Welcome back everybody, I'm Greg McEwan, I'm your host, and I am here with you on this
journey to learn, to grow, so that we can accomplish more, but to do it without burning
out.
Today is part two of my interview with Bruce Feeler.
Bruce is the author of six consecutive New York Times best selling books.
He's a deep thinker, and he's interviewed thousands of people to try to understand what
really leads to a higher contribution.
Here's what's it's not, thinking of work as a single linear career where your job is to
go higher and higher is not the way to maximize contribution.
By the end of this episode, among other things, you will have what Bruce feels is the single
most powerful question he has ever discovered for helping people to find what their real,
essential mission and calling in life is.
Let's get to it.
If you haven't yet signed up, you can find the link in the description below.
Get signed up for the one minute Wednesday newsletter.
I'd encourage you to take a moment to do that.
Just go to gregmecuan.com forward slash one M W and join more than 160,000 people who
have already signed up and are receiving that newsletter every week.
Are you ready to level up your business and scale effortlessly?
Meet NetSuite by Oracle, your essentialist solution for growth.
NetSuite's modern cloud based platform brings HR, financials, inventory and more together
in real time in one place.
Boost efficiency control costs and scale easily with a platform that adapts alongside
you.
NetSuite helps you make faster, better decisions.
For the first time in NetSuite's 22 year history, as the number one cloud financial system,
you can defer payments for a full implementation for six months.
There's no payment, no interest.
Join 33,000 companies that have upgraded to NetSuite for visibility and control over
financials, inventory, HR, e-commerce and more.
Take advantage of this special financial offer at netsuite.com forward slash essential.
So I'm familiar with the Marshall Duke research.
It was this research that gave me the language into generational self.
Just the idea that it was-
I noticed you dropped that in.
Yeah.
That even exists is I think quite profound because even as you make this important transition
in our conversation to narratives in work, I'm not at all convinced that everybody has
figured out the first part.
Yes, I agree.
When I ask people about this, I will say, okay, show of hands, who can just name first
and last name of your great grandparents.
So everyone has a great grandparents.
And all I'm asking is first and last name.
And you might get five people out of a group of 250.
And I don't even get them to prove that it's true.
So these are just the ones that are putting their hands up for that.
This is a- this is trainee percentage of people that know even the first thing you would know
if you knew anything about them.
So the loss of intergenerational knowledge and with it, the loss of intergenerational
self can hardly be overstated, I think.
I didn't know that you had found that it was the number one predictor.
What did you say?
Number one predictor of a child's emotional well-being and they tested it against a raft
of other studies.
That this completely connects with what I have learned anecdotally.
But I just can't wait to dig into that specific research now.
It's very- look, this is just one of the things that I happen to have done in my life.
It's the one that took this research from security and popularized it in the world.
And I'm grateful to have done it.
And I've become very close to Marshall.
And I, like you also spend a fair bit of time talking to different groups of different backgrounds.
And I have talked about this research quite a lot in different groups.
The number one question that I get when I do this is what happens if my kid is adopted,
right?
How does it work?
Is it passed down through the blood?
Now because I've become quite close to Marshall, in fact, I learned of this at his home in
an intergenerational family dinner.
I happen to know that Marshall and his wife Sarah have two natural-born children and an
adopted child.
And it has nothing to do with blood.
It has everything to do with how you talk about what your family is.
And Marshall, because he's got the biggest twinkle in his eye of anybody that I know,
he's just retired after 50 years of teaching an Emory, says, it doesn't even matter if
the story that you tell is true or not.
So I had an experience when my kids were young where one of my kids went through a phase
where she didn't want to go to school.
And she didn't have access to her feelings at the time, so she couldn't really talk
about it.
This was not a problem with me and I certainly not a problem with my wife who went to Harvard
and Yale Law School.
She loves school.
And so we tried everything and then one day she came home and I said, oh, you know what?
I was just talking to my mom today and she reminded me that when I was your age, I went
through a period where I didn't want to go to school.
It was an entirely made up story, but it was designed to show that she was not alone,
but none of us is alone.
I mean, and this is what Marshall said when I asked about this, he said, there are three
types of family narratives and this gets really to the heart of what we've been talking about
in this entire conversation.
There's an ascending narrative, right?
We came from nothing.
We worked hard.
We have a lot.
There's a descending narrative.
We had a lot.
