Daniel Coyle is the New York Times bestselling author of The Culture Code and several other books. Daniel has advised organizations such as the Navy SEALs, Microsoft, Google, and the Cleveland Guardians, and his work has reshaped how leaders think about group performance, skill development, and human connection. His newest book, Flourish: The Art of Building Meaning, Joy, and Fulfillment, is his most personal and expansive yet, which published the day this episode airs.
Daniel joined host Robert Glazer on The Elevate Podcast to talk about his new book, how leaders can find meaning and fulfillment, how to help others do the same, and much more.
—
Listen to the podcast on your favorite platform
Daniel Coyle On How To Flourish As A Leader, And Building Great Teams
Welcome to the show. Our quote is from Robert Waldinger. “The good life is built with good relationships.” Our guest, Daniel Coyle, is the New York Times bestselling author of The Culture Code, The Talent Code, The Secret Race, The Little Book of Talent, and now Flourish: The Art of Building Meaning, Joy, and Fulfillment. Daniel has advised organizations such as the Navy SEALs, Microsoft, Google, and the Cleveland Guardians, and his work has reshaped how leaders think about group performance, skill development, and human connection. His newest book, Flourish, is his most personal and expansive yet, and is available.
Daniel, welcome back. It is great to have you on the show.
It is good to be back with you, Robert. Thanks for asking me.
You are on the podcast tour for the new book, I am guessing.
This is it. It is very glamorous, as you can see. I am speaking to you from Cleveland, Ohio, which is where we spend part of the time, and then part of the time up in Alaska. It’s nice to be flexible about that stuff.
You do not have a warm-weather place. I guess Alaska is pretty in the summer.
It is very pretty in the summer, though we try to keep that a secret, so not too many people come up there.
Daniel’s Work As An Author And Leadership Expert
We were just saying, you first joined on episode 12, which was probably really bad from my perspective. Looking back at some of those old perspectives, I am sure you were good. For those who are not going to go, you should check it out. The Culture Code is a super interesting book that will be back in the 18 or 19 archives. Just give a quick refresh for those who have not heard that episode. We have a lot more audience now, about your background and what has been the focus of your work as an author and a leadership expert?
I grew up figuring I was going to be a doctor, and I took this left turn into journalism right at the end. I also grew up in a super competitive family, so the question that was always in my mind is, “How do I get just a little better than my brothers?” That was the main goal of life.
Define is like silly, like your parents were competitive with each other, the siblings were competitive. The holiday parties were all competitive games. Is that just the culture?
That is underplaying it a lot. Yes, it is. It is three boys born within twenty months. Every single act, whether it was getting the chocolate pudding after dinner or running on a skeet, or whatever it was, it was Hunger Games. I almost became a doctor and then took this turn into journalism at the last second. This career ended up being combining those things, like looking at the science of what looks like magic, like great performers in the world of talent, great individuals.
With culture, it became like, “What is going on in these groups? Why are they able to add up to more than the sum of their parts? What is happening in those interactions between those people?” Journalism is this wonderful license to be curious. You can call people up and say, “Can I come hang out with you? I am fascinated by what you do, and I would love to spend time with you.” People tend to say yes. That ends up being like this wonderful Willy Wonka golden ticket. When you have a scientific interest like mine, it is also fun.
My deal is to go to these places, figure out the machinery beneath the magic, and then connect it to what is going on in the science to say that it is not magic, it is a thing. This is what it is made of. When it comes to groups. You’re deconstructing. The Culture Code is the story of the X-ray of every great group. It turns out it is the same X-ray of like, “We need to build a connection, we need to share information, and we need to move in a certain direction.” This book ends up being like this weird trilogy where I started with individuals, then I went to groups. I have expanded even more now with this latest book, for like, “What is it all about? What is it all about, Robert?” Those are the questions that we are exploring with this latest book.
The culture code is the X-ray every organization needs to build connection, share information, and move in a certain direction.
Most importantly, though, if your brothers are tuning in, have they written books?
One of them has actually. Yes.
Got it. Who sold more copies?
I do not want to talk about it, Robert. It is pretty clear. I do not like to brag except at Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, and every other family holiday.
That sounds fun. I can picture this. In fact, I always talk about different cultures or different universities. They have a different value proposition. One of my made-up companies is a competitive company, where everything is a competition, and a high percentage of the bonus goes to small people, and the company events are competitive. That is a certain type of company that some people should be like, “I am in, maybe you,” and other people would be like, “No, I am out.”
That sounds like a nightmare.
Writing Flourish: The Art Of Building Meaning, Joy, And Fulfillment
As I said before, Flourish has been described as your most personal book. Instead of maybe noticing a trend and descending on it, it sounds like it might have come from some reflection and reckoning. How did your journey influence the themes and some of the stories that you chose for the book?
