216. Embracing Mindfulness, Purpose, and the Art of Bouncing Back with John R. Miles

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All loans and amounts subject to lender approval. But I found through that, that we could make time like an elastic band, but we had to be intentional about how we're using it.
And so that would be a huge piece of advice I would give to people is you have to be very

intentional about how you manipulate the time that you have, because it is the most important

thing that you have.

But if you don't do that self-care, none of the rest of it is going to create this light

that you're so much aspiring to have.

In a crude laboratory in the basement of his home. Hello everyone and welcome back to the show.
Today we have a tremendous episode for you, a conversation with John R. Miles, author, speaker, founder, CEO, and Navy veteran.
John is one of the top 100 leadership and personal mastery, speakers, thought leaders. He's got a tremendous podcast called Alternative Health, and he has a brand new book, Passion Struck, 12 Powerful Principles to Unlock Your Purpose and Ignite Your Most Intentional Life.
And it's that last bit, that intentionality that we really dig into and what that means. What does that word mean? Why is it so important for us to be intentional? And at face value, this is a term that I think we get what it means, deciding on something and doing it with purpose, but oftentimes we do not act or live our lives with intentionality, and John is just a tremendous thinker, tremendous guy.
I loved this conversation. Whether you're in leadership, sales, or just trying to push your life and your business forward, this episode, this conversation is absolutely tremendous.
Also, there will be links in the description of the podcast, whether you're watching on YouTube or listening in iTunes, Spotify, et cetera, to get to Amazon to pre-order John's new book, Passion Struck. Tremendous book.
I have read through it. You're going to love this.
It's going to give you all kinds of insights to help you live intentionally, which I think is something we all should strive for here in 2024. With that though, I want to just briefly mention the Insurance Growth Mastermind.
My friends, the Insurance Growth Masterclass is a mastermind, clean that up, that is going to be a deep dive into everything I've learned in the insurance industry. 18 years in this business, eight as a boots on the ground producer at a generalist agency, Ford Agency Nation, Bold Penguin, been a CEO of a fitness franchise, founded, grew, my own independent agency coming out of COVID, which I then sold and continue to grow at a rapid pace in conjunction with the organization that bought us, SIA.
And now it is time for me to take everything that I've learned, package it up in a way that you guys can digest it, use it, implement it into your agencies, and start to capture organic growth. There are all kinds of thought leaders out there that can help you with M&A if that's what you're interested in.
And if you have ideas around M&A, whether you're selling or buying, you can always reach out to me. I have a huge network in that space.
And there'll be more to come there as I kind of learn that world. Lots of exciting stuff.
But to get access to all this, you have to be part of the masterclass. Go to masterclass.insure, masterclass.insure.
That's masterclass.insure today. Name, email, you'll know about all the announcements, all the latest releases, and have the opportunity to join the Masterclass and be part of what is going to be one of the fastest growing communities in this industry as basically I give back to you guys everything that I've learned, bring in thought leaders, bring in people who helped me in the various aspects or times in my career grow.
What are the resources that I'm reading, that I'm learning, that I'm taking derivatives of and applying into the insurance industry, and the clients that I now have as a consultant in the sales side here in the insurance industry.

So that's masterclass, M-A-S-T-E-R-C-L-A-S-S dot insure, I-N-S-U-R-E, masterclass dot insure.

Guys, I love you for listening to this podcast.

Let's get on to John R. Miles.
So, John john it's such a pleasure to have you on the show um the place that i wanted to start and what i found most interesting and researching you and looking through the book and working all that was um this idea that you've been an incredibly successful individual by so many of the metrics that really anybody would measure themselves by, but that at a time when those things had all taken place and you were in this position that I think could be considered enviable, you also found yourself, and these are your words, directionless, lonely, and bored. And I have found from doing this show, from my own work, this is not an uncommon feeling that people have and I'm interested in if you could break down where do you think that comes from and then I think that will lead us very well into your new book and a lot of the topics that you talk about and the different advice that you have but I think people don't realize that you could be at a level of success in which others may say, wow, look at how amazing he's doing and still have those feelings.
I think, I think that's not a common understanding, if that makes sense. Well, Ryan, thanks for opening up with that.
And thanks for having me on your great show. I guess I'll just give a backdrop for people for where I was at, at the stage of my life.
I had always been a high achiever, like probably many of the listeners of your podcast are. And I had this trajectory that I wanted to accomplish, and I was nailing each one.
I was the youngest person up for partner in a big four consulting firm I was in. I left there, and number of years later, I became the youngest vice president at Lowe's.
And I had had this ultimate goal that I wanted to be a fortune 50 CIO before I turned 40 and I accomplished it. And I sat there at the top of what I had thought was going to bring all this fulfillment and happiness in my life.
And I felt absolutely the opposite. I felt empty.
I felt as if I were wearing a mask every day, actually doing something that I felt compelled to do, but wasn't really what I had been called with my inner voice to do. And this is something that I wish I would have read this book when it came out in 2003 by Tim Kasser.
He wrote a great book called The High Christ of Materialism. And in it, he offers the

scientific explanation of how our contemporary culture of consumerism and materialism affects

our everyday happiness and our psychological health. And in it, he explores how people whose

values become centered on the accumulation of wealth, material possessions, external rewards,