There was a war, a recession, a pandemic and we lost it all.
Or there's an oscillating family narrative.
Okay?
So, you know, grandfather got off the boat and he built, you know, he built a big company
and then his house burned down.
His daughter was the first in her generation to go to college and she became the vice president
of a bank and then she got breast cancer.
The children who understand, the adults who understand that our lives are oscillating understand
that when they hit a rough patch and they are going to hit a rough patch, they know
people.
It is in their collective family narrative in their intergenerational self that other
others they know also hit setbacks.
Got stuck, you know, lost a loved one.
Got sick, suffered through a downturn.
That is what is essential.
Breaking the expectation that every narrative is going to be up.
Rags to riches, up by your bootstraps, bigger salary, higher floor, better view.
That's the only story of success we've been telling, Greg, and that's the story that we
have to denormalize and renormalize.
But my data show is that you're going to go through 20 work quakes, 20 disruptive events
in your work life where you're going to reevaluate.
You're going to have a, you know, some sort of turn and move up or some sort of turn and
move down.
That's what we have to normalize.
You're going to be disruptive.
You're going to spend half of your life in a life transition and we have to stop talking
about these transitions as periods you have to quit and grind and resilience.
You don't even get me ranting on resilience.
It's a ridiculous diversion and negative idea because resilience suggests it comes from
a spring.
It suggests we're going to go and we're going to bounce back to where we are.
Nope.
Some people might, but more of us are going to bounce sideways or forward.
That's the story we need to normalize.
You said something that a linear expectation in a nonlinear life causes serious problems.
And this, I think the answer to this question is the, also the answer to why does this matter?
Why does all of this research, why does what you've written in the search matter?
So from everything you've said, can you just get to the heart of that?
What happens to a person who has linear expectations in a nonlinear life?
They make life decisions that do not focus on the meaningful life that they are seeking,
that chase this outdated dream that they think they should be chasing, the decisions are the
wrong decisions.
And two years later, they are back facing another example, another iteration of the
same bad choice.
Okay.
Let's just take a work because that's what we're talking about here in the case of the
search.
Okay.
70% of people are now saying that they are unhappy at work.
Okay.
These are numbers from 2023.
A study was released last week as we take this conversation that 75% of people are expecting
to look for new work in the next 12 months.
Okay.
So we are at an unparalleled moment in the history of work in the United States.
Okay.
According to the no lesson authority, as then the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the United
States government, a million people a week are quitting a job, not laid off, acquitting
a job that's 50 million people a year.
That's one third of the workforce are voluntarily leaving a job that is twice as high as the
number has ever been historically.
Okay.
We are saying there's this idea of the great resignation that came from the pandemic.
That's total BS that number has gone up every year except for one since 2000.
Okay.
Okay.
Something is happening in work that's never happened in the history of work.
What is that something?
We are changing that fewer people are searching merely for work anymore.
More people are searching for work with meaning.
We are shifting from what I call a means based economy to a meaning based economy.
And you asked why it matters.
I've just we've just done the numbers.
Three quarters of us are unhappy with our career.
Well, it turns out the problem is not with you.
It's with the idea of the career itself.
It's the linear trap.
It's the equivalent of the linear life.
For most of human history, there never was a career.
Most people lived where they worked and worked where they lived.
The word career was never used a 450 years ago.
What happened to 150 years ago?
Two things.
Number one, people left rural areas and moved into cities and then mass migration happened
so people moved from one country to another and they settled in cities.
So all these people needed something to do.
So a guy named Frank Parsons in Boston in 1908.
Okay.
Who was a guy who had himself 40 jobs in the course of his 30 year life.
He sat down and created a mechanism where you would sit one of these rural farmers or
immigrants or whatever down, ask him a series of questions to determine who they are.
Give him a list of jobs and make a match.
He basically invented the idea of the career.
And within two years, because of the vocational beer that he opened, career counseling as
a field begins, the career was invented.
Okay.
So what's the visual manifestation of that?
The resume.
And what is the resume?
It is a linear construct of go from one job to one that comes.
So that's the next change.
So these are all inventive things.
Okay.
This is these are a lie.
You have a career.
That's a lie.
You have, you know, you have a path.
That's a lie.
Even the idea that you have a job.
That's also a lie as you've written about in a lot of your work because in fact people
have multiple jobs these days, only half of us even have a main job anymore.
