Sledge, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Henry Sledge:

It’s been an honor to be here, Brett. Thank you.

Brett McKay:

My guest today was Henry Sledge. He’s the son of Eugene Sledge who wrote With the Old Breed. Henry’s got his own book out called The Old Breed: The Complete Story Revealed. It’s available on amazon.com. And make sure to check out our show notes at aom.is/OldBreed. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but to put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Back in 2019, David Epstein joined me to talk about his book Range and why generalists often thrive in a specialized world. Now he’s back with a new book that explores a seemingly opposite idea: the power of constraints. In Inside the Box, David argues that limits — deadlines, boundaries, and even setbacks — are often the very things that spark creativity, sharpen focus, and help us actually get meaningful work done.

Today on the show, David shares how, in a world of endless freedom and options, constraints might actually be the thing you need most. He shares the surprising true story behind the creation of the periodic table, explains how a broken arm changed the course of his own life, and explores why giving people too much leeway can actually kill innovation. We discuss what Pixar did right that doomed companies like General Magic got wrong, why brainstorming sessions are usually ineffective, how to identify the bottlenecks holding back your work and life, and why learning to settle for “good enough” may be the key to getting more great things done.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• David’s previous appearance on the AoM podcast: Episode #512 — Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
• Pixar’s Tin Toy
• AoM Article: Curing Your Restlessness — Limiting Your Choices
• The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt
• David’s This American Life Episode: “Something Only I Can See”
• AoM Article: Via Negativa — Adding to Your Life By Subtracting

Connect With David Epstein

• David’s website

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page

Download this episode

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice

Transcript 

Brett McKay:

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the AoM podcast. Back in 2019, David Epstein joined me to talk about his book Range and why generalists often thrive in a specialized world. Now he’s back with a new book that explores a seemingly opposite idea, the power of constraints. In Inside the Box, David argues that limits, deadlines, boundaries, and even setbacks are often the very things that spark creativity, sharpen focus, and help us actually get meaningful work done. Today in the show, David shares how in a world of endless freedom and options, constraints might actually be the thing you need most. He shares the surprising true story behind the creation of the periodic table, explains how a broken arm changed the course of his own life and explores why giving people too much leeway can actually kill innovation. We discussed what Pixar did right, that doom companies like General Magic got wrong, why brainstorming sessions are usually ineffective. How to identify the bottlenecks, holding back your work in life and why learning to settle for good enough may be the key to getting more great things done. After the show’s over. Check at our show notes at aom.is/constraints. All right, David Epstein, welcome back to the show.

David Epstein:

Thank you so much for having me back.

Brett McKay:

So we had you on the show back in 2019 to talk about your book Range, which is all about being a generalist, the power of being a generalist and not focusing only on one thing. You got a new book out, it’s called Inside the Box, and this book is about the power of constraints to accomplishing things, getting things done. How are these two ideas connected, this idea of being a generalist and also embracing constraints? How are they related?

David Epstein:

Yeah, as I know on the face of it, it can seem contradictory from one book to the next, but it’s kind of responsive to a question I was getting from a lot of readers after Range, which was, all right, I’ve got these diverse experiences, this broad toolbox now what I am having trouble deciding where to focus, and I put myself in that same boat. And so there’s a hefty dose of me-search in this book. So it’s really about how you channel all those ideas, all those experiences into achievement and actually get something done. And again, hefty dose of me-search. I have been terrible in the past at putting useful boundaries around my own work. So that’s one reason why it’s been so long. It’s like six to seven years between all my books, but what I learned in this book actually gave me a totally new process. And so now I think if I write more books, I could probably do them in about half the time I did in the past. 

Brett McKay:

Well let’s dig into the ideas of this book. I thought it was really interesting. What I love about your writing in general, what you do is you find these great case studies from history that cuts across domains, sports, business, arts, technology to show these principles that you’re highlighting in the book. You start off the book with two stories that show how constraints can help us do big things. The first guy you talk about is this Dmitri Mendeleev. He’s the guy who created the periodic table that we’ve all seen in our chemistry classes in high school. What’s the usual story about how he came up with that idea?

David Epstein:

Yeah, the usual story is that he was in the winter of 1869. He was looking for an order for all the elements, the chemical building blocks of the universe, and he worked for three sleepless days and senses something but couldn’t find it. And finally he falls asleep and he drifts off into the most impactful nap in human history. And he dreams about the elements sort of swirling around and they snap together in this grid where as you move across it, the chemical and physical properties of the elements repeat periodically, which is how it got the name periodic table. And it’s not just a poster that hangs in classrooms, it actually pointed the way to where new elements would be. So gaps in the table showed us where to look for new materials and motivated the underlying search for atoms. So what was the cause of this order? So that’s the typical story that it’s this incredible kind of dead end. And then in a dream he sees this vision and just wakes up and writes it down.

Brett McKay:

What’s the real story though?

David Epstein:

Yeah, the real story. So by the way, that’s the story that I learned in college chemistry. It’s in Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep. It’s there to show the power of our brains freed from reality, but the real story is completely different. So that dream story absolutely did not happen. What really happened was that Mendeleev had a publishing contract for a two volume intro to chemistry textbook, and he had only gotten eight of the then 63 known elements into volume one. So he had to get the other 55 into volume two, and he had to do it in a way that was logical for beginners. And you realized he couldn’t continue the way he had been describing one element at a time. So he had to start looking for groups or families where he could describe a representative, family member and then sort of by analogy teach about the rest of the group. And it was in doing that, that he started looking at the chemical world in terms of families and found these groupings that actually had a much greater underlying meaning. He was absolutely not looking for a fundamental law of nature, he was looking for an organizational scheme for his textbook, but that channeled his experimental thinking to start looking in a totally different way that nobody ever had.

Brett McKay:

Alright, so he had two constraints there. So one was that he needed to organize in a way that made sense for a beginner. That was one constraint. The other one he had a deadline, a book deadline that was the second deadline.

David Epstein:

Straight to space constraints of time, and there were other constraints even beyond that. Yeah, yeah.

Brett McKay:

See that shows how once you have this tight constraint, it can get you to think in different ways to actually do something pretty remarkable. You also talk about how a broken arm, your broken arm in eighth grade changed the trajectory of your life and even helped you become a master memorizer. What happened there?

David Epstein:

Yeah, so I was like a crack head for sports when I was a kid. That was the sun around which my world orbited and football, basketball, baseball, the usual and playing I could throw. I had a really strong throwing arm. And so I was playing quarterback in some schoolyard football one day in eighth grade. And as the quarterback, instead of having kickoff, you just throw off as far as you can down to the other side and my arm snapped on the follow through of a throw. Nobody hit me. It was touch football and it just snapped in a spiral. So pretty crazy injury. In fact, nobody believed it was broken because I hadn’t been hit. And I could feel my hand in places where it wasn’t because I was rotating my shoulder, but it was totally separated. I’ve only seen this happen once before. One other time, by the way, major league baseball pitcher and he had to have his arm amputated, but we’ll never know the exact cause because whatever break happened, the evidence for some bone weakness or something was then gone.

But it led to these interesting things where in school we had these French tests I had to take every week where you had to follow along with a recording of a native speaker on a worksheet that had the transcript except then there’d be blanks and you had to catch them and fill them in. And I was okay, I was mediocre at this. And then once I broke my arm, I couldn’t use my writing hand. It was strapped to my body for months. And so I realized I had to start memorizing the words and then go back and write them all down slowly at once with my left hand. And so the way I started doing that was using sports related mnemonic devices. I would hear a word and then I would attach it to some sports fact or memory or image in my mind. And I started acing these things.

And so I started using these kinds of mnemonic devices, which we now know are key to improving your memory all over the place because I couldn’t write quickly enough to remember things and I still use it to this day. I can memorize an hour long keynote word for word in a few days because I used mnemonic devices. And decades later I would come across one of the most famous studies of memory improvement ever done where an undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon was taken from being able to memorize seven digits to 80 digits. And surprise surprise, he too was using sports related mnemonic devices to remember things. So it made me a better student. And because I couldn’t play contact sports for a year, I started running. And long story short, I ended up being a college runner and a university record holder and all these things just, I never would’ve even tried the sport. And that’s what got me interested in physiology, which got me into writing because I was a science writer for Sports Illustrated is just all these things I never would’ve tried if I hadn’t been forced. And sometimes that’s what useful constraints do. They launch you into productive experimentation because the low friction path is blocked.

Brett McKay:

But see, that’s counterintuitive because I think oftentimes we think in order to be creative, accomplish big things, you got to get rid of the constraints. With the idea of the dream, well, you just let your subconscious percolate on it, there’s no constraints there and it’ll just magically spit out this idea. But as you’ve shown that’s not the case, and you highlight this one company that I’m sure a lot of people have never heard of that shows what happens when you have no constraints. You just give everyone in the company or the organization free reign to do whatever they want. This company was called General Magic. What was General Magic and how did having too much money, too much creative license doom the company?

David Epstein:

Yeah, I like to think of it as the most important company nobody’s heard of and not important because of what they ended up doing, but because of the people that came out of it. But this was a company that starting in really the late eighties and then the early nineties was essentially building the iPhone and the internet didn’t exist. 15% of American households had computers at all, and they had so much buzz. It was founded by several of the designers of the original Apple Macintosh. This other visionary guy from Apple named Marc Porat became the CEO. And they absolutely had the vision of what was coming in communications technology over the next half century Porat for his 1976 PhD dissertation at Stanford. It was titled The Information Economy. He coined that term and when I was reading it in research, absolutely eerie, I mean he saw what was coming, the promise and the problems, misinformation, inequality, all this stuff.

But the vision was so compelling. He was basically sketching a thin glass rectangle with no protruding buttons and a touchscreen with rectangular apps in 1989. And the vision was so obviously right that Goldman Sachs took them public in the first so-called concept IPO, where they went public just with an idea, not a product to make this personal communicator. And Porat said the goal of raising so much money was to create heaven for engineers where they were totally free. What more could anyone ask for? He said, and I think the answer was a little less freedom because the company turned into a disaster. They had so much talent and so many resources they could do anything. And so they did. Every time someone had a good idea, they did it and the project got bigger and bigger and it became less and less coherent and they missed deadlines.

And when they finally shipped something, it was a 200 page manual, nobody was really sure what they were supposed to do with it. There was one guy who I think this interview was emblematic of the place where this was an engineer named Steve Perlman whose job was to make a calendar function, and he wrote it to go from 1904 to 2096 and checked it in and thinks he’s done. Then one of the leaders comes to him and says, Steve, you got to make this thing go back farther in case people write historical apps. So he makes it go back to year one, checks it in, then another team comes to him, Steve, why are you starting with this arbitrary religious context of year one? You got to make it go back to the beginning of astronomical time. So he checks it out again and writes a calendar function to go from the big bang into the future, and it ends up taking months when it would’ve been four lines of code if they just left it the way he originally had it. But because they could do all this stuff they did. And so the refrain when I was interviewing former employees from General Magic was I just couldn’t figure out what not to do.

Brett McKay:

This story reminded me of John Boyd. He was a fighter pilot who’s had a big impact on military thinking. He came up with the OODA Loop, if you’ve heard of that.

David Epstein:

Yeah, absolutely.

Brett McKay:

But there was a period where he was working with the Air Force when they were redesigning one of the fighter jets. And Boyd was really big on maneuverability, like a jet needed to be highly maneuverable so you could get in position on your enemy. And to do that, it had to be small, lightweight, et cetera. But what ended up happening is this project was a project by committee and you had all these corporate interests who wanted a, we want to get all of our technology in this thing as much as possible. And they kept on adding and adding and adding to it. And of course it’s the government say almost an unlimited budget. They just kept adding stuff to it and they kind of created this thing that was sort of an albatross. And Boyd was like, no, we got to strip this down and make something more efficient. But yeah, that’s another example of when you have no constraints on anything, things actually can get worse.

David Epstein:

That really resonates. There’s actually not long ago, the Wall Street Journal did a front page story on why the US had gone from being the world’s leader in naval ship building to being such a laggard that we’re trying to outsource it. And basically that was the story. It was that there’s so many cool things that could go on that we never stop making design changes. And so the thing never gets done, and good designers often use a principle called design freeze where you say, okay, we’re going to this point, this date, and then we’re stopping no more changes, and then we’re testing it. We can’t just change endlessly and you stop and you regroup and you collect your lessons. And I think there’s a whole bunch of that in history and in a lot of government projects. When I was reading about some of the history of government works, there was one phase under defense secretary Robert McNamara, who’s the defense secretary during Vietnam where people would talk about paper wars. There was like, they had so much stuff like paper moving all the time on projects that it’s like nobody ever had a point to stop and figure out what it was they had decided to do because they were always changing all the specifications.

Brett McKay:

I imagine this is only going to get worse with artificial intelligence or LLMs because you can just generate new stuff.

David Epstein:

Oh man. 

Brett McKay:

You’re doing the vibe coding, right? You’re like, oh, it would be cool if you had this feature. Here’s prompt. I got the feature. 

David Epstein:

Now the promise is incredible, but it has never been easier to do too much. And I’ve been seeing this with, so for the last year, just to kind of educate myself, I spent a bunch of time with one particular AI company that helps other companies implement AI. And one of the things I saw is that a lot of companies said, oh, we need AI, right? It’s really alluring. Our competitors have it. And so they implement and it sprawls and it turns into what researchers are now calling work slop where you just generate this insane volume of stuff that never gets finished or just piles up at some bottleneck. Whereas the organizations that I think are having a better run of it start by mapping the jobs to be done or defining a problem and then saying, how does the tool fit this problem? So they lead with the problem instead of leading with the technology and having these sprawling implementations just so much easier for people to start an infinite number of things that they will never finish now. And I think that’s a real challenge and why we’re not seeing in many cases the expected productivity benefits, even while adoption has been really rapid

Brett McKay:

And you highlight research why we have this tendency to keep adding and adding and adding when we don’t have constraints, we actually have a natural bias towards that when we’re given a choice to make something better. Humans typically like to add things, and so yeah, addition can be good sometimes, but what is it about addition that tends to muck things up? I think we talked about one of them, you just get the slop sort of stuff, but what else is going on there?

David Epstein:

Yeah, I mean, you’re right about that. This appears to be a hardwired bias. So there are these series of studies that show that people will overlook solutions that involve subtraction even if they’re obviously better, cheaper, easier, et cetera. And it’s actually called subtraction, neglect bias. So in one of the fun studies, this researcher at the University of Virginia named Leidy Klotz and his colleagues, he gave people this Lego structure and they were supposed to bolster it, so it would balance a masonry brick over the head of a storm trooper action figure, and they could add as many pieces as they wanted, but they had to pay to add pieces. And still most people added pieces and paid when just taking away one piece would’ve solved it instantly because we’re just not programmed to look for subtraction unless someone tells us to do that. And so we pile more things on than can get done.