Thank you. people whose values become centered on the accumulation of wealth, material possessions, external rewards, end up facing more unhappiness and then end up developing things like anxiety, self-depression, low self-esteem, problems with intimacy and relationships.
And this is regardless of income levels, age, culture, you name it. And it was the things that were hitting me.
And I don't want people to sit here and feel sorry for me. But as I have talked to people who were at that level, who are CEOs of large corporations, I have to tell you, it's not an isolated thing.
It happens far more often than people would ever expect. I think, you know, so I say this all the time and I have my own viewpoints on life and we'll see how far we get into them.
But I feel like most of the issues that we face in today's society, particularly addressing our own internal voice have to do with an over indexing on narcissism, materialism, and secularism in our current society. And we feel like there's so much I, I, I, I, I that we lose like what really makes us happy, right? Like I want this, I see, you know, John's in this position.
I want that position. I want this.
And when we get there, maybe it is what we want. And we work hard to get there and feel a sense of accomplishment.
But then we ultimately hit these points and we realize that like, okay, well, what do I do now? And it's so much of it comes back to giving and growth, right? Like, like, those are the two places that I feel like we have to, we have to constantly be giving and we have to constantly be growing. And if we can, if we can build those two things into our lives, then it, it, things start to shake out.
Our, our eyes start to open and, um, we come back to that cliche, which for, I hated for so long, but I just can't fight it being true. Like it kind of really is the journey and not the destination.
And I hate that because it's so, I just fight those like really cliche ideas, but, but truthfully it's, you probably were happier and I'm not, I don't want to speak for you. I'm interested in your take, but my, if I had to guess, it would be that you were happier in the battle to get to those places than you were when you actually got there.
So I would say in part, that was true, that I really love that journey of getting there. I also think that once I reached that point, I was farther and farther away from the activities that really brought joy in my life.
I mean, when you're at that level in a Fortune 50 company, let's face it,

75% of your day is either dealing with inner office politics or HR issues. It's not doing what I love to do, which was being strategic, which was having time to really be creative and to bring new ideas to the surface.

It was going from one meeting to the next,

dealing with all kinds of things that brought me no joy in my life,

not ever having white space to carve out

so that I could spend more time cultivating relationships,

spending time with the troops,

ultimately trying to dive in and look for solutions that would take the business forward. And I think for me, I was getting farther and farther away from the things that caused me to feel passion.
And instead, I was dealing with all this BS that after a period of time just led to complete and utter burnout, which ultimately resulted in those feelings that you described. And for me, the worst was I just had a numbness pervade me like I have never felt before in my life.
And it's something I would never wish on anyone. So what did you do? I think the thing that people get wrong about burnout is that they think it's going to be an overnight turnaround situation.
And the fact of the matter to me is burnout is like depression or it's like digital addiction. You don't become addicted to your phone overnight.
It starts out with you getting it and you playing around with certain apps. And before you know it, you're gradually on it more and more and more.
And you don't even realize that that use is expanding until you reach a point where you're on it for seven hours a day. And at this point, it's gone from a small minuscule thing to impacting so many different areas of your life.
And I would say the same thing is true with burnout is it comes at the beginning as this shallow thing that you're probably not even perceiving. And it's not until you start feeling it mid-grade that you're starting to get concerned about it.
but before you can really even tackle it, it's already becoming a tidal wave that's engulfing you. So what I had to do was I had to pick an area of my life to focus on where I was going to start making tiny habit changes that I hoped would from that point cascade into other areas of my life.
And the way I like to liken this as an analogy for those who are listening is at this time, I was going to see a career coach and he helped me see my life through this metaphor. If you picture a kitchen stool and that stool has one major support underneath it, and that's the constant grind.
What happens when that stool eventually breaks? You're going to have a complete meltdown. And he encouraged me to live my life as if it was that kitchen stool with as many supports as I wanted to put under me that would round out all the different areas of my life.
And a person could pick whatever they wanted. I ended up picking for me physical health, mental health, spiritual health, emotional health, relationship health as the pillars.
Because if I knew that I could get those underneath me, then everything dealing with the career was going