We have side jobs and hope jobs and ghost jobs and all these terms we could talk about.
But so the problem is if you've bought into the linear narrative of a career, when you
go through a change in my data show, it's every 2.85 years, we have a work quake as I
call it.
Okay.
And by the way, younger, you know, extras have a more than boomers, millennials have
more than Xers, ziers have a more than more than have a more than women have them more
than men diverse workers have them more than non diverse workers, which means they're only
going to increase.
If you're in a work quake, if you go buy into the narrative and just go chase the next
job, you'll get a job.
And two and a half years from now, you will be unhappy again and may facing this choice
because you're not doing the internal work to determine what's the story you want to
tell.
You're chasing a myth of a story that no longer exists.
That's what's at stake.
There's a movement that started in Silicon Valley called the race to nowhere.
And it was because of young children in school committing suicide.
And it's been subscribed to just the stress level that some of these students are being
put under.
And the sense that if I don't get the right grades, then I won't go to the right university
and then won't get the right job.
Everything is dependent on this single moment.
And if I'm failing now, it's all over and all the disappointment and everything.
And it feels consistent with what you're describing because I think what you're saying
is that the problem with the linear narrative is that it turns these transitions into more
disruptive, more like it does more damage than it needs to.
And also we don't learn the right lessons from the transition.
Yeah, for sure.
That's correct.
Those two things, like it's worse than it needs to be in the transition.
And we keep trying to get ourselves back on track to a narrative that isn't helpful in
the first place.
Is that the gist of this?
This is the why this matters so much.
First of all, it's a pleasure to be in conversation with you.
You're an extraordinarily talented listener and kind of summarizer of what you're hearing.
I just want to pause and admire that life scale.
And I mean it genuinely.
Yes, here's how I would put it.
Let's just do it with the lifequakes for a second and then we'll talk about the workquakes.
We have three to five of these lifequakes in the course of our lives.
And the signature piece of data from my first book, Life is in the Transitions in this space
is that their average length is five years.
So three to five times in our lifetime, four, five, six years, that's 25 years.
That's half of our adult lives we spend in transition.
If we stigmatize the transition, we are stigmatizing half of our lives, Greg.
And what we've done is what you've just said is you've said we fetishized the stable periods
that that is on track.
There is no track.
Every life is a different shape.
Okay, and some people don't even look at their life as a track.
They look at their life as a heart or a mini bus, right?
Or a piece of lettuce.
So the idea of the track isn't even the universal view.
That's point number one.
Now let's turn to work where we're going to have 20 of these workquakes in the course
of our lives.
What to me is the signature piece of data of the search?
The signature piece of data of the search.
And I have looked at 3,000 workquakes.
And I've studied where they began.
And the majority of them, 55% of workquakes begin outside of the workplace.
55% of workquakes have nothing to do with work.
They have everything to do with our personal life, with our health, with something in our
family.
One of ours, a loved one moves.
We have a child with an anxiety disorder.
We have a kid on the travel soccer team.
Our mindset changes.
We no longer want to be, say, as someone I interviewed, a corporate lawyer.
We want to be a physical trainer.
And this woman, Robin Arzan, becomes the vice president of Peloton.
Okay.
Or we have one of the highest jobs in the United States intelligence.
And then we, as Eric Velez-Viar, tells me the story.
That's one of the opening stories in the search.
Okay.
He is one of the highest ranking people.
He runs intelligence for the FBI.
And he leaves there and he goes to the Walt Disney Company.
He runs security for the entire companies, making $800,000 a year.
Okay.
And then he's watching Finding Neverland on TV one night.
That's the documentary about Michael Jackson.
And he said that happened to me.
Wow.
And it turns out he's been keeping the secret for 50 years, even from his wife.
Wow.
And he said, to some extent, he's keeping it from himself.
Correct.
And he says, I have this successful job.
I make a lot of money.
Okay.
I have the highest commendations from the White House, from my national security work.
Okay.
But I would drive home and I would see people who are working at carwashes or auto mechanics.
And I would say they have what I don't have, which is they're happy and I'm not.
And I'm not prepared to do this.
And Disney was great given this much time.
He walked away and said, I want to deal with myself.
I need to fix me.
So if you are at preschool in high school, in college at 24, constantly calculating the
metric and this is why he became so successful.