I was getting into my mid-50s, and I have been writing about performers and hanging out with high performers all the time. They are basically mountain climbers. In a way, they are going to the top of their performance 100% of the time in that world, and it happens with a lot of people. You reach a crossroads. You sense this hollowness to things at some point. The thing that helped me make sense of that hollowness was when my parents both passed away, in fairly quick succession.
It just knocks you down and wakes you up. All of a sudden, you get tons of clarity, and all this stuff that you thought was important just falls away. It was during that time that I started. I abandoned the project I was working on, and I was like, “Who has figured this out?” It was that same old question that I used to have, except I was aiming it in a new direction of joy, fulfillment, and meaning. I started with the definition of flourishing, being the scientific definition, joyful, meaningful growth shared.
That last word is a really important piece of it. It is like an ecosystem. It is a place where you are actually interdependent, sharing growth. Instead of the mountain top, this got me interested in the valleys, like the green places where things are growing, where there are impossible amounts of personal growth, generativity, and creativity. I started looking for places like that, for places like this crazy little business that started as a tiny deli and now is a $90 million community of businesses.
That would be Zingerman’s.
I did the same thing. I am visiting these places. I am looking at the underlying science, and it turns out that these places, when you really look at them, are all doing the same thing. We are pre-wired. The science is super clear on this. We are pre-wired for shared meaningful connection. That is how we are built.
You are saying that social media is not aligned with our pre-wiring.
This is a news flash.
Screaming at each other from home is not alignment with our software, not good for our hardware.
Typing on screens to get to strangers and having arguments. It is hard to believe, but when you actually see the difference, it can be a bummer. How can I have a meaningful, joyful life? How can I do that? The trips that I took and the places that I visited gave me a ton of hope and reassurance, because when you see this happen, it is not like, “We have really got to turn everything upside down.” It is like, no, you’ve got to make small changes. It is like we are trying to unlock something here. We are wired for this stuff. We need to change the conditions so that, boom, it comes out of us.
Just double-click again, define flourishing for us again, so we can anchor that for everyone who just heard it.
Joyful, meaningful growth shared with others. There are no flourishing hermits in the mountains. We need other people to become our best selves.
There are no flourishing hermits in the mountains. We need other people to become our best selves.
I have parents who moved to Florida into a community. I would have told you they were the absolute last people that would move to Florida, move into the community. They are so happy. When I talk to them, it sounds like they are at summer camp. Like, “We have laser tag tonight.” People, as they get towards the end of their lives, the formula is clear, and they have figured this out, and Waldinger and the science and all this stuff, but why in the rest of their lives does that fall apart?
Difference Between Flourishing And Happiness
We were talking before, too. I heard some parental experts say that if you ask parents what they want for their kids, the answer is always happiness. She was like, “You do not want happiness.” That is not the right answer. The people who say she was very funny, one of the top parenting experts in America, I had on the podcast, “I am only going to be as happy as my least happy kid.” She is like, “Why would you do that? You would be miserable all day long.” I like this distinction between flourishing and happiness. Happiness implies this almost impossible standard that you think is always the thing that you have to have.
Picture a perfectly happy life. It could be hellish almost. You want that richness.
I was going to say, it is not actually more about a perfectly happy life. It is like, at what point? There are valleys, there are peaks. You are looking for, on average, it is better than it is not better. If you want to ask me why the world is struggling so much, is that the problem is that we have embraced struggle as a bad thing, and it is part of flourishing for sure.
It is how we grow. The world is always changing, and so you cannot navigate a changing world with a brittle system. These places that are flourishing are really flexible and supple, and they are able to connect. The thing that you really notice when you go to these flourishing places, I am thinking about the businesses I visited, I am thinking about the teams I visited, the schools, these neighborhoods that transformed themselves from being really disconnected to being like a cohesive village. Like your parents’ experience. There are places all over where people are experiencing exactly this.
It all comes down to these two things. The two things are that they are good at making meaning. They are good at stopping. We always want to keep moving and look at things narrowly. They are good at stopping and opening up and connecting to something bigger than themselves, whether that is their cool neighborhood in Florida and laser tag, or whether that is the people that live next to them, or where that is a higher cause. That is number one.
The second thing is that they are good at this thing called group flow, where a group comes together. People are autonomous, but connected, and they are moving toward a horizon together, whatever that horizon is. When you referred to camping, when you ask people about where they felt like they were flourishing, you would be astonished at how much like, “It was summer camp. It was when I went camping with my family as a kid.”
What is happening when you are going camping? Let us break that down to its essence. You are together in a sometimes difficult, strange place. You are coming together. You do not have control. You are connecting to nature. You are connecting to something much bigger. You are trying to get from A to B to C to D sometimes. You are welcoming and bringing in strangers into the group sometimes, if it is like a summer camp.