And typically that leads to work becoming extremely fragmented, which leads to people starting to multitask more. And that gives a feeling of increased productivity. But we actually know that multitasking, since it’s not really possible, you actually have to toggle between things and your brain has to drop one and pick up the other. And every time you do, there’s a cost. And when you’re doing it a lot during a day, the cost compounds. And so you end up doing everything in a mediocre way and modern work is insidious at this, adding more to our plate, more obligations, more dashboards, more meetings, all these things. And they cause people’s attention to be really fragmented, which makes them both worse at what they’re doing, less likely to have their priorities straight for what they’re actually working on. And we now know from physiological measures much more stressed.

Brett McKay:

And I imagine it also adds complexity. The more things you add, absolutely. The more different ways things can interact and they might not interact in the way that you planned on it interacting.

David Epstein:

That’s a great point. And we underestimate that complexity systematically. So this is the famous Brooks’ Law about software projects where if you add people to a project that’s already late, you’ll make it even more late because we underestimate the costs of assimilating people and the coordination costs between people and all these sorts of things. So yeah, complexity, steals clarity. I think of that famous story about Steve Jobs where when he was kicked out of Apple, and then we came back in the late nineties, Apple was making, people don’t probably don’t remember this much, but at the time they had tons of different models of computers. They were making printers, they were making servers, they were making this thing called the Newton. They were just making a ton of stuff. And he comes back and says, what nobody knows, we have no priorities. And so he draws a two by two grid on a whiteboard on one side it says consumer and pro, and on the other it’s portable and desktop. We’re going to have four products. That’s it. Everything else is canceled. And people complained, right, because it canceled things they were working on, but it lent to tremendous clarity to what they were actually doing and saved the company. I mean, they were basically dead about to die before that.

Brett McKay:

And I mean, this not only applies to work life, but it applies to people’s personal lives as well. Our tendency is just to keep piling on stuff. Our kids do more and more activities or we take on more and more responsibilities with organizations we belong to. We want to do more and more vacations when sometimes the answer is just like, you know what? We’re not going to do those things this year. We just need the buffer or the bandwidth to just relax and focus on other things.

David Epstein:

Yeah, man, proactively choosing when to choose. So saying, what are the things we’re not going to do is hugely important, but I think we often push that kind of decision away because it feels limiting. So I think we’re often trying to escape situations that really force us to ruthlessly clarify our priorities because whether it’s productivity tools or just being human and not wanting to face our limited time, that I think we do a lot of things that help give us the illusion that we can get everything done on some time span, but in fact, you need to face up to our mortality and prioritize ruthlessly.

Brett McKay:

So a counter example you gave to General Magic of an organization that put constraints on themselves proactively so they could get stuff done is Pixar. How did Pixar work within constraints to eventually make Toy Story, which would go on to revolutionize animated filmmaking?

David Epstein:

Yeah, I liked using Pixar because their vision was created at the same time as General Magic and unfolded over about the same period basically. But unlike General Magic, so Ed Catmull who led Pixar for many, many years and was the co-founder, he also in the mid seventies decided he wanted make the first fully computer animated feature film. Initially he wanted to be a Disney animator, but he wasn’t that great of a drawer, so a little bit of a problem. And on route to making the first computer animated feature film, which was Toy Story, instead of jumping straight from big idea to big execution like General Magic did, he was relentless. He and his colleagues were relentless about defining what is the next tiny step, okay, here’s the big vision, but what is the next tiny tiny step? They were always making estimates of how many pixels will we need, how many polygons will we need?

Where’s the technology now? How far does that mean it needs to go to get there? Okay, we’re not there yet, so we’re going to work on all these proximate problems. And so it almost seems like when I was spending time with Ed, you’d almost seem like a killjoy in a sense. Yes, we have this great vision, but we can’t rush toward it. And so he was always keeping things as small as possible for as long as possible. And that continued even once Pixar started making movies where they let directors stay with a tiny team in story development for years, simplifying the core of a story because it’s easy to make changes then, and the costs only explode once you move into production. And so they really prioritize staying as small as possible, as long as humanly possible.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, it’s amazing the difference between General Magic and Pixar. Pixar worked within the technology. They had General Magic, got a little head on their skis a little too forward on their skis. So I mean, it’s funny, you can look at Toy Story. The first animated video or film that Pixar did was this thing called Tin Toy. It was about this little toy figure, and it was like the precursor to Toy Story. It was made in 1988, and it was only five minutes long, and it actually looks pretty good. I’ll put a clip of it in the show notes. But they had to work with the processing power that they had at the time, all that stuff. And so it had to be really short. And then they built on that to the point where they can make a full length featured film.

David Epstein:

Those shorts, by the way, I don’t know if people remember, but if you went to Pixar movies in theaters, there were often shorts, five, 10 minutes that would run before the main film. And they used those as their little labs test new animation techniques, test new story techniques. So they were constantly doing things in this really, really small way, even though they had big ideas, they were always looking for ways, what is the smallest possible way we can try this thing out?

Brett McKay:

So it seems like they had a process established in order to avoid that bloat and to maintain those creative constraints.

David Epstein:

And they had a bunch of important rules that were always changing because the staff were changing, the environment was changing. But to go back to that calendar story that I told about General Magic, where it just got bigger and bigger and bigger, even though it was not important, ed told me about something at Pixar. They called the beautifully shaded penny problem where directors are, animators are super conscientious and they want to get all the details. And so they would be obsessing over the shading on a penny that would be in the background of some scene that viewer would never even notice, and they’d be working away on that for weeks and ignoring main characters that still need to be animated. And so they came up with a system, here’s high tech system, popsicle sticks velcroed to a board where each popsicle stick represented the amount of work that one animator could do in one week. And if the director wanted those animators to keep working on that penny, then he had to start taking popsicle sticks away from some other character that needed to be animated. And so again, it was a way to visualize the priorities and force them to be ruthless and General Magic had nothing like that. So they had all these minor priorities competing with major priorities and nobody differentiating them. And so I think Ed and his team were great about that, about forcing people into situations where they had to really clarify their priorities.

Brett McKay:

I imagine everyone’s experienced that shading of the penny problem in an organization. There’s always a group of people or an individual that gets like, okay, this little tiny thing is the most important thing, and it takes up like 80% of the time.

David Epstein:

You get tunnel vision, tunnel vision on those things, especially when it’s your thing. And you don’t see how it connects to the bigger strategy. 

Brett McKay:

You got to kill your darlings sometimes. You also highlight another organization that used constraints very effectively to put out a great product. And you actually had an experience with this organization, This American life, the famous NPR radio show with Ira Glass, famous for their driveway moments where they have these shows you’re listening to in your car, and then you get to your driveway and you want to keep listening. What did this American life do with constraints to create those driveway moments shows?

David Epstein:

Yeah, again, like Pixar, I think they had this system that I came to think of as putting bumpers in a bowling alley where you’re not telling someone exactly what to do, but you’re keeping them trundling in the right direction. And I had a story pitch accepted by them, and I had to write a 35 minute radio script. The story was about a woman with two rare diseases of fat and muscle wasting, and she identified one of them in an Olympic medalist sprinter who had fat wasting and explosive muscle growth and felt like they shared some physiological mechanism she turned out to be right. So I’m supposed to write a 35 minute script on this, and I’ve never written one second for radio before. And so I go in, I try to write a script, and we do some interviewing. And the way it works is you do a read through where people get together in a room and Ira Glass is holding a stopwatch, timing it, and you have your producer there, you I’m reading the narration and the producer’s hitting play on the audio anytime it comes to an interview that we want to cut in.

And so it’s sort of listening to a rough draft, and at the end people get to say what they’re confused about. And in my case, people were confused about a lot because I was used to writing a lot of scientific detail. And in a magazine story, people can stop and go back over that, but when it’s flying by in audio, that’s much more difficult. So people were confused and I was seven minutes over length. So they identified all these points of confusion and you are obligated in their process to fix them, but they don’t tell you how. They’re not going to tell you how you have to do it, but you have to do it. You can’t come back without having addressed people’s confusions. You can’t argue and say, no, I think that was clear. If one of ’em says it’s confusing, you have to deal with it.

And then you come back for the next read through, and every time you do it, there’s a new person who’s never heard any of the material before and that person gets to say what they were confused by. And then you do that over and over and over until a new person comes in and says, nah, I got it all. That was all really clear, and you’re not allowed to go on until you’ve satisfied that. And it was an amazing process because it made a complete rookie like me, like a total radio novice look like a seasoned veteran because it just highlighted for me all the points where I had to do problem solving. And once the problems to be solved is made clear to you, it kind of empowers you to go off and be creative and do your thing. Yeah,

Brett McKay:

I mean it’s interesting about that they didn’t solve the problem for you. They gave you the constraints and then you had to figure out how to solve it.

David Epstein:

So it didn’t feel oppressive because it was hard editing. At the time, I was working at ProPublica as an investigative reporter, and when I tried to bring this system over to ProPublica for the writers and they were like, no, no one editor is too much. Nevermind this crazy process. So I mean, it’s really intensive and hard because your impulses, you want to go, I did a great job. I think I want them to just love it, and they come and say, I was lost on this or that. But also you feel like you have a ton of agency, they’re telling you things to do, but it’s really up to you to then spread your wings as a problem solver within that. And so it’s actually kind of a gift to have someone, well define a problem for you and then unleash you on solving it.

Brett McKay:

How long did that whole process take you to refine your piece for This American Life?

David Epstein:

Gosh, I mean, it dragged over months.

Brett McKay:

Oh dang, I was thinking maybe like a week or something. 

David Epstein:

No, no, no. So there are a few reasons for that though, because Ira’s attention was at a premium. So there were a lot of different stories going through this process at once. And mine didn’t have a time peg in the news or anything, so there was no need to brush the read-throughs. But also since I was brand new in radio, there were some cases where somebody highlighted some confusion and I realized that the way to fix it was I had to go do some more interviewing, and that often meant lining up schedules and recording and all these things. So it went on and again, it was a 35 minute piece and I was seven minutes over on the first draft. So that necessitated a serious reorganization, but a major reason why it took a long time was just there’s a whole bunch of these in process at any one time. And so you can’t just say, tomorrow I’m doing a read through, you sort of have to get Ira’s attention scheduled.

Brett McKay:

Did that process going through that, did that change your writing at all?

David Epstein:

It did change my writing. I think for one, it made me a lot more likely to look for a naive reader and say, what’s confusing you here? Not one of my own editors who has a lot of similar knowledge in some ways to what I have. It also led me to simplify. I think I had a tendency if I find some scientific, before I was a writer, I was training to be a scientist and I switched careers. And I have a tendency if I think some aspect of science is really interesting to want to get it in no matter what, just get it in. Cause I think it’s really interesting. And I had to cut so much scientific stuff that I thought was interesting from that This American Life piece. And yet the piece turned out amazing. It had probably the best response of anything I’ve ever worked on, maybe along with my previous book. And so I think it showed me that the reader or listener doesn’t know what’s not there. And so what you have to make sure is that the stuff that is there is interesting and really clear. And so I think it made me much more aggressive in cutting back in the interest of clarity.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, this story, it made me like, okay, I need to be better about my editing. My wife edits all of my writing, and sometimes she’ll be like, I’m confused here. I’m like, well, why are you confused? It makes perfect sense in my head. What are you talking about? And she’ll be like, well, it could be confusing to a reader and it would be better if you rework these sentences like this. And I’m like, okay, yeah, that is better.

David Epstein:

There you go. Yeah.

Brett McKay:

Well, let’s talk about the idea of bottlenecks because you highlight a book that I read a long time ago and I forgot about, but I still think about it. I still think about the ideas. This book is called The Goal. It’s all about thinking about our problems and looking for bottlenecks. So the big idea is if you want to be more productive in anything, whether it’s work, I mean this focuses on manufacturing and work, but I think it’s applicable to your personal life as well. You got to look for bottlenecks. Tell us more about this idea in this book. 

David Epstein:

Yeah, this book is bizarre by the way, but fascinating. And it was written by this physicist named Eliyahu M. Goldratt, who was studying the behavior of atoms and crystals when a friend of his with a small chicken coop building business asked him to help increase production. And the friend had been hiring new help, but it wasn’t increasing the number of coops they were producing. And so gold rats studied the process and found that that’s because no matter how fast some steps in the assembly process were working, they just piled up at the single slowest step, what he called the bottleneck. And so he ended up moving one worker from a fast step to the slowest step, and it increased overall production by threefold. And this became the core of his idea, what he called the theory of constraints, that every system is limited by its single slowest step or bottleneck.

And so he writes this book, The Goal to try to explain the idea, it’s a business novel where this plant manager is facing shutdown and his Jedi-like physics professor shows up and gives him these Socratic lessons. And he starts to see the whole world in bottlenecks where he takes his son’s Boy Scout troop on a hiking trip and realizes some of the kids are really fast, but this kid, Herbie is really slow and the whole group can only move at the speed of Herbie. So he decides to redistribute the weight from pack, so the fast kids have more, and Herbie has less, and suddenly the whole group is moving faster, and it’s a strange book, and yet it sold 10 million copies. And Jeff Bezos forced all his executives to read it and hosted a full day book club on it. And it just became a phenomenon. But the core idea is really simple. It’s that the constraint, the system constraint shows you where to focus because if you apply energy somewhere else, it doesn’t change the outcome of the overall system because that’s all limited by the single least effective step. And it turned out to become one of the most impactful ideas in management and even spread into personal improvement as well.

Brett McKay:

When we don’t have the output that we want, we typically think, well, we just need to input more. We got to do more and more, and then we’ll get more output. But if there’s a bottleneck somewhere, you can keep putting in more and more input, but the output is going to stay the same. It’s all getting held up at that bottleneck. And so instead of adding more, just remove that bottleneck or somehow widen the bottleneck.

David Epstein:

So the bottleneck shows you where to focus. It’s the highest leverage place to apply energy. In some cases, it’s the only place with any leverage that will make a difference if you apply any energy. But yeah, and so I think it’s a really effective, I dunno if we should get into those stories, but really effective for personal improvement as well. I tell the story of an athlete who applied it, the book, tell us about that. Okay. It also really resonated with my own athletic journey. So the story I tell in the book is about this swimmer named Sheila Taormina. She was at the University of Georgia, and in 1992, it goes to the Olympic trials, tries to make the team the 200 meter freestyle, doesn’t make it isn’t close retires. But then for one of her last classes at University of Georgia, she takes management 5 77 in which she learns about the theory of constraints and decides to do a class project on using it to create a plan to drop three seconds in the 200 meter freestyle.

And so she looks for, she audits her training. And what’s her bottleneck? Well, she determines it’s strength and power. She’s five foot two, which is really small for an elite swimmer. She has an incredible aerobic engine, world-class, and all her coaches have her working on is aerobic endurance and not her strength and power. So she’s continuing to feed the thing that is not limiting her that she already has. So with this class plan, she decides to unretire find a new coach who will work with her on strength and power, and four years later she makes the Olympic team and then is part of the relay team that wins an Olympic gold medal. It’s crazy. If you Google her, you’ll see pictures of her with the other three women in the relay, and she’s about a foot shorter than them. And so she retires after this now as an Olympic champion and then just concerned about her health, she comes out of retirement and starts doing triathlons.