He said, I would be in a room of 14 people.
And if 13 people said that Eric is the greatest colleague I've ever seen, if there was one
who wasn't saying that, I would like focus on them.
55% of the changes in our work begin and our personal lives and our families and our heads
and our bodies.
So trying to stay on that track, you can't anticipate when these external or internal
events are going to happen because the idea of the path, there is no path.
There is no career.
That's line number one.
There is no path.
That's line number two.
There is no job.
That's line number three.
And there's only one truth that only you can write your story of success.
Only you can figure out what is it.
Maybe you want money, good for you, but you also might want service or self expression.
Okay, or to follow a love or to follow a spouse, okay, or to mix multiple side jobs to do
it.
So the point is what my book tries to do is give you, as I call them, 21 questions to
find work you love, how to do the work.
And this to me is the greatest convergence in what you and I have been doing parallel.
Because I will say it here, if there's one thing I believe Greg is that the people who
were happiest and most successful and find most meaning in work, they don't climb, they
dig.
They do the internal work.
They do what I call the personal archaeology.
In my book, I call you called a life audit.
I call the meaning audit in my book.
They do the internal excavation to find out the childhood ghosts, what they learn from
their parents, you know, the stories that they've always been trying.
They do this excavation and figure out who they are, what story do they want to tell.
It's the only way to move forward.
If not, you'll just get another job and two and a half years from now, you'll be back
doing it again.
So this leads us to the now what.
We've covered the what and the so what, but now what.
Now you've identified in the search some overarching questions.
So the first question you asked, for example, is who is your who?
Can you explain the overarching questions?
Why you framed them that way?
Okay, so what are we talking about here?
We're saying that the old store, the old rules have no longer apply.
The idea of follow your passion when you're young, you know, like sell it to your parents,
set off down the path, like keep climbing until you reach the top.
That doesn't work anymore.
Okay.
20 times in your life, you're going to be knocked off of that path.
There is no career.
There's no path.
There's no job.
So what do you do when you are thrown off course?
What do you do when you're in a work week?
Okay.
So the essence of this is what I call you have to do the work, right?
You have to conduct the meaning audit.
As I said, you have to rewrite your own story.
You can't chase someone else's dream.
You have to chase your own dream.
How do you conduct a meaning audit?
Exactly.
So that's what we're talking about.
How do you determine what is your dream?
And at it's hard, there are three parts to it.
Number one, what's the difference between meaning and happiness?
Happiness is what you feel in the moment.
Meaning is about stitching together past, present and future.
Okay.
So the essence of a meaning audit is to go back to the past.
We all have these stories and expectations and parables and homilies and myths built
inside of us, you know, from our parents, from our cultures.
You have to go back and identify what is it that locked into you when you were young.
So step one is to look at the past.
Step two is to look at the present.
Like where are you right now?
And then step three is to look forward to the future.
And so as you say, how do you tell a story?
Fortunately, there's some knowledge about this.
Okay.
And so let's go back to what Kipling said, right?
Which is there are these six questions, right?
Who, what, when, where, why and how.
The problem that we do is that we put how first and we call our networks, right?
And we post on, you know, social media and that we go right to finding and the problem
is we're successful and we find a job, but we haven't done the stuff that's beyond that.
So you've got to ask a series of questions.
Who is your who?
What is your what?
When is your when?
Where is your where and so on.
And my book kind of walks you through that process, but just to pick a couple.
So let's just take two questions from the past.
I would say the first question I'm interested to know is what were the upsides and downsides
about work that you learned from your parents?
I started asking, what did you learn from your parents?
Everyone said the power of hard work.
I'm like, okay, that's fine.
So like what are the downsides?
Oh, then it got interesting.
Like my parents work so much.
There was not family or my father in many cases, like, you know, started a bunch of
companies and they failed, you know, so it's like the go work for someone else or my father
worked for the same company for 40 years and got laid off.
And so therefore I want to do something I don't want to work for somebody else.
Like, what did you learn?
Okay.
Now that's not something that you choose.
That's what you inherit.
If you want to get to what you chose, this is the most valuable question to ask.
I'm in fact, I'll start with you.
Greg, other than family, who were your role models as a child?
Yeah.
I mean, I would say, I mean, I'm thinking now of a family friend who seemed to me to
have a great marriage, a great family.
So that was sort of a model of what I wanted.