It is actually how humans, for the vast majority of your ancestors and my ancestors, evolved in exactly that way. We are in a small group in a hazardous place together. We need to figure it out. We can vote with our feet and follow the leaders we want. We are sensing meaning and connection. We have got a bit of autonomy. It really makes you realize that the way we live now is lacking some of those basic conditions. That is the bad news. The good news is that it is also pointing us in the precise direction that we need to recreate those conditions for work, or at home, or whatever.
Finding those ways, and it is weird. What we are really talking about is community, that experience of community. If you look at any of those, they are doing two things like that. Making meaning is like stopping, and then group flow is like the exhale, the action. They are stopping, making meaning, and exhaling action. When you start to tune into that and start paying attention to where you already have it in your own life, it allows you to figure out, “Where am I going?
Why Flourishing Is Built, Not Discovered
What is interesting is that if you look at where I think younger people are least flourishing, it is affluent suburban environments, which seems like an oxymoron. They are not communities. That is the struggle. I was going to say before, because you talk about it as flourishing something we build, it is not something we discover. What is one of the other isms rolling around? Go find your passion. It is hiding under a rock, and when you just find it, it is all good.
When really everything in life, as Waldinger said in your quote, everything is a relationship. We are taught a lot of facts, we are taught a lot of information, and the world gets a lot of its excitement about information. This particular thing that we are talking about now, the art of how to create meaningful relationships in my life? What do those moments look like? How do I stack those moments to have them add up to more than that, making meaning? It is counterintuitive to a lot of modern instincts.
There is this weird experiment that some Russians did some years ago that anybody can do at home. It is where you ask your kid two things. First, stand still as long as you can. Just ask him to do that. Now, after that, ask him, “Pretend you’re a soldier guarding something really important. Stand still as long as you can.” You will find that the second time, there will be triple the discipline. There is meaning. How did that meaning happen? They imagined it. They had to stop. They had to stop, just probably like your parents stopped when they walked into that Florida place, like, “What’s this? How am I going to fit in here?”
They actually had a great community, but they were in a different place. They loved the place, loved the weather. Not a great community, great place they were spending the year, but it was transient. The people came, and they left. It was more of a seasonal place. This is almost the same environmental equivalent, except there is a continuous community.
More consistent. It makes sense. That moment where you stop and you realize, “Wait, what? What is being illuminated?” Meaning happens in these moments of imagination and illumination, which sounds super woo-woo. It sounds like, “This is all a spirituality thing,” but it is, and it is not. It is like when you have somebody talk about their core values and think about those and go deeply, they are no different than those kids imagining being a soldier trying to guard something important. It does happen in this space of a certain type of attention. There is a type of attention that you bring to those moments, and tuning into those moments where you are open and connected is really a powerful thing to do.
The Role Of Curiosity In Flourishing Communities
The thing about this meaning and interesting engagement, with TikTok and everything, there are a lot of things that are horribly inaccurate and not right, and things that have taken up truism. It will be long written by the time this comes out, but I wrote a Friday Forward that has not come out yet on my curiosity with if you look at what is going on in the UK and the workforce and the twenty-year-olds, a third have been out for mental health leave in the last year. The whole of TikTok’s mental health UK is encouraging everyone to stop working for mental health.
There literally is no data that supports this other than if you were having an acute crisis, or you are stressed or burned out, or you are overworked, you should take a break, like a weekend, but that disengagement from work does not at all produce. In fact, the data is pretty clear. It produces worse mental health. You are clearly not flourishing, but there is this whole unsupported playbook these days that says, “Look, if it gets hard or whatever, disengage,” which seems to go against every single thing in this book.
Meaning is the ultimate capacity builder because meaning is not information. Meaning is energy. It is momentum. That is a way to put it because it is directed energy. It is a relationship that is moving you towards something. I saw this really vividly. The food business is famously a burnout business. Margins are hard.
It is difficult to keep it going. There is this food emporium in Ann Arbor, Michigan, called Zingerman’s that has built its whole thing on the power of meaning. We think, “Businesses have to keep scaling.” They have not. In 40 years, they have only been in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Walt Disney came to them and said, “You guys are the best deli in America. We need you in our park. We’ll give you $50 million.”
They said, “No, thanks. We do not get meaning from being in Florida. We get meaning from being in Ann Arbor.” It is funny that Walt Disney could not believe they were getting rejected. They do not get rejected. They kept telling the leaders of Zingerman’s, “No, you guys don’t understand.” Finally, the leaders at Zingerman’s said, “If you guys ever open a park in Ann Arbor, you should definitely let us know.” That was where it landed. As they said, like I was talking about this with their CEO, Ari Weinzweig.
He has already been a guest.