And now she has this new view on training to look for what is her actual limiting factor. And she wins the US National Championship, triathlon goes to the Olympics, finishes sixth, goes to the next Olympics in triathlon retires again, unretires again, takes up fencing and horse jumping and goes to the Olympics. In modern pentathlon, she’s the only woman ever to have competed in four summer Olympics in three different sports. And she was about to retire if she hadn’t learned about the theory of constraints in a management class. So I thought it was an amazing story, and it was very similar to my less illustrious, but I was also a college athlete, not at the level, but had a very similar story where my bottleneck was my ability to recover from workouts. And once I realized that I was an 800 meter runner and scheduled class over one workout a week, so I’d have an excuse not to show up, I improved like rocket fuel. I became a university record holder. I went from walk-on to university record holder by targeting the thing that was limiting me. 

Brett McKay:

I think it’s a big takeaway. Well, let’s talk about constraints to make collaboration more effective. So I think all of us have worked in a group, we might’ve done brainstorming sessions. We have those meetings where we’re all just throwing out ideas. And we have probably all experienced, those meetings are not very productive. Why don’t traditional brainstorm sessions work usually?

David Epstein:

Yeah, there are a few reasons. So there was some psychologists recently did an international survey of known creativity myths where things that we know are not true from research and the top two mistaken beliefs where people are most creative when they’re most free. And that brainstorming is the best way to come up with lots of creative ideas. And it doesn’t work for a few reasons. One is because it’s too open-ended and people don’t tend to come up with creative ideas when something is really open-ended much better, giving them a specific problem almost no matter what it is. And they’ll come up with more creative ideas. But also people tend to be confused by the norms of brainstorming. So there’ll be conflicting norms like say whatever comes to mind, but also don’t criticize. Those things can be quite mutually exclusive. And there’s a lot of what’s called production blocking, where people who might have something interesting to say won’t share it because they’re embarrassed or they’re not that eloquent or because of the person who spoke before them. So there’s a term called HPPO would be a highest paid person’s opinion. And once that person shares their opinion in a group, other opinions will tend to coalesce around it, not because it’s a better opinion, just because they’re the highest paid. And so there are all these factors that sort of make the norms of the situation unclear for people. So much so that brain writing works much better where if people are allowed to write ideas separately before they come together and evaluate them.

Brett McKay:

Alright, so that’s a constraint you can put in. Instead of having vocal brainstorm sessions, have everyone write a memo of ideas they have and then they submit it to the group

David Epstein:

First. Yeah, separate it. And really trying to keep sort of equal social norms. So the best team, this shows up in all sorts of research, like Google did all this internal research on it, but in other places that the best teams for problem solving are those that have relatively equal conversational turn taking, not in every task they’re doing, but over the course of a day. So you need to be really careful to put certain constraints in place to make sure that happens. So at Pixar for example, they banned Steve Jobs from certain meetings because they were worried about that HPPO effect. They knew his larger than life persona that his opinion would carry too much weight. And then other people wouldn’t share some of the important things because not every person who has value to add is super eloquent. And so you have to be careful about making everyone feel like they’re going to have a turn. But again, also because you want to give a specific problem, if it’s too open-ended, people do not come up with creative ideas. Yeah.

Brett McKay:

Well, that’s the point I want to talk about you highlight in the book is this idea of settling for good enough that it can help you get more great things done. What’s going on there?

David Epstein:

Yeah, the last chapter gets kind of more personal philosophical, and a major idea in it is called satisficing, which is a word that’s a combination of satisfy and suffice and was coined by Herbert Simon, whose work is sprinkled throughout the book. And he was trained as a political scientist, but he won the highest award in computer science. He was a founder of ai. He won the highest award in psychology and he won the Nobel Prize in economics. And one of his major ideas was Satisficing, where humans do not conform to the rational actor model of classical economics where we evaluate all the options and make the best decision because we have limited cognitive bandwidth, we can’t evaluate all the options, we can’t predict all the repercussions of our decisions. And so what Simon argued is that we should proactively satisfy, we should set good enough rules for our decisions, and when they’re met, make the decision and never look back because the opposite.

If you’re not a satisfier, then the opposite end of the spectrum is what’s called a maximizer who really does try to evaluate every possible option and make the best decision. Maybe we’d call it an optimizer today. And it turns out that in psychological research, it’s almost always bad to be a maximizer. They’re less satisfied with their decisions, less satisfied with their lives, more prone to regret, often prefer reversible decisions, even though it leads them to not really commit one way or the other. And so I think it’s really important in this world of seemingly infinite choice, whether you’re buying a dishwasher or looking for a date to set certain good enough parameters, and maybe things will go way beyond that, but once they’re hit, make the decision and move on, and it gives you the possibility of being satisfied.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I’ve noticed in my life some people have, they have a constitution or a temperament to be maximizers or satisficers. I imagine if you’re naturally a maximizer, you have to be a lot more intentional or proactive about putting those good enough constraints on yourself.

David Epstein:

Oh yeah. I mean, because I think I have maximizing tendencies for sure. And so setting down these rules ahead of time of what’s good enough for this decision has been really helpful for me. Even in fact, when I started a newsletter, I was reading Simon’s work, and it was very much because I had just had this very successful book and I felt a little paralyzed. I’m like, if I do anything else, it has to be as good at this or better. And so the newsletter was a case where I said, okay, if a book has to be a nine or 10, if I get a newsletter post to six and a half, maybe it’ll fly past that on the first draft maybe. But if I’m confident that it’s at six and a half, I’m sending it. And that became a really important satisficing exercise for me to kind of tamp down some of my maximization. But as maybe it sounds like silly or I don’t know, just weird. But I proactively make satisficing calls, like if I’m trying to buy something and here are the three things I needed to do, that’s the job I want to hire it for. Once I see those three things, I’m done looking. I’m not reading every single review. And that’s been really helpful for me.

Brett McKay:

When do you think maximizing is beneficial or is it ever beneficial?

David Epstein:

It’s a good question because Simon, I mean, he did all these things where he wore one kind of beret only and one color of socks. And he said, you only need three pairs of clothes, one in your body, one in the closet right away and one in the wash. And he at the same breakfast every day, lived in the same house for 46 years. And what he was saying was, look, this freed up my cognitive bandwidth to focus on the things that were really important, like his research. And so I think there are things where he famously said, the best is the enemy of the good. And I think it’s almost always good to be a satisfier in terms of making progress. But I think there are also cases where once you have enough experience to know the kind of things, the ways that you want to spend your time, that it can be okay to be more of a maximizer in trying to craft your work life so that you’re spending more of the time working on something that you think is ideal, basically.

And again, I think aiming for perfection is way too much, but being okay with dithering more on that and saying, how can I really work my way towards spending my time working on things that I think are really important? And again, not that you have to jump to that immediately, but over the course of a working career, not just necessarily saying this is kind of a good enough thing, but once you get to good enough thinking about, well, could I go a little farther? So I think it’s okay to do that, but again, I think it should be done in steps as opposed to maximization right from the beginning.

Brett McKay:

Well, David, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

David Epstein:

Davidepstein.com has links to the book and my free newsletter, all that kind of stuff.

Brett McKay:

You’re on Substack now, right?

David Epstein:

I’m on Substack, yep. And there’s a link for that on my website for all that stuff. And there’s some free sort of tip sheets related to Inside the Box on the site also. 

Brett McKay:

Well fantastic. David Epstein, thanks for your time, it’s been a pleasure.

David Epstein:

Pleasure’s mine.

Brett McKay:

My guest today was David Epstein. He’s the author of the book Inside the Box. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can learn more information about his work at his website, davidepstein.com. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/constraints. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but to put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

You hear a lot today about how our ample screentime is affecting our mental health. But how is it affecting our bodies, and how is that impact on our bodies affecting, well, our mental health?

My guest today will unpack the ways that digital technology is sapping our vitality, and offer a simple protocol to get it back. Her name is Manoush Zomorodi, and she’s the host of the TED Radio Hour and the author of Body Electric. In our conversation, Manoush explains why a day spent sitting in front of screens can leave you exhausted, even though you haven’t really done anything, and how small bouts of movement throughout the day can counteract that drain and keep you feeling energized and focused. She shares how much activity you need to offset periods of being sedentary, and how to realistically incorporate these movement breaks into your routine. We also get into the specific effects digital technology is having on our eyes and ears — and what you can do to prevent the damage.

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Connect With Manoush Zomorodi

• Manoush’s website
• Manoush on IG

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page

Download this episode

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Transcript

Brett McKay:

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the AoM podcast. You hear a lot today about how ample screen time is affecting our mental health, but how is it affecting our bodies and how’s that impact on our bodies affecting our mental health? My guest today will unpack the ways that our digital technology is sapping our vitality and offers simple protocol to get it back. Her name is Manoush Zomorodi and she’s the host of the TED Radio Hour and the author of Body Electric. Manoush explains why a day spent sitting in front of screens can leave you exhausted even though you haven’t really done anything, and how small bouts of movement throughout the day can counteract that drain, keep you feeling energized and focused. She shares how much activity you need to offset periods of being sedentary and how to realistically incorporate these movement breaks into your routine. We also get into the specific effects digital technologies having on our eyes and ears what you can do to prevent the damage. After the show is over, check at our show notes at aom.is/bodyelectric. All right, Manoush, welcome back to the show.

Manoush Zomorodi:

It is so great to be back. It’s been a while, Brett.

Brett McKay:

It has — 2017 was the last time we talked. It’s been nine years and it was about your book about boredom, Bored and Brilliant, about how boredom can be good for us. You got a new book out called Body Electric: The Hidden Health Cost of the Digital Age and New Science to Reclaim Your Wellbeing. And yeah, you’re exploring the health cost of always being on our screen sitting down looking at iPads. What led you to explore this beat for the past few years?

Manoush Zomorodi:

Yeah, so I’ve been a journalist for 30 years, but my sort of specialty about 15 years ago became tech and business and everyone was talking about upgrading and valuations and all those things, but I was looking around and seeing that my technology, this sounds so quaint now, but my new iPhone was changing the way I did everything. It was changing the way I parented. I could be at the playground and on a call at the same time. Is that good? We don’t have to debate that right now, but for me, it was becoming really a anthropological experiment that was happening on us. And one of the things I noticed was that I started to think differently. So in terms of the first book, I would notice that I was having trouble sort of being more creative than I used to be. And I sort of looked around and thought, what is different now?

And the difference was that whenever I had a crack in my day, a spare moment, waiting in line for coffee, waiting for the subway, I could be productive. I could look at my phone, I could check the headlines, the weather, ping my husband, you name it. And it made me wonder what were the effects of never being bored? And as a Gen Xer, I was told, oh, only boring people get bored. But what if being bored was actually a good thing, this thing that we thought was terrible and to be avoided at all costs. So that led me down this road to understanding the neuroscience of boredom or what really cognitive neuroscientists call mind wandering. So boredom as a gateway to mind wandering, which activates a particular network in the brain that is responsible for our most original thinking, problem solving and something called autobiographical planning.

This is telling ourselves the story of our life, creating a narrative, and that helps us then set goals and work towards those goals. So to me, mind-blown. Okay, so I need to get more boredom in my life. That was like 10 years ago. Apparently boredom is back though from what I hear, Brett, it’s very big on socials. I guess the people who were 10 years old when that book came out are just facing that issue now. Then after thinking about that, I think we’ve seen in the last decade since that book came out, a greater understanding of the connection between how our brain works and our body functions. And so for me with this new book, I couldn’t understand why I was so damn tired At the end of a day sitting on my laptop, I was like, I haven’t done anything. Why am I physically exhausted? And that was the question I basically was trying to solve that ended up in this book.

Brett McKay:

Was there a particular moment where you can think about where it’s like, boy, sitting at this computer all day, this probably isn’t good. Not only for my brain, but just for my overall physiology and health?

Manoush Zomorodi:

Yeah, well, I felt it, and I think for a lot of us things came into very stark vision during the pandemic. It was literally that moment where I was on my laptop for work, on my phone, checking in on my family, ordering groceries online. Netflix was the only way to entertain ourselves, and I was bone numbingly tired. I was safe, I was healthy. I had no reason not to feel like I couldn’t spring out of my chair. And so to me that felt like a paradox. I just couldn’t understand how you could get more tired from doing nothing. And the last time I took biology was in high school. So my favorite thing is to track down the absolute experts in whatever field I’m curious about and have them explain it to me and then sort of bring that back to us normies and try to make some changes based on what the science, A lot of science is locked up in journals and my idea is like, well, let’s get it out there and let’s apply it and try to change the way we live based on what we know works.

Brett McKay:

So let’s do a sort of a big picture overview of the state of Americans sitting at their screens and just staring at ’em all day. How much are Americans doing that?

Manoush Zomorodi:

Yeah, it’s not good, Brett. It’s not good. By some estimates, the average American sits 187 days out of the year, so more than half the year, nine to 10 hours a day. We know also that the average American is interacting with media about 12 and a half hours a day. So I mean that includes double screening. So I don’t know about you, but my life revolves around chairs and sitting in the morning, I check my phone and where do I go? I go to the office to sit at my desk to look at two different screens. Then I come home, I check my phone again to make sure I know where my daughter is. I listen while I take the dog out for a walk. I meet my husband. We’re rewatching Mad Men on the couch. Essentially, we have built our lives around sitting and screens, and it’s really not that different for older or younger people either.

Like kids are on laptops in the classroom, they come home to do their homework on their laptops, they’re texting with friends, they’re watching YouTube, older adults, how do they stay connected a lot? There’s amazing online courses they can take, the WhatsApp family chat groups. And I say that not as judgment, but just as a fact that this is our connected society, but it just annoyed me that at the same time that screens have become so ubiquitous, it’s now estimated the average 19-year-old moves as much as the average 60-year-old and type two diabetes in young people have doubled. And it is estimated that by the end of this decade, 500 million more people will have at least one more chronic illness and many of those are preventable. So I think we talk so much about the mental health effects of being online, but we have been missing a key part of the equation, which is the physical health effects, the effects on our bodies.

Brett McKay:

So being sedentary increases your risk of diabetes. What else is it doing to us?

Manoush Zomorodi:

Yeah, so I mean obesity, that’s sort of a catchall term from essentially metabolic dysfunction for some people. Other people, it’s just lifestyle. As you mentioned, diabetes, I think what we’re leaving out though when we talk about the illnesses is the sort of mental health effects that come from these physical chronic illnesses. So we’re seeing rising levels of anxiety, inability to concentrate, depression, et cetera. And I think we think, oh, that’s because terrible things are happening in social media, but actually a lot of that is related to sitting and looking at screens as well. So when I went to talk to scientists to try to understand that was the question for me. I was like, what is happening in my body when I am sitting and staring at a screen for hours on end? And what I was told was really three things. 