to take care of itself. But if those were out of whack, and I think so many of us see this, if one thing starts going down on that stool, okay, maybe you're tilting.
But if you've got multiple supports going down, you're going to topple over. So for me, the first thing I knew I had to get right was my mindset.
And the way I needed to pursue this was I started a mindfulness practice. And I ended up doing it almost unconsciously by habit stacking my mindfulness practice with a daily three to four mile walk that I would do first thing in the morning.
And by getting clearer of the negative influences that were hitting me, the things that I was allowing to control who I was and starting to parse them out at the same time that I was making some time for me exercise, those two things started to open up so many other aspects of change in my life that then began to cascade over time. But it probably took me several years to ultimately get through the burnout that I had faced.
So I agree with you completely on it's basically everything other than your career that you have to work on oftentimes in order to move your career beyond a plateau. I found that very much in my own career as well.
Some of the pushback that I've gotten around that and I'm just very interested in your take or how you advise people. So I say to this audience quite often health is a competitive advantage in business.
If you're unhealthy, if I look across the negotiation table and I see that someone is unhealthy, that they're not fit, I know I can just outlast them. You know what I mean? I just know, I know their brain's going to be foggy.
I know they're not going to have the endurance. I know they're not going to be able to move as fast.
And we don't want that, right? We want to be able to combat in a way and, you know, in way and in a business sense, in a place where we always have our full capacity as much as possible. So I completely agree.
The pushback that I get is oftentimes like, well, it's easy for you to say that because you've reached this level of success that gives you the leeway to work on those things. I'm grinding away, living paycheck to paycheck, et cetera.
And I don't know how to break free. And I mean this in all candidness.
I struggle with advice for people in that situation sometimes because I do understand, I came from nothing. I came from a town of 900 people in the middle of nowhere, like, you know, whatever.
I understand those times when like, just, just making rent or convincing your landlord that to give you an extra week on rent is like a big win, let alone like, I need to go do some deadlifts this week or whatever, you know? So how do you position this, which I completely believe and think is incredibly important and really the only way out? How do you position that advice for people? How do you help them through those moments where they feel like the business of life is so much that they can't make space to improve these other areas? So the first thing I would say is I am very much aware of this dilemma because I lived it. It's not as if I became an overnight success and one day I woke up and was a C-level executive.
That's not how it works. I have faith to so many trials and tribulations along this journey, but each one was an opportunity for growth.
But I'll just pick a great example. I'd gotten out of the military and my career went in a completely different direction than I expected it to.
I was supposed to join the FBI. I'm a day away from going to my Quantico class.
I had no plan B and Congress pulls the shenanigans that they've been doing with the budget and my class gets canceled and it gets reshuffled to years in the future. So here I am, I'm married.
I don't have any other options, but I've got to make money. And I put myself in a situation where I did the only thing I knew that I could, and that was sell

myself. I ended up getting a position at Booz Allen and Hamilton, which is a management consulting firm.
But at that time, I'm living out in San Diego. We're living in barely an 1,100 square foot house.
I now have a one-year-old. I'm going through my MBA program.
I'm working 70 hours a week. I'm barely able to make the bills for the life that we're having.
And yet I'm trying to improve my life as well. And when I looked at that situation, I realized that I couldn't put that time in once I got home from work because I was already doing MBA type things.
I had my family I had to spend time with. I had my son who I wanted to spend time with.
And so I had to intentionally open up a window, the only place where I could. And at this point, I was not a morning person, but I cultivated a morning routine so that I could find a period in the day where I could put some self-care in to getting my mindset right so I would be the best person I could be so that I would be able to serve, whether it was the people that work or my family, the best that I possibly could.
And I think what people fail to realize is we think of time as a fixed element. And a key message I want to give people, and it's a key message in my book, is that time is actually malleable.
And where I found this out was when I was running competitively earlier on in my life. And it's that sensation that you get when you're in a blow state, which I first experienced when I was running, where sometimes you could be doing a 10-mile workout that feels like it's five minutes.
And I'm sure other people have experienced things that they're doing where they're only doing it for five minutes and it feels like it's five hours. But I found through that that we could make time like an elastic band, but we had to be intentional

about how we're using it. And so that would be a huge piece of advice I would give to people is you have to be very intentional about how you manipulate the time that you have because it is the most important thing that you have.
but if you don't do that self-care

none of the rest of it

is going to

create this life that you're so much aspiring to have i took a few religion classes in college because i didn't understand i was a i was a baseball player and i didn't understand why there were times when, and again, speaking to flow state and

just a very, uh, uh, this is a micro example of this topic, but like there'd be times when

you'd be standing in a batter's box and the pitcher would throw a 80 mile an hour fastball

and it would look like 200 miles an hour.

And there'd be other times where it looked like they were tossing it underhand from,