No way. I was asking him about that decision, and he pointed to my wedding ring, and he said, “Do you take every opportunity that comes along?” What he understands and what he has built Zingerman’s around is the idea that pausing and connecting to something meaningful is not some groovy extra. It is actually at the total core of who they are and what they do. Being in Ann Arbor is where they get their meaning from. It is this incredible capacity multiplier because they are not just mindlessly growing like a cancer cell. They are deepening that relationship over and over again in a place that means something to them.
No one gets meaning sitting on their couch, doom scrolling, and binge watching. There is a zero percent chance. Someone was telling me a story recently about someone who was struggling without work, and they were encouraging them to go do gig stuff. It just was not happening. Eventually, they started doing it. They are like, “Yeah, it’s fun.” They are all gamification. “I picked a morning ride,” or “I figured out an afternoon ride.” It is just so clear to me. I think meaning can be little stuff. You get up, and you are like, “I get to figure out my strategy.” It is so much better than nothing, withdrawal, and not being connected to people.
It is true. There is a thing in the world now, where I love the word habit. Habits are great. They are fantastic. What they do ultimately is they automate parts of your life. You are just operating like a machine. You do not have to think about it. On the other side, pausing, doing what I call in the book, awakening cues, rituals, they do not automate. They animate your life. They make that little breakfast thing actually connect to things you care about.
They make your workout actually connect to who you want to be as a dad. It is those moments where you are trying to create that open, warm, reciprocal, high attention. There is all this attention stuff I have in the book that is about this particular model for attention. If I were to sum it up into one thing, it is like you have two attentional systems in your brain. You have two of them. Always think we have one. When we say the word attention, we think it is just one thing. The science is super clear on this.
There are two of them. One is for narrow control. One is super narrow control, understanding things as if it were a puzzle you were solving, A to B to C to D. The other is for warm connection. To speak back a little bit, the reason we have this is that throughout evolution, every living thing had to do two things. It had to get food. That means I have to look super narrow, I have to just grab stuff, I have to categorize it. Friend or enemy, right now, fast. We’ve got to do it fast. The other thing I have to do is look at the whole picture. Where is my social group? How can I fit in? It is nuanced, it is slow. I need to really have a relationship with it. That narrow form of attention is not your friend when it comes to forming meaning. Meaning is not an informational increase.
The 2010 Copiapó Mining Accident
Historically, there is more meaning in people who have struggled in wars or hard times. The level of anxiety and depression amongst rich suburban kids. I keep coming back to this because I am fascinated by how lonely people are who ostensibly have everything. The Chilean miner story is a great example. Talk about that.
If you had to pick a group to trade places with in the world, these guys would not be in the top 10. You are 2,000 feet down. This is in 2010, the San Jose mine in Chile.
It was a long time ago, I remember that.
Thirty-three people down there, they were down there for sixteen days with basically no hope. They were 2,000 feet down, in complete blackness. When they first got there, it got lower than the flies. There was a group that ate all the cookies. That is a bummer.
Better than each other.
When they first lowered the phone to check on him, sixteen days later, the psychologist kept everybody awake because he thought, “We do not know what we are going to find here.” What they found was that they were thriving weirdly with no food, not much water, horrible temperatures, and horrible infections. They were thriving. The first question they asked was about other people, about a driver who had been in the mine, and they sang a song.
It’s like, “How did that happen? You are in the worst, literal hell.” How did they do it? They had a couple of moments. There were two moments, and they were pauses. They were like that pretend you’re a soldier moment, where they stopped, where the leader is an authoritarian guy named Luis. He took off his helmet, and he said, “There are no bosses and employees anymore.”
Was he the de facto leader?
He was a supervisor. Everybody respected him. Everybody thought he was going to help lead us out. The first thing he does is take off his helmet. “I’m not a boss. We’re all in this.”
This is a different game.
They found little rituals. They started doing these little rituals around meals, taking care of each other while they slept, and trying to signal for help. These rituals got them through these moments. The rituals do not make a ton of sense. They are not from a narrow attention point of view. They are not useful. What they did was create this deep, meaningful connection that got them through.
Our brains like that narrow attention system and see in straight lines.
Was Elon Musk involved in that and getting them out or something?
I think he was in the Thai mining rescue over there.
The other one. The one with the kids. That was the one.
Speaking of people who flourish.
The Dutch Soccer Team’s Story Of Always Almost Winning
People who solve difficult problems, I guess. Another story is the Dutch soccer team. Is this Total Football?
Yes.
Did you watch Ted Lasso?
Yes.
It is putting two and two together.
It was a bummer to see it because I had already written the chapter, and it is like, “Wait a minute, this is in the book, but maybe people will read it.”
Did you read about the team, or did you talk to people on the team?
I knew about the mystery of the team because the Dutch were terrible in the ‘60s, and then 1973 comes along, 1974, and they are the best in the world by a huge margin. They almost won the World Cup that year. It always was a huge mystery to me. How did they do that?