So the first one is that when you sit, you are bent at your waistline and at your knees. And so think of a garden hose when you kink a garden hose and it gets, the water gets backed up in it. The same thing is essentially happening at your legs and at your torso. And what is happening then is that there is less circulation and your leg muscles, I had no idea, are doing incredibly important work and they need blood flow and oxygenation to do this. They are flushing out glucose constantly. They are pushing oxygen up your body, up to your brain, but they need to be stimulated in order to do that. If you don’t do that, that is when you start to see blood pressure rising, blood sugar rising and do it long enough, those chronic health issues start to creep in. Then the other thing I learned was when we sit, we don’t breathe properly.

Our diaphragm is contracted essentially, and full breaths. Again, this is oxygenation. When you don’t get enough oxygen into your brain, this is called neurovascular coupling. Usually the neurons up there can flush out the CO2 if you keep the circulation going. But if you don’t, what does CO2 do? It makes you feel sleepy, foggy, tired, that sense you can’t concentrate. It’s a metabolic thing that is happening. It is within your body. And then the third thing is kind of new and interesting. I started to learn about a relatively new field of study called a Sense called interoception. So I had never heard of this. I’ve heard of introspection or perception, but interoception is the study of the signals that our body is sending us internally. So some of those are subconscious. Our body tells us to breathe. We’re not usually aware of that or heart rate speeds up if we’re anxious about something.

But then there are other times where we are more aware of it or we should be more aware of it. Like, oh, my stomach’s growling, I should go eat. But what I had noticed and what newer studies are starting to also show is that when we are locked in on screens, we ignore what our body is telling us. It might be telling us we need a break or we need to just get some air, some fresh air, or we need to move our body, or we’re getting anxious or we can’t focus. And I think certainly I saw this in myself and I hear from a lot of other people, I just got to power through. I just got to keep going. I got some stuff on my list. I’m just just going to put in one more hour. I can get this done and like, Ooh, what’s that other thing? And then suddenly you have 87 tabs open and you’re kind of spinning your wheels and you’re sort of getting things off your checklist and you feel like you’re working really hard, but the next day you come back and you’re like, wow, that was total crap that I actually produced yesterday. So to me, I was like, oh, okay. So they’re really good biological reasons why I’m tired and cranky and anxious and can’t concentrate.

Brett McKay:

And speaking to that, sort of not being able to pay attention or read your body signals. That’s another thing I’ve noticed when I sit down a lot is that I don’t really pay attention to whether I’m hungry or not. And so it’s like I’m not really hungry, but I’m like, well, I’m kind of bored and I need something to kind of power through this, so I’ll just eat some Reese’s peanut butter cups,

Manoush Zomorodi:

I will eat and have absolutely no recollection of having eaten an entire bag of, well, in my case, it’s popcorn, but it’s amazing. And of course, that’s what our technology is designed to do, to keep us focused, to keep us swiping, to keep us clicking through, to keep us there. That’s the whole point of it. And these sort of more subtle, I would say, ancient signals that we’re getting from inside, they get drowned out pretty easily.

Brett McKay:

What’s interesting about your book is that you highlight that people have been noticing the ill consequences of being sedentary thanks to our new form of labor all the way back in the 19th century. In the 21st century, it’s a lot more cute. It’s all digital. We’re at a desk. But people in the 19th century, they’re shifting away from agrarian to more knowledge work that we think of today, or even just working in a factory where they might be sitting down but moving their hands. What were these people, these writers and thinkers noticing about how that change in work was affecting our bodies, but also maybe their souls even?

Manoush Zomorodi:

I love that you picked up on this, and that is where the title actually comes from. Body Electric is based on the poem by Walt Whitman, and back in the 1800s, there was this move from you could used to be able to, or you used to have to use a thresher to thresh the wheat. And then the industrial revolution begins, we start to have engines and combines and people can sit and do this labor and there’s increased production. And in order to manage this increased production to account for it, to ship it to the right places to create essentially supply chains, we needed clerks. We needed people who managed systems, who managed other people. And as we all know, that requires sitting at a desk, not at a laptop back then, but certainly at ledgers, there was a spate of poetry and people noticing that the clerk’s vitality, I guess is the best way to put it, was diminished.

That they were of slighter stature, that they were pale, that they were as one newspaper, put it tired, not tired because of their work, but tired with their work. And Whitman is saying his poem, the body electric is actually an ode to the human physique at its ultimate when it is relishing the world, when it is using its muscles, when it is breathing the air, when it is in the sunshine and outdoors. And that sort of joie de vivre unfortunately, was not really to be found for people who were stuck at desks indoors even nearly, well, 150 to 175 years ago.

Brett McKay:

There’s a line from Whitman. He wrote an article in life illustrating 1856, talking about clerks at their desk. He said this, I thought it was really good, described them. He said, A slender and round shoulder, generation of minute leg, chalky face and hollow chest. Great description. 

Manoush Zomorodi:

So sad, right?

Brett McKay:

Yeah. And what’s interesting too is a lot of these writers and thinkers around the same time, like late 19th century, early 20th century, not only were they noticing it affecting people’s bodies, but it gave rise to this idea of sinia, which was basically like you were just overly anxious, you were depressed, and they developed all these health cures for neuro sinnia, and the health cure was like, well, you got to get out to go to some sanitarium and get fresh air and take cold baths. It’s basically the same stuff we’re doing in 2026. 

Manoush Zomorodi:

So true. They were doing cold plunges back then. Well, it’s like you just want to feel something, right? You just want to feel alive, like touch grass. I guess what’s old is new again. 

Brett McKay:

So sitting down looking at a screen, not great for us, you feel crappy, you feel tired, diabetes, you feel creaky and cranky. But then you came across this study by this guy named Keith Diaz that offered a really simple solution to this problem. 

Manoush Zomorodi:

Almost too simple. So I was walking my dog listening to the news, and I heard about this study that had come out. This was January, 2023, and it was a physiologist at Columbia University Medical School. And Keith’s sort of mission in life is to try to understand what is the minimum amount of movement that the human body needs in order for a sedentary, and I would add screen filled life not to kill them prematurely. And what Keith had found in his lab was that five minutes of gentle movement, so about two miles per hour, not fast on a treadmill for every half hour during extended periods of sitting offset the harms of high glucose blood pressure. It made people feel less fatigued. They were able to concentrate and it improved their mood. And when I heard that, I was like, wait a minute, it can’t be that easy.

That’s it. Just move gently for five minutes every half hour. And then I was like, oh, wait a minute. That’s kind of often actually, would people actually do that? Would they be able to interrupt all their sedentary screen filled lives to add this sort of five minute break within their day? And so I reached out to Keith and I was like, what do you think people could do this? He’s like, I don’t think people can do this. And it makes me depressed because it doesn’t matter if I can show something in the lab if this doesn’t actually translate to real life, it makes no difference.

Brett McKay:

So you and Keith decided to do a big study to see if people would do it, which we’ll talk about. But you actually first tested this on yourself to see does five minutes of walking every 30 minutes, does that actually change your physiology? And so you went over to Keith’s lab and hooked yourself up to some monitors to see what would happen?

Manoush Zomorodi:

I did. So he invited me. He’s like, well, why don’t you try it for yourself and see if you disagree with me that people can do this? So I was like, great, I will be your lab rat. So for a week before I went to the lab, I wore a heart rate monitor, a very sort of fancy accelerometer, pedometer, glucose monitor, the whole jammy. And then I went up to his lab and I spent two days there. So the first day they had me in a room. They were work on your laptop like a normal day all day, just work on your laptop. I had bathroom breaks, I had time to eat my lunch. But basically I just powered through for eight hours and all the while they were collecting my blood sugar data, my blood pressure heart rate, and I was filling out regular surveys regarding my mood and ability to focus.

And then the second day when I was there, every half hour, Keith’s lovely assistant guided me over to a treadmill in the corner and she’d type in 2.0 miles per hour, and I would take a sort of gentle stroll for five minutes. And again, they measured all of those things. And when they compared the two days, it was kind of crazy actually. My blood sugar was cut nearly in half. My blood pressure dropped by five points. My concentration was so much better, and I mean my energy levels and mood were just far superior. I mean, that was so obvious to me. I could feel it the day I didn’t move. I slithered back onto the subway to go home. I was exhausted the day I took the breaks. I was like, great. This was super fine. Okay, bye. I just skipped my way out. And when I saw those results, I was like, well, this is too powerful not to try to get regular people to do this, especially since it is something you don’t need money to move for five minutes every half hour, and maybe there could be effects even if it was not quite that often.

So yeah, so Keith and I, we took our teams at NPR and at Columbia, and we launched a global clinical trial. This was exciting for me as a journalist to do a proper medical study. And we had 20,000 people sign up, which was really cool.

Brett McKay:

And what were the results of that? Did people see benefits and were they able to integrate these short walks into their daily routine?

Manoush Zomorodi:

So what we did was we had them choose a cohort so you could decide to move for five minutes every half hour, five minutes, every hour or five minutes every two hours because not only did we want to measure the effects, but we really wanted to understand the feasibility of it, who managed to stick with it the most. And I was really surprised. I mean, keep in mind of course, Brett, that this is a self-identifying audience like their public radio. Yes, for sure. They’re like, I have this problem. I want to do something about it. So we have to have that caveat. However, of the people who signed up and started the two week period of integrating these breaks into their lives, 80% stuck with it, which I was quite surprised about. They saw on average a 25% decrease in fatigue levels. Anecdotally, they told us about aches and pains going away, being able to concentrate again.

There were reports of better mood essentially, not only just being able to focus, and surprisingly 82% said that they found it doable and they liked taking the breaks. So to me, I was like the data was clear, and I should say there was a dose response relationship. So the people who took the breaks every half hour saw greater decreases in fatigue, greater increases in concentration and mood, but the difference was pretty slight. So for the book, I just thought we know broadly what the data say, but what I wanted to understand was how did people do it In a world that is in schedules and universities and offices and lives built around screens and chairs, what did they do in order to succeed? That’s where I was like, how did they hack their lives to be able to do this without being annoyed by it and without upending all the things that they needed to do?

How did they deal with the interruptions? Because I should also add, Brett, this did not impact productivity. To me. That was the most surprising. I expected people to be like, well, I didn’t get as much done, but I felt better. That was not the case. In fact, we saw a slight improvement in productivity, which is actually what I had observed when I went and did it in the lab. So I just found that every time I took a break, I did not look at a screen while I took my breaks on the treadmill, but I noticed that I would, at first I was annoyed. I was in the middle of something, but then I would sort of strategize. I’d be like, okay, when I get back to my desk, I really need to answer that one email and I need to say these three things and I would just get back and be super efficient and focused and get it done instead of faffing around and not reading all the way to the end of emails and clicking over to check one thing. I just did the work. 

Brett McKay:

When you’re on those walks, you’re thinking about your work a little bit in your head, like, okay, what do I got to do when I get back? And when you got back, you’re like, okay, I know what I got to do because I’ve already thought about it. And so you just were able to do it.

Manoush Zomorodi:

Exactly. Exactly. And I think that’s what a lot of people saw is that the quality, maybe the quantity was less, but actually if the quality is better than you’re not spinning your wheels. 

Brett McKay:

So how did people integrate this in their lives? What were some strategies and tactics that they used?

Manoush Zomorodi:

Super interesting. So what I ended up doing was going through and creating sort of three buckets. One was younger people, students and educators, and we could not let people under 18 into the study, but there were a bunch of teachers who tried to do it with their classrooms. Then I had the middle group, which was information workers, knowledge workers, people who generally make a living off of sitting and looking at a screen. And then the third group, which was older adults who maybe were retired and thinking more about the longevity and health effects for students. Some of it was, I can put it to you two ways. One was there were teachers who really felt very frustrated because there is no mandate for recess in schools. And so it is really left up to teachers to figure out how to get movement integrated into their classrooms.

And it’s not a nice to have Brett. There is a ton of research that shows that movement helps students learn better. There is a direct correlation between those things. And the teachers see it too. It’s not just the kids are wiggly, their bodies are growing and need the circulation and they need the oxygenation. So some teachers, they turned it into a science project in their class. They were like, look at this weird NPR project. This was a high school teacher. And she said, we’re going to do this to understand data collection. We’re going to do this to experience it ourselves and track ourselves, and then we’re going to talk about the placebo effect and see if that has anything. So they turned it into a science project, which I thought was such a creative way of doing it, but I also heard a lot from professors who maybe would’ve powered through a three hour workshop who then integrated breaks into their workshop and found they had a better time teaching their students were more attentive and on the whole people actually retained the information better.

So there’s a lot more into that. And my whole thing is that I think we need to teach interoception at a much younger age, teach really little ones to start to listen to what their bodies are telling them because they are surrounded by screens all the time. So that’s part of that chapter Information workers. I really went deep in trying to understand scheduling, right? Because that’s the thing. And what you saw of course, was that the people who are in power, those are team leaders or executives, they set the tone. They can say, instead of half hour meetings, we’re going to schedule 25 minute meetings. So you get that five minute break or 55 minute meetings instead of an hour. They can say, it’s okay to not have your zoom camera on and move. If you need to move during a meeting, go for it.

Some people who maybe were not in charge could just say like, oh, I need to turn off my screen. I have terrible wifi. And then they would do their movement break, which really cracked me up. And then they would start to create rules like another boss said, when we’re having an internal meeting, anyone is welcome to move during a meeting as they need to, but if we’re with clients, let’s make sure we don’t do that. It’s not socially acceptable. I think once a team decides that it’s okay for heads to be bopping up and down on a zoom, then it’s not a big deal, but it really needs that cultural sort of shift that we are able to do better work and we have higher job satisfaction and also potentially less sick days. So the winds are big. And then older adults had a completely different issue because what I heard from a lot of retired people was actually they were more active during the day.

They were volunteering or helping out with grandchildren or whatever. But come say four or five o’clock, there was sitting for the next 6, 7, 8 hours watching tv, Netflix, scrolling on their phones, and those were the hours that they needed to insert interruptions into, and they made a big difference. I mean, one of Keith’s other studies I should add for people who replaced half an hour of sitting with movement decreased their risk of an early death by 18%. So we’re not talking about huge changes here. We’re talking about just getting more movements into your life. And if you need to start by looking at your phone while you’re doing that, whatever, who cares? Baby steps. We just want you to live longer and healthier

Brett McKay:

After I read the book. So I am pretty active. I take a morning walk every morning mile, and then I take another walk. But after I read your book, I was like, I need to start taking these five minute breaks. So I just set a timer. Every 25 minutes I get up. It doesn’t matter if I’m in the middle of something, I’ll go take a walk for five minutes. Or if I can’t take a walk, I have a problem going outside and taking a walk when it’s really cold outside, I’m kind of a wuss. So I’ll just do jumping jacks. I’ll just kind of look like a weirdo moving my arms up and down, doing 1980s aerobics. 