you know, 20 feet away. And it was moving as slow as a ball, you know, it was moving in molasses.
And I understand, you know, flow state really wasn't a thing almost 30 years ago, 25 years ago. So I didn't necessarily understand it, but this idea of we can, we can put ourselves in these positions.
If we focus on them, mindfulness, right. Slowing down, creating white space is another term that you've used in here.
And I, I feel like this, this is a topic that, and I, and I love that it, that it's part of your, that you part of your book and just part of your platform and message in general. We don't, we talk about things like mindfulness, but we don't talk about, I don't believe enough or enough people aren't talking about, uh, like what is the actual result of it? Like, yeah.
Okay. Maybe reduce some anxiety.
Sure. But I think everyone kind of lives with a low level anxiety and just assumes it's part of our lives.
And there's, you know, we, we pass off a lot of these ideas. And when, when you think about things like mindfulness or creating white space, creating time, creating creativity time, right? Like dead space in the day, uh, you know, uh, uh, serendipity, these kinds of things, what you're allowing yourself, you're allowing your brain to actually process more complex ideas in ways that it cannot do.
If you've got nine meetings stacked on top of each other minute after minute after minute. And my argument specifically to this audience in general over the last few years has been one hour of really incredible work where you are in flow state or whatever we want to call it.
You are dialed in and doing absolutely your best, your pinnacle, your peak in that moment for one hour. And the rest of the day, you're just like sitting around is better than nine hours of, you know, shallow, you know, rapid activity where you're just moving through the motions and can't actually dive deep.
You know, that time is more valuable, that deep time. And we just don't think about it.
We don't build it in. We're not time blocking.
We're just trying to be busy. And the busyness is killing us.
Honestly, I think about that. Busyness is legitimately killing us, not just our productivity, but legitimately impacting our personal mental health, our relational health, all these things that you said are what allowed you to move to the next level.
Right. Just busyness alone just destroys it.
It's like throwing a cherry bomb in there. I had a great example of this on my my podcast.
I interviewed Gloria Mark, who is a professor at UC University of California, Irvine, and she is an expert on attention span. And in her book, she put out this figure that I just couldn't wrap my head around.
I guess decades ago, the typical person would get distracted. I think her numbers were like every five to eight minutes.
But based on the research that she's done both in the field and in her lab, what they're seeing now is that the average person gets distracted every 45 seconds. And then once you are distracted, it takes between 25 to 30 minutes to get completely back on task into what you were originally doing.
But if you keep distracting yourself again and again, you never get back into that state. And it's something that I document in chapter 13, which is all about the need for us to be conscious engagers.
And in this chapter, I explore another metaphor where we often hear too many of us are living our lives on autopilot. And I don't like that saying, because if you think about autopilot, the plane is still going in a direction.
It's still pointing on a path that is going to take it to a destination. I liken our lives today with all the distractions that we have to be more akin to a pinball in the game of pinball.
We are the ball in our lives. And it's something that I think the listeners really need to think about because if you're a pinball, you absolutely have no control over where you're going.
You're listless, just bouncing off the different elements that you come across. And I think that's what so many of our lives are like.
We just get into these routines where we just let ourselves bounce off of the things that are around us. And what I am trying to get people to see is that they have the opportunity that instead of being that pinball, they can be the person who becomes an expert at playing pinball and learns how to manipulate that ball to win the game.
And it's the same thing we have to do in our lives. And I've heard you talk about this on another podcast, where you were talking about the fact that we can have all these things we want in our life.
But if we're not deliberate about being consistent in our pursuit about it, then what the heck are we doing? And when we are that pinball, there's no deliberateness about anything we're doing. So there is no consistency.
So you don't make the incremental gains. And then you sit back here and you review your year at the end of 2023.
And you're like, I had all these goals and I only accomplished 10% of them. Well, there's a major reason staring you right in your face why that's occurring.
Yeah. I love that.
The, the, one of the things that, um, you know, to, to that, to that extent, one of the things I'm constantly saying to myself and I, I don't do enough mindfulness work, but I do a lot of, um, I have a lot of, uh, things that I try to repeat to myself and remind myself of. And I try to be, about three years ago, a mentor of mine told me, never be self-critical, be self-reflective.
And he said, and he didn't give me context. He goes, think about that and come back to me the next time we talked and we meet like once a month.
And I came know, I came back and it was, it was really interesting. I said, self-critical is blaming myself and, or my surroundings for the reasons things didn't happen.
Self-reflective allows me to understand what happened. And then this was the key word that really changed a lot of how I operate or try to operate is intentionality, right? I can be, when I'm reflective of something, I can understand, okay, this is why this happened.
Now I can be very intentional to make sure that that thing doesn't happen again. And, you know, when I look at the people who either, who either reach out to me as, uh, my, the industry that my career is born out of, and that I work in most of the time is the insurance industry.
So I have a lot of insurance entrepreneurs or reach out to me. And I'm always trying to help as much as I can.
You know, so much of the issues stem from they're just reacting like a pinball. I think your autopilot versus pinball example is like 100% dialed in.
Like they're just kind of bouncing off all these things. And the other thing about a pinball to take that analogy even further, it's like, there's nowhere to go, right? You're just cycling through the

same system over and over again, bouncing off of things versus when you're intentional about

something, you can say, no, I'm not going to do that. That may sound like a great idea.
I may love you. I may care about you.
I may want to help you, but that's not. What's up guys.
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Peace. Let's get back to the episode.
Part of my plan. I'm going to be intentional about getting to this goal and what it forces you to make decisions to get there versus just, I'm going to breathe air today and hope something good happens.
And if it doesn't, I'm going to complain and drink myself into oblivion until I fall asleep and then wake up and do it again. And, and why, why isn't my life where I want it to be? And, and that really idea of intentionality purpose, I love a conscious engagers, like that whole crux of ideas to me is like a keystone to being successful.
It's like you cannot do it without that concept. Yeah, and let me tell you where that whole lens of intentionality really opened up for me.
is I'm a huge reader And one of my favorite books was always Angela Duckworth's book, right? Yep. And I happened to be rereading it for like the fourth or fifth time.
And for those who haven't read it, she really explores West Point cadets and is trying to understand what is getting them through their plebe summer

and they've ultimately done work that came out in 2019 that examined I think it was 11,000 cadets

through all four years but what they found was that it was passion and perseverance and really

physical abilities over a person's intellect that got them through that program and I started the