This is coming out a couple of months before the World Cup. Tell us how they did it.
It is a guy named Rinus Michels who is the coach. He was coached in a small Dutch team called Ajax. They were young, and they were at the bottom of the table. He got wind of this concept. It came from British soccer. The concept was what if every player could play every position? Interesting question. At the time, soccer was organized like the military, like you took care of your rectangle of space. That is your job.
Fullbacks look a certain way and have a certain set of skills. Forwards same, midfielders same. He took them running in the woods, and they started to get a fluid feeling together. He started doing these little experiments where he would just have, “Look, I want the defenders to go all the way up and he would see what would happen.” As they practiced in this way, they started to develop a shared vocabulary, a shared set of signals.
How do they know to cover for each other and all this stuff?
You’re starting to do things. You’re starting to see new patterns. I am not just looking at this space. I have to look at the whole field and have to look at where the ball is not. We have to decide whether we are going to chase down and press, or if we are going to fall back, or if we are going to pass back. At the time, passing backwards was unusual. They started doing it a ton because they realized if we kept possession, they were not going to score. They made a set of fundamental strategic advances by doing these experiments.
They did not think of it in advance. They started experimenting their way into it. As they do those experiments, they start developing the skills that it takes to keep doing this fluidly. When they ran into the World Cup, they blew out Argentina, Brazil, and Spain. They finally lost to Germany in the final in a really physical game. The kickoff of that game, the Dutch kickoff, they make fifteen passes, and it goes in the goal. They are moving as nobody has ever moved. A lot of top teams have inherited this, pursued this total football.
It was not like the NFL, where everyone tried to copy it. Usually, someone does something novel, and everyone copies it. Maybe it was too hard or too unorthodox.
Extremely unorthodox, extremely difficult. At the time, information did not flow like it does today, but a beautiful example of what a lot of flourishing groups do, which is they do not talk about how they can get better. They do not read a bunch of books on how they can get better. What they do is they make a well-designed mess. Leadership as mess design is a hugely fascinating area because what we are talking about is complexity.
That is a word that I am sure your audience has heard a ton, but would it be useful to go into the difference between complicated and complex? That is a distinction that is an important and revelatory distinction. We use those two words as if they are the same, but they are not. Complicated things. Complicated means I can do it the same every time, and it will turn out the same. A connects to B to C to D. It is a Lego set. I could say, “If I gave you all the materials to build a Ferrari and a set of instructions to follow, and you followed them, you would have a Ferrari.”
It is hard. It is very complicated, but it hooks up the same every time. Complex is alive. Complex changes every time you do something. The experiment to have in your mind, question to have in your mind is, “Is this more like building a Ferrari or raising a teen?” Raising a teen, there is no instruction manual. You cannot, you have to be. What happens with complexity? What is the best way to deal with complexity? It is not with a rule book, it is with you got to try stuff. You’ve got to see what happens, and then you’ve got to learn, and then you’ve got to try something new. You’ve got to be like the Dutch.
Is that where values are, “We are super flexible, but here are the non-negotiables?”
I think so, that gives you an area to define. You are not exploring everywhere. He was not saying, “We want to figure out how to make our goalie score a goal,” we are not going to do that. We are going to do a lot of different stuff, but here is the area we are going to explore. It is funny, because our brains, because of that narrow attention system, we always see in straight lines. We want it to be A to B to C to D. If I do this, then I will get that. It is not how it is.
Life is much more like this fluid thing. If you ask anybody to draw a picture of their life, take a pen on paper and draw the shape of where they came from and what they bumped into. I went this way, then I went that way. Everybody draws a squiggly line. All those turns like, “I was screwed, and this was not working, and then I went this way, and then I went this way, and then I tried this, and this did not work.”
With entrepreneurs, there are want-repreneurs and entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs are like, “I am going to go to that flag, and I am going to go up the front of the mountain.” They end up going the side, the back, around, and they might get to the flag, but it is never there. The want-repreneurs are the people who just cannot even take the first step until it is mapped out, and if they think they are going to go off the path, then it is not going to work. I have never seen a successful business execute on the business plan that it presented that it would be successful on.
It is true. They are navigating complexity and understanding that. If you walk around with the illusion that this is going to be a straight line, which is an illusion that can keep you on the couch. If you accept the fact that you are dealing with a living thing, and the smartest thing you can do is try something, see what happens, and then try something new. That is the key tennis match that is always happening in these flourishing places. They are not acting like they are machines. They are acting like they are rivers, like they are tilting their river in certain directions and getting into group flow and seeing what happens.