I'm thinking here of other authors, you know, before I ever thought I would be an author.
I'd read their books, even when I was quite young.
And it wasn't so much what they wrote about it was more who they were.
And again, I would say the similarity is the kind of marriage and family they had.
Yes, they were successful in other ways.
But that seems to have been, I hadn't really thought about that until now because that's
true.
Even there are some church leaders that I admired and was mentored by.
And the same thing is true.
I was drawn to those that seem to explicitly have marriage and family that was the kind
I would aspire to.
That's beautiful.
And that's the question.
It's like, other than family, what role models did you have?
And what did you admire about them?
That's the follow up question.
Okay.
Okay.
And the reason that this is so telling is that we don't choose our parents.
Okay.
We inherit our parents and then we have to learn posing comms from them.
Our role models are the first decision and choice we ever make about work because we
are choosing to connect ourselves with them.
If you want to know what you should be doing now, look at what you were admiring back then.
And what did these things have in common?
You led in all three cases with character.
Okay.
With family.
Okay.
And then you went to ideas being a public person.
Okay.
I know very little about you actually other than things I've learned that you talked about,
but I know you're interested in, you know, in character.
And I know that you're interested in ideas and your answer revealed that.
And that's why these are effective questions.
Okay.
So those are some questions about the past and I have, you know, I have another 10 questions
like that in the surge.
And now let's talk about today.
Then I would like you to know, like, you know, fill in this blank.
I'm at a moment in my life when blank.
Okay.
How you answer that question, people will say I'm in a moment in my life where I want
to be a supportive spouse.
I'm in a moment in my life when my children are young and it's not about me right now.
It's about being a character.
I'm in a moment when I have an aging parent who needs my attention.
So now is not the good time to have work that's going to take me away from home three
weeks a month.
Okay.
I'm in a moment in my life when talks about where you are right now.
Okay.
Another question about today is what kinds of stories do you like?
Okay.
And the kinds of stories that you consume turned out to be the kinds of stories.
I talked to a man, a wonderful man named Isaiah Warner, right?
Like the first stories I have in my book who grew up literally picking cotton in Louisiana
in a black school where the whites used the textbooks and when they got outdated in six
years, the white schools got new textbooks and the black schools got the hand me down
textbooks.
Okay.
He went to an HBCU.
He became a chemistry professor.
When he arrived at LSU 15 years ago, they had given four black students PhDs.
Now he's personally given a hundred black students.
Okay.
He's the most decorated chemist of any race in America.
And he told me when I asked him what kinds of stories he said, I like detective stories
because it's all about solving problems.
And that's what I do in my work.
So what kinds of stories do you like?
Do you like to consume?
Because if you like, you know, civil war videos versus if you watch Bridgerton versus
this old house versus James Bond movies, these are all telling you a version of the kinds
of stories you want to tell.
So, so part of a meaning on it is questions about the past.
Part of it is about the present and then part of it is about the future, right?
Answer this question.
My purpose right now is blank.
What is your why?
Why is your why?
What is the why that motivates you right now?
It might be making money.
It might be giving back.
It might be, you know, solving food insecurity.
Okay.
These kinds of questions are the deeper, harder question.
And then the last question that I'll just throw out here is one of my favorite is what's
the best advice you have for yourself right now?
I asked people in their biggest work quake, what was the best advice that they got?
Okay.
Then I asked them what, whether that advice agreed with what they were already saying
to themselves or contradicted it in three quarters of cases, the advice people got reaffirmed
what people were already saying to themselves.
Even what we need is not a kick in the butt, it's a pat on the back.
It's so ask yourself what advice you have for yourself.
Listen to it and then keep moving in that direction.
There are two things I love about this.
The first is that I have seen many, many, many self-reflective type exercises.
But these feel fresh to me.
And there's a specificity about them that's encouraging too, right?
I mean this, I want to be the kind of person who.
I want to do work that.
I'm in a moment in my life when I want to be in a place that my purpose right now is.
The best advice I have for myself now is.
I mean these are deceptively simple.
They're clear and they're precise, but they get to the heart of the matter, which is the
point of the exercise.
And so many times when people are writing sort of, even things like, okay, write a mission
statement and so on.
It's like they're directionally right, but what people end up with isn't very actionable
and isn't really fit for purpose often.
So I really like these questions.
I think these are very helpful.