Manoush Zomorodi:

Totally. And I think what you’re doing is exactly right. Is it time to move? Yes. But if you are like I’m in the middle of something and I am in flow, well then, okay, fine. Don’t take a movement break. It’s no big deal. What I sort of am sick of a little bit is this idea that we are so all or nothing, we’re either on the traveling soccer team for our kids or they don’t play soccer at all. Well, what about just going out in the backyard and kicking the ball around more often? We don’t need to be training for a marathon or just sitting on our butts. It’s like, what if we just got up and I like to do this works for me. I get up and I just walk around. There’s a big conference table, and I walk around that for a couple minutes and then I get a glass of water and I go back to my desk and it helps a lot.

Brett McKay:

You’re kind of like a prisoner that gets your yard time walk around the yard.

Manoush Zomorodi:

I try not to think of myself as a prisoner, but yeah.

Brett McKay:

That’s what I was thinking the other day when I was taking a walk just around in my driveway because I needed to. Why not? It worked.

Manoush Zomorodi:

Yeah.

Brett McKay:

But what’s interesting too, you highlight a lot of people may be listening to this, okay, yeah, you can get these health benefits by taking these five minute breaks. But it’s like, well, I exercise every day. I had this hard workout for an hour. I do CrossFit. I do a run. But you highlight research that that’s probably not enough if you’re sitting down the rest of the day. 

Manoush Zomorodi:

No, in fact, it’s definitely not enough. And it’s so unfair. It sounds so unfair. So Keith told me about his own journey when there started to be research into this idea that even if you do a morning workout or you go for an evening run, if the majority of your day is then spent sitting and looking at a screen, it doesn’t matter, don’t give up your workout. Obviously you’re building muscle, cardiovascular strength, all the rest of it, but it is not enough to offset the harms of sitting for long stretches for the rest of your day or evening. And he just said to me, he’s like, this was shocking to him. He’s like, we had been taught when we were getting our PhDs that exercise is the ultimate medicine, that it is the cure for everything. So to then read that, you could check it off your list first thing, but it doesn’t make a difference the rest of the day. That just sort of shocked him. I mean, I guess the good news is if you haven’t been moving at all, you are going to see benefits just by starting to take five minute walks or as you have said, if you can’t walk, there’s options with your arms. The point is to get the blood flowing and raise your heart rate just a little bit, but you don’t have to go crazy.

Brett McKay:

And then the other thing too, you highlight that this is interesting. A few years ago, standing desk became all the rage people heard sitting as the new smoking. Okay, well I got to stand up while I’m working, standing all day at work. Can that offset the downsides of being sedentary?

Manoush Zomorodi:

No. And this was such a drag too. I had people say that to me. They’re like, oh, I’m so glad I have a standing desk. And I was like, oh, I’m so sorry to tell you this. There have been massive studies looking at all the different clinical trials about standing desks, and unfortunately the consensus is that standing at the very best doesn’t really cause much harm. It gets you up, maybe it relieves some back pain, but at the very worst can actually cause circulation problems or increase your risk for stroke and varicose veins and things like that. It’s the movement that stimulates the muscles. And when the muscles are stimulated, they suck in the glucose, they push the oxygen up. Just standing unfortunately is not the answer. It’s so sad again. Yeah, but

Brett McKay:

The answer, it’s easy. It’s just five minutes of gentle movement every 25 minutes. If you can’t do that at least an hour. Just move more. Just move. 

Manoush Zomorodi:

More. Yeah, exactly. What we ended up finding was that most people, if you hate the timers, there’s another thing. Some people would just set a goal, I’m going to take four or five minute breaks today, and then just when it pops up and it feels doable, you know what I mean? And I think what I also found so interesting, and there’s starting to be more research into this, this is not in the book because the research is very preliminary, but this idea that the number one thing people did was set timers in order to get themselves moving. And that makes sense. You can’t remember to get up. You’re in the middle of something. But what ended up happening, and I’ve seen this in myself and it sounds like you probably do too, is that your body begins to send you pings and messages that even if you don’t set the timer, it’ll start to say like, yo, I’m feeling a little rough around here.

Can we please get up? Can we please get up? And many people told me that by the end of the two week study, they didn’t need to use their timers anymore. And I was just talking to some researchers at the NIH who are looking into this idea of introception and motivation and how the body begins. They think it has something to do with sort of circadian rhythms, but not what has to do with night or morning or anything like that, but that the body gets itself on a sort of rhythm and it begins to anticipate and alert the brain that it wants something or needs something, which I think is really interesting.

Brett McKay:

And as you increase your movement, you increase your interoception. So you were able to notice those urges to move more.

Manoush Zomorodi:

Totally. And like Keith said to me, he’s like, I feel like we don’t want people walking around in circles like robots. That’s not the goal. But I think for younger people, if you tell them, this will help with your anxiety, your ability to focus, we hear a lot about people having more depressive symptoms. This will help you feel more positive. And then for people of a certain age, I’ll include myself. I’ve started thinking about chronic illness. I don’t want a chronic illness, and if this is something I can do that makes me feel better and protects my health for longer so I can live not just longer, but live well, then why the hell not?

Brett McKay:

Yeah. One bit of advice I’d give to people who want to start this, and you talk about this in the book, is don’t use your smartphone or smartwatches nudges that they have. I think that the Apple watch has this where if you haven’t been moving for a while, it’s like get up and move. Actually, I talked to someone, it was a psychologist who brought up research that those nudges, those automatic nudges, they actually backfire because you start to resent them. It’s like, I don’t want to do that. And I noticed that with the apple. I set that up in the apple, apple watch when I first got, I was like, oh, I can have it remind me to move when I haven’t been moving. And I would just be like, dismiss, dismiss, dismiss. Shut up for the rest of the day. So if you want to set up a nudge, you have to make it yourself. Set up a timer. So don’t rely on the AI to tell you to move.

Manoush Zomorodi:

And the way I like to think of it is that setting it with intention is you’re making a contract with yourself, right? You’re saying, in one hour I will take a five minute walk, and instead of being stupid machine, you’re like, oh yeah, okay, I made a plan. I better get up and go. That’s not to say it’ll be easy. There are some days where I’m like, I don’t want to. I’m comfortable in my chair, but I feel better. Every single time. 

Brett McKay:

So something else you do besides exploring these overall systemic health benefits of moving gently several times throughout the day. You also talk about what staring at our screens all day is doing to our eyes and to our ears. So how are screens messing up our vision?

Manoush Zomorodi:

Well, I did not know that they are changing the shape of our eyeballs. So our eyes are extremely malleable and cooperative. If you tell them that you want to look at something that is close to you a lot, they will conform, they will change shape and become sort of egg like shapes and you will go nearsighted. And what they’ve seen is that in the past few decades, this is happening to younger and younger kids and more and more kids. I think there’s some statistic that it’s like one out of three kids is now nearsighted. And I spoke to Maria Liu at Berkeley who has been studying exactly, because for the longest time people thought, oh, if you’re nearsighted, it’s genetics like tough luck. And she was convinced that it was actually lifestyle and behavior that were these soaring rates that she saw in her native China that were starting to come to the US. This was 20 years ago.

And so she went into the lab and she actually fitted chicks with contact lenses that made them nearsighted and then tracked how their eyeballs changed shape. And we see the same things in humans that the more you stare at a screen, the better your eyes will get at doing that. It’s basically saying to your eyes, I don’t need you to look into the distance. And so they lose the ability to do so. The good news is that as long as your eyes are still growing, and this is actually into your thirties, there are treatments now that will reverse the effects. You can literally turn back the clock and you need to combine that with things like going outside. I was looking out the window. She was like, no, you have to go outside your brain when you’re inside knows that there are walls and that it won’t be able to get the full horizon effect that your eyes need. She also said, you need to go outside. They’re not entirely sure why vitamin D and sunlight are so powerful for healthy eyes. But that combination of being outside, looking into the horizon, scanning the horizon and doing it regularly tells your eyes that they need to be good at looking close and far.

Brett McKay:

Alright, so mean is especially if you’re a parent of young kids, make sure they’re not just looking at screens. Make sure they get outside and looking at the horizon. If you’re over 30 and you’re already nearsighted, it seems like the clock has already ran out on you,

Manoush Zomorodi:

Kind of. Yeah. But it does matter if you’re in your twenties, you got to be on top of it. If you work inside or you work in a lab or whatever, you will go nearsighted faster. So to me, I was like, wow, I could have done something. I could have staved it off. But you’re right, once your eyes stopped growing, you’re sort of cooked,

Brett McKay:

But it’s still good for you to get outside when you’re on that walk. Don’t look at your screen, look at the horizon. You might not be able to change the shape of your eyeball if you’re 45, but I think it’s still good for you. I mean, I got football shaped eyeballs. I’m in astigmatism, but I still like to get out there and scope out the horizon. It does feel nice on the eyeball,

Manoush Zomorodi:

And there’s a good reason why it feels nice. There’s actually been research into animal eyes. Certain mammals, they have seen that sunlight that hits the back of their retina releases serotonin. They have not been able to show this in humans because it’s hard to prove. But like you say, I don’t know about you, but when I get some sunlight, it just feels good. 

Brett McKay:

What about your ear health? Because what a lot of people use their digital devices for is to listen to stuff. They’re always walking around with AirPods in their ears.

Manoush Zomorodi:

Yes. So there has been a really fascinating study going on between Apple and a Michigan researcher named Rick Knight. This is the Apple hearing study where they have tens of thousands of people enrolled through the iPhone. So they’ve been able to track noise exposure, how long they’re listening to something, the volume, also the external noise. So do people put on noise canceling? Do they raise the volume in order to counteract? They’re walking by a construction site or something like that. And Rick told me, because I was like, well, you just need to turn down the volume. He was like, yeah. Not only that though, it’s the duration of listening your ears. It turns out also need breaks. So you know that feeling when I don’t know about you, guns N Roses man would come out and you couldn’t hear for a couple days.

Those are the clia, the little tiny hairs in your ear that have been damaged. And if you give them a break and you let them relax, they will eventually recover. They can recover. But if you do that often enough or you wear down your CLIA and you never give them a break, once they die, they do not grow back. So they are seeing and expect to see more levels of people losing their hearing at much earlier ages. And for a while people were like, well, why didn’t we see that? When we first started, when had consumer devices like the Sony Walkman, and they think that the reason why that didn’t really have that much of an effect or damage people’s hearing was because the battery life was so crappy. And now of course we charge our phones and we listen nonstop. So again, take breaks exposure. Something is being used in your body when you are exposing yourself to exterior sound information vision, and your body just needs to regroup

Brett McKay:

And hearing loss. I think they’re starting to see more hearing loss in younger and younger people. They’re always got their AirPods in really loud, but hearing loss can eventually contribute to dementia down the road.

Manoush Zomorodi:

Right? And also it’s related to people losing their balance and falling the vestibular sort of feeling of being able to hold yourself without falling over. So yeah, there’s very good reasons to protect your ear health. And there’s actually, this has not been shown yet, but there’s suspicions that having noise canceling on all the time might disrupt some sort of connection between your ears and parts of the brain. They’re not entirely sure. That’s very preliminary.

Brett McKay:

You also talk about how our digital lives are impacting our sleep. So how are screens messing up our sleep?

Manoush Zomorodi:

Well, I mean I thought I was like, it’s going to be blue light, right? Blue light is the devil. And actually they don’t think that blue light is the problem. It’s so minimal what blue light does in terms of, look, there are some people who would say, no, I’m very sensitive to it. Absolutely. And children absolutely are sensitive to blue light. But on the new thinking is that rather than the devices themselves messing with our sleep, it’s the fact that we are displacing our sleep with time on screens. So somebody can’t sleep, what do they do? They look at a screen. It’s not necessarily the screen that’s making them unable to sleep. It’s because they turn to the screen or we have the phone on next to us and it’s not looking at the phone right before we go to bed necessarily. That’s making it impossible for us to sleep. It’s constantly being interrupted. I have my phone on next to my bed nervous wreck. I have elderly parents and I have teenagers, but I did learn to set it up. So they are the only people who can call me in the middle of the night. So it’s this idea that just one more show, just like let’s keep playing game. And you lose track of what time it is. It is displacing the amount of sleep that you got and it’s not necessarily the screens itself doing it.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, we had a chrono biologist on the podcast a while back ago. He mentioned that it’s not, the light from a screen is not enough to disrupt your circadian rhythm, so you don’t have to wear those goofy Elton John blue blocker glasses. 

Manoush Zomorodi:

You need to know yourself. If you were a person who loses track of time or you can’t help but be like, oh my God, I wonder what happens in the next episode. You need to know that, okay, this is a problem for you. Turn it off. Don’t blame the screens though for you’re not sleeping well, blame yourself essentially.

Brett McKay:

And then the other way that screens can mess up our sleep or just being on screens all day is we’re not moving. And being sedentary can also mess up your sleep. You’re not building up sleep pressure. Your body needs movement to feel like you’re tired at the end of the day. And if you’re just sitting around all day, your body’s like, well, I’m not tired. We don’t even go to sleep.

Manoush Zomorodi:

I think to me, that was the best explanation for the feeling of being wired and tired. This idea that you are exhausted and yet an alert, I guess is the way to think of it. And I hate that feeling so much. And what I have noticed, I do track my steps and what I have noticed is I need to hit, if I hit 12,000 steps every day, that’s when I can sleep properly. It makes a huge difference for me. It’s so obvious. If I only get 8,000, I do not sleep as well. I need the full sort of mental and physical fatigue to be able to rest, to really enjoy and sort of let go.

Brett McKay:

Speaking of step count, did Keith Diaz, did his research find that you had to hit a certain amount of steps a day to get these benefits? Or it didn’t matter as long as you moved five minutes? No.

Manoush Zomorodi:

Okay. Keith hates step trackers, which it really cracks me up. He said that when he started wearing one, it made him weird. He would be doing laps around his living room to try to get a step count up. He’s like, it does not work for me. It becomes my master. I don’t care. He’s like, what you need to do is put in the time. You don’t need to go crazy. No sprinting needed. If you want to do jumping jacks, go for it. But you really don’t have to. It’s just putting in the time, putting one foot in front of the other.

Brett McKay:

Last question. So you’re a parent. I’m a parent too. Our kids, they’ve lived in a world where they don’t know a world without screens. They’ve probably seen one since they were one years old. What can we do to help our kids integrate screens in their lives in a healthier way?

Manoush Zomorodi:

Yeah, I mean, I think that we’ve become so negative about screens to the point where it might be backfiring. I just think shaming kids for time that they spend on their phones, when really, a lot of the time it’s how they connect with the world and with their friends. I just want us to think about what we’re missing when we are on screens. And that is movement and getting outside. So instead of like, oh my God, get off your phone. Just be like, Hey, did you get some stroll time in today? Did you go for a walk? I think if they’re younger, taking a lap around the block after dinner, a dog is actually a great way to get them moving. Having conversations about if you’re going to have iPad time again for the little ones, how do you feel before you’re starting on your iPad?