Partaking In The Longest Lunch In Paris
We do a lot of international work with nurses, and I think it’s true everywhere, but it would not be a shock when everyone says the US is in this divisive period right now, and it does not feel like the two sides could ever come to the middle or get along on everything. First of all, how did you find this? Tell us about the little Paris neighborhood that could give us a blueprint for maybe why we are not resound this to the end of our lives. How did you hear about this, and did you go there too?
I did. The neighborhood is called the Petit-Montrouge. It is in Paris. It is an upper-middle-class place. There was a former newspaper editor there named Patrick Bernard who retired. He had always been a shy, introverted dude, but he got this hunch. There is a sleeping wealth just underneath the surface. He saw people wrapped up in their phones. He saw people not connecting. He took some of his generous retirement settlement. That’s how they do things in France. They give you a lot of money when you retire, which is not a bad thing.
That’s why the system is collapsing.
He rented 80 tables. Put them down the center of the street, closed the street, got 800 chairs, and put out a message saying, “Would you like to come be part of the biggest, longest lunch in Paris?” The whole neighborhood turned up. Great, fun, huge day, everybody is bringing food.
Longest duration or lunch of the table?
Length of the table. The lunch itself was three hours.
Was this a Guinness qualifying event or not?
It might have been. I think there are some long tables elsewhere, too. Just a fun day. He took the next step, which was to set up some constraints. To your point, what are our values here? What are our non-negotiables? His non-negotiables were two things. First, he was like, “Set up any group you like. You guys figure out what group you want to be in.” You want to do a group on bicycle touring. You wanted a group on history.
Is the group table discussion or afterwards?
No, the group is afterwards. Afterwards, having people divvy up into interest groups. Everybody in this neighborhood is interested in something. Let us put interested people together at the same time. Self-organize into your group. You’re into dogs, you’re into legal questions, you want to do entrepreneurial stuff, and you want to be a Robert Glazer fan. Get in your group. The only constraints were, number one, the meetings that you have to take place around joy devices, which means food, drink, wine, and coffee. The second constraint was no politics. You cannot bring politics into it. No politics. No negativity. Get together. If you want to talk about cheese.
Talk about cheese over wine. That makes sense.
That would be a perfect combo. They did, and in the course of a few months, I think they had 45 groups spring up. This was a great example of the swiftness of the change because before they did this, they called Bernard a teddy bear kisser, which is a French term, I think they call it a bisounours, and it is a French term for somebody who is naive. Like, “You’re kissing teddy bears, man. Don’t be such a child.”
Childish belief.
“You’re like a child.” They called him a teddy bear kisser. Of course, yeah, it’s hard to meet people here. It’s Paris. We’re all Parisians. It’s snobbish, and we do our own thing.
We’re not super friendly.
That is our brand. Afterwards.
It is a feature, not a bug.
Afterwards, it became completely transformed. To hear some of the voices in the book of the people who are talking about. “I’m 75, I broke my wrist, I had twenty people come and help me. When I don’t live here, but I come here to visit all I can because it just feels different.” It captures the fact that the difference was not that the people changed.
The difference was that the conditions just allowed them to do what came naturally, and I think a lot of times we let the conditions of modern life, our devices, our habits, and also the economic structures that would like to keep us isolated and alone, and purchasing entertainment or whatever. When we remove those forces and put a table in the street and say, “Get together, however you want to get together, around these joy devices.”
Don’t talk about the one thing that might divide you.
Just do not talk about it.
Have you studied the case study where the Basecamp guys said there were going to be no politics at work, and they were told they would be out of business and on the wrong side of history, and they very much were on the right side of history? They were like, “Look, this is just divisive. If you want to do this outside of where we’re a B2B software company, we don’t need to do politics.” This was in 2022. This was Twitter’s cancel culture, which came after them, and this sounds like they were on the right path. Same thing as your French guy.
My daughter is 27 now, but she used to say when she was a little bitty kid, something would be happening around the house, and she would just have this little catchphrase. She would say, “Let’s not talk about that.” That is actually a really nice thing to say.
Purpose: A Major Pillar Of Flourishing
I like it. We danced around this, but purpose is a major pillar of flourishing. What distinguishes shared purpose from a lot of these slogans or visionary statements that organizations rely on, that people have learned to roll their eyes at?
It is a lot of stuff, and I have written about it a lot in The Culture Code and in this book as well. I think what you find in a really flourishing place is a whole ecology of meaning that exists in behavior, in signal, in interaction, in conversation, in symbol, and in ritual. We often try to distill it to one thing to just say, “You have purpose.” What I see, though, in these places is that, yes, they have purpose. They also have a sense of meaning.
They also have tangible beliefs that they can express and connect to behavior. They know what it looks like when their beliefs are in alignment or out of alignment. One example that I see here is that I do some consulting with the Cleveland Guardians baseball team. Over the last few years, they have been a super small market team that has had pretty incredible success.
Took our old manager from the one we ran out of Boston. He has done just fine.