The second observation I have is it comes back to this story that you shared in the
beginning about your father and how you giving him a prompt every week in an email helped
him come back from the brink.
And what that means is that he found meaning again.
That's what I'm interpreting.
I mean, he has a lost complete loss of meaning and there's that life without meaning is pure
suffering.
That's all that's left.
And so meaning is the, let's say the primary vehicle, the only antidote I know of for addressing
that suffering.
And so if you lose all meaning, you don't become some sort of blank state.
All you feel is pain in every aspect of your consciousness.
So suicide suddenly becomes not anything but crazy because it's the promise of relieving
all of this pain, but you found an alternative way to relieve it for him.
And one that was probably surprising this idea of the prompt.
Well, let me first of all, thank you for the kind words you've said about these questions.
I've asked literally millions of questions in the last six years in the course of doing
1500 hours of life stories.
And so nothing is more important to me than questions.
And the thing I would say about questions is there's only one metric for evaluating a
question.
And that is the quality of the answer.
Everything else doesn't matter.
Okay.
If it's about the vanity of how great the question is, that's an irrelevancy.
It only works if it gets to the matter that we're talking about.
And as I know you've spent a lot of time how to get to the essence of things and how to
help people find meaning.
And so I just want to acknowledge and express gratitude and appreciation for recognizing
all the work that went into these questions.
That's point number one.
As for meaning, you're exactly right.
I mean, where do the meaning movement came from?
Their meaning movement came from Victor Frankl, right?
In the middle of the Holocaust saying that you can live without anything, but you can't
live without meaning.
And the issue as you so beautifully just put it is that it's confronting pain.
One of my great ways of looking at the world is a sort of a forgotten book that may not
even have come across your radar screen.
But it's called Men and Fire.
It was written by Norman McLean.
It was about the, about fire jumpers in the upper northwest who would parachute in when
these wildfires would break out.
Firefighters and then the wildfires would go mad and it would and the firefighters would
try to outrun the fire and any of the firefighters who outran the fire got killed.
Only one group survived.
What did they do?
They burned their own fire and therefore ate up the fuel and so that when they ran toward
the fire and when the fire ran toward them, it jumped them because there was no fuel.
To me, this is like my metaphor of life.
Turn it into the fire, confront the pain, go to the most difficult question.
So those ones read that the Young Man and Fire by Norman McLean, but continue with what
it means to you.
I have asked, as I've said, millions of questions.
I asked a question in this set of interviews, what I call the work story project, right,
that led to the search that if you can ask one question right now, it would be this question.
Before I started this project, I read Hans Christian Andersen's final fairy tale.
And it's about a young boy who's clearly a stand in for Hans Christian Andersen, who's
got away with words and his auntie always says to him, you've got to read with words.
You're going to be a great poet.
This young boy also suffers from a lot of toothaches as it does his aunt.
And one night he ushers her back from the theater, it's snowing, he has she has to stay
with him and he's a young adult at this point and he has this delirious dream when he's
visited by this old wisened woman.
And he calls her auntie toothache and auntie toothache says to him, every great poet has
a great toothache.
I love this.
This may be the smartest thing I have ever read.
Okay.
And the name of this fairy tale is auntie toothache.
And I asked everyone in my interviews as I will now ask you, correct.
Did you have a toothache as a child?
Did you have a problem that you wanted to resolve?
Okay, a dispute you wanted to cure it is you wanted to scratch a dilemma you wanted
to resolve.
Did you have a toothache as a child?
I think the toothache for me had to do with relationship pain.
It had to do with what I was observing around me that I couldn't fix.
You know, as a child, there's all sorts of problems you can't fix as a child.
You can't fix your family.
You can't fix your parents.
You can't fix their marriage.
You can't fix.
You know, there's so many problems.
And I think that that's part of the toothache is that you're faced with things that you can't
do anything about now.
I think that was more, even more formative than I've been previously aware of.
I mean, all of these mentors that you ask me about, you know, they have a common thread.
And even now, as I'm working on new research that feels like the most important project
I've ever worked on professionally, has it the heart of it, the idea of how do people
solve the right problems with each other?
You know, how do you actually deal, get to the, you know, face it, face the right problem,
perceive the right problem, prioritize the right problem, and get to the heart of it
so that you can actually resolve it and move forward.
And what happens when people don't do that is absolutely ridiculous.