You feel good? Okay. And then afterwards, how do you feel? And if they’re grouchy, be like, okay, so now we know that maybe you spent too long on your iPad. Maybe let’s do it a little less next time so that you don’t feel grouchy. I think for teenagers, it’s hard, right? Boy is it hard. But I have seen that my kids walk themselves essentially. They make sure that they get out and air themselves multiple times a day and they don’t feel right. If they don’t, they’re like, oh, I need a walk. And that is just music to my ears.

Brett McKay:

So just have those conversations. Encourage them to develop their sense of interoception and maybe offer some gentle nudging.

Manoush Zomorodi:

And I think it’s more saying what you can do and should do as opposed to what you can’t and shouldn’t frame it as positive. Let’s frame it as enjoying the world. Let’s frame it as touch grass.

Brett McKay:

Touch grass. Well, Manoush, this has been a fantastic conversation. I think hope everyone goes out and starts taking their five minute walks, but where can people go to learn more about the book in your work?

Manoush Zomorodi:

Oh yeah. Well, I’m the host of NPR’s Ted Radio Hour, and you can find out more about the book at my website manoushz.com. And that’s me on Instagram as well. And Brett, my God, congratulations. I hope I’m on again in another nine years. 

Brett McKay:

Let’s make it happen.

Manoush Zomorodi:

Let’s do it. Alright. 

Brett McKay:

Well Manoush, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Manoush Zomorodi:

Mine too.

Brett McKay:

My guest today was Manoush Zomorodi. She’s the author of the book Body Electric. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but to put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

While we often think of life as linear, my guest’s own life, along with a decade of research, has taught him that it’s anything but. In his latest book, What to Make of a Life, Jim Collins unpacks the cyclical pattern life actually unfolds in, and how to navigate it. He explains how we all go through periods of “fog” — times of disorientation and uncertainty — at least three times: in youth, after a life-changing “cliff” event, and as we move through midlife into older age. We find our way out of these fogs by what Jim calls coming into “frame” — aligning what you’re built to do with what you actually do in a way that feels enlivening and meaningful. And Jim unpacks the three elements that help you find, and re-find, this frame over the course of your life.

Along the way, Jim shares case studies of these principles at work, and we explore the role of luck, the inevitability of drudgery (even in work you love), and how to keep your inner fire lit over the long haul.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Good to Great by Jim Collins
• All Rise: The Remarkable Journey of Alan Page by Bill McGrane
• Self-Renewal: The Individual and the Innovative Society by John W. Gardner
• Sunday Firesides: You Never Know How Many Chapters Are Still to Come
• Sunday Firesides: Do the Right Thing, for Right Now
• AoM Article: The 5 Best AoM Podcast Episodes on Finding Meaning and Purpose
• AoM series on finding your life’s vocation

Connect With Jim Collins

• Jim’s website

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Transcript 

Brett McKay:

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the AoM podcast. While we often think of life as linear, my guest’s own life, along with a decade of research, has taught him that it’s anything but. In his latest book, What to Make of a Life, Jim Collins unpacks how the cyclical pattern of life actually unfolds and how to navigate it. He explains how we all go through periods of fog, times of disorientation and uncertainty, at least three times in youth after a life-changing cliff event. And as we move through midlife into older age, we find our way out of these fogs by what Jim calls coming into frame, aligning what you’re built to do with what you actually do in a way that feels enlivening and meaningful. And Jim unpacks the three elements that help you find and refine this frame over the course of your life along the way. Jim shares case studies of these principles at work and we explore the role of luck, the inevitability of drudgery even in work you love, and how to keep your inner fire lit over the long haul. After the show is over, check out our show notes at aom.is/Collins. All right, Jim Collins, welcome to the show.

Jim Collins:

I am really happy to be here with you, Brett. 

Brett McKay:

So you’ve made a career for yourself researching about what makes good companies great. I’m sure a lot of our listeners have read your book Good to Great, and other ones as well. In your latest book, What to Make of a Life, you apply that same intellectual rigor you’ve used to analyze companies to figure out what makes an individual’s life feel meaningful. What kickstarted this project?

Jim Collins:

Well, so first, even though it looks like a departure, it is a wonderful extension from my prior work — one thing that is a thread that goes all the way back even to my earlier work is the focus and real interest in what people do and how people navigate. When I look back at what I have as themes in my what makes great companies tick work such as in Good to Great, I’ve always been fascinated with people and with leaders as people, entrepreneurs, as people, and by the sheer human drama of starting and building some of the most audacious and amazing companies in the world. And that interest in people has always been there. Companies don’t build themselves, people build companies. So my interest in people has been a pretty consistent theme in looking through that lens. But this project, of course, as you know, really takes a look at the lens of an entire life rather than say the development of a company.

And the seeds of this actually predate Good to Great by a long time. Three basic seeds. The first when I was young and I realized that my father would never be a father, as you know, the opening line of the book is my first big cliff in life came quite young when I lost my father while he was still alive. And what I meant by that is that I was a kid who was trying to figure out my way in the world and I had this shattering realization when I tried to establish a relationship with my father that he could never really be a father. He could never really be there for me as a father. That when I went down to visit him in New Mexico when I was in early high school and he was living in an adobe hut with a dirt floor, and I went down on Thanksgiving and brought a turkey in hopes that we would cook this turkey and some father-son relationship would ignite mysteriously in my mind.

By the end of the weekend, I realized that he was never really going to take an interest in me. And so when I got back on that Greyhound bus that I’d ridden down to New Mexico on the way back north through Colorado where my mom had brought us, after my parents had separated and divorced, I realized I was heading out into the fog of life really. I mean, I had no idea how to go about life, what to do with this one amazing gift of a single life to live. I had no male role models, no framework, no guidance. I just had no idea how to do this right. What do you do? What to make of a life? So that was the first seed. And then the second seed came a few years after that when my wife Joanne, who was a world champion athlete, she won the Hawaii Ironman in 1985 and she had the premature end of her athletic career due to an injury, a hamstring injury that simply would not heal.

And one day she said to me as she was beginning to accept the brutal fact that her athletic career would be over that phase of her life as an elite professional athlete would be taken from her. She said to me at the breakfast table one day, just almost a gasp, I feel like I’m dying. And this was a really deep seed for me. I had no answer. It just sliced through me. And it really planted a seed of like, wow, how do you come at life if life as you knew it is all of a sudden radically changed or different than what it was before? And you have to rethink this whole question again. And then a third seed came a little bit after that. Each of these seeds were separated by about a decade. What a wonderful wise man and mentor by the name of John Gardner who wrote a book called Self-Renewal.

He was a wise man at Stanford when I was teaching there. He got me really interested in the question of why do some people remain incredibly well renewed over the long arc of a life so that they’re able to continually answer these questions of life as they go through midlife and then into the later decades such that those are really vibrant and fire filled. And these three seeds sat inside me gestating until I reached this point about 13 years ago when I realized I wanted to do a big research project on what became really the title of the book, what to make of a life. But it is really a question and we have to answer it three times. One like that kid, that shattered kid, what to make of a life when you’re emerging from the fog of youth and you’re trying to find your way in the world.

Second time when you go through a cliff event, an event that changes your life and you have to reconsider and now answer the question again, well now what to make of a life. And then at least a third time later when we’re heading into midpoint and after, well now when I’m looking at whatever years and decades remain, well now what to make of a life so that those decades are as fire filled as our younger years and that our younger selves need not tower over our older selves. And all that came together ultimately in doing this 10 year research project that led to the book.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, this took 10 years to write and like you did with your other books, you amassed a team. I think you had like 28 people working on this. And you’re looking for examples of individuals who might have an insight about what makes life, what do they do to navigate the fog or cliffs or how to transition from midlife into the second half of life. And like you did in your other books, you find these individuals and then you start comparing and contrasting. If we compare these lives, just like if we compare companies, what lessons can we extract? And what you and your team found is that the people who seem to discover a calling or a project in a life that gave them significant meaning and were able to maybe maintain that for their entire life or maybe find new ones even after the first one sort of fizzled out. They often had three things in common. And the first one is they found work that they were deeply encoded for. What do you mean by that?

Jim Collins:

Yes. So Brett, you’re right in this framing of it. So the way I kind of look at it is that all of us have a set of encodings, which were kind of these durable capacities of our intrinsic construction that are awaiting discovery through the experiences of life. I like to think of it as they’re like a constellation of stars, but it’s except as a constellation of encodings inside us. And that what happens is that as life unfolds, if you think about it, when your life is what I like to describe as in frame, it’s like looking through a window frame and you can only see a portion of that constellation, but you’re capturing a portion of that constellation or a big bright set of some of your marvelous encodings or shining through the window, which is different than a time when you’re out of frame and there’s not really many shining through the window.

So one of my favorite examples of that in the book is John Glenn and Gordon Cooper, a pair of test pilots and fighter pilots and astronauts. They were two of the first to orbit the earth, for example. And so if you take John Glenn, he’s kind of emerging through life. He’s coming out of the fog of youth, he goes off to the local college and he’s kind of out a frame, not a lot of encodings coming through the window. His parents hoping he might become a doctor or maybe come back to the family business or something like that, but nothing really clicked that much. Sports didn’t work that well for him. He was very energetic and very hardworking, but hadn’t really clicked yet. And then there was this moment when he was younger, by the way, his father had put him on an airplane and let him have a flight that somebody was offering some flights in this plane that they saw parked on the side of the road and just dabbled let him go up in this feel of being in the airplane, sort of stayed with John Glenn.

And then he happened across one of these luck events, a card that was put on the physics department bulletin board, and it said that I think it was the Department of Commerce, but some government agency was offering to pay for people to get their pilot’s license. And so John Glenn got really excited about this and convinced his parents to let him do it and goes off and as soon as he starts flying aircraft, the whole window frame shifts and he has these intrinsic capacities for flying. He just has a feel for the aircraft. He can wear it like a glove. He’s really good at making decisions at times of great speed and great danger. I mean, he became a fighter pilot and I’m fairly confident that if somebody is flying behind me in a jet as I’m in a fighter jet and that person is trying to knock me out of the sky, I’m reasonably confident that my heart rate will go up with great sort of anxiety and fear.

But he was always able to remain calm and clear and to be able to make really good decisions at really high speeds in moments of tremendous danger where the consequences of making a bad decision could be the end of everything. Then the next instant and all of a sudden these encodings he had for being a fighter pilot and a test pilot and then later an astronaut just popped into frame and now he is clicked in frame in a way that’s very different than when say he was trying to figure out how to do chemistry classes and things like that. Gordon Cooper, who’s the other test pilot in this, described it as that flying was his truest element that when he was in the cockpit, when he was even in the space capsule, piloting it back to earth after a total power failure, remaining calm and making brilliant decisions as everything seems to be falling apart, just so perfectly suited them and captured these encodings. Yes, they trained, but that intrinsic construction was there. And so at times of life what we’d find is that you could look across the arc of a life and there are times when people are sort of out of frame and there are times when they’re in frame, in frame meaning they’re hitting a big bright set of their encodings and things click very much into place, very natural.

Brett McKay:

Alright, so encodings are innate talents, innate interests. It’s the thing that you would just do and you lose track of time and you just get so engrossed and you couldn’t see yourself doing anything else. And that could be a lot of things for Glen, it was flying planes, but for an individual could be teaching or art. I mean even managing or analyzing data can be that for some people it’s going to be different for every single person.

Jim Collins:

Yes, exactly. And in fact, one of the things that I really want to highlight about this is two things. First of all, in this study we have people from all different walks of life where we have writers, we have scientists, we have actors, we have rock musicians, we have surgeons, we have political leaders, we have football players, we have skaters, we have architects and all these people. The interesting thing is that the thing that worked for them was when they clicked into frame with a set of encodings that fit really well with what they were doing, but it was different things for different people. But then here’s something I really want to highlight for folks is that it’s never too late to discover a set of wonderful encodings. We have a pair of writers in this study, Barbara Tuchman and Toni Morrison, and both went on to have these really wonderful writing careers and one writing history and one writing novels. Interestingly, they didn’t click into frame and really discover their encodings for being writers until they were essentially heading into midlife. They were in their forties. And so John Glenn and Gordon Cooper found it early, but there are others who don’t maybe find it until a bit later. They’re always there to discover, which is a very uplifting finding. The other piece is that there’s many possibilities. There isn’t just one thing you could do in a life that would be in frame. There could be many possibilities in a life of what you could do in frame.

Brett McKay:

A great example of that, someone who found their encoding and got in frame with that encoding is Dwight Eisenhower. My wife wrote an article for our newsletter. It was called, “You Never Know How Many Chapters Are Still to Come.” And it was inspired by this Eisenhower biography she was reading, and you get to page 172, and Eisenhower is already 52 years old. He’d missed out on combat in World War I. He’d been a good staff officer, but he just hadn’t had a very remarkable career. And he feels like, well, this is pretty much as far as I’ll go. He feels like his life has largely run its course. But in this biography there’s still 600 pages left because starting on page 172, that’s when World War II starts, and then Eisenhower becomes Supreme Allied Commander. And then after the war, he’s president of Columbia and then president of the United States. Most of his highest moments in life happened in his fifties and sixties because that’s the period in his life where his encodings for things like administrative work and strategic planning, managing the social aspect of military campaigns and politics, that’s when it came into frame.

Jim Collins:

I love you bringing in that article and I congratulate your wife on writing it. I think by the way, it’s also a wonderful title and it really resonates with the people that we studied because the interesting thing is that at any given point in time in their lives, they couldn’t have necessarily seen what was coming next. And one of my favorite little data points that’s analogous to this in the study is Benjamin Franklin. And if you ask a simple question, if you take the major biographies of Benjamin Franklin and you ask what percentage of the book remains when Franklin turns age 60 and the average across the major biographies is 53%, which means that imagine coming at life with the idea that when you hit age 60, more than half, more than half of what might be most interesting and creative and impactful and meaningful has yet to be written.

Although he didn’t know that he was going to be involved in writing the Declaration of Independence and helping to bring forth the Constitution and end up as our greatest diplomat to France during the Revolutionary War, he didn’t know any of that when he was 60. And I think that’s one of the things that has just been so interesting about this study because I’m looking across the entire arc of these lies up to cliffs, through cliffs after cliffs and the incredible sense of what may still lay ahead and it’s not done until it’s done. Some of the things that some of the people in our study did way late as one of the most uplifting aspects of the entire study, you really don’t know. 52 is really, really young.

Brett McKay:

And some individuals, they find it early on, you highlight some individuals like that where they had this knack for whatever and this sort of intrinsic drive and motivation to do that thing. And it came into frame early on, the stars aligned for them to be able to display those encodings and really get engrossed in it. You might have these encodings and it might take until your fifties before you’re able to really hit that frame and be able to really express them. So we have these encodings, is it possible to have more than one thing that we’re encoded for?