Is it okay, right?
Yes.
Over the last thirteen years, won as many games as the Yankees and spent $1.7 billion less.
From a growing talent standpoint, it is not bad.
Growing talent, and yes, there is a mission statement. Yes, there is a purpose. In the last few years, they have really evolved their sense of beliefs and written this stuff down and talked about it. Beliefs like, “We believe that care and candor are more important than strategy and tactics.”
That also does not sound like the platitude that anyone else could say. That sounds distinct and unique.
That is right. Believe in working with, not doing to. There are about 8 or 9 of these things. They are each very particular. You can navigate to them. That is the thing that I think people miss when they talk about purpose. That is like a great North Star, but the world is complicated. I need more than a North Star. I need all the navigational beacons. I need all the aid. I need all the GPS. I think what you get with places that are eloquent and explicit and live this meaning is that they are sending a much more robust signal. Meaning is about clarity, not informational clarity, but relational clarity. What relationship now is the most important for me? What direction are we going together?
What Separates Flourishing Communities From The Rest
You have studied elite teams and communities. You have now studied a wide range of different types of organizations. I know the principles, but what are the behaviors day to day that you think separate these groups that just function from those that flourish?
There are two buckets that I would put under them, and they are behaviors that are connected to these qualities. The first quality is curiosity. They can pause. The good ones, at every moment where you get a piece of information, and you want to respond, let us do it. The good ones often are like, “Let’s just hang on a sec. What is this really? Who do I need to connect to?”
They are much more deliberate in those moments, the leaders, because they are curious. They are not going to see it for just what it is in the future, and they are not going to rush to some reaction. They question themselves. They question themselves deeply. What they are doing there is they are meaning-making. They are doing those pauses.
What is happening in that pause is that they are getting a sense of what is relevant right now. What really matters? Should we take that offer from Walt Disney for $50 million? Every other business in the world says absolutely yes. Zingerman’s is able to pause, and because of that pause, and they are pausing all the time, they are pausing to figure out their beliefs. They are pausing to train people on orienting toward the right thing at the right time. That is the first quality.
You would have to have high psychological safety to even have, say, “Should we do that?” without feeling like someone is going to yell at you or call you a moron.
Hundred percent. That actually links to the second one because I think the second one is courage. The second ones are behaviors that you see that are courageous, and that courage can come from the willingness to speak out and say, “Guys, I think this is a terrible idea,” or “I think we need to do this.” That willingness to speak out and that willingness to take action, to learn from action, and to be the courageous of vulnerability. All these places are learners.
Courage can come from the willingness to speak out against terrible ideas and take action to unlock greater knowledge.
That is what separates them and those values of like, “We need to pause. Now we need to do something. We need to take action. We need to experiment.” That pause, experiment, pause, experiment, all the behaviors connected to those things are the stuff that I see. I guess deep down, I see a lot of care. They genuinely like each other. They genuinely care about each other for illogical reasons. It is a beautiful thing to be around. They sort of feel like they are on that camping trip that we talked about. The days are hard to predict. We are going to lean on each other. It is not going to be what we planned, but when stuff happens, we are going to stop, figure it out, and do something together, moving toward that horizon.
Some are giving up of self or ego. I’m going to get this wrong, but my dad’s friend who is a long time subscriber to the newsletter, sent me this story about a guy who shows up at the club, the new retirement community club, and he is talking about his accomplishments and his things, and the guy is like, “You’re not going to make it here. I understand you’re new, but unless you realize that we’re all PIPs.”
The guy is like, “What’s PIP?” It’s like Previously Important People. It is not about the companies you have sold or whatever you did, or that you’re still living and wanting everyone to know that. That is not what this community is about. You’re really going to struggle here. We are about today and together in these drinks and this dinner, and what we are doing. I am screwing up this whole story because it was told all in my story form, but that was the moral of it.
I love it. It is true. We all can feel the truth of that.
It is hard. The point of coming into these communities, particularly later in life, is not about what you did before. We all know that the most tortured individual that we know in life is their greatest achievement long in the past. The high school athlete, or whatever, where they are just living on that highlight reel and have a hard time doing today and doing it with who they are.
It is so true. Embracing the messiness of that. That is the thing that we see with flourishing communities. All communities are messy. All communities are also annoying. There is a great saying that I heard recently, which is, “Annoyance is the price of community.
I will remember that the next time someone tells me they are on the standards committee, that your fence is too white.
These people are complicated. People are hard to deal with. They are complex. The idea of saying, “In a world where I think there are a lot of structures and signals that we should never be annoyed, that everything should be perfect,” is super refreshing to be around a group that is messy, that understands that no community is perfect. The friction of it is part of the wonder of it. We are all human beings. We are not machines. Despite the fact that we are brought up to think like machines and act like machines and plan like machines and think about our careers like machines, that is an illusion. We are all PIPs in the end.