Thank you. and really physical abilities over a person's intellect that got them through that program.
And I started to think about it because I went to the Naval Academy. And as I examined it, I think she is right.
You did have to have some physical abilities or you're not going to be able to get through that aspect of the training. You definitely had to have passion for wanting to be there because let's face it, there are a lot of other universities where I would have rather had spent my time being like a normal adult at that time.
But I was passionate about wanting to serve my country. And then you definitely had to have perseverance when you're taking 21, 22 credits.
I was a division one the military stuff they had to persevere through that but the one important thing that she didn't equate into this was intentionality meaning i i could have all of that but still be aligning it to the wrong place yeah and i happened to have a conversation with her partner, Katie Meltman, who she started Behavior Change for Good Initiative with. And I asked Katie that question, and she said, I think Angela would completely agree with you, because there's a behavior science concept where if you are recognizing that your life isn't going the way you want it and you do nothing about it you're going to stay stagnant yet if you recognize that and you make changes to course correct that's really being intentional and that's to me the life all went.
And it's like the second law of thermodynamics. If all things being equal, you're going to face inertia unless you do something to overcome that aspect.
And that's what, to me, intentionality is. And it's a muscle that we can develop and strengthen.
Yeah. A good buddy of mine who I just had on the show recently just wrote a really interesting book around the idea of inertia called the inertia of legacy and how we allow, essentially the title gives the idea away, we allow our past actions or the legacy of our lives or our family to keep us in a path that we may or may not even want.
And it takes purpose, intentionality. It's got a bunch of things to push us away from that inertia to where we ultimately want to go, which is a really interesting concept.
I couldn't agree with you more. I'll tell you, even in my own life most recently, and I'm bringing this up because at 42 years old, I think a lot of people hit a certain age and like, wow, this is just who I am.
I do not believe that in any capacity. And I believe we are always capable of changing the direction of our lives.
But I found myself and with a sequel, we'll call it a series of unfortunate events in my life that was leading to a sense of I found myself feeling lethargic. I felt myself feeling off course, et cetera.
So I took on, I just said, I need to do something. And I took on, I don't know if you're familiar with 75 hard, which is like a mental toughness, a mental challenge.
And I just said, look, I wanna build discipline into my life. And over the course of those 75 days, what I found is one, I can get these seven things that you have to do as part of this program in every day and, you know, be the CEO of

a company and be a single dad.

I'm divorced and, you know, and, and, you know, and I was like, wow, if I really think

about what I want and I'm in your word, I'm intentional about making time for those things that I want to do that I believe are going to push me forward. I can fit all these things into my day because that's what everyone would say.
They'd be like, that's cool that you're doing that. But like, I don't have time.
And I'm like, you think I have time? I run a 22 person company company. I'm a single dad, coach both kids' individual sports teams.
You know, like all these other. And I'm working out twice a day and reading and, you know, not drinking and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And it's just because I created a plan, was intentional about it, and executed it. And I think we just, here, let, let me position this as a question.
Why, why do we think with as much information is out there today, like more than ever before conversations like the one you and I are having are, are happening, right? Amazing books like yours are being published, talking about these specific things. And there's more access to information and resources and thought leadership than, than ever before in history.
Why do people still make these excuses? What are the primary reasons that we're still, we may know the answer. We may know, I just, if I'm intentional, if I'm purposeful, if I do a little bit of time blocking, then these things that I want in life can happen.
But so many people just stay where they are.

What do you think that is? Why do people refuse to break free of the cages they create around themselves, maybe? One of the favorite chapters I read in this book is called The Action Creator. And in it, I profile one of my longest term mentors.

Her name is Captain Wendy Lawrence. And in it, I profile one of my longest term mentors.

Her name is Captain Wendy Lawrence. Wendy was my physics instructor when I was at the Naval Academy.
And during that year, she was selected to the astronaut program and became the first female astronaut from the Naval Academy to fly in space. and as I was interviewing her for the book

she had that saying that she's been teaching kids now for three decades. And that is you have to give yourself permission to dream your dream.
And I think too oftentimes we run into the slightest bit of resistance or self-doubt or fear, and we sit there dead in our tracks. And it's interesting because Cornell did a 2018 research investigation of thousands of people who were facing death in the near future and asked them, what is their number one regret? And 76% of them said the number one regret was that they did not aspire to live the dream that they wanted to achieve.
And the number one reason that people fail to do this is they fail to take deliberate action. And in the book have three parts to it the first part is six mindset shifts the second part is six behavior shifts but the third part I call the progress the psychology of progress and it's all rooted in the power of deliberate action and I think what we all get wrong and I got wrong until I really started studying this and investigating it and talking to 30, 40, 50 of the biggest experts in the world on it, is we tend to think that our action has to be this grandiose thing that is life-changing when we do it.
And that's where we get everything wrong. And the principle that I like to showcase to people is another metaphor, and I call it the bee and the tortoise principle.
And a great example of this is Elon Musk and what he's done with SpaceX. What we need to do in our lives is to have these aspirations and to be like the tortoise that has these long-term goals that we're looking for and that longer-term aspect but we also need to be like the bee who spends their entire day doing what can to serve the queen and the hive and to take those daily actions that are just taking us a step forward to achieving that long-term goal like the tortoise did.
And this is exactly what Elon has done at Tesla and now at SpaceX, where he's got these long-term goals of saving humanity from itself, but he's taking daily actions to try to tackle the different things that when you think of the goal of trying to get to Mars, it's almost unfathomable how many hurdles we're going to have to deal with. Yet he is looking at how do you do boring through his boring companies, looking at how we're going to have to deal with electricity through batteries.
But what people don't realize from that story of SpaceX is when he was awarded that contract, they were awarded a much smaller pot, like 25 to 30% of the budget compared to Boeing who got 70%. But what he came into it realizing is that he was going to need to make a bunch of tiny mistakes and learn from them and take actions that he would learn from those mistakes, make more mistakes, take more actions, and eventually these actions lead to results which culminate into what we've seen from SpaceX.
And that's the exact same thing that people need to do in their lives. But we end up maybe taking an action, it turns out in a negative way, and we stop.
Instead of what I describe in the deliberate action process, the thing we don't do is measure what went wrong, and then renew and go back and attack it from a different direction, and keep persevering to get to where we want in life. And that's exactly what I used in my own life to get me from that struggling 26, 27-year-old, he was making $60,000 a year, had a family to support, was trying to work on his MBA, to breaking through and just over a decade later, achieving my goal of becoming the Fortune 50 CIO.