Jim Collins:

Yeah, I think this is really one of the most uplifting findings from the study. And first, let me just put a little context for people who are listening about how we did the study and then come into this and we’ll maybe talk about a couple people that really show how different the frames can be even in a single life. And what we did in this study was to look at pairs of people who were on a similar trajectory and then they each hit a cliff event. A cliff event is where you go through this event where your life changes in some very significant way that forces you to make really big decisions about what comes next one way or another. And sometimes it’s even the end of your life as you knew it before, and some really, really significant way that end. It can either be by choice or it can be by imposition, but it may not be entirely up to you whether you go through the cliff, John Glenn and Gordon Cooper, for example, at age 42, each of them came to the conclusion that it was time to leave behind their careers as right stuff astronauts and test pilots and so forth and move on to a next phase of life.

But they had half their life to go, right? So they faced this question of what would come next? One of my favorite people in this study, well, they’re all kind of favorite people, but one really wonderful illustration of this is Alan Page. He was number 88 on the Minnesota Vikings “purple people eaters” defensive line. He and Carl Eller were the two football players in that number 88 and 81. They played in the same four Super Bowls together, and they both had amazing lives after their NFL careers and did really remarkable and creative and really beautiful things with their lives. Alan Page for instance, he made a shift from playing football to moving into the study of law. And it’s interesting how his interest in law actually predated his years as a star football player. He was so encoded for football that he was the first defensive player in NFL history to be named league MVP by the Associated Press as a defensive player.

I mean that’s pretty encoded for the sport of football, but you would think, well, how could anything be as much in frame as that? And he discovers that he loves the law, he loves the questions, he loves the cerebral thinking, and it’s a really different world than football. And the seeds of it go all the way back. He was a kid and he loved watching Perry Mason on TV and he thought, well, that looks like a pretty interesting way to spend time. And that seed stayed within him, and as he got towards the end of his NFL career, he began taking law classes and so forth. Anyways, after his NFL career, he ends up as a Supreme Court justice in the state of Minnesota. And one of my favorite images is there’s a biography of him called All Rise, and the cover of that biography shows him prominently in his justice ropes.

And there’s a smaller photo behind that photo of him in his football outfit. And it shows that as amazing as the football was, he had found a second frame in law that was just as fire filled just as he was amazingly encoded for. Now, here’s the interesting thing. What does terrifying quarterbacks and writing cerebral judicial opinions share in common in their encodings? Probably almost nothing. And so what that shows is that within any given person, it’s not that the legal encodings weren’t there, it’s that when he is playing football, they’re not called upon. Then the frame of his life shifts and now the frame is looking at a different set of encodings in the same person. The beauty of this is suggests to anyone that’s listening. We go through these things in life, particularly in a disruptive world, the world of change or maybe your entire career gets wiped out by AI or whatever happens. And you sort of think, well, I was in frame, could I find another frame? And the answer from this study by looking at people going through cliffs is the answer is yes. You can find more than one frame in a life. I don’t know how many you can find, but it’s multiples and we will likely get to the end of our lives without having discovered all of the possible frames that could be incredibly fulfilling for us.

Brett McKay:

That’s really a cool story. I love that Alan Page story. It also reminded me of Steve Young, the quarterback. He also, he studied law while he was still playing football because I think football players, athletes, they’re very cognizant of the fact that they’ve got a timeframe on their career. A built-in cliff. So they had to make plans for it. And so Steve Young studied law and think he parlayed that after his career, he did I guess some VC funding and some legal stuff. So I mean, how do you manage that? So you might find this encoding young in life or maybe in your twenties and thirties that’s in frame, you’re able to express it, but then you might have to think about, okay, well do I have other encodings? And how do you figure that out and then maybe kindle them a little bit so when the time comes, when it’s time to do something else, you’re able to tap into that.

Jim Collins:

Well, I think first of all, let me just highlight from the research that there’s two ways that these cliffs can happen or multiple ways, but two big buckets. One are the cliffs you can see coming. These are the ones where you can see a change in your world that’s inevitable and it’s going to affect you. It could be something where, I mean it’s built in cliff being in athletics or built in cliff, being a test pilot or built in cliff, being in certain walks of life where you know that is going to come to an end. So there are cases where we can see the cliff coming, but there are other kinds of cliffs and these hit us in a very different way. These are the ones that we can’t see coming. These are the ones that they come as a shocking event in our lives and we can’t prepare for them because we can’t predict them.

It could come in a form of a tragedy. For example, two of the women in our study, their husbands, they were going along with their lives and their husbands died unexpectedly. One in a plane crash, one from a heart attack. And in both of those cases, their husbands had served in Congress. So not only did they have to face the unexpected cliff of losing the love of their life and having the fog of grief and the pain of that and the loneliness of that, but then on top of that they were put into their husband’s seats or they chose to step into their husband’s seats in Congress because there was this thing that makes that possible if your spouse dies in Congress, that you can go and serve in their seat. And they had never planned to be in Congress.

It was never part of their life plan at all. And all of a sudden, dang, their life is completely different than what was shortly before that. And so first, I think that if you have a cliff that you can see coming, you can begin to kind of make steps for it ahead of time. Alan Page started taking his law classes while he was still playing football. John Glenn became a senator in his second frame and he started getting interested in that relatively early. And he would go sit in the Senate gallery in Congress and he would watch legislative proceedings while he is still serving in active duty and sort of feeding that so he could eventually, he knew that his active duty part of life and his astronaut part of life would come to an end and he was sowing seeds, if you will. But then there are other cases like Curtis Collins and Marion Pittman Allen with this shocking change in their life.

And we have other cases in the study where just came totally out of the blue. And there you can be really left reeling and have to go through a very, very thick fog. And these can be personal, these can be diseased, these can be just shocking turns and hopefully your life doesn’t have one of those, but you live long enough. The odds are some sort of shocking, unexpected cliff is got a good probability of happening. So lemme just pause there for a moment because with that context, maybe we can explore a little bit of what happens when people go through cliffs, how they go into the fog, how they get out of it, how they find themselves to a new frame and so forth.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, let’s talk about, let’s say you hit this cliff. I think you did a good job of describing these cliffs. You found everyone encountered a cliff at some point. You can’t go through life without encountering some sort of cliff. And so the ones that you know are coming, maybe you’re an athlete or you’re in a career where there’s a timeframe or you see that, okay, my industry is going to go in this direction. I got to start looking at other things. Maybe you’re a stay at home parent and your kids are going off to college. You can start doing things, planting seeds, looking for those different you might have that might be able to come into frame afterwards. But what about the shocking ones? What do you do there? You don’t even know it’s coming. How do you figure out what do I do with this thing that I’m in now?

Jim Collins:

So one thing I want to share with people, because it really is for me, one of the crucial findings in the study that has given me a lot of compassion for people and maybe self-compassion for my own times of whether it be post cliff or just navigating a foggy terrain of life and fog is are these times when you go through a period of being lost, confused, disoriented, befuddled, you feel like you might be wandering, you’re uncertain, the fog diss descends and you can’t see clearly. So you can be in one phase of life where things are really clear, this is what I’m doing, this is how my life is working. And then bang, life can change on you. Or even if you see the cliff coming, it still might be disorienting when it’s over because you’ve been so focused on what you’re doing prior to the cliff.

So these periods of fog, the interesting thing to me is everyone had them. There can be the fog of youth. I certainly had some fog of youth, certainly my twenties were a fog of youth. Some people who had really amazing overall lives in this study had a fog of youth. And there can be a fog of success, which is a very strange one, but where success catches you off guard and it sends you into a befuddling fog. There’s the fog of disappointment, thought life was going to go one direction or was going to work a certain way. It doesn’t, doesn’t meet your expectations, hopes or desires. And there’s the fog of disappointment. There can be the fog of retirement. This is a really big one because retirement’s actually a cliff. And then finally in the wake of cliffs, we found fog as a very prevalent pattern. And what that says to me is that first of all, fog is not a defect if you go through a period of fog. You’re right in there with the people in our study who had in the end quite remarkable arcs of lives, but they still had to go through periods of fog. And it might take you a while to get to the other side of the fog. When you’re in the fog, it can feel befuddling, uncertain, lost, reeling. But it’s not a character defect. It’s not something that you look at and say there’s something wrong with you. It’s to be expected.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I think everyone’s experienced that or will experience it sometime. I mean it happens. I think it happens in life. You get laid off from a job suddenly I don’t have a job anymore. It’s like, what do I do now? What’s my next move? I can see this happening in retirement. And then the solution to this, once you find yourself in the fog, and again, this could last years for someone who the last years decade even, but what they do, the people who successfully navigate out of the fog, they do something called simplex stepping. What’s that?

Jim Collins:

Yeah. So this was very interesting to look at because when you’re in the fog, there can be this real desire, I just got to get out of the fog. So you just want to do something big and bold and leap because you just want to be out of the fog. But that can just throw you right off another cliff. If you can’t see clearly and you leap, how do you know you’re not just leaping off a cliff and if you just sit still, well the fog’s just going to sit there with you. So how do you get out of this? And what we found is a thing that we call simplex stepping. So imagine you’re in the fog and you can’t really see what’s on the other side. You don’t know what it’s going to look like weeks or months or years down the road.

You’re just in the fog and you look around yourself and you say, I don’t have a plan. I don’t know where it’s going to go. I don’t know what the end result’s going to be. What do I do? Well, what the people in our study did was they just kind of looked around themselves and said, well, what’s the next best step? All I’m going to have is I can only see maybe three feet in front of me, but if the possible steps I could take, this one looks like the best, so I’m just going to take that one, then I’m going to reset. I’m going to look around again. And then, okay, I’ll take this step. And they iterate in these small steps. And once I take that step, I look again and take the next one.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I can see this. How does it apply to a listener who might be going through this? Let’s say they got laid off from a job or maybe their career is changing. They’re like, I’m in this fog. What do I do next? The simplex stepping is just do the next best thing. It might be making a lunch appointment with a colleague that’s in a field that you’re interested in. Tell me about the field. And then maybe you start applying for jobs in that field or doing a little bit of consulting work for that thing or maybe taking a class. It’s just little small things that are low stakes that don’t require a lot of investment. So even if it doesn’t work out, okay, I tried, but I can go do something else. And then little by little you’ll figure out what your next encoding is and how you can put that into frame.

Jim Collins:

That’s a really good description, Brett, because it is that very much little by little, and essentially what’s happening is you’re kind of kicking the frame to the side a little bit as you take those small steps and you begin to get clues or something clicks into place. And the really amazing thing to me is how unplanned the path was for many of the people as they got through the fog. It’s not that they were in the fog and they said, well, I know what the answer is on the other side. And they just have to figure out how to get there. They actually really didn’t know what was on the other side. And so that sense of just being able to say, I can take steps. I can take what looks like good next best steps, even though I don’t know where they’re going, is a tremendous relief. Because if you feel you can only take steps if you know where they’re going, at least to me, that would feel paralyzing when I don’t know where I’m going.

Brett McKay:

Okay, I think we did a good job of covering this idea of cliffs. We’re all going to hit. They can come in different ways. You might know the cliff’s coming, it could come to you as a surprise. And then when you hit a cliff, you’re going to experience fog. And if you feel befuddled and just confused and you can’t figure things out, that is completely normal. It could last a long time, but there’s things you can do, do the simplex stepping, just do the next best thing essentially. And you’ll figure it out. You’ll get through the fog. I want to circle back to this idea of frame and figuring out what your frame is. We talked about encodings, and so those encodings are those innate interest talents that we have that just light us up.

But there’s other elements to being in frame versus know your encodings, discover them, but to do the work that you feel like you’re meant to do, you got to pay the bills. So you have this. One thing you found is that these people who were able to find meaningful work or a meaningful project, they’re able to figure out how to do that in a way that allowed them to not make their focus so much on the money, but the money allowed them to do the thing that they were encoded to do. And you call this flipping the arrow of money. What does that look like?

Jim Collins:

So let’s just maybe put a little framework around this for everyone that’s listening, what it fully means to be in frame. So one, there’s being in frame with your encodings. The second is that you are willing to flip the arrow of money and are able to flip the marrow of money to do it. And then third is that it really feeds and focuses your inner fire. So when you have all three of those, you’re fully fully in frame. So this part about flipping the arrow of money, there’s a very practical part of this, which is how did they fund it? And I’m going to talk about the philosophical part very briefly. You already hit it. I don’t need to overstate it or over belabor it, but essentially it’s this look, is the purpose of work to make money or is the purpose of money to be able to fund your work where your work is defined as doing what I’m encoded for?

And that really feeds my fire with great excellence. And for the people in our study, it was the arrow flip — it’s that the purpose is for money to fuel doing what I’m encoded for and feeds the fire. That’s the direction of the arrow. But then the question is how did they do it? And so we had this research team meeting where I said, well, and then they figured out how they could get paid for it. My team just kind of had this wonderful irreverent revolt in the research team meeting, and they said, that’s just way too simplistic. We have to really better understand how they actually did it because not all of them were able to have a salary doing it. And nobody necessarily came in and just wrote them a check to do it. How do they make it happen? And so we were able to kind of strip away and ask the question, how did they fund their work?

And it turns out there were these 12 different ways that they could draw upon to do it. I don’t need to go through all 12 in our conversation, but they were in a range of things. Sometimes it was they had the help of a spouse for a period of time while they say they got a portion of their career going, or maybe they cross funded where they were doing like Robert Plant was laying tarmac while he was also getting his singing career going, which then eventually led of course to Led Zeppelin. Or you could have, for example, you could get education and training that would then lead to being able to do what you’re about. And that education and training can come in many ways, not just traditional education. The government paid for John Glenn to learn how to fly. There’s a lot of different ways that they drew upon resources to be able to pursue what it was that they were encoded for.

And they had some combination of these 12 streams. But one of them that’s really big is this is the idea of creating a flywheel of some kind. And a flywheel is the idea that you sort of have what you really feel the fire to do and you’re encoded for. And one part of the flywheel is doing that in the world, making the music, acting, writing your books, playing football, whatever it happens to be. One part of that. And then the other side of the flywheel is how you convert doing that into some kind of fuel that you can put back to the top of the flywheel to make the flywheel go around yet again, our albums start doing well or people will start reading the books, or I’m doing better as a football player, or I’m getting more opportunity to the test pilot, whatever. But because you’ve started with what you’re really encoded for and feel the fire four, the cycle is reinforcing.

I do more of that and then that leads to more fuel to do more of it, which leads to me doing it even better, which leads to even more fuel to do more of it further still, whether it’s a creative flywheel, a business flywheel could be a social cause flywheel. Once you have a flywheel effect going in some form, it starts to be a very powerful thing. I would imagine that when you started your podcast for example, there were early clicks on the flywheel, and then over a period of time it became exactly that. The more that you did it and did it really well, that created more opportunities for fuel to put back into this thing that you’re encoded for and feel the fire for to make the flywheel go further. That’s the flywheel effect. Yeah,

Brett McKay:

I can see that in my career. I mean, it started off as a blog and then it picked up steam, and then because it picked up steam, we were getting money. I was able to like, oh, I’m going to start a podcast. And the podcast started picking up steam and I was able to do other things as well. And the thing is, I wasn’t able to do this thing full time right away. I had to do a couple of years of legal work while doing the blog and the podcast on the side until I could do it full. So sometimes you have to do something that’s not connected to the thing you’re encoded for in order to move toward the thing you’re encoded for.