Dealing With Contrasting Opinions In Your Community
It is also this rugged individualism. This is where a lot of people have ideas that I understand about. I am not saying I am all for liberty and free markets and all these things, but they have a viewpoint that is so extreme, or some of their political systems or the sociological systems they believe in, that they could exist in a vacuum. They can exist in a book or on paper. If you are trying to have a functioning society and everyone is optimizing for their own personal beliefs, and I believe my favorite is you can call yellow blue, and I can call it yellow.
It is postmodernism. Great, you can have that theory. The problem is to live in a community with others where you do not agree on any truths or any baseline. That is really hard. If everyone lived in their own world and their own matrix, you could do that. Being part of a community by default has sacrifices, where you are not optimizing everything for yourself.
It is not optimizing. It is interdependent. It is much more like nature is. Nature does not build machines. Nature is this interdependent ecosystem that creates connection in a soil of meaning and that grows, and it is messy, and that is the beautiful part of it. That is the other thing about flourishing that I think I appreciate now after having written the book, which is, “If you are not being surprised, you are not doing it right.” This idea that we have that everything needs to be planned for and that everybody is on this path that is narrow path, certainty and vitality are inversely related.
I have this argument with my daughter and my wife on using this restaurant app, Beli, and everywhere we go, she checks it on that thing. I am like, “You’ve got to go to some bad places. You’ve got to have some discovery.” I understand if we are planning a birthday dinner, let us pick a place that people like, but now your expectation is that it is always perfect and it is certain. They look at me like I have three heads, but I’m telling this, but I am like, “You need to eat at some shitty restaurants and have some discovery or else your expectations are so high, they’ll almost be more disappointed.”
A hundred percent. We used to do a thing with our kids, and I think we only did it three times, but it became a legendary thing where it was Secret Saturday. “Where are we going?” “I am not telling you.” We are just going to go somewhere. It would end up at some apple farm or something, but it would be great because they are not looking at the reviews, and you are coming at it like a human being in the world and having those moments, that sense of surprise is not frosting on the cake. It is the whole cake. If you are living a life with no surprises, you are not flourishing.
Where We Can Improve As A Society
Last question, or else we’ll do this all day long. I know we touched on this before, and maybe sometimes things need to be bottom up before they get better. With all the disconnect and division that we are living through, and when you look at these communities and individuals that you studied for the book, what gives you hope that things might improve?
The swiftness of the unlocking. We live in these worlds that are made of words. We read words on a screen, and it gives us a certain feeling. A lot of these places have shown us that words are just squiggles on a screen. They are not real. When we have experiences that connect us to other people in a community that let us create some sense of surprise, the experience itself is so addictive and worthwhile.
If you are living a life with no surprises, you are not flourishing.
The thing that gives me hope, a bunch of stuff does, but like the move back toward live music. Massive. Live music. What is that exactly? This new generation gets it. Even some of the complaints about modern workplaces are coming from a place of, “I’m not signing up for what my parents signed up for. I’m not just going to grind my way to the top.” The interest in places like your six questions. That gives me the idea that there are so many thousands of people who are willing to pause and think about what matters to them and figure out their core values.
It feels like we’re moving somewhere better. It feels like we’re moving somewhere that people are we are going to see this thing that we have lived through, hopefully as a temporary thing that guided us, like all good constraints. If we think about it as complexity, it shows us where not to go. That is incredibly valuable. Let us make that turn and see where it takes us.
Get In Touch With Daniel And Buy His Book
Flourish is out. I assume people can find it wherever books are sold. Where can they learn more about you or find you or your work if they have any questions?
I am at DanielCoyle.com. If people want to know, and send me an email, I like the conversations.
Daniel, thanks for joining us and helping us figure out how we flourish, and happy pub week to you as well.
Thanks, Robert. Always fun to talk to you.
You can learn more about Daniel and his work on the episode page at RobertGlazer.com. If you enjoyed our episode or the show in general, I have a small favor to ask. Would you mind just taking a minute to share this conversation with someone who you think would appreciate it? If it made you think or see something differently, just hit the share button in your app and text or email it to a friend. That is how new people find out about the show. Thank you again for your support, and until next time, keep elevating.
Important Links
- Daniel Coyle
- Daniel Coyle on LinkedIn
- Daniel Coyle on Twitter
- Daniel Coyle on Facebook
- The Culture Code
- The Talent Code
- The Secret Race
- The Little Book of Talent
- Flourish: The Art of Building Meaning, Joy, and Fulfillment
- Episode 12 – Daniel Coyle on Elevating Group Performance – Past Episode
- Friday Forward
- Ari Weinzweig – Ari Weinzweig On Building Zingerman’s And Leading Without Hierarchy – Past Episode