And now I've used that same methodology to completely reinvent myself when I was in my

40s to doing what I'm doing now.

And I'm telling anyone who's listening to this, you have the power to do it yourself.

Yeah.

You know, the interesting anecdote about Elon and just thinking, you know, how he thinks so long term, when he first founded the Boring Company, people like, oh, what is this guy doing? He's created this company to dig a hole from L.A. to the Dodger Stadium.
and you know he's getting made fun of and people are questioning his decision making and why would you spend money on this and you're like when you put it together you're like he knew that when we

get to mars we're gonna have to dig holes because we can't just live on the surface. And if, you know what I mean? And like you piece all the things together that he's done and that have been questioned.
And when you start to assemble them all, you're like, they're all for this goal that's X number of years in the future. And it took him, and this is what, and I'm an enormous Elon fan for a whole bunch of reasons, but in particular, it is his willingness to fail in public and be questioned and to continue on with that action.
I feel like so many people, people that I care about, either sit on the sidelines or as you said,

take one action, it doesn't work out the way they want, and they pull the ripcord because they're so unwilling to fail in public. And I think, you know, and I think the in public part is vital, right? The failing in private, while it can be good learning lessons, etc., it's easy to fail in private, right?

But failing out private, while it can be good learning lessons, et cetera, it's easy to fail in private, right? But failing out front, failing in public, failing with eyes on you when you're pushing forward, when you're doing something meaningful, and not that that's ever your goal, but there has to be a willingness to fail in public and to do it again and again and again, or you're not going to figure out what the

meaningful work even is. Cause I, even from my own career where I am today and where I was 18

years ago, the first time I sold an insurance policy, I mean, I mean, it's like, you ever see

that, like what people think success is. And then what that meme, you know, and it's like this

scribbly line, like my career and like probably like yours and like so many others that is

literally my career, right? Like day one selling insurance, 25 years old, you know, 42 years old,

Let's go. Like my career and like probably like yours and like so many others.
That is literally my career, right? Like day one selling insurance, 25 years old, you know, 42 years old in the industry. Like in there is all this crazy stuff.
And today I believe I do good, valuable work and I want to keep doing it. But I failed in public a million times.
And my superpower is probably similar. I was never the best athlete.'m certainly not the smartest uh you know i i have all kinds of things that that wouldn't you know never no one would ever put me here and say you're the best for these reasons right like these characteristics like my uh you ever see that movie um uh it's a it's a it's a disney movie um oh they'd be going the video game uh uh Jungle something with The Rock and Kevin Hart oh the heck is that oh yes uh Jumanji Jumanji yeah and Kevin Hart's like Kevin Hart like presses a button and his like profile comes over to his head and he's like look my weaknesses are cake strength and speed you know like you know no one would ever take my profile and say like here you go you know you're, you're going to be exceptional.
You've had to iterate. But I just know so many people that I, that I, that I believe in and I love, and I want them to be successful yet.
They're so unwilling to step out front and, and, and take that, take that shot. What is your advice to them? What, how do you, you know, when you, when you talk to someone like that or someone comes to you and says, John, I have this idea, but God, you know, I, I, you know, my, my, I'm worried what people are going to think, or my family's going to think, or my wife is going to say, or, or, you know, if, if this doesn't work, I'm never going to get a job again or whatever.
How do you, how do you help them get through that? Cause, cause that to me feels like a big part is that public failure terrifies people more than anything else. One story I love to turn people to who are dealing with this is Michael Jordan.
When he took the leave of absence right there in his prime, I think it was after the 96 season, might have been before that, when he goes and decides to pursue the long-term passion of playing baseball. And when Michael started playing baseball, it went off immediately in a successful way.
He was just smacking the ball. I think he had a hit in every one of his games for like the first two or three weeks until they realized he couldn't hit a curveball or a breaking ball, whatever it was.
And then all of a sudden, that's all they're throwing him, and he's striking out left and right. But here's a guy who, at that point, I mean, he is Nike.
I mean, think of the humiliation he's now feeling. But instead of that, he doubled down.
And just as he did in basketball, he was the first person at the practice field, the last person to leave, kind of like the stories you hear of Tom Brady, and spent hours and hours and hours every single day facing that biggest thing that was inhibiting him from achieving that next step. And everything that I've read and watched indicates that had they not had the baseball strike at that point in time, everyone says that he had the talent and was going to be a major league baseball player so i think it's the same thing that we have to do in our own lives and i found you know when i started this podcast i didn't have a platform i barely even had a personal brand i am an introvert i'm the last person who wants to get on camera and do this interview like we're doing here.
But ultimately, I realized if I just stay in my own shell, I'm not fulfilling my ultimate goal of trying to help people. And the only way I could do that was to put myself out there.
And I think the other mistake people make is they then do it, but they're not authentic about it. They try to emulate someone else.
And to me, you just have to go for it and realize that, I mean, I look at my first podcast that I did, my first Instagram post that I did. And, man, I just sit there and laugh because it was so awful, but you learn.
And it's by doing that you learn more. And people talk to me about like, how is your podcast gone to where it's at? I mean, I have done every single job that you could possibly do on this podcast.
And I have to tell you, when you edit 200 episodes and you see all the mistakes you make and your guests make, you start learning from them and you get better. And I realized when I was starting out, I used to say, um, you know, et cetera.
So I started doing Toastmasters. I started being intentional about not doing that because I knew it was inhibiting my credibility.