Jim Collins:

Yes, I think that really is true. And the critical thing is to be expending some of your very best energy, a big portion of your life on that which feeds the fire and that really you’re encoded for. And then the economic question, sometimes it might be a very direct kind of economics for it. Your albums sell or you get paid to do it or the government pays you to fly or whatever it happens to be. There can be a direct economics source, but there can be other cases where it’s like, no, I have other sources of funding including where I might be working or what I’m doing that will allow me to feed it. Toni Morrison, the writer, she worked full time as an editor, which wasn’t writing. It was editing, and her writing was ultimately her real thing. She did that for quite a number of years, even when she started writing to essentially allow her to put her energies into the writing. The writing was on one side, but it didn’t make any money at first at all. And her editing job is what kept her going while she got her writing flywheel going.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I think TS Eliot, he was a banker or a bank teller or something like that. And I know Philip Glass, the composer, he was a plumber in New York City.

Jim Collins:

Really? How about that? 

Brett McKay:

So I mean, you could listen to a Philip Glass concert in New York on Saturday night, and then the next Monday morning, Philip Glass shows up at a monkey wrench to fix your sink.

Jim Collins:

Well, of course maybe he was also in frame with that too. I think that’s actually a really important thing I just want to share, is that being in frame doesn’t have to be something that’s grandiose at all and super visible to the world, or even in the classic sense of making albums or anything like that. I got an email from a former professor of mine who read an early version of the book, and he was one of my early professors in my life, had a big impact in a couple of key ways in my thinking. And he’d grown up on, I think Belgium. And he sent me this story about a person in his life that he knew when he was a kid who laid cobblestones. And this person was in our parlance here completely in frame with laying cobblestones. And he took such pride and created such beautiful sets of cobblestones that you could walk around the city streets and he could point out, and then you could begin to see which of the cobblestone sections were his, because they were laid down with a different level of beauty, if you will, in those cobblestones on the streets, and people are going by on their carriages and walking on them or whatever.

But he could point to those and he could feel those, and he felt that when he was making ’em. And so you would look at that and say, well, that’s just as much in frame, right? He is doing a beautiful job with the cobblestones and he’s totally in frame making them the best cobblestones they can be. And it’s not necessarily something you think of as like a Led Zeppelin album, but for him it’s absolutely in frame. And I think you can be in frame doing lots of things. You can be in frame as a high school coach. You can be in frame as a firefighter, you can be in frame in military service. There’s so many ways to be beautifully, beautifully in frame.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. Alright, so we talked about finding your own framings. We talked about flipping the arrow of money. The third element of people who find that frame or what you call their hedgehog is they learn how to focus the fire. What does that look like?

Jim Collins:

Yeah, so this is really an important idea because what we found is that they would go through these phases in life where there would be a really big thing that they would focus as much of their energy on as they could. So we call it a hedgehog because the idea that the fox knows many things and the hedgehog knows one big thing. And what it means to be in hedgehog mode is for a period of time, I’m not just dabbling in this. I’m really channeling the energy, the intensity, the fire that I have into this for a sustained period of time. And when you do that, the fire can show up. It doesn’t necessarily mean always. Part of it can be that you just really love doing it and that of course will feed the fire, but it also could just be something that you’re just going to stay with this, with the fire focused on it until something really important is done. And if it’s something that you really have true inner fire for, then a very interesting thing happens. You never really want to stop doing it unless you have to.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. And then you also talk about when you have this fire and it’s focused, even when there is what you call the stress and drudgery tax, you’re willing to pay that tax.

Jim Collins:

Yeah. The truth is, even if you’re doing something that feeds the fire and they truly love, as was true for people in our study when they were really in frame, but no matter how much you’re into doing it, what we observed is there’s this thing called the stress and drudgery tax. Everybody pays it. You never get out of it. I don’t know how big of a tax you have to pay before it becomes too much, but there’s always some. So for example, I.M. Pei, the great architect, I mean, you would think by the time that he’s in his seventies and he’s won every architectural award imaginable and he has some of the most famous buildings in the world, and his career is fully established, that at some point somebody with that much stature and success and the flywheel going wouldn’t have to pay the tax.

But when he did the Louvre pyramid in his seventies, there’s these stories of people still spitting at his feet in the streets because a lot of people were upset in France with the Louvre pyramid at first before it was accepted, he was dealing with these cultural committees. It was very stressful. And he always described, well, even he kept architecting into his nineties, but he always had this phase at the beginning of a project that would be sort of stressful and not really sure what the design was. And he would even describe it as, it’s traumatic for my wife. I can’t sleep. He has to go through the stress and drudgery of figuring out what the design is. And every person in the study had some permutation of paying the stress and drudgery tax. I have yet to escape it. I imagine you have the stress and drudgery tax, and in a certain way I find it a bit of a relief because you would maybe have this idealistic view that, well, if I just get everything in place, I can live without the stress and drudgery tax, and I actually find it good news to know that nobody escapes it so I can more easily accept my own stress and drudgery tax.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, no, I think we can all see that. I mean, I’m thinking of it as you were talking, I was thinking of an example of say someone who’s really, their encoding is maybe leadership in church as an example. Well, there’s a stress and drudgery tax there. You have to deal with committees and people being upset over decisions you made. There’s a lot of stress there, and it can happen at work. You’re really passionate about your work that you do. But then, okay, I got to do these papers and forms and I got to deal with managers micromanaging. And if that’s what you’re encoded for, that’s the price you got to pay.

Jim Collins:

That’s right. And there’s one of my, I think I use it in the stress and drudgery section. It was Grace Hopper, one of my favorite examples of this. So she was the one who pioneered essentially software subroutines and so forth. She was there on the very first computer of the Mark one and dedicated her life to advancing the cause of standard languages. And she wrote the first compiler and so forth, and she worked a lot in organizations. She was in academics and then went into industry. And she also spent a big chunk of her life in the Navy and working in these big bureaucracies. And she said, for my entire life, I had to deal with the fact that people are allergic to change. So as much as she loved her computers and her software and getting all of that done, she had to deal with bureaucratic resistance. She had to deal with resistance to change to get new things adopted. And that tax never went away, never stopped her. She just kept right on going. But the tax was always there.

Brett McKay:

The tax was always there. Well, something you talk about, and I think this is really important, I’m glad you did talk about this in the book, is how much luck plays a role and whether we get into frame or not. So I’m thinking about John Glenn. I mean, the thing was he was born at the right time. He was born while aviation was just getting started. So he hit the prime of his life when jet test piloting was going on. And then the NASA program, the Apollo program went on. I imagine if he was born two decades later, he might’ve missed that frame. 

Jim Collins:

Well he wouldn’t have been the first to orbit Earth.

Brett McKay:

Right. 

Jim Collins:

So to me, it’s a really interesting area to explore, which is why we actually ended up spending quite a number of pages on it, which is this question of what is the role of these luck events and how people’s lives unfold? And there’s two parts of it is one is there’s the luck, and then there’s what they do with the luck, which is the return on luck. But the luck, man, it’s just amazing how many serendipitous type events happen. The story of how Jimmy Page got his first guitar is living in one end of London as a kid, he is like 10 years old or something, and his parents move across town and they move into a new house. And mysteriously, the only thing that was left behind by the previous owners in this entire house was a guitar just mysteriously, there’s just this guitar.

And then he hears Elvis coming over the radio and Baby Let’s Play House. And he’s wondering if I can replicate those chords. And there’s this guitar and there’s a lot of steps in there, but essentially, well, what would’ve happened if Jimmy Page had been born in Iowa rather than just down the street from people like Eric Clapton and the session musicians that were all gathering just up the road in London and right at the beginning of the whole blues rock thing and hadn’t had a guitar at his house that was mysteriously left. They’re like, would Jimmy Page have become Jimmy Page, the great guitarist and founding member of Led Zeppelin? And the answer is probably not if he’d been born in Iowa or Delhi or Helsinki or wherever. But here’s the beauty of this is that as we discussed earlier, if he hadn’t found that frame, he might’ve found a different frame. The beauty is that there’s other frames to discover, but the twists and turns of life are amazing. I still find myself thinking about those three types of luck in there. There’s the what luck. There’s the who, luck people that intersect with your life. And then there’s just the zeitgeist luck. You were talking earlier about when you started your podcast, the zeitgeist was on your side.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, for sure. I started it before podcasting was really a thing, and it was completely just random. I didn’t have any grand strategy. I was just like, I want to talk to authors that write books that I enjoy. I got an early start and then podcasting became this huge thing, and now everyone has a podcast. I imagine if I tried to start a podcast now, it wouldn’t have been as successful. The competition is just so much more fierce. But I got lucky and I did that whole return on it. I tried to take advantage of that lucky event that I had in my life and make the most of it.

Jim Collins:

Yeah, exactly. And you put exactly the point on it, which is that when we . . . well, let me just back up a little bit about this notion of return on luck, because that concept, I share a lot of credit. Well, really much of the credit goes to a co-author I had on a previous book called Great By Choice, and that was with my colleague Morton Hansen. And Morton and I we’re studying companies, but we were studying companies in really turbulent industries and we’re studying the entrepreneurs who built some of the most successful companies in really chaotic, turbulent, rapidly changing disruptive environments. And we were comparing them to other companies that didn’t do as well in those same environments and asking what was different. And Morton had this idea of like, well, we ought to really see if we can define and quantify the role of luck because these are environments that have a lot of luck in them and see if there’s any difference.

Were the successful companies luckier, successful entrepreneurs? Were they luckier? And we were able to define a lock event as something you didn’t cause it’s something you didn’t make happen, it just happened. The second is, it has potentially significant consequence, good or bad. And the third is it came in some significant weight as a surprise. . . and what Morton and I were able to do is to then be able to analyze enough luck events across the histories of these companies to ask a simple question. Were the more successful entrepreneurs and companies that they built luckier than the others? And the answer was no. They didn’t get more good luck, and they didn’t get less bad luck. They didn’t get bigger spikes of luck. They didn’t get better timing of luck. What they got is exactly what you described, Brett, which is that when the luck events came, they made more of those luck events and it was the return on luck. That was the real differentiating variable. If they were lucky. Everybody is, at some level you have good luck, bad luck, all of that. It’s what they did with the luck that they got.

And that is then carried over into this study where we can see that over and over again. There’s a lot of luck that happens, good and bad. But what they do with the luck is what really become these kind of separating moments. What we call the not all time in life is equal moments. The moments where there are real inflection points.

Brett McKay:

So I think we’ve done a really good job capturing this idea of frame. You’re doing the thing that you just feel like you’re meant to do and you couldn’t imagine yourself doing anything else, or at least one of many possibilities. So you got to find your encodings, those sort of innate talents and interests. Find out how you’re going to fund that encoding and then really focus that fire. You’re going to hit cliffs. They might be coming. They could be surprised. There’s going to be fog after that. 

Jim Collins:

Step out of the fog.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. Simplex step out of the fog. But let’s talk about the elder, the second half of life. I think there’s this idea that as we get older into retirement, that you’re naturally going to start losing your fire to take on ambitious or meaningful projects, and all you’re going to do is just go on cruises and read mystery novels and that’s it. I’m done. But you found that there’s a lot of people who did some of their best work, and it might not be great creative work or business work, but even just something that’s really impactful in the world or in their community when they’re in their seventies, their eighties and their nineties. Any examples of those individuals that stand out and what were they doing differently from the people who might not have done that? 

Jim Collins:

Well, I think one of the truly most uplifting findings in all of this is what people in this study did well past the midpoint of their lives in their fifties, sixties, sometimes even their seventies, eighties, even nineties. We mentioned earlier in the conversation about Benjamin Franklin, right? 53% of the pages in a biography were after the age of 60, but we could go through others. You have, for example, some of Robert Plant’s greatest music coming late in life. Most of his Grammy nominations and awards come in his fifties and sixties when he does these amazing bluegrass album with Alice Kraus. And that doesn’t happen when he’s young. It happens when he’s down the road. I.M. Pei doing the Louvre pyramid in his seventies. Toni Morrison didn’t publish Beloved until 56 and didn’t get to Jazz, one of her most spectacular creations in my view, until her early sixties, and then just continued right on doing spectacular work.

And we can go through sort of case after case where remarkable things happened late. And what I kind of stand back with is they would’ve rejected the idea that their younger self has to tower over their older self. And that as I looked at these lives, it was maybe the other way around in a number of cases, but certainly it wasn’t the tyranny of youth over our older selves. The evidence from this project convinces me that much of our great creative steps in life can easily happen well past the midpoint and maybe the most spectacular parts of our life to come well past the midpoint.

Brett McKay:

And you talk about reasons why that might be is one is you’re just more familiar with yourself. You know what your encodings are probably, and by the time you’re 70 or 80, the different ones you might have, you have all this experience that you can draw upon that you didn’t have when you were in your twenties, and you also just have more skill. You might not have that, what is that fluid knowledge where you can think fast on your feet, but you got that crystallized knowledge, this reservoir of wisdom that you can call upon that can help you make better decisions and figure out what is the thing I need to do with the time I got left?

Jim Collins:

Yes. I also think that you can do spectacular creative things that you’d never done before, and this is where you can begin to discover when the frame shifts and you do things that are almost like drawing upon things that had always been there, but now you’re amplifying them in ways that are almost like a whole new arena. And so I love this idea that it’s not necessarily going to be derivative things you do. They could be entirely new things that you do.

Brett McKay:

So be open to that. Don’t think, okay, I did this when I was younger, so I’m going to stick to this. There could be new things that I can discover.

Jim Collins:

Or you might go back to things you did earlier, but do them in a reimagined way for those who know Led Zeppelin. I love how Robert Plant will go back and he isn’t repeating like Black dog or rambling on in just a classic Zeppelin way. He will bring forth in bluegrass or with a different orchestra from a different part of the world or Arabian music or whatever and bring it all together and create a whole new reimagined version of Black dog, black dog in Bluegrass as a duet with Alison Kraus. It’s still black dog, but it’s not still black dog. And that ability to kind of circle back to something that might’ve been earlier, but then to do it in a new and completely reimagined way, that process is part of how we saw the creative efforts happening for many of our people over the course of their lives.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. I love that section was really inspiring for me. In my forties. I’m seeing the second half of life, and it’s good to know that I can still have projects that light me up.

Jim Collins:

Well, let me just put it this way, Brett, when you hit 60, you’ll have finished your warmup.

Brett McKay:

Okay. That’s good to know. Yeah. You never know how many more chapters are still to come.

Jim Collins:

That’s right.

Brett McKay:

Well, Jim, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Jim Collins:

Probably the best place is our website, just simply jimcollins.com and there they can learn about the classic work and they can learn about the new work.

Brett McKay:

Fantastic. Well, Jim Collins, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Jim Collins:

It has been a real pleasure. Brett.

Brett McKay:

My guest today was Jim Collins. He’s the author of the book, What to Make of A Life. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, jimcollins.com. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but to put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.