Because what happens when you don't do that is that the problem just carry on, even if
you maintain a sort of equilibrium, it's absurd.
An unresolved problem, a serious unresolved problem, even if you just maintain it, means
that you are dealing with something for decades or an entire lifetime that could have been
resolved maybe in a few hours, you know, or maybe in a few days or weeks, or maybe at
the most months or a couple of years.
I mean, if the book, if the research and book I'm currently writing does not help to help
people resolve the right problems in their most important relationships, and to do it
rapidly, which is important to me, then I like, it's like, well, what's the point?
There was no point writing that book.
There was no point doing this research.
It has other advantages, but if it can't do that, it won't do anything.
And I am, I am a little surprised at myself at being able to sort of think about that
toothache in that way from that far back.
That's beautifully expressed.
We were talking earlier, right?
You told that story about Al Gore and getting him to go back to the grandparents and
what I said in response was there's no chance that later in that conversation, it didn't
come back because I have done this, Greg, for 1500 hours, I've sat in front of total
strangers as you and I are meeting for the first time in this conversation.
And I have asked these questions and in 100% of the cases, there is this moment of individual
discovery and then shared discovery that happens in this process.
Okay.
And that's why I said this is the best single question I've ever asked in 35 years of asking
questions professionally.
What is your toothache?
Because the correlation with the meaningful work you want to be doing now is almost 100%.
And there is a moment as I frame this in the search into the chapter called Why is your
why, which is what we're talking about.
We're talking about chapter two in Paradise Lost where you've got two angels, right?
And should they lead this counter offensive against heaven?
And one of them says, no, we should not do it, right?
Because we, we should try to make peace, right?
And so one says we should turn our tortures into horrid arms.
We should turn our pain into fighting.
The other one says we should turn our torments in the length of time and we shall let them
become our elements.
And that is the question that we are talking about.
Are you going to turn your pain into torture and fighting and liquor and affairs and, you
know, profligate spending or whatever other way you happen to express, okay, your, your
fears, whatever your horrid arms are, or you're going to turn them into, you know, into your
element.
Okay.
And I should read from my book here it is on page 248.
A question for all of us at some point in our lives is, do we do what our lesser angels
want and turn our tortures into horrid arms?
Or do we do what our better angels want and turn our torments into our essential elements?
That is the question that we're talking about.
Okay.
Do you continue to chase that outdated dream, that linear career success, that story that's
been told for 150 years, or do you write your own story?
Do you do the digging?
Do you do the work to excavate your pains and unearth your long buried dreams and stop
chasing someone else's dream and chase your own dream and find meeting in the story of
your own life?
Well, that's a beautiful place to land.
And all I want to add is that when you contrast, did you have a toothache as a child question
and the answers that flow from that with how do I get the next step on the ladder?
The difference is outrageous.
You know, it really is such a night and day difference.
When you ask the question, okay, next step on the ladder, it might have no bearing whatsoever
on what is meaningful to you.
Literally none, because it's just a game you got put into.
You know, you woke up in the middle of a game and you're just trying to win and what's more
pointless than winning the wrong game.
And all the while there is this asset deeply buried inside of you, you know, it's pain,
but it's exactly the raw materials you need to be able to build a work life of meaning.
And of course, beyond that, because it doesn't have to be limited work life by any means,
but a contribution that's lifelong, that doesn't have an expiration date, that doesn't
come with a, well, now you have retired and now you've got to do some other weird thing
for the rest of your life and pretend not to work.
And all of the disaster that comes with that, I think, foolish concept.
And instead you can have a whole life long of meaning trying to alleviate this ache within
yourself and also within other people.
It's a really profound question and a profound and beautiful conversation.
It's been great having you on the podcast.
Thank you.
It's been my pleasure.
Well thank you.
Really, thank you for listening.
I've thoroughly enjoyed every moment with Bruce Fiehler.
I hope that you have too.
What is one idea that has stood out to you?
And what's one micro action that you can take in the next few minutes to put into action
that idea?
And who is somebody that you can share these ideas with?
For the first five people who write a review of this episode on Apple Podcasts, you'll
receive completely for free access to the Essentialism Academy.
Just go to gregmecuan.com forward slash podcast promo for all the details.
Thank you and I'll see you next time.
Bye.
in.
the.
the.
in.
the.
the.
the.
the.
the.