And you just learn and you evolve and you adapt.

The other big thing I would tell people is that I think we allow too many plan Bs in our life.

And we keep the plan A in motion, thinking we're going to be able to do the plan B.

But to me, I didn't really achieve it until I took away that safety net and I just went for it. And I think that that critical thing that you just have to allow yourself to do is go for it in your life and don't give yourself that safety net.
Because I found for me, anytime I did, I wouldn't give it my all. Have you ever read Bo Eisen's There's No Plan B for Your A Game? Yep.
That's incredible. That was one, that was a gut punch.
You know, I really love that book. I love his whole way.
I've read and now watched a lot of his stuff. And I couldn't agree with you more.
And, you know, and I look at the times when I feel like I wasn't doing my best work. And it was because I was hedging.
You know, I was hedging. I was like, well, you know, I'm not sure yet.
And, you know, I still got my foot in this bucket over here. And the times when I feel like I did my best work, you know, when I really pushed out ahead of where I thought I was capable of were the times when it was like, this is the thing.
If this doesn't work, I don't know what I'm gonna do, but I'm gonna make this thing happen. I'm gonna, you know, but it's very difficult for a lot of people and I understand that.
I think, and how I encourage a lot of people is find a way to fail in public first, to get used to it, like an Instagram account, like start a topic-based Instagram account that you can create and do video or audio or whatever your thing is going to be so that you can start to do it and see what it feels like. See what it feels like.
See what it feels like. Keep going.
Keep going. And then you can always bridge that expertise to something else later, right? But you have to get out there and start doing it.
And again, I know that is very cliche advice, but there's literally no other way to figure it out. I've had three different podcasts.
That's a whole other story. But I've done over 1,300 interviews since 2011 in my life.
And people from all different walks, all different success levels, not one of them has a linear path to success. Not one of them.
So if you take that data point, just that subjective data point of my own experience interviewing 1,300 people and not one of them has a start here, success here, linear path, what it says to me is you can't get there without failing at some point or some sort of setback. Like you literally can't get here without that happening.
So almost go seek those things out. Go push yourself out over the edge a couple of times to see what it feels like and see what happens.
One, you may just be successful, which is amazing. Two, you stumble, fall, you cut your knee, you get back up and you're like, wait a minute, I'm still alive.
I'm okay, I can try this again. Let me go find another cliff to jump off of because there just isn't that path.
It doesn't exist. No one has ever just woke up and just marched the steps up the mountain and success was here and never had a bad day.
That just doesn't exist. So to believe that you could somehow sidestep a miss, a failure, a lost client, uh, uh, saying something stupid on a podcast one time that you

didn't mean to say or whatever, it's just simply never going to happen. If you ultimately want to

get to that, that high level achievement, you have to feel what those things feel like, or

you're just not going to get there. Yeah, I absolutely agree with you.

Yeah. There wasn't really a question in there.
And you can tell that even though I've

Thank you. Yeah, there wasn't really a question in there.
And you can tell that even though I've done so many podcast interviews, I'm still not good at that. I'm kidding.
No, I, you know, man, I, I do, I do, I do have one more question for you. But something that I said a while ago that got a lot of run off of this podcast, I did like a solo episode because I've been getting a lot of questions about how to choose partners in business and how to recruit and et cetera.

Because one of the things that I have been good at in my career is recruiting.

I've always been able to surround myself with people who just wonderful, high intensity people who are high achievers. And I feel very proud of that and blessed.
But the thing I said to them was, I look for people who walk with a limp. Like I look for people who have scars and are beat up and banged up and bloody noses and black eyes.
And if you come in and you've never had the shit kicked out of you, then what am I supposed to do with that? You know what I mean? Like, go, go engage, go, go feel what it feels like. And then, you know, when you, those are the people you want to surround yourself with the people who've, who've been in the fight, you know, I mean, you know, maybe quite literally, if you're, you're in the military services, but then in the, you know, in the non-military aspect of it, who've put themselves in situations and maybe they did start a company and it failed.
That's not a reason not to hire somebody. I mean, I got into it with a with a actually with an agency principal one time, which is an insurance agency owner who I made the case that producers, that he was making the case that producers who've like, who've maybe lost a book of business or started an agency and failed or et cetera, were somehow like a black mark.
And I said, no, those are the guys or gals that you want to have on your team because they know all the things that the way is that you can this up, like you want to, you know, it doesn't mean they can just be complete screw offs. You want to make sure they have the good qualities, but, but a big miss is not a reason not to add somebody to your team or to partner with somebody.
You know what I mean? That shouldn't be a black mark. It's a data point.
But I think it actually, in some cases, especially with the right type of people, it's actually a net positive to working with someone who's had a loss because they've seen the world from a vantage point that maybe you haven't experienced yet and can help you sidestep those things. So, you know, I guess my last question for you is, and if you have any comments on that little diatribe I went on, I'd be happy to hear them.
But I guess my last question for you around the book is really like, why right now? Like, was it just the natural evolution of your platform and your mentality that it was time to put this together? Did you feel like this was a moment in time where this topic, these ideas, this framework that you've put together are really meaningful to the world? Yeah, I'll touch on your first thing and then I'll answer this. So to your comment, I'll just go back to Michael Jordan and let's go back to when he came back on the Bulls.
Their biggest nemesis for so many years was the Detroit Pistons, and the biggest nemesis on the Detroit Pistons was, who am I thinking of? The guy who has all the tattoos. Bill Lambert.
Well, Bill Lambert and... Isaiah? No um well isaiah too but rodman rodman i don't know why i'm not i was right there on the tip of my tongue so it was rodman and they hated rodman i mean he was such like he was the person who would just find that weakness and grind it like 10 times more.
But you talk about someone who came with a lot of baggage and a lot of past turmoil. It was him.
But Scotty Tiffin and Michael Jordan knew that if they were going to take the team to the next level, that he was an ingredient that they needed who was going to be able to help them overcome some of the hurdles that they were going to face. And they didn't have a power rebounder or someone who was going to fight the way he did.
And I think we need to think of our businesses the same way. And sometimes bringing in something like that, if you know what you're getting and know how to cultivate it, then that Rodman situation

can be a great benefit for you. And why now for the book? I have kids who are 19 and 25, and I see them, if they're launching their lives and careers, really struggling with all the things that are hitting these coming generations from digital distraction to automation to AI to robotics to everything.
And they are so petrified about like, what am I supposed to study? What am I supposed to do when it's just going to get annihilated? And the whole key of this book is I've profiled 12 principles that when I studied 700 of the most outstanding people you're going to find, ranging from billionaires to astronauts, generals, admirals, actors, actresses, professional athletes, it kept coming back to these 12 things that all of them did to weather the uncertainties that we all face in our lives. And to me, it was something that I wanted to get out for my kids' generation, but it really can help anyone, whether they're completely at rock bottom and they need to build it all from scratch, or perhaps they've hidden a certain plateau and they're looking for what do I need to do to get to the next level? And so a critical chapter in the book is I outline five plateaus on the path to becoming passion struck.
And you can take a quiz on our website where you can understand where you're at. But that's supposed to be an entry point that then allows you to apply the framework so that you can take it from there to ultimately becoming closer and closer to living your life in a passion struck state, which let me just tell you, it never ends.

Once you reach there, it's not like Mark Benioff,

who's the CEO of Salesforce got,

got there and then just stopped doing anything.

I mean, you get there and then you have to keep going and reinventing yourself.

And that's another thing that I would just like to end on is this guy,

Don Swavel,

who's a partner at a research company called The Future Workplace, did a similar exercise that I did.

He interviewed 1,200 remarkable individuals.

And the one thing that he found was consistent across all of them was a constant pursuit of reinvention.

Yeah.

John, I appreciate your time so much.

I love the book.

I love the topic.

I love the way that you're approaching it.

I think that's're approaching it. I feel blessed that we were able to share your story, your message and what you're doing with our audience.
If they're, well, I shouldn't say if, I have a feeling knowing them that they're going to be very interested in picking up your book and just learning more about you. Where are the best places to connect with you both on the internet?

And this show will be coming out right around the time that the book is being launched.

We're going to time it with the book launch so they can go get it.

I'm assuming it's on all the major book platforms.

But where are the best places to connect with you and get the book?

Thank you for that.

And thank you for having me on the show.

The best place for all things me is passionstruck.com. Or you can go to my personal website, johnrmiles.com.
But right there on Passion Struck, you can access the book. And if you purchase this during that first week, you're still qualified for the pre-purchase bonuses, which are $300 plus of giveaways that I've cultivated just to help people like your audience upskill their lives.
And so they've had access to masterclasses and workbooks that help amplify what I wrote in the book. And then if you want to follow me on the socials, I post daily John R.
Miles on all of them. Awesome.
John, so much pleasure talking to you. Uh,

I loved our time together and, uh, look forward to the book coming out. Sure.
It's going to be

a bestseller and, uh, hopefully everyone listening will be a big part of making that happen. So thank

you so much, man. Thank you so much.
It was an honor to be here. I'm going to jump booze! Thank you.